Dude, with a sig that says "There are 10 kinds of people in this world, those that get binary and those who don't" you aren't the masses. I am not saying that Lin is or isn't ready for said masses, but just being able to get that joke rules out your representaion in that group. You obviously haven't met my users. They really are the masses, and they sometimes get confused dealing with decimal.
I think that languages get adopted widely when they offer something that other languages can't do, or do very poorly.
I don't know about this. Python has reached the point where you can safely say that it is in wide adoption. And it doesn't really offer much that Perl doesn't. There are legions of Perl coders who aren't going to switch to Py for just this reason. They have invested a lot of time in learning and becoming comfortable with Perl idiom and they don't feel they are going to get much bang for the buck by changing over.
On the other hand, a more modern design with much more natural object support and a number of other features make it much easier and faster for many people to code in, particularly for implementing GUI's and larger programs.
The point being that a second language in the same space, implementing not that far from the same general feature set of an overwhelmingly dominant language can still provide a good enough design to get a lot of coders to start using it. I code in Python every chance I get becuase it makes more sense to me and for my personal style it makes me a lot more productive.
D might be able to do the same thing. It doesn't have to be all that different from what is out there, if the way it is structured strikes a chord with the personal style of enough developers.
Is Microsoft actually dumb enough to write memo after memo about something they now have admitted is their biggest threat and allow all of these memos to leak so the opposition can read them?
In short, yes, they are. Never worked at the enterprise level, have you?
Exactly how else are you going to communicate with divisions that have over 5,000 people in them in order to set policy and implement proceedures than send out memos and other documentary evidence? Direct communication doesn't work over around 30 people in an office, that is why there are entirely different managment techniques for very small buisness situations and mid sized business scenarios.
As for "allowing them to leak", when you have hundreds of people in on a memo, some of whom might have their own motives for wanting to see one idea/department/division spun a certain way, it is exceedingly difficult to keep that information from going public. Just ask the government, which is constantly leaking information, sometimes intentionally, but just as frequently unintentionally.
Microsoft used to be a sure path to making millions quickly for an employee, but the stock options aren't worth what they used to be. It is not surprising to me at least that the level of employee loyalty might drop. Further, this might actually be a case of employee loyalty. If you really were devoted to your company, but were convinced it was going the wrong direction, this might be a way to help force the situation.
I am not saying that I know that these memos are real, but thinking that Microsoft just wouldn't let this happen isn't realistic. All you need is a couple of people at the right level and it is exceedingly hard to stop this kind of thing. It can be done, but requires tight compartmentalization, which is very hard to do with large scale policies that you are implementing across entire enterprise groups.
Re:why use an IDE for an interpreted language anyw
on
The Humane Environment
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· Score: 2, Insightful
There are a couple of things that could be handy with a python IDE. Visual class browsers come to mind as something I have use for on bigger projects. I use a Tk based class browser I cobbled together for myself, but I gather many py ide's have this feature.
The other would be a Tkinter visual interface builder. I don't think that any of the current IDE's have this, and THAT would get me to start using them. I can code Tkinter manually, but for rapid small prototyping, I could find this feature strong. The swing interface builder is one of the things I really used the most in JBuilder when I did a lot of Java codiing.
And if they want me to get really excited, adding a WxWindows interface builder on top of that.
And, heck, while we are at it, throw in some automated packaging tools. Not that it is very hard to package stuff for Python, but it I can see where it would save me some time over doing it manually.
Boy howdy. While I have plenty of higher education, none of it is in programming, at which I am self-taught. For a very long time I didn't see the point of a CS degree, and my attitude was "well, it is all in the books, and I can read."
However, after long enough, I realized that a CS degree from a decent school would have definintely been the easier, softer way for me. I haven't had a problem learning the things I have needed to know, but feel that I could have shaved a large amount of time off my learning/proficency curve if I had learned some of the things I learned in a different order and didn't go off on a few pointless boondogles that I don't think I would have made if I my trainning had been of a more structured and formal nature.
Some of the best coders I know are self-taught, but that doesn't change the fact that for many people, myself included, the rigor of a formal program would have made me stronger quicker than the path I ultimately took.
