I wandered through the thread for a while to confirm someone had the right answer.
If this was a comparison between "proper" XBox arcade games and Steam, then it would mean something. But "Indie Games" is a wasteland (because of no quality control or promotion of quality games), and none of the XBox owners I know have bothered to look there for a long time.
There's a strong, justified assumption that if something is in "Indie Games", it's trash. MS need to give some attention to helping promote and discover good games, or else Indie Games will continue to wither (despite, reasonably good tools and technology).
It's not that simple. This outage also affected developers attempting to run their own code on their own development devices. That's not malware prevention (which can be served by limiting access to "App Stores" or something, like other competitors do). RIM is clearly concerned with platform control beyond any malware concerns - it's a kind of DRM.
This story made a lot more sense when it was about Silverlight. HTML5+Script does a lot of what Silverlight is meant to do, and it thus makes sense Silverlight is going to get less love.
However, HTML5+Script doesn't replace the other roles.NET has in the MS dev plan, which is basically everything else: random desktop apps, services, database-integrated software, server-side web stuff. That last one might seem like the closest, but even then it makes sense for MS to leave the server side mostly the same, but just change how it works on the client side.
MS has certainly dumped developers before - and I fully expect them to screw over Silverlight developers - but.NET is a reasonable framework, the bulk of which is not replaced by HTML5+Script. Even as someone who's fairly skeptical about MS, I find it very unlikely we'll see a major shift from.NET in the next 5 years.
Sorry everyone for wasted space - but that was a beautiful comparison, perfectly summing up my thoughts as I've listened to advocates of different methodologies over the years.
You can't write good direct x code even if they did manage to provide a JS wrapper..net is here to stay.
You know another place you can't write good DirectX code?.NET. Well, at least ever since they killed MDX.
You're right in that there's no reason to believe MS is dumping.NET in general - but people using it to do XNA Game Studio stuff is hardly the core thing MS is going to be worried about.
Office is not written in.NET. Unless they've made a very big change, it's written in C++, probably with a lot of MFC....you could still release cross platform.NET applications.
Lol, cross platform.NET applications. Also, do you remember.NET controls hosted directly in IE? Neither does MS, despite pushing them for a while. And despite the fact that they had a reasonable security model for trusted interactions (unlike Silverlight).
If anyone thinks Silverlight isn't going to be a part of IE10 in some capacity they've lost their minds
Silverlight will probably be supported for a while, but it will slowly get worse. Just like ActiveX. Just like IE-hosted.NET controls. Just like some of the "browser re-use" components (things like custom print templates, and DHTML editing). You're probably too young, but at one point, ActiveX was the egg nog that was in all MS goat milk. Then it wasn't cool. Then it started having problems. Now it's an afterthought that doesn't work and with an incomprehensible magic security model.
Silverlight will be the same. We're an MS shop, but we didn't drink any of the Silverlight Kool-aid, because it was clearly a tech that wouldn't last. It just didn't bring much to the table. Unless it finds a much better home in mobile or something, it will slowly wither away..NET itself should remain for a good while, though. It's a decent framework.
There's quite a few people making $300k - both in the financial industry, and on the upper shelf at any big software company (MS, Google, Apple, Valve, etc..). I don't have statistics, but I've run into quite a few online or at events - certainly not nepotism types or "legacy knowledge ransom holders", just very strong programmers that have accomplished things and proven their value over time.
At my company, there's people making $75k with no significant formal education. A+ doesn't seem to have any penetration here, but we have a lot of people taking 1-2 year certificate type programs and that could certainly expect $75k after a few successful years. In fact, we quite often interview people who won't accept that little despite not having huge amounts of education or experience (and, sadly often, failing the programming exercise).
The account seems pretty clear that the intention was to crash one, to prove to the US military that they (the Russians) could cause a nation-wide UFO scare.
To cause a scare, why not, uh, let their UFO get caught flying on film (hopefully doing things that only their advanced aircraft could do). Again, if I was trying to fake this, I'd do it at night with a formation of planes (thus appearing larger than a plane could be, or - using tricks of perspective and a formation moving faster than planes could move). Crashing one proves only one thing: that they couldn't fake a crash site well enough to fool anyone. How do I know their crash evidence wouldn't be good enough to fool anyone? Because you still couldn't do a crash that would fool anyone, at least not by starting with a plane that could fly in that era and a human pilot.
