However I think this particular submission was reasonably clear. A group of professional Internet engineers and technicians from New Zealand (ie. a private group) are following the published procedure to obtain the delegation of GEEK.NZ (ie. they'll be able to give out.GEEK.NZ domains to anyone) from the NZ Domain Name Commissioner (DNC). If successful, GEEK.NZ would be New Zealand's twelfth second-level domain.
It's significant because it allows a private group to define what a particular subdomain looks like by who they grant registrations to. It is leveraging the delegation model of DNS to give a particular social/professional group their own DNS namespace.
A more detailed explanation could be useful to people not familiar with DNS, though.
Many people subscribe to a theory more around what Alan Turing talked about: If a computer appears to be sentiant, it IS sentiant.
Turing said nothing of the sort. He didn't speak to sentience at all, and he even considered the question "Can machines think" to be "too meaningless to deserve discussion." He only spoke to the question "could a machine some day win at the imitation game?"
Just realise that there are other compelling viewpoints on the issue and keep an open mind. Don't become like Searle and just reject anything against your view as impossable or silly:)
I have to admit that I do. More than 50 years of AI have failed to produce anything that can function at the level of a four-year-old. I believe we are a long way off from understanding sentience and biological intelligence, if they can be understood and analyzed at all. I'm not saying that it's impossible, but it's certainly more than the sum of a massive neural network. Current proponents of strong AI won't admit that there's something going on there that they don't understand.
Your argument is, once again, pretty similar to Searle's (he give the example of having the people of India carry out the telephone calls, and asks "Is India concious?").
I swear I'm not ripping him off, I thought of that argument just now!
The argument was evident to me before I ever heard of John Searle, but yes, I do agree with him.
How's this for a thought experiment. Take a human being, and swap one of his neurons for an electronic circuit that behaves identically to a neuron. One at a time, swap out each real neuron and swap in an electronic one. Is he still concious when his brain is entirely made up of electronic neurons instead of organic ones?
I don't believe such a thing is possible. But let's assume that it is. Now try this for a thought experiment: instead of swapping out biological neurons for mechanical ones, take an instantaneous state snapshot of an entire brain. Now find a person for every neuron and give them a set of instructions for how to behave exactly like a neuron, making telephone calls to communicate with the other neurons (if it's possible to create an electronic circuit modeling a neuron, it must be possible to codify the behavior into a set of human-understandable instructions). Give them the initial state of the brain you are copying. Is this vast network of people following instructions a conscious (albeit vastly slower) clone of the brain whose state was surveyed?
Repeat the above, but only use two people to simulate two random neurons from the surveyed brain. It is conscious? Now try three. Is that conscious? What is the magic threshold that can achieve consciousness?
I think your position of "consciousness is no more than the sum of the brain's neurons" is a much more perilous position to defend than the claim that there's something going on there that we don't understand.
Namely, what happens if some researched finally stumbles across an application that passes the Turing test? One that for all intents and purposes appears to be a conscious life form?
The resulting ethical problems will be myriad
You watch too many movies. No matter how smart you can make a computer look, it is still performing the same fetch-execute cycle on primitive instructions like "add," "shift," and "branch." If that is a conscious life form, then so is a pencil and piece of paper on which you perform all these primitive instructions manually.
In my biased opinion, the audio editor Audacity is a success story in OSS usability.
I've been working on this project for almost two years now, and the experience has completely shifted my priorities and my perspective in software development. Before I started working on Audacity, I had the mindset that I think many OSS programmers have of only caring about the capability and raw power of a program. I never really considered the non-programmer users a significant concern.
Audacity's project lead is Dominic Mazzoni, who is uniquely excellent at both programming and user interface design. He comes from a Mac background, a world where interfaces generally don't suck. From day one he was writing for maximum usability and maximum use. Doing simple things with Audacity is child's play. Dialogs and messages are written to be easy to understand. Audacity is portable to Windows/UNIX/MacOS9/MacOSX, so right off the bat the potential audience is much larger than an application written for only one platform.
There is an audacity-help list that is advertised in big letters on the web page. This is an open invitation to ask questions that most would see as newbie questions not worth their time. This gives us a chance to see what users are having a hard time understanding. Most of these questions are answered in a timely fashion, which means these users don't abandon Audacity.
As a result this focus on usability, a lot of people use Audacity. We're pretty consistently in the top 20 downloads on sourceforge. People write often to ask if they can incorporate Audacity on CD compilations. We've been reviewed in the Washington Post.