Now you are defining a ghost. Which starts putting you on the right path, sempai. But originally you were making a blanket statement without definitions using absolute judgments.
I am not disagreeing with your case, only with your imprecision in describing it.
And as for another take on what a ghost is, that is likely to be at least partially correct in the long run, take a look at the research being done by Persinger at Laurentian University in neuro psych. Very interesting stuff. Here is a link to a pop article about some of his work.
The paths the railways followed were those travelled by those who came before the railways...
Horsepucky. There might be places this is true, but there are a TON where it isn't. Like anywhere with real elevations. Once you get past parts of the northeast in the US, I am willing to bet this is almost entirely bogus. One of the keys in building railroads in the US was blowing holes in mountains. Obviously, people weren't treading those paths before.
That was good except for one thing: scientific impossiblities like ghosts.
I don't believe in ghosts, and doubt the IQ of people who do. But there is nothing I know of that vigorously proves them to be impossiblities. There are just a ton of reasons to think they are very highly improbable. By saying something is impossible that you can't prove to be so, you are making a statement of faith instead of science. Which is what you are trying to decry in the first place.
Absolutely absurd. The USPTO *really* needs to start actually *reading* the applications it approves.
They haven't approved this. The USPTO makes more than its share of truly retarded blunders, but this isn't one, yet.
And I agree with you that there should be some sort of fine for companies that try to push through drivel, but I can't really imagine how you would do that. I mean, all the corps are lawyered up in this department, and you start trying to assess those fines and they are going to put up a huge argument about the drivel. It would probably end up costing more time and money than it would save, is my bet.
Yet the dim bulb is calling a lawyer to file and civil lawsuit instead of a criminal one.
Filing a criminal lawsuit isn't his choice. It is the choice of the prosecutor with jursidiction over the case, in this case I think that is the US Attorney for his region. You know how much of a hassle it is going to be for them, with very little payoff, to actually run this out as a mail fraud case? Like they don't have better things to do. Odds of them paying much attention are about nil.
What he is doing here with the civil suit is the only real option open to him for personal action in this matter.
And, for my money, the guy isn't dimly not getting the point of what is being done to him. He is just making statements that are self-serving to the press. Of course the guy gets it. But what is he going to say, "Uh, well, I guess it is only fair and I repent my evil ways now." Not likely.
Have you ever seen the EA campus at Redwood Shores? It is bloody huge and houses something like 20 dev teams now that they have consolidated in the last year.
Canuck pride is all well and good, but like 80% of dev for EA happens in Redwood, motion capture or no.
Mod parent up, he is right. The Via Eden mini-ITX platform is the opposite of this 'We need more and we don't care if we need liquid nitrogen to cool it,' thinking that has been going on in the Mhz wars. For a load of applications, you don't need all that cruch, and smaller, cooler is the way to go.
Check out mini-itx.com for more on these eden processors.
There is no reason that 90% of the artists out there should be earning more then average Joe.
Man, I don't know where you hang out, but I want a membership. About 99.9% of the artists I know don't make dick, especially compared to code jockeys. Hell, I make more when I am technically out of work than most of the _signed_ musicians I know.
And I keep seeing this "well, the industry should lower prices so the whole thing is their fault" argument a lot on here. You know what, you gotta be a retard or an Eagle scout to go the store and buy something that you can get for free over broadband with no real hassle.
"But lowering prices worked for DVD's!" Yep, and that is cause it takes too long to download DVD's and DVD burners don't come on every new machine shipped yet. Both of those things will change in the future and DVD's will be in the same boat.
The RIAA is doomed in the long run, and good riddence to them and their cracked crap. But all of this slashdot kneejerk about just lowering prices every time this subject comes up is bunk. Lower prices are only going to work if you are getting some kind of value added. And for every person who wants the CD cover art, there are going to be ten who will pull down the free product if it isn't much more hassle than going to the store and buying the new CD, no matter how cheap it is.