Flying disk technology was considered advanced technology in that day, as flying wing technology was still being tested.
If you're trying to make a good crash site - why make it fly at all? Again, if I was doing a fake crash site, I'd leave out the human (which is an obvious, stupid tell that only a fantastic moron would think of or try) and just have a big disk with layers of odd metal. Have a bunch of magnets, glass spheres, crystals, long antennas made of strange plastic, and generally weird crap in there, all intricate and incomprehensible. Then drop the whole deal out of a plane.
Again, the starting plot doesn't make any sense, and requires a lot of commitment for something that obviously wasn't going to do anything (at least not anything more than just flying around a weather balloon would).
I'm not saying my stupid ideas would work either. But they at least aren't guaranteed not to work (as this stupid, stupid plan would be), and they have some hope of not being discovered in an embarrassing way. Give the Russians some credit - if they'd wanted to do something like this (which they, uh, wouldn't because it's a fantastically dumb goal to start with) then they could have come up with something much better.
This narrative doesn't make sense for any of the players involved. The only way you see the plastic-surgeried child pilot is if you're deliberately crashing the thing - at which point it is clear to the people picking it up it's "normal" technology and the child is clearly a clumsily mutilated (even modern plastic surgery is not going to conceal this kind of thing) human. It would have also been immediately clear who did it, why it isn't scary aliens, and it would have been reasonably hard to do (requires launching a plane deep into the US). It also wouldn't make much sense to keep secret - the message is simple: the Russians are weird douchebags who sent a over a plane with a dead kid.
Contrast that with another, significantly-less-crazy-but-still-pretty-crazy plan that could have actually worked: Have a weird formation of small planes with blinking lights. Send them around at night to New York. If you want, maybe blow up the Statue of Liberty with an unconventional mix of explosives while shining a big light on it or something. Get a whole bunch of weird coincidence stuff going too, broadcast strange radio messages and have it happen in correspondence with some astrological phenomenon. Then get out real fast before they can find your planes, and see that they have conventional propulsion systems and human pilots.
Anyways, I'm sure you or I could do better than the above stupid plan with a little time to think it out (heck, a rope and a cornfield works pretty good). Imagining that the Russians, with plenty of time to think through a plan that required significant commitment, couldn't do better than mutilated kid crashing a plane in the desert... is just so very dumb. I think the only people dumb enough to accept it would be the morons who already have an "explanation" (ie. those who believe it was aliens).
I realise that I cannot get an interference fringe by throwing cricket balls through slits at a screen
You can, it's just not probable. For small numbers of bits, the distribution is going to be 1s and 0s. As we add more bits, we're going to get a sums in the middle - and with large numbers of bits (as in our ball) we're going to get stuck at.5. I can certainly see the guy's argument that specially constructed large scale objects could create thresholds, meaning that we see the 1s and 0s again instead of the default aggregate. (My brain is very tired, hopefully that made some sense).
I know our business just recently went from zero to one. We bought a Mac Mini so we could better ensure compatibility of our corporate sites (and offer better support) to Mac users. Might also do an iPad app at some point. Not so much for any direct business need, but CEO mentioned we might want an iPad app as a marketing tool.
But anyways, yeah, it would be interesting to see how all those Macs are getting used.
We get great support from Dell on hardware - but MS has never given us any.
A while back we had a MS rep come in and offer to help us with any problems. We gave him a GDI bug that hard crashes on about 1/100,000 JPEGs we get (we get a lot of photos, and some of the processing software is "legacy"). The photos are fine as far as we can tell, and open in any other program (including IE and the MS preview thingee). Our current solution was to "canary" attempt to process each photo by opening with a GDI call in a new process, and if that process mysteriously died then we use a 3rd party library to re-encode it before sending it back for the regular processing. Not a big deal in any way, but annoying.
We detailed the clear, reproducible problem reasonably, detailed what we were using as a workaround, and gave a few sample files.
The solution we got back from the "high level programmer" was to open the pictures in IE first, and copy and paste them into Paint.
We told them that was really not satisfactory. Their next idea was to stop talking to us. It has been about 7 years.
to do this in software we need to model the pie, model the oven, model the uncertainty of the robots actions/observations
You don't need to "model" pie or oven. The only vaguely interesting thing would be interpreting the vision of the pie for doneness. And, if you want to do that, you can just get some pictures of real pies and try to interpret them. In software. Without building a computer that controls an oven. That's my point.
