Science is huge field of knowledge. Why should people outside this field be expected to know in depth about it? Before you flame about the importance of science, advancement of humanity etc, ask yourself this.
Do you know Henderson's Law of the stockmarket movements?
Do you know what waxes are good for a violin string?
What is a fourier series?
How many ways do you know to hold a paintbrush?
How long is kangaroo steak best grilled for?
What should your diet be like 8 months into pregnancy?
How do you compile a computer program?
What does it smell like in the Sistine Chapel? (from a great speech in Good Will Hunting)
All the questions above are important in their own ways, but only to certain people. To most others, issues like the origin of species and the power of the gene are simply outside the scope of their lives. Fine, let them be.
I just hope the scientists don't try to "rectify" the situation through "raising awareness" by putting lab coats on bimbos hosting edutainment shows...
The approach you describe is how chess programmers began - getting the computer to evaluate as many positions in advance as possible. As computer hardware has grown faster and faster, the machine's ability to do this has increased hugely, but the general idea remains the same. This began back in the time when people thought building a chess player was one of the great leaps to true AI.
However, this approach has very little to do with what humans think during a game of chess. Grandmasters only consider a handful of scenarios during their turn, not thousands as some would believe. There's a huge amount of low-level filtering happening which intelligence researchers haven't been able to explain yet.
When a beginner chess player looks the the board, they filter out illegal moves, and they see a vast array of possible moves. When an intermediate player looks at the board, they filter out illegal and stupid moves, and they see a smaller range of not-so-bad moves. Grandmasters look at a board and only see a couple of "good" moves.
This is what separates man and machine players. Nobody understands how this abstraction and filtering takes place in the human brain; which is why computer players have an identifiable mechanicality to them.
Sad to say, the quest for a machine player who performs this sort of filtering has almost ended. The supercomputer players these days are armed with a huge database of past human-played games, they simply pick a game which approximates the current game, and follow script.
Half of the posts here seem to be saying "Yeah, my computer makes me recalcitrant and unfriendly too".
Hey, we're geeks, that's the way we are! But the article ain't about personal intolerance, it's talking on a global level.
It's the same problems scaling up... personal intolerance scaled to international aggression, national (American) self-absorbedness scaled up to cause global resentment...
I don't understand this big push for linux on the desktop. For the majority of people Windows does just fine, especially with regards to the huge library of consumer software available to it. Really ask yourself, why does linux need to be big on the desktop, apart from poking a stick in bill's side?
Further more, if linux did become successful in both server and desktop arenas, there would have to be some fragmentation. Linux on the server would probably need some of the GUI stuff stripped out for performance reasons, while desktop linux is likely to minimize the role of the CLI as much as possible.
Come to think of it, maybe it's already happening. Take the paradigm difference between Mandrake and Debian, and magnify greatly.
Hackers and home users have different needs. The home users are under-catered for in many ways, not only UI.
Now this is an interesting idea! A lot of but-ifs though...
If microsoft can pull lindows because of "name" infringement, how do you think they'll treat pixel perfect duplication of their GUI? Not only that, you can expect them to point at the open source movement's lack of "innovation" and originality.
Not only that, but how far would this duplication go? HTML-ize the file system browser too? Put Minesweeper and Solitaire in the same place? Have the same settings available in the control panel?
Perhaps what you mean is to copy the MS Look and Feel, but that's not the entire UI. To duplicate the windows environment would mean copying both form and function in many ways and like somebody else said here, that would mean modifying a fair chunk of low level functionality.
Microsoft has a long history of ditching projects that don't take off the way they hoped (Hailstorm anybody?). The question now if, will XBox go the same way?
Here in Australia, XBox is basically dead, I don't think the price cut will overcome the fundamental problem of the miniscule software library. I imagine the same situation in Europe if they're having the price cut too, and it's flopped in Japan too, where the games just aren't suited to local tastes.
It's only in North America where XBox has been even moderately successful (if that!). Is it worth Microsoft's trouble to keep the XBox alive? The raft of in-house game developers? The super-subsidized hardware? It will also be harder to keep those game developers, who are going to see tiny xbox audiences and be sorely tempted, contracts or no, to go back to developing PS2/GC/PC titles.
Sure MS can absorb the hit, even a substantial one like this, if there's any chance of Xbox3 or Xbox4 being successful (My take: probably), but Microsoft seems to be focussing on the short-term lately, and I don't think MS has the patience at this stage to stay the distance.
That said, Xbox has only been here in australia for barely 2 months, making it one of the most spectacular flops I've ever seen. The image of an 800 pound gorilla bellyflopping off a 1-metre high diving board comes to mind:)
"The interactive map is -really- well done, but requires flash..."
I've seen plenty of places where flash is used well to do things that otherwise couldn't be done. Despite all the anti-flash sentiment around here, it's not flash or macromedia itself which sucks, it's designers which insist on making kludgy, overbranded, full-flash sites which suck. Macromedia is actually trying to educate its users about usability and trying to encourage them in the next flash.