Debatable. The thing that keeps MS in their monopoly and Apple in the margins, the argument goes, is that Apple is a hardware company that happens to ship an OS. If Apple on the other hand decided they were going to start acting like an OS company, they might be able to give MS a run.
Personally, I think there is some merit to this argument, but not much. However, I really do think that MS way doesn't want to even think about that right now. Linux is causing them enough trouble. Linux isn't taking over anything but the geekiest desktops right now, but they are eating into the back office space like beavers on meth, and the logic of free (as in beer) could put them on some more desktops in the very near future as soon a few issues get dealt with, and at the speed of Linux evolution over the last few years, I don't think Redmond is laughing at the threat. They think they can win it, but they are starting to take the idea seriously.
In that light, I think they don't want any hassles with Apple. Even if you think you can win a fight, that doesn't mean you want to fight it.
And that would be about the time that Apple committed suicide.
It is critical to Apple that MS keep making Office for the Mac. It isn't anywhere near as critical for MS to keep the Mac marketshare of Office. I have seen people argue (and I am not sure that I don't agree with them) that the x86 port of Darwin was simply to keep some leverage with MS on this one issue.
While you might not like Office or MS (and don't look at me, I am exclusively Linux) from a business perspective Apple cannot afford to mess with this relationship.
I have some pretty serious environmentalist leanings, and I wonder about the sanity of those who don't. But at the same time, I wonder a little about this when it comes from these sources. They have a vested interest in seeing this report show very high numbers.
I mean, MS-backed studies show all kinds of strange crap. Studies that come out of pro-gun groups show that we should all have guns and crime would go away, and from anti-gun groups we get that we all have to be totally disarmed in order for crime to go down.
I always am pretty skeptical about reports from highly polarized sources.
Bull. This is not about "companys who dare to sell what Google may only Google has the right to do: put you on top of the result search" or google trying to squash competition.
What this is about is someone taking advantage of the google system and google doing an error correction. Google is of use because it works as a ranking engine, and these people are intentionally trying to throw off the rankings.
This isn't trying to stomp on people, it is manually tweeking an algorythm. And it is a GOOD thing.
Yeah, I agree with you that the term presents a problem when used outside a purely academic context. A problem much akin to that is trying to talk about hackers with anyone who isn't in the open source movement these days.
But one thing I think people in general don't give enough credit to is that playing chess isn't an easy problem. And it isn't a "bigger version of a tic-tac-toe program". There isn't enough computing capacity on the planet to compute things as a simple search tree and see all the moves. There is some real finesse to how to optimize that search and make it work effectively, no matter how big the iron you throw at it.
Is this something that is going to produce AI as in Wintermute? Probably not. But some of the self-learning heuristics used in some game programs (that checkers program that I can't remember the name of right now that was taught to play totally by self-learning heuristics comes to mind) are likely to be included in the basic makeup of any kind of Wintermute.
Also, look at the stuff Wolfram has been doing for the last 20 years or so with cellular autonoma. Even if everything in A New Kind of Science doesn't play out as far as he claims it will, some of the work he and other a-life/cellular folk have been doing is pretty damned sure to be fundamental for what is to come.
Gotta crawl before we can walk.
But I do agree with you completely that the term is a perceptual hinderance at this point.
Okay, RM, that's good. But what we are talking about here is an academic disipline called AI. It is a branch of computer science. Certain problem domains and techniques are acknowledged by much of mainstream academia to fall within the bounds of AI. Playing chess at grandmaster level is generally acknowledged as a worthy test of some of those techniques.
This is not to be confused with science fiction and popular usage, where AI has an entirely different meaning, which is why most AI researchers have been sprinting as fast as they can away from the term.
And in terms of waiting on Wintermute to start ringing the row of payphones in the airport just once as I walk by, well, I agree with you we aren't going to get there for a while and probably with much different tools than we are currently using. But that is a fantasy future and not the reality of the situation today.
Don't get to read much news, do you? What do you think all that face scanning software they are talking about putting in airports or have been using in London is? How do you think that some smart bombs match viusal target profiles from arbitrary angles? Parts recognition in manufacturing plants...the list goes on.
Links are rife to this, and I am not trolling for karma, so I am not going to bother.