Any algorithm developed would translate directly into the areas of pattern recognition, computer vision, and cognition. I don't know how pie factories tell when a pie is done...
The algorithm would probably be pretty easy here (that's why I picked it). But it doesn't matter to my point. Again, to the extent that the algorithm is not easy then you're doing software research and your actual pie baking machine is still stupid. (And, to be clear, if you're doing this industrially, real-lifey you probably have no real algorithm. You just know how long it takes to bake a pie and you bake them for that long.)
Robots in the future will need to operate our current infrastructure: doors, appliances, cars - these will all still be built for humans, not for robots.
Fine, you want to make a robot that opens doors? Cool. Do that. That would be useful. You're doing research. It's a problem that you could have novel solutions for. But it doesn't also need to talk. Unless you actually want a talking, door-opening robot.
You want to make a robot that moves around a room, makes a vague map, plays sounds, listens to sounds, and does some simple processing on those sounds (like these people did)? Don't call it research and don't expect me to get real excited. Those are all solved problems. Combining a bunch of solved problems into one is only a useful exercise if the result is something useful or has something else going for it.
The same technology used to tell when a pie is done could be used to characterize road conditions or tell whether a person is being aggressive.
No, probably not. And if you want to write software to tell whether a person is aggressive, that's fine. That's good research. But unless you're studying machine/human interaction, there's no reason to then make a robot that wanders around a takes pictures of faces and turns red if people are aggressive or something (which, again, is the normal mode for robot "research"). Again, the real research there would be software that processes pictures of faces. By building the robot, you're re-solving a bunch of solved problems (moving around, pointing a camera, making a light turn red) instead of focusing on the part that's the interesting problem. If you're doing this as an engineering exercise, fine. If you're doing it as a way of publicizing your new facial interpretation software, cool. Do that. But, again, it's not a breakthrough unless the software is a breakthrough - the "robot" part is just a boondoggle because the robot isn't doing anything interesting. Like opening doors.
To be doubly clear: if these people are doing something interesting in terms of communication theory between two agents, then that's cool. But if they're not, and they're just physically realizing a fairly trivial bit of software (and it appears that's what they've done) then that's really, fantastically pointless.
If you did the same thing in a software simulation, nobody would pay any attention. It would be fairly trivial. Adding in the actual robot parts means that you, uh... need to have robots that can play and understand sounds. That's great, you made a robot that can play and hear sounds. If we assume nobody has made an audio modem before, then that would be something. As history stands, it isn't.
Adding these two unimpressive things together doesn't equal anything. I mean, if they're actual going to use these for something, then that's great. Make them. But so much robot "research" seems to be crap like this. We have software that can solve problem X in simulation. To do the same thing in the "real world" you'd need hardware capable of these 3 things, all of which we can do. Unless you need to solve problem X for some reason in the real world, you're done. There's no need to build that thing.
It's like saying "can we make a computer that can control an oven and use a webcam to see when the pie is done?". Yes. We can. But unless we actually want to do that, there's literally no point in building the thing. There will be no useful theory produced in actually building a pie watching computer. The only thing you'll get is to have built the first pie watching computer, and - apparently - an article on Slashdot.
Yeah. Some executive did an interview at BoingBoing a while back. He was joking about how people give these suggestions but "they just don't get it". Apparently, people don't understand that the way SYFIE is currently being run is literally the only possible way to run it, that the revenue streams they have now are the only revenue streams they could ever possibly have, that there must be no variance from how things have always been done, that people who want different shows actually, uh, don't, etc...
It was terribly sad - guy was clearly intent on business as usual until business as failure (which I assume he'll blame on everyone/anyone else).
Meh. I always go back to the Windows 2000 era theme. The only UI perk I'd miss in vanilla Windows 2000 would be the "quick launch" area (which I think was added with the release of IE 4). That said, I don't have any real objection to, say, the Windows 7 default interface. But also nothing real good to say about it. I guess the little window preview could conceivably be handy - but it's not terribly exciting, and certainly doesn't "pay" for the cost of not knowing where crap is and exactly how it works.
If there was an install option for "leave the UI how it was", I'd take it most of the time. I just don't have a lot of UI problems, and haven't had them for years - not since I worked/played in DOS and it was a pain to go back and forth between Windows and DOS stuff (and rebooting to different memory schemes). For a decade and a half, I've been able to efficiently go about my business without thinking about the OS/Windowing system UI.