Flash ain't a bad tool, but only in the right places, and this is one of the better uses I've seen...
I first read this 2 years ago on howstuffworks. Same theory, same proposed applications, but no new ideas except for the possible weaponization - (yeah, some idiot had to think of it eventually).
Once it solidifies though, it is definitely a cool sounding (excuse the pun) technology. Use humans only have 2 ears in fixed positions, and I've often wondered how we can locate 3 dimensional sounds using only 2 ears (do we really?). Wonder how this turns out over the next few years...
Where I went, the main difference is that CS/CE are run by an engineering school. Hence, the content is more theoretical - you deal with low level hardware and algorithms and data structures, generally the abstract stuff. It's obviously designed to expose a research-like environment and hopefully encourage students to take on postgraduate research.
The IS courses are administered by the school of commerce, and the syllabus is developed with consultation with industry and recruiters. You learn things like Access, VB, Novell and how to hook up a MS/Novell network. They learn Java, but only the language; no data structures or proper OO or any of the things that separate a can-do programmer from a real hacker. Also, they spend half their time doing management and accounting/finance courses, whereas in CS you obviously won't.
In short, IS is about 'practical' and geared to what recruiters want 'today'. CS is about giving you the skills which the university wants in you as a researcher. (but coincidentally are also the skills which make you a better technology worker IMO.)
A major three-letter intelligence agency will suffer a public and catastrophic breach of classified data because of exploits in Windows XP and ban its use completely...
1. Business as usual. Linux will continue slowly replace Unix servers. Windows will continue to sit on the desktop. Talk of a mainstream linux desktop will continue for several more years.
"We might try and block somebody," Glazier said. "If we know someone is operating a server, a pirated music facility, we could try to take measures to try and prevent them from uploading or transmitting pirated documents."
When you fire up a file sharing program, you are a server. That makes you fair game by that wording. It may not be cost effective to crush every end user, but scaring everybody is certainly a possibility.
Find some college kid with rich parents and a couple gigs of mp3s, haul his ass into court, and make it a high profile case. Half the moms and pops FUD their kid into compliance.
First off, this ain't the first phone to have an MP3 player - Samsung came out with one last year which is doing decently well, but of course Nokia is a different story.
Here is a nokia music player press release dated March this year. It says 32megs for an hour of music. (Must be a pretty crummy bitrate though). Today's link claims 2 hours, but I doubt that's at the standard 128kbps. Anybody know how much memory in this thing?
I find it crucial that W3C endeavour to hold on to as much of their intellectual property through the means of patents as they can. Only through this method can the W3C guarantee success of the web for America.
W3C's aim is not to make money or to hold onto patents. The point of this patent policy is so that W3C can develop technologies for the web without getting their ass sued off by some patent holder.
Slashdot Mirror
- Do you know Henderson's Law of the stockmarket movements?
- Do you know what waxes are good for a violin string?
- What is a fourier series?
- How many ways do you know to hold a paintbrush?
- How long is kangaroo steak best grilled for?
- What should your diet be like 8 months into pregnancy?
- How do you compile a computer program?
- What does it smell like in the Sistine Chapel? (from a great speech in Good Will Hunting)
All the questions above are important in their own ways, but only to certain people. To most others, issues like the origin of species and the power of the gene are simply outside the scope of their lives. Fine, let them be.I just hope the scientists don't try to "rectify" the situation through "raising awareness" by putting lab coats on bimbos hosting edutainment shows...
Indeed life is short
Gone are the cheesemakers, but
Bill gates always sucks
If the MS staff are smoking $24 million of Mexico's finest, I wonder what the next version of Windows will behave like ;-)
Multihued Swirling Screen of Death anybody?
However, this approach has very little to do with what humans think during a game of chess. Grandmasters only consider a handful of scenarios during their turn, not thousands as some would believe. There's a huge amount of low-level filtering happening which intelligence researchers haven't been able to explain yet.
When a beginner chess player looks the the board, they filter out illegal moves, and they see a vast array of possible moves. When an intermediate player looks at the board, they filter out illegal and stupid moves, and they see a smaller range of not-so-bad moves. Grandmasters look at a board and only see a couple of "good" moves.
This is what separates man and machine players. Nobody understands how this abstraction and filtering takes place in the human brain; which is why computer players have an identifiable mechanicality to them.
Sad to say, the quest for a machine player who performs this sort of filtering has almost ended. The supercomputer players these days are armed with a huge database of past human-played games, they simply pick a game which approximates the current game, and follow script.
Hey, we're geeks, that's the way we are! But the article ain't about personal intolerance, it's talking on a global level.
It's the same problems scaling up
Further more, if linux did become successful in both server and desktop arenas, there would have to be some fragmentation. Linux on the server would probably need some of the GUI stuff stripped out for performance reasons, while desktop linux is likely to minimize the role of the CLI as much as possible.
Come to think of it, maybe it's already happening. Take the paradigm difference between Mandrake and Debian, and magnify greatly.
Hackers and home users have different needs. The home users are under-catered for in many ways, not only UI.