This is the classic moving the goal-posts that has plauged AI since its inception as a disipline. As soon as a computer can do something, it isn't AI anymore.
This has happened with Chess, visual recognition, speech recognition and a host of other tests of AI techniques.
I have complete and utter faith in human nature, and am quite sure that as soon as an algorythmic strategy for effectively attacking the problem of Go is developed, people will start saying: well, go is just a matter of implementing $foo on really good hardware, and that isn't a test of AI.
Give credit where credit is due. This is many years of AI development at work.
Actually, a couple of theaters in the east bay area where I live are addressing just these issues and doing a gangbusters job of it. The Parkway theater is a small brewpub/theater environment that carefully crafts their movie schedule to theme nights and provides special nights for things like people with small children and they do boffo business at $5.00 a ticket.
The Paramount Theater, in Oakland, CA provides a great old-time experience, including prize giva-aways, live organ music and a ton of other fun extras, again for a low ticket price, and they are packed for every show I have atteneded there.
Theaters that keep cramming in more seats and charging higher ticket prices for the same sub-standard experience SHOULD start to die, but specialty houses that cater to their clientelle will be able to keep picking up the slack and hopefully spread out from their hardcore urban niche to the rest of the country. Which for me would be a good thing.
And the death of the blockbuster would just be icing on the cake for me.
Python is basically a RAD environment. The only difference between this and the stuff you named is that Py is free software and it is cross platform by nature.
And that last is important, because writing a real 3d modeling ap and tying it to an OS like Windows where less and less real 3d work is happening doesn't seem wise.
No, you aren't the only one. I personally use Python because it simply makes more sense to me and is more elegant and readable. However, the two are in the same space for all intents and purposes in the way that most people use them.
However, the one thing I do think is slightly, note slightly, different is that for big jobs it becomes annoying to try to read perl or debug someone else's code, and it is much easer in Python. At least for me. So in Python I can produce apps, and in perl I would rather not.
But while I prefer Python, there is nothing I have done in it so far that isn't trivial to port to Perl.
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, with a sig that says "There are 10 kinds of people in this world, those that get binary and those who don't" you aren't the masses. I am not saying that Lin is or isn't ready for said masses, but just being able to get that joke rules out your representaion in that group. You obviously haven't met my users. They really are the masses, and they sometimes get confused dealing with decimal.
I think that languages get adopted widely when they offer something that other languages can't do, or do very poorly.
I don't know about this. Python has reached the point where you can safely say that it is in wide adoption. And it doesn't really offer much that Perl doesn't. There are legions of Perl coders who aren't going to switch to Py for just this reason. They have invested a lot of time in learning and becoming comfortable with Perl idiom and they don't feel they are going to get much bang for the buck by changing over.
On the other hand, a more modern design with much more natural object support and a number of other features make it much easier and faster for many people to code in, particularly for implementing GUI's and larger programs.
The point being that a second language in the same space, implementing not that far from the same general feature set of an overwhelmingly dominant language can still provide a good enough design to get a lot of coders to start using it. I code in Python every chance I get becuase it makes more sense to me and for my personal style it makes me a lot more productive.
D might be able to do the same thing. It doesn't have to be all that different from what is out there, if the way it is structured strikes a chord with the personal style of enough developers.
Is Microsoft actually dumb enough to write memo after memo about something they now have admitted is their biggest threat and allow all of these memos to leak so the opposition can read them?
In short, yes, they are. Never worked at the enterprise level, have you?
Exactly how else are you going to communicate with divisions that have over 5,000 people in them in order to set policy and implement proceedures than send out memos and other documentary evidence? Direct communication doesn't work over around 30 people in an office, that is why there are entirely different managment techniques for very small buisness situations and mid sized business scenarios.
As for "allowing them to leak", when you have hundreds of people in on a memo, some of whom might have their own motives for wanting to see one idea/department/division spun a certain way, it is exceedingly difficult to keep that information from going public. Just ask the government, which is constantly leaking information, sometimes intentionally, but just as frequently unintentionally.