So I don't understand how people spend so much time fiddling with basic window, launch, and dock interfaces - and how reviews always seem to give a massive crap about how slick this or that crap is - and how they never deduct enough points for the fact that lots of stuff was shaken up for no good reason.
I know our corporate users would never accept the amount of dicking around that, for example, MS does with Office. We'd be asked to explain what the benefits of moving "that button they always use" are.
If you have a big change with real benefits: cool. But enough wanking around with interface changes/experiments that might make for 2% more available screen width or 3% shorter mouse travel (in exchange for 100 problems, user confusion, and 40 hours of moving 10% slower while you acclimatize to the new interface).
Fair enough. You're not a big fan. I'm not a huge fan either (though I really enjoyed "How To Train Your Dragon", and I think the tech will likely be successful in terms of penetration).
The posts that have me interested have a much clearer, much angrier/obsessive bent. But again, maybe I'm just over-reading emotion when people are ranting for comedic or some other effect.
What I find interesting about this story is that the Slashdot majority seems to have changed its mind (or perhaps the rabid anti-3d crowd just got tired of posting on every one of these stories?).
Anyways, I think it's an interesting phenomenon that generally "techy" people seem to sometimes get really bent out of shape about new tech. We saw the same thing with HD TVs. We used to see it more with new versions of OS's and software.
I'd like to figure it out more, but I can't find anyone in real life who has or had this kind of anti-3d anger, and when you talk to someone online they stick to their talking points (despite the fact that none of the talking points seem likely to inspire the kinds of emotion they obviously have). Perhaps I'm just misreading people who are stuck in "angry rant" mode for all their posts.
Now 99% unemployment isn't a bad thing. But when we inevitably get to the point where we simply don't need very many workers anymore we're going to need to shift our views on compensation so that those who simply are useless don't suffer.
I agree. Eventually, full employment just isn't going to be possible. I think that'll be a good thing; however, I'd also agree that the transition will be awkward. But the way to deal with this isn't to try to halt technological progress. If we're going to artificially prop up jobs in order to smooth the transition, they might as well be more interesting jobs. People could build out public infrastructure, grow food (for the starving, of which there's still no shortage), create art, do research, increase services, or who knows what - but moving boxes of books is pointless.
In any case, we're not at this point yet, and won't be soon. For example, I think supporting (and replacing) aging boomers is going to create a lot of labor shortage in the next 25 years (especially in, for example, Japan).
At best, you're making a "broken windows" argument. Perhaps we could make book distribution even less efficient, requiring more people to be involved? Would that be positive?
But even that's missing the point. The important job, the one we should focus on here, isn't "clerk at bookstore", it's "author". Because books are costly to produce, because money from sales has to be divided among so many, and because there is limited shelf space at a book store, very few people can make a living as an author. With e-books, there's the potential for many more authors to find niches, and I think the total money value of the industry could grow significantly as the breadth of subject matter, sales logistics, and means of discovery improves.
Jobs generating ideas are the future, and having an efficient, vibrant market for books is great for that.
..but I have to say it's ironic that you're posting about this algorithm on Slashdot, a site whose moderation system has incorporated the best of your ideas for years, and yet that doesn't seem to come up when you're asking for ideas.
I like the Slashdot system. Moderators are assigned points at times beyond their control, to prevent just the kind of abuses you mention. There's appropriate feedback control on how moderators behave. The job of moderating (and meta-moderating) is presented and appreciated in such a way that people actually do it. People are picked to do moderation in a reasonable way. The process is transparent, and the proof that it works is that the Slashdot comments you typically see are actually not horrible (usually) and sometimes are quite informative.
'In school, intelligence is a measurement,' he said. 'If you have the same answer as everyone else in math or science, you're intelligent.'"
Well.. not really. Schools don't measure intelligence, they measure compliance and effort. If you're intelligent and willing, it's easier to comply with "memorize this crap" and "be able to solve math problems in this form" - but grades are not intended to measure intelligence, nor are they good at doing so. Nor would it make sense. The feedback mechanism grading is requires something you can change - and that's why grades usually target things that all students are capable of and that are easy to evaluate: memorization, putting time into a report, etc..