If microsoft can pull lindows because of "name" infringement, how do you think they'll treat pixel perfect duplication of their GUI? Not only that, you can expect them to point at the open source movement's lack of "innovation" and originality.
Not only that, but how far would this duplication go? HTML-ize the file system browser too? Put Minesweeper and Solitaire in the same place? Have the same settings available in the control panel? Perhaps what you mean is to copy the MS Look and Feel, but that's not the entire UI. To duplicate the windows environment would mean copying both form and function in many ways and like somebody else said here, that would mean modifying a fair chunk of low level functionality.
*bows* +5 Informative, thank yoo, dankyooverymurch!
... but there are better ways to deal with it. Really.
Here in Australia, XBox is basically dead, I don't think the price cut will overcome the fundamental problem of the miniscule software library. I imagine the same situation in Europe if they're having the price cut too, and it's flopped in Japan too, where the games just aren't suited to local tastes.
It's only in North America where XBox has been even moderately successful (if that!). Is it worth Microsoft's trouble to keep the XBox alive? The raft of in-house game developers? The super-subsidized hardware? It will also be harder to keep those game developers, who are going to see tiny xbox audiences and be sorely tempted, contracts or no, to go back to developing PS2/GC/PC titles.
Sure MS can absorb the hit, even a substantial one like this, if there's any chance of Xbox3 or Xbox4 being successful (My take: probably), but Microsoft seems to be focussing on the short-term lately, and I don't think MS has the patience at this stage to stay the distance.
That said, Xbox has only been here in australia for barely 2 months, making it one of the most spectacular flops I've ever seen. The image of an 800 pound gorilla bellyflopping off a 1-metre high diving board comes to mind :)
I've seen plenty of places where flash is used well to do things that otherwise couldn't be done. Despite all the anti-flash sentiment around here, it's not flash or macromedia itself which sucks, it's designers which insist on making kludgy, overbranded, full-flash sites which suck. Macromedia is actually trying to educate its users about usability and trying to encourage them in the next flash.
Flash ain't a bad tool, but only in the right places, and this is one of the better uses I've seen...
Once it solidifies though, it is definitely a cool sounding (excuse the pun) technology. Use humans only have 2 ears in fixed positions, and I've often wondered how we can locate 3 dimensional sounds using only 2 ears (do we really?). Wonder how this turns out over the next few years...
Where I went, the main difference is that CS/CE are run by an engineering school. Hence, the content is more theoretical - you deal with low level hardware and algorithms and data structures, generally the abstract stuff. It's obviously designed to expose a research-like environment and hopefully encourage students to take on postgraduate research.
The IS courses are administered by the school of commerce, and the syllabus is developed with consultation with industry and recruiters. You learn things like Access, VB, Novell and how to hook up a MS/Novell network. They learn Java, but only the language; no data structures or proper OO or any of the things that separate a can-do programmer from a real hacker. Also, they spend half their time doing management and accounting/finance courses, whereas in CS you obviously won't.
In short, IS is about 'practical' and geared to what recruiters want 'today'. CS is about giving you the skills which the university wants in you as a researcher. (but coincidentally are also the skills which make you a better technology worker IMO.)
MSN?
Oh, wait. Intelligence, you said ... :)
I say...
1. Business as usual. Linux will continue slowly replace Unix servers. Windows will continue to sit on the desktop. Talk of a mainstream linux desktop will continue for several more years.
Between all the kids yelling "FIRST BID! FB!!!!" and the people holding up big pictures of a guy spreading his backside, nothing's gonna get sold.
The article is quite vague - I can't figure out whether it uses watermarking or actually identifies the song by audible content.
If it's the latter, then that'd be very interesting - they've essentially implemented 'grep' for audio!
It's "interesting" but I can't think of many uses of it apart from copyright enforcement.
I'd like to feed this system three seconds of "baby baby baby baby" from a generic pop song, and see how confused it gets.
Dr Evil: Mr Bigglesworth, attack Mr Bond!
Cat: meow...
Dr Evil: Mr Bigglesworth, attack Mr Bond!
Cat: purr....
Dr Evil: That's it, you're fired!
Mini-me: <giggle>...
They better listen to BritneySpears.mp3.vbs before they delete it!
When you fire up a file sharing program, you are a server. That makes you fair game by that wording. It may not be cost effective to crush every end user, but scaring everybody is certainly a possibility.
Find some college kid with rich parents and a couple gigs of mp3s, haul his ass into court, and make it a high profile case. Half the moms and pops FUD their kid into compliance.
Here is a nokia music player press release dated March this year. It says 32megs for an hour of music. (Must be a pretty crummy bitrate though). Today's link claims 2 hours, but I doubt that's at the standard 128kbps. Anybody know how much memory in this thing?
Probably not. Zippos have a lot more style.
"Sorry Dave, my phone's running low! But I've got some beans in my pocket ... I'll call you back in an hour!"
W3C's aim is not to make money or to hold onto patents. The point of this patent policy is so that W3C can develop technologies for the web without getting their ass sued off by some patent holder.