I've really come around on this in the last two years. Usability is worth it. Anyone can appreciate software that is usable, even programmers. This doesn't mean dumbing things down -- right now a feature is in the works that will allow a project to have a speed envelope, that will allow you to have the speed continuously vary (with appropriate resampling). This is a pretty advanced feature that most users would never have a use for. But a lot of thought is going into how to integrate it into the GUI in the best way possible. It's not going to just get bolted on.
I'm no fortuneteller but a good start would be an email protocol that fucking authenticates the sender so that you could be guaranteed that every email in your inbox has a from header that doesn't lie. No more untracable spammers. No more viruses that claim to come from your friends. As an added bonus, this would stop the flood of emails from various postmasters warning you that an email you never sent was not able to go through.
Seriously, SMTP needs to be redone and the sooner the better. I know there are things like TLS and SMTP auth floating around, but they are not pervasive or mandatory, so they do no good at all.
Err, vertex shaders come first. The verticies are moved around by the shaders, then they're projected, 2D triangles are generated, and the pixel shaders run on the pixels covering the generated triangles.
I meant historically, not in the rendering pipeline.:-)
Could someone please explain how shaders enhance a scene, and how to know if you're seeing one? I've done a fair amount of graphics coding (2d, 3d, splines, nurbs, etc) but I don't understand what shaders offer or how they really work.
Images that can illustrate this would be especially nice.
Hot damn, if derived works aren't (c) their creator, why don't you set up a website offering Disney movies for download? See if Disney and the courts agree with you.
Your link only addressed the fact that creating derived works from works still in copyright requires permission from the author of the existing work. It doesn't claim that the author of the derived work gets no copyright for the derived work.
I am quite aware of this distinction, however you are missing my point. The license says more than "you cannot use the free version to develop the competition." It also says "if you, the person, do any kind of unrelated development on a competitor (perhaps even submitting a bug report!) you no may no longer use the free version of bitkeeper. Which means that any kernel developer who has become accustomed to using BitKeeper will retstrain himself from aiding competing free software projects at all.
This divides the world of open-source developers into two mutually exclusive groups: those who use bitkeeper for kernel development and those who can ever work on free alternatives.
It seems reasonable enough that Larry would want to prohibit people from using bitkeeper to compete against bitkeeper.
However I think it is telling that the license goes a step further and disallows any person or entity who ever works on a competitor from ever using bitkeeper. So Larry is essentially helping to see that many people (Linux kernel hackers using bitkeeper) are unable to ever compete with him, even if the kernel hacking and open-source-SCM hacking are in no way related. Way to drive a wedge through the free software community.
Say you managed to discover an algorithm that made factoring easy, to the degree that cyphers dependent on the intractability of factoring would be completely compromised. What would you do with with this extremely dangerous information?
The only reasonable action I could think of is to anonymously (through a dozen anonymous remailers) email a description of the algorithm to Bruce Schneier, entrusting him to proceed with this knowledge in whatever way he finds most prudent. I surely wouldn't want to be associated with the discovery and the calamity that would follow, and somehow I feel like Bruce Scheier could be trusted to act responsibly and intelligently.
RMS is reaping the results of his own decisions. If he was concerned with public perception of the free software movement, he should have made more pragmatic decisions that would have yielded more favorable publicity, but he didn't.
He could have given his project a catchy and descriptive name that people would naturally associate with a movement about freedom. Instead he chose an obscure name like GNU that no one knows how to pronounce (or really wants to once they do).
He could have worked on writing a simple yet fully functional monolithic kernel, which would have been a quick way to finish the off a basic GNU system. Instead he chose a design so apparently complicated that it still is not usable even though they had a one-year head start on Linux!
He could have adopted Linux as part of the GNU system (after all, it's always been GPL even if FSF don't own the copyright). He could have pursued making Debian an official GNU distribution which would have given him the authority to call it a GNU system. However the FSF stopped funding Debian after November 1995.
He could have found some graceful way to seek credit for his contribution to Linux distributions. Instead he came up with the abomination known as "GNU/Linux" (pronounced guh-noo slash linux -- you're supposed to pronounce the slash!) He continually wonders why no one (except the Debian people) is interested in perpetuating this offense against what little dignity is left in American English.
And now he's upset that he gets no credit, no recognition, no acknowledgement of his ideals in the mainstream media. Well he probably should be upset, but only at himself for his lack of pragmatism.
Original poster: "Ballmer is too devout a capitalist to understand things that aren't businesses. You can't bankrupt a social movement." (Note he didn't even say "Linux")
Reply, desperately looking for a cause: "Linux isn't a social movement. Waaaaah, don't stereotype me based on what OS I run." (Onlookers: "WTF is he talking about?")