At issue, he said, are rules that tell each student exactly what they should be studying and when.
Everyone knows there's more effective ways to teach, but it's also clear why teachers have structure: how else are you going to address the needs of 30 different students - many of whom don't want to be there - and keep them all doing something vaguely productive?
But I don't intend to. All I'm saying is Microsoft could make Indie games a lot more successful with a bit of quality control, some loosening of restrictions, and some better discovery tools (to be fair, all the "app stores" need better discovery/categorization tools).
I'd say their larger problem with Indie Games is the lack of quality control.
I'm happy to play a small game. But there are many games on there that are pretty much "I figured out how to draw a sprite, time to publish!", or worthless variants on other trivial games.
More content is fine - the problem is that these little turds take up spaces in the new release list (a valuable source of advertising) - and the problem feeds on itself. I think a lot of gamers have given up looking through the new Indie games - and that makes developers less likely to have a go at the platform.
I know if I was developing an XBox Live game, I'd try to find out how to get listed as a "real" arcade game and do what it takes to get there.
OK - you're either fantastically stupid or you're just pretending not to understand him (which is also fantastically stupid). Obviously he didn't mean a chain of moves 1,000,000 moves long. He meant the computers consider millions of individual moves. Which they do. Some of those moves might be 10 moves away, the bulk of them will be much closer. And you, despite obviously doing some Googling, apparently haven't given up on the idea that consulting a database is in any way the prime technique a computer chess program uses (beyond the opening).
All in all, this article has had some of the stupidest, most depressing Slashdot comments I've ever seen. It's like reading the comments on a Youtube video.
Slashdot Mirror
I wandered through the thread for a while to confirm someone had the right answer.
If this was a comparison between "proper" XBox arcade games and Steam, then it would mean something. But "Indie Games" is a wasteland (because of no quality control or promotion of quality games), and none of the XBox owners I know have bothered to look there for a long time.
There's a strong, justified assumption that if something is in "Indie Games", it's trash. MS need to give some attention to helping promote and discover good games, or else Indie Games will continue to wither (despite, reasonably good tools and technology).
It's not that simple. This outage also affected developers attempting to run their own code on their own development devices. That's not malware prevention (which can be served by limiting access to "App Stores" or something, like other competitors do). RIM is clearly concerned with platform control beyond any malware concerns - it's a kind of DRM.
This story made a lot more sense when it was about Silverlight. HTML5+Script does a lot of what Silverlight is meant to do, and it thus makes sense Silverlight is going to get less love.
However, HTML5+Script doesn't replace the other roles .NET has in the MS dev plan, which is basically everything else: random desktop apps, services, database-integrated software, server-side web stuff. That last one might seem like the closest, but even then it makes sense for MS to leave the server side mostly the same, but just change how it works on the client side.
MS has certainly dumped developers before - and I fully expect them to screw over Silverlight developers - but .NET is a reasonable framework, the bulk of which is not replaced by HTML5+Script. Even as someone who's fairly skeptical about MS, I find it very unlikely we'll see a major shift from .NET in the next 5 years.
Sorry everyone for wasted space - but that was a beautiful comparison, perfectly summing up my thoughts as I've listened to advocates of different methodologies over the years.
You can't write good direct x code even if they did manage to provide a JS wrapper. .net is here to stay.
You know another place you can't write good DirectX code? .NET. Well, at least ever since they killed MDX.
You're right in that there's no reason to believe MS is dumping .NET in general - but people using it to do XNA Game Studio stuff is hardly the core thing MS is going to be worried about.
Office Office is going to remain .NET
Office is not written in .NET. Unless they've made a very big change, it's written in C++, probably with a lot of MFC. ...you could still release cross platform .NET applications.
Lol, cross platform .NET applications. Also, do you remember .NET controls hosted directly in IE? Neither does MS, despite pushing them for a while. And despite the fact that they had a reasonable security model for trusted interactions (unlike Silverlight).
If anyone thinks Silverlight isn't going to be a part of IE10 in some capacity they've lost their minds
Silverlight will probably be supported for a while, but it will slowly get worse. Just like ActiveX. Just like IE-hosted .NET controls. Just like some of the "browser re-use" components (things like custom print templates, and DHTML editing). You're probably too young, but at one point, ActiveX was the egg nog that was in all MS goat milk. Then it wasn't cool. Then it started having problems. Now it's an afterthought that doesn't work and with an incomprehensible magic security model.