Microsoft used to be a sure path to making millions quickly for an employee, but the stock options aren't worth what they used to be. It is not surprising to me at least that the level of employee loyalty might drop. Further, this might actually be a case of employee loyalty. If you really were devoted to your company, but were convinced it was going the wrong direction, this might be a way to help force the situation.
I am not saying that I know that these memos are real, but thinking that Microsoft just wouldn't let this happen isn't realistic. All you need is a couple of people at the right level and it is exceedingly hard to stop this kind of thing. It can be done, but requires tight compartmentalization, which is very hard to do with large scale policies that you are implementing across entire enterprise groups.
There are a couple of things that could be handy with a python IDE. Visual class browsers come to mind as something I have use for on bigger projects. I use a Tk based class browser I cobbled together for myself, but I gather many py ide's have this feature.
The other would be a Tkinter visual interface builder. I don't think that any of the current IDE's have this, and THAT would get me to start using them. I can code Tkinter manually, but for rapid small prototyping, I could find this feature strong. The swing interface builder is one of the things I really used the most in JBuilder when I did a lot of Java codiing.
And if they want me to get really excited, adding a WxWindows interface builder on top of that.
And, heck, while we are at it, throw in some automated packaging tools. Not that it is very hard to package stuff for Python, but it I can see where it would save me some time over doing it manually.
Boy howdy. While I have plenty of higher education, none of it is in programming, at which I am self-taught. For a very long time I didn't see the point of a CS degree, and my attitude was "well, it is all in the books, and I can read."
However, after long enough, I realized that a CS degree from a decent school would have definintely been the easier, softer way for me. I haven't had a problem learning the things I have needed to know, but feel that I could have shaved a large amount of time off my learning/proficency curve if I had learned some of the things I learned in a different order and didn't go off on a few pointless boondogles that I don't think I would have made if I my trainning had been of a more structured and formal nature.
Some of the best coders I know are self-taught, but that doesn't change the fact that for many people, myself included, the rigor of a formal program would have made me stronger quicker than the path I ultimately took.
Now you are defining a ghost. Which starts putting you on the right path, sempai. But originally you were making a blanket statement without definitions using absolute judgments.
I am not disagreeing with your case, only with your imprecision in describing it.
And as for another take on what a ghost is, that is likely to be at least partially correct in the long run, take a look at the research being done by Persinger at Laurentian University in neuro psych. Very interesting stuff. Here is a link to a pop article about some of his work.
The paths the railways followed were those travelled by those who came before the railways...
Horsepucky. There might be places this is true, but there are a TON where it isn't. Like anywhere with real elevations. Once you get past parts of the northeast in the US, I am willing to bet this is almost entirely bogus. One of the keys in building railroads in the US was blowing holes in mountains. Obviously, people weren't treading those paths before.
That was good except for one thing: scientific impossiblities like ghosts.
I don't believe in ghosts, and doubt the IQ of people who do. But there is nothing I know of that vigorously proves them to be impossiblities. There are just a ton of reasons to think they are very highly improbable. By saying something is impossible that you can't prove to be so, you are making a statement of faith instead of science. Which is what you are trying to decry in the first place.
Absolutely absurd. The USPTO *really* needs to start actually *reading* the applications it approves.
They haven't approved this. The USPTO makes more than its share of truly retarded blunders, but this isn't one, yet.
And I agree with you that there should be some sort of fine for companies that try to push through drivel, but I can't really imagine how you would do that. I mean, all the corps are lawyered up in this department, and you start trying to assess those fines and they are going to put up a huge argument about the drivel. It would probably end up costing more time and money than it would save, is my bet.
Yet the dim bulb is calling a lawyer to file and civil lawsuit instead of a criminal one.
Filing a criminal lawsuit isn't his choice. It is the choice of the prosecutor with jursidiction over the case, in this case I think that is the US Attorney for his region. You know how much of a hassle it is going to be for them, with very little payoff, to actually run this out as a mail fraud case? Like they don't have better things to do. Odds of them paying much attention are about nil.
What he is doing here with the civil suit is the only real option open to him for personal action in this matter.