Me: "Linux is definitely part of a social movement. And drop the persecution complex."
You: "Technically, Linux is an OS and Open Source is the social movement." (Onlookers: "WTF does that have to do with anything?)
And linux is not a social movement, it's an operating system.
Are you kidding me? Thousands of developers worldwide spontaneously volunteer millions of hours into a collective pot, the fruits of which eventually rival the biggest software companies on the planet. Sounds like a social movement to me.
Right now I'm running Windows 2k, working through some bugs in a custom DCOM object. So I guess I'm a corporate sheep. In an hour or so I'll be working through some fortran code in unix. Then I'm a greasy peace loving hippy.
Straw man. No one is making judgements about users based on what OS they are running on their desktop. The claim is that you can't try to discuss the development model of Linux based on terms that only make sense for businesses (such as "bankrupt") since they simply don't apply (there is no entity involved that can have assets or debt).
I listen to very little music from the last ten years. If you're talking about music older than that, the RIAA companies own every single significant recording.
You can't just go find free versions of Bach, Palestrina, Herbert Howells, Miles Davis, or Herbie Hancock. These are the genuises who made music evolve before our very eyes. Refusing to listen to them because the record companies are evil is to voluntarily stunt your own musical growth.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with your sentiment completely.
.GEEK.NZ domains to anyone) from the NZ Domain Name Commissioner (DNC). If successful, GEEK.NZ would be New Zealand's twelfth second-level domain.
However I think this particular submission was reasonably clear. A group of professional Internet engineers and technicians from New Zealand (ie. a private group) are following the published procedure to obtain the delegation of GEEK.NZ (ie. they'll be able to give out
It's significant because it allows a private group to define what a particular subdomain looks like by who they grant registrations to. It is leveraging the delegation model of DNS to give a particular social/professional group their own DNS namespace.
A more detailed explanation could be useful to people not familiar with DNS, though.
Many people subscribe to a theory more around what Alan Turing talked about: If a computer appears to be sentiant, it IS sentiant.
:)
Turing said nothing of the sort. He didn't speak to sentience at all, and he even considered the question "Can machines think" to be "too meaningless to deserve discussion." He only spoke to the question "could a machine some day win at the imitation game?"
Just realise that there are other compelling viewpoints on the issue and keep an open mind. Don't become like Searle and just reject anything against your view as impossable or silly
I have to admit that I do. More than 50 years of AI have failed to produce anything that can function at the level of a four-year-old. I believe we are a long way off from understanding sentience and biological intelligence, if they can be understood and analyzed at all. I'm not saying that it's impossible, but it's certainly more than the sum of a massive neural network. Current proponents of strong AI won't admit that there's something going on there that they don't understand.
Your argument is, once again, pretty similar to Searle's (he give the example of having the people of India carry out the telephone calls, and asks "Is India concious?").
I swear I'm not ripping him off, I thought of that argument just now!
Fan of John Searle [utm.edu], are you?
The argument was evident to me before I ever heard of John Searle, but yes, I do agree with him.
How's this for a thought experiment. Take a human being, and swap one of his neurons for an electronic circuit that behaves identically to a neuron. One at a time, swap out each real neuron and swap in an electronic one. Is he still concious when his brain is entirely made up of electronic neurons instead of organic ones?
I don't believe such a thing is possible. But let's assume that it is. Now try this for a thought experiment: instead of swapping out biological neurons for mechanical ones, take an instantaneous state snapshot of an entire brain. Now find a person for every neuron and give them a set of instructions for how to behave exactly like a neuron, making telephone calls to communicate with the other neurons (if it's possible to create an electronic circuit modeling a neuron, it must be possible to codify the behavior into a set of human-understandable instructions). Give them the initial state of the brain you are copying. Is this vast network of people following instructions a conscious (albeit vastly slower) clone of the brain whose state was surveyed?
Repeat the above, but only use two people to simulate two random neurons from the surveyed brain. It is conscious? Now try three. Is that conscious? What is the magic threshold that can achieve consciousness?
I think your position of "consciousness is no more than the sum of the brain's neurons" is a much more perilous position to defend than the claim that there's something going on there that we don't understand.
Namely, what happens if some researched finally stumbles across an application that passes the Turing test? One that for all intents and purposes appears to be a conscious life form?