Silverlight will be the same. We're an MS shop, but we didn't drink any of the Silverlight Kool-aid, because it was clearly a tech that wouldn't last. It just didn't bring much to the table. Unless it finds a much better home in mobile or something, it will slowly wither away. .NET itself should remain for a good while, though. It's a decent framework.
There's quite a few people making $300k - both in the financial industry, and on the upper shelf at any big software company (MS, Google, Apple, Valve, etc..). I don't have statistics, but I've run into quite a few online or at events - certainly not nepotism types or "legacy knowledge ransom holders", just very strong programmers that have accomplished things and proven their value over time.
At my company, there's people making $75k with no significant formal education. A+ doesn't seem to have any penetration here, but we have a lot of people taking 1-2 year certificate type programs and that could certainly expect $75k after a few successful years. In fact, we quite often interview people who won't accept that little despite not having huge amounts of education or experience (and, sadly often, failing the programming exercise).
The account seems pretty clear that the intention was to crash one, to prove to the US military that they (the Russians) could cause a nation-wide UFO scare.
To cause a scare, why not, uh, let their UFO get caught flying on film (hopefully doing things that only their advanced aircraft could do). Again, if I was trying to fake this, I'd do it at night with a formation of planes (thus appearing larger than a plane could be, or - using tricks of perspective and a formation moving faster than planes could move). Crashing one proves only one thing: that they couldn't fake a crash site well enough to fool anyone. How do I know their crash evidence wouldn't be good enough to fool anyone? Because you still couldn't do a crash that would fool anyone, at least not by starting with a plane that could fly in that era and a human pilot.
Flying disk technology was considered advanced technology in that day, as flying wing technology was still being tested.
If you're trying to make a good crash site - why make it fly at all? Again, if I was doing a fake crash site, I'd leave out the human (which is an obvious, stupid tell that only a fantastic moron would think of or try) and just have a big disk with layers of odd metal. Have a bunch of magnets, glass spheres, crystals, long antennas made of strange plastic, and generally weird crap in there, all intricate and incomprehensible. Then drop the whole deal out of a plane.
Again, the starting plot doesn't make any sense, and requires a lot of commitment for something that obviously wasn't going to do anything (at least not anything more than just flying around a weather balloon would).
I'm not saying my stupid ideas would work either. But they at least aren't guaranteed not to work (as this stupid, stupid plan would be), and they have some hope of not being discovered in an embarrassing way. Give the Russians some credit - if they'd wanted to do something like this (which they, uh, wouldn't because it's a fantastically dumb goal to start with) then they could have come up with something much better.
This narrative doesn't make sense for any of the players involved. The only way you see the plastic-surgeried child pilot is if you're deliberately crashing the thing - at which point it is clear to the people picking it up it's "normal" technology and the child is clearly a clumsily mutilated (even modern plastic surgery is not going to conceal this kind of thing) human. It would have also been immediately clear who did it, why it isn't scary aliens, and it would have been reasonably hard to do (requires launching a plane deep into the US). It also wouldn't make much sense to keep secret - the message is simple: the Russians are weird douchebags who sent a over a plane with a dead kid.
Contrast that with another, significantly-less-crazy-but-still-pretty-crazy plan that could have actually worked: Have a weird formation of small planes with blinking lights. Send them around at night to New York. If you want, maybe blow up the Statue of Liberty with an unconventional mix of explosives while shining a big light on it or something. Get a whole bunch of weird coincidence stuff going too, broadcast strange radio messages and have it happen in correspondence with some astrological phenomenon. Then get out real fast before they can find your planes, and see that they have conventional propulsion systems and human pilots.
Anyways, I'm sure you or I could do better than the above stupid plan with a little time to think it out (heck, a rope and a cornfield works pretty good). Imagining that the Russians, with plenty of time to think through a plan that required significant commitment, couldn't do better than mutilated kid crashing a plane in the desert... is just so very dumb. I think the only people dumb enough to accept it would be the morons who already have an "explanation" (ie. those who believe it was aliens).
I realise that I cannot get an interference fringe by throwing cricket balls through slits at a screen
You can, it's just not probable. For small numbers of bits, the distribution is going to be 1s and 0s. As we add more bits, we're going to get a sums in the middle - and with large numbers of bits (as in our ball) we're going to get stuck at .5. I can certainly see the guy's argument that specially constructed large scale objects could create thresholds, meaning that we see the 1s and 0s again instead of the default aggregate. (My brain is very tired, hopefully that made some sense).