And, for my money, the guy isn't dimly not getting the point of what is being done to him. He is just making statements that are self-serving to the press. Of course the guy gets it. But what is he going to say, "Uh, well, I guess it is only fair and I repent my evil ways now." Not likely.
Have you ever seen the EA campus at Redwood Shores? It is bloody huge and houses something like 20 dev teams now that they have consolidated in the last year.
Canuck pride is all well and good, but like 80% of dev for EA happens in Redwood, motion capture or no.
Mod parent up, he is right. The Via Eden mini-ITX platform is the opposite of this 'We need more and we don't care if we need liquid nitrogen to cool it,' thinking that has been going on in the Mhz wars. For a load of applications, you don't need all that cruch, and smaller, cooler is the way to go.
Check out mini-itx.com for more on these eden processors.
There is no reason that 90% of the artists out there should be earning more then average Joe.
Man, I don't know where you hang out, but I want a membership. About 99.9% of the artists I know don't make dick, especially compared to code jockeys. Hell, I make more when I am technically out of work than most of the _signed_ musicians I know.
And I keep seeing this "well, the industry should lower prices so the whole thing is their fault" argument a lot on here. You know what, you gotta be a retard or an Eagle scout to go the store and buy something that you can get for free over broadband with no real hassle.
"But lowering prices worked for DVD's!" Yep, and that is cause it takes too long to download DVD's and DVD burners don't come on every new machine shipped yet. Both of those things will change in the future and DVD's will be in the same boat.
The RIAA is doomed in the long run, and good riddence to them and their cracked crap. But all of this slashdot kneejerk about just lowering prices every time this subject comes up is bunk. Lower prices are only going to work if you are getting some kind of value added. And for every person who wants the CD cover art, there are going to be ten who will pull down the free product if it isn't much more hassle than going to the store and buying the new CD, no matter how cheap it is.
Debatable. The thing that keeps MS in their monopoly and Apple in the margins, the argument goes, is that Apple is a hardware company that happens to ship an OS. If Apple on the other hand decided they were going to start acting like an OS company, they might be able to give MS a run.
Personally, I think there is some merit to this argument, but not much. However, I really do think that MS way doesn't want to even think about that right now. Linux is causing them enough trouble. Linux isn't taking over anything but the geekiest desktops right now, but they are eating into the back office space like beavers on meth, and the logic of free (as in beer) could put them on some more desktops in the very near future as soon a few issues get dealt with, and at the speed of Linux evolution over the last few years, I don't think Redmond is laughing at the threat. They think they can win it, but they are starting to take the idea seriously.
In that light, I think they don't want any hassles with Apple. Even if you think you can win a fight, that doesn't mean you want to fight it.
And that would be about the time that Apple committed suicide.
It is critical to Apple that MS keep making Office for the Mac. It isn't anywhere near as critical for MS to keep the Mac marketshare of Office. I have seen people argue (and I am not sure that I don't agree with them) that the x86 port of Darwin was simply to keep some leverage with MS on this one issue.
While you might not like Office or MS (and don't look at me, I am exclusively Linux) from a business perspective Apple cannot afford to mess with this relationship.
I have some pretty serious environmentalist leanings, and I wonder about the sanity of those who don't. But at the same time, I wonder a little about this when it comes from these sources. They have a vested interest in seeing this report show very high numbers.
I mean, MS-backed studies show all kinds of strange crap. Studies that come out of pro-gun groups show that we should all have guns and crime would go away, and from anti-gun groups we get that we all have to be totally disarmed in order for crime to go down.
I always am pretty skeptical about reports from highly polarized sources.
Bull. This is not about "companys who dare to sell what Google may only Google has the right to do: put you on top of the result search" or google trying to squash competition.
What this is about is someone taking advantage of the google system and google doing an error correction. Google is of use because it works as a ranking engine, and these people are intentionally trying to throw off the rankings.
This isn't trying to stomp on people, it is manually tweeking an algorythm. And it is a GOOD thing.
Yeah, I agree with you that the term presents a problem when used outside a purely academic context. A problem much akin to that is trying to talk about hackers with anyone who isn't in the open source movement these days.