The resulting ethical problems will be myriad
You watch too many movies. No matter how smart you can make a computer look, it is still performing the same fetch-execute cycle on primitive instructions like "add," "shift," and "branch." If that is a conscious life form, then so is a pencil and piece of paper on which you perform all these primitive instructions manually.
In my biased opinion, the audio editor Audacity is a success story in OSS usability.
I've been working on this project for almost two years now, and the experience has completely shifted my priorities and my perspective in software development. Before I started working on Audacity, I had the mindset that I think many OSS programmers have of only caring about the capability and raw power of a program. I never really considered the non-programmer users a significant concern.
Audacity's project lead is Dominic Mazzoni, who is uniquely excellent at both programming and user interface design. He comes from a Mac background, a world where interfaces generally don't suck. From day one he was writing for maximum usability and maximum use. Doing simple things with Audacity is child's play. Dialogs and messages are written to be easy to understand. Audacity is portable to Windows/UNIX/MacOS9/MacOSX, so right off the bat the potential audience is much larger than an application written for only one platform.
There is an audacity-help list that is advertised in big letters on the web page. This is an open invitation to ask questions that most would see as newbie questions not worth their time. This gives us a chance to see what users are having a hard time understanding. Most of these questions are answered in a timely fashion, which means these users don't abandon Audacity.
Documentation is another area where Audacity shines. Tony Oetzmann has been writing some really excellent, concise, useful documentation.
As a result this focus on usability, a lot of people use Audacity. We're pretty consistently in the top 20 downloads on sourceforge. People write often to ask if they can incorporate Audacity on CD compilations. We've been reviewed in the Washington Post.
I've really come around on this in the last two years. Usability is worth it. Anyone can appreciate software that is usable, even programmers. This doesn't mean dumbing things down -- right now a feature is in the works that will allow a project to have a speed envelope, that will allow you to have the speed continuously vary (with appropriate resampling). This is a pretty advanced feature that most users would never have a use for. But a lot of thought is going into how to integrate it into the GUI in the best way possible. It's not going to just get bolted on.
The future of email is??
I'm no fortuneteller but a good start would be an email protocol that fucking authenticates the sender so that you could be guaranteed that every email in your inbox has a from header that doesn't lie. No more untracable spammers. No more viruses that claim to come from your friends. As an added bonus, this would stop the flood of emails from various postmasters warning you that an email you never sent was not able to go through.
Seriously, SMTP needs to be redone and the sooner the better. I know there are things like TLS and SMTP auth floating around, but they are not pervasive or mandatory, so they do no good at all.
Any unix apps around that will let you do interesting things with svgs? Like, VIEW them even? Why no mozilla support, even though a freely available implementation has been available since May 2001?
SVG looks uber-cool, but there doesn't seem to be much supporting software.
Err, vertex shaders come first. The verticies are moved around by the shaders, then they're projected, 2D triangles are generated, and the pixel shaders run on the pixels covering the generated triangles.
:-)
I meant historically, not in the rendering pipeline.
Thanks, that was an excellent explanation.
I assume pixel shaders came first? "Vertex shaders" sounds like kind of a misnomer, since they affect geometry and not shading.
Could someone please explain how shaders enhance a scene, and how to know if you're seeing one? I've done a fair amount of graphics coding (2d, 3d, splines, nurbs, etc) but I don't understand what shaders offer or how they really work.
Images that can illustrate this would be especially nice.
Hot damn, if derived works aren't (c) their creator, why don't you set up a website offering Disney movies for download? See if Disney and the courts agree with you.
Your link only addressed the fact that creating derived works from works still in copyright requires permission from the author of the existing work. It doesn't claim that the author of the derived work gets no copyright for the derived work.
In order to register for Rhapsody, you must use one of the following browsers:
* Internet Explorer 5.0, or newer
* Netscape 6.0, or newer
(Please note: In order to use Rhapsody, you will need Internet Explorer 5.0 or newer.)
Oh well.
First they ignore you,
then they laugh at you,
then they fight you,
then you win.
-Mohandas Gandhi
Bruce Perens nailed some of the puppetters behind the "software choice" campaign.
I am quite aware of this distinction, however you are missing my point. The license says more than "you cannot use the free version to develop the competition." It also says "if you, the person, do any kind of unrelated development on a competitor (perhaps even submitting a bug report!) you no may no longer use the free version of bitkeeper. Which means that any kernel developer who has become accustomed to using BitKeeper will retstrain himself from aiding competing free software projects at all.
This divides the world of open-source developers into two mutually exclusive groups: those who use bitkeeper for kernel development and those who can ever work on free alternatives.