I know our business just recently went from zero to one. We bought a Mac Mini so we could better ensure compatibility of our corporate sites (and offer better support) to Mac users. Might also do an iPad app at some point. Not so much for any direct business need, but CEO mentioned we might want an iPad app as a marketing tool.
But anyways, yeah, it would be interesting to see how all those Macs are getting used.
We get great support from Dell on hardware - but MS has never given us any.
A while back we had a MS rep come in and offer to help us with any problems. We gave him a GDI bug that hard crashes on about 1/100,000 JPEGs we get (we get a lot of photos, and some of the processing software is "legacy"). The photos are fine as far as we can tell, and open in any other program (including IE and the MS preview thingee). Our current solution was to "canary" attempt to process each photo by opening with a GDI call in a new process, and if that process mysteriously died then we use a 3rd party library to re-encode it before sending it back for the regular processing. Not a big deal in any way, but annoying.
We detailed the clear, reproducible problem reasonably, detailed what we were using as a workaround, and gave a few sample files.
The solution we got back from the "high level programmer" was to open the pictures in IE first, and copy and paste them into Paint.
We told them that was really not satisfactory. Their next idea was to stop talking to us. It has been about 7 years.
to do this in software we need to model the pie, model the oven, model the uncertainty of the robots actions/observations
You don't need to "model" pie or oven. The only vaguely interesting thing would be interpreting the vision of the pie for doneness. And, if you want to do that, you can just get some pictures of real pies and try to interpret them. In software. Without building a computer that controls an oven. That's my point.
Any algorithm developed would translate directly into the areas of pattern recognition, computer vision, and cognition. I don't know how pie factories tell when a pie is done...
The algorithm would probably be pretty easy here (that's why I picked it). But it doesn't matter to my point. Again, to the extent that the algorithm is not easy then you're doing software research and your actual pie baking machine is still stupid. (And, to be clear, if you're doing this industrially, real-lifey you probably have no real algorithm. You just know how long it takes to bake a pie and you bake them for that long.)
Robots in the future will need to operate our current infrastructure: doors, appliances, cars - these will all still be built for humans, not for robots.
Fine, you want to make a robot that opens doors? Cool. Do that. That would be useful. You're doing research. It's a problem that you could have novel solutions for. But it doesn't also need to talk. Unless you actually want a talking, door-opening robot.
You want to make a robot that moves around a room, makes a vague map, plays sounds, listens to sounds, and does some simple processing on those sounds (like these people did)? Don't call it research and don't expect me to get real excited. Those are all solved problems. Combining a bunch of solved problems into one is only a useful exercise if the result is something useful or has something else going for it.
The same technology used to tell when a pie is done could be used to characterize road conditions or tell whether a person is being aggressive.
No, probably not. And if you want to write software to tell whether a person is aggressive, that's fine. That's good research. But unless you're studying machine/human interaction, there's no reason to then make a robot that wanders around a takes pictures of faces and turns red if people are aggressive or something (which, again, is the normal mode for robot "research"). Again, the real research there would be software that processes pictures of faces. By building the robot, you're re-solving a bunch of solved problems (moving around, pointing a camera, making a light turn red) instead of focusing on the part that's the interesting problem. If you're doing this as an engineering exercise, fine. If you're doing it as a way of publicizing your new facial interpretation software, cool. Do that. But, again, it's not a breakthrough unless the software is a breakthrough - the "robot" part is just a boondoggle because the robot isn't doing anything interesting. Like opening doors.
To be doubly clear: if these people are doing something interesting in terms of communication theory between two agents, then that's cool. But if they're not, and they're just physically realizing a fairly trivial bit of software (and it appears that's what they've done) then that's really, fantastically pointless.
If you did the same thing in a software simulation, nobody would pay any attention. It would be fairly trivial. Adding in the actual robot parts means that you, uh... need to have robots that can play and understand sounds. That's great, you made a robot that can play and hear sounds. If we assume nobody has made an audio modem before, then that would be something. As history stands, it isn't.
Adding these two unimpressive things together doesn't equal anything. I mean, if they're actual going to use these for something, then that's great. Make them. But so much