But one thing I think people in general don't give enough credit to is that playing chess isn't an easy problem. And it isn't a "bigger version of a tic-tac-toe program". There isn't enough computing capacity on the planet to compute things as a simple search tree and see all the moves. There is some real finesse to how to optimize that search and make it work effectively, no matter how big the iron you throw at it.
Is this something that is going to produce AI as in Wintermute? Probably not. But some of the self-learning heuristics used in some game programs (that checkers program that I can't remember the name of right now that was taught to play totally by self-learning heuristics comes to mind) are likely to be included in the basic makeup of any kind of Wintermute.
Also, look at the stuff Wolfram has been doing for the last 20 years or so with cellular autonoma. Even if everything in A New Kind of Science doesn't play out as far as he claims it will, some of the work he and other a-life/cellular folk have been doing is pretty damned sure to be fundamental for what is to come.
Gotta crawl before we can walk.
But I do agree with you completely that the term is a perceptual hinderance at this point.
Okay, RM, that's good. But what we are talking about here is an academic disipline called AI. It is a branch of computer science. Certain problem domains and techniques are acknowledged by much of mainstream academia to fall within the bounds of AI. Playing chess at grandmaster level is generally acknowledged as a worthy test of some of those techniques.
This is not to be confused with science fiction and popular usage, where AI has an entirely different meaning, which is why most AI researchers have been sprinting as fast as they can away from the term.
And in terms of waiting on Wintermute to start ringing the row of payphones in the airport just once as I walk by, well, I agree with you we aren't going to get there for a while and probably with much different tools than we are currently using. But that is a fantasy future and not the reality of the situation today.
Don't get to read much news, do you? What do you think all that face scanning software they are talking about putting in airports or have been using in London is? How do you think that some smart bombs match viusal target profiles from arbitrary angles? Parts recognition in manufacturing plants...the list goes on.
Links are rife to this, and I am not trolling for karma, so I am not going to bother.
This is the classic moving the goal-posts that has plauged AI since its inception as a disipline. As soon as a computer can do something, it isn't AI anymore.
This has happened with Chess, visual recognition, speech recognition and a host of other tests of AI techniques.
I have complete and utter faith in human nature, and am quite sure that as soon as an algorythmic strategy for effectively attacking the problem of Go is developed, people will start saying: well, go is just a matter of implementing $foo on really good hardware, and that isn't a test of AI.
Give credit where credit is due. This is many years of AI development at work.
Actually, a couple of theaters in the east bay area where I live are addressing just these issues and doing a gangbusters job of it. The Parkway theater is a small brewpub/theater environment that carefully crafts their movie schedule to theme nights and provides special nights for things like people with small children and they do boffo business at $5.00 a ticket.
The Paramount Theater, in Oakland, CA provides a great old-time experience, including prize giva-aways, live organ music and a ton of other fun extras, again for a low ticket price, and they are packed for every show I have atteneded there.
Theaters that keep cramming in more seats and charging higher ticket prices for the same sub-standard experience SHOULD start to die, but specialty houses that cater to their clientelle will be able to keep picking up the slack and hopefully spread out from their hardcore urban niche to the rest of the country. Which for me would be a good thing.
And the death of the blockbuster would just be icing on the cake for me.
But when "features" are mail readers, newsgroup readers and an HTML composition program, you can do without them.
I am still waiting for Moz to add a complete emacs implementation.
Python is basically a RAD environment. The only difference between this and the stuff you named is that Py is free software and it is cross platform by nature.
And that last is important, because writing a real 3d modeling ap and tying it to an OS like Windows where less and less real 3d work is happening doesn't seem wise.
No, you aren't the only one. I personally use Python because it simply makes more sense to me and is more elegant and readable. However, the two are in the same space for all intents and purposes in the way that most people use them.
However, the one thing I do think is slightly, note slightly, different is that for big jobs it becomes annoying to try to read perl or debug someone else's code, and it is much easer in Python. At least for me. So in Python I can produce apps, and in perl I would rather not.
But while I prefer Python, there is nothing I have done in it so far that isn't trivial to port to Perl.