It seems reasonable enough that Larry would want to prohibit people from using bitkeeper to compete against bitkeeper.
However I think it is telling that the license goes a step further and disallows any person or entity who ever works on a competitor from ever using bitkeeper. So Larry is essentially helping to see that many people (Linux kernel hackers using bitkeeper) are unable to ever compete with him, even if the kernel hacking and open-source-SCM hacking are in no way related. Way to drive a wedge through the free software community.
I've heard of people drinking small amounts of liquid nitrogen. This is beyond stupid.
No kidding.
Revisionist history indeed. BSD (in the form of Unix patchkits) were available as "open source" when Linus was still in diapers.
WTF does Linus have to do with this? The claim was that the GPL spawned the open-source/free-software movement. RMS started writing GNU under the GPL in 1984. BSD wasn't freely redistributable until Networking Release 1 in 1989.
Say you managed to discover an algorithm that made factoring easy, to the degree that cyphers dependent on the intractability of factoring would be completely compromised. What would you do with with this extremely dangerous information?
The only reasonable action I could think of is to anonymously (through a dozen anonymous remailers) email a description of the algorithm to Bruce Schneier, entrusting him to proceed with this knowledge in whatever way he finds most prudent. I surely wouldn't want to be associated with the discovery and the calamity that would follow, and somehow I feel like Bruce Scheier could be trusted to act responsibly and intelligently.
RMS is reaping the results of his own decisions. If he was concerned with public perception of the free software movement, he should have made more pragmatic decisions that would have yielded more favorable publicity, but he didn't.
He could have given his project a catchy and descriptive name that people would naturally associate with a movement about freedom. Instead he chose an obscure name like GNU that no one knows how to pronounce (or really wants to once they do).
He could have worked on writing a simple yet fully functional monolithic kernel, which would have been a quick way to finish the off a basic GNU system. Instead he chose a design so apparently complicated that it still is not usable even though they had a one-year head start on Linux!
He could have adopted Linux as part of the GNU system (after all, it's always been GPL even if FSF don't own the copyright). He could have pursued making Debian an official GNU distribution which would have given him the authority to call it a GNU system. However the FSF stopped funding Debian after November 1995.
He could have found some graceful way to seek credit for his contribution to Linux distributions. Instead he came up with the abomination known as "GNU/Linux" (pronounced guh-noo slash linux -- you're supposed to pronounce the slash!) He continually wonders why no one (except the Debian people) is interested in
perpetuating this offense against what little dignity is left in American English.
And now he's upset that he gets no credit, no recognition, no acknowledgement of his ideals in the mainstream media. Well he probably should be upset, but only at himself for his lack of pragmatism.
I couldn't figure out how to downmix from stereo to mono
From the stereo track's menu, choose "split stereo track." Then change both tracks to mono. Then select Project->Quick Mix.
or how to reduce the sample rate.
Audacity doesn't do resampling in 1.0. This feature exists in the the 1.1 development branch.
Josh Haberman, Audacity developer
Original poster: "Ballmer is too devout a capitalist to understand things that aren't businesses. You can't bankrupt a social movement." (Note he didn't even say "Linux")
Reply, desperately looking for a cause: "Linux isn't a social movement. Waaaaah, don't stereotype me based on what OS I run." (Onlookers: "WTF is he talking about?")
Me: "Linux is definitely part of a social movement. And drop the persecution complex."
You: "Technically, Linux is an OS and Open Source is the social movement." (Onlookers: "WTF does that have to do with anything?)
Your self-righteousness is amusing.
And linux is not a social movement, it's an operating system.
Are you kidding me? Thousands of developers worldwide spontaneously volunteer millions of hours into a collective pot, the fruits of which eventually rival the biggest software companies on the planet. Sounds like a social movement to me.
Right now I'm running Windows 2k, working through some bugs in a custom DCOM object. So I guess I'm a corporate sheep. In an hour or so I'll be working through some fortran code in unix. Then I'm a greasy peace loving hippy.
Straw man. No one is making judgements about users based on what OS they are running on their desktop. The claim is that you can't try to discuss the development model of Linux based on terms that only make sense for businesses (such as "bankrupt") since they simply don't apply (there is no entity involved that can have assets or debt).
I listen to very little music from the last ten years. If you're talking about music older than that, the RIAA companies own every single significant recording.
You can't just go find free versions of Bach, Palestrina, Herbert Howells, Miles Davis, or Herbie Hancock. These are the genuises who made music evolve before our very eyes. Refusing to listen to them because the record companies are evil is to voluntarily stunt your own musical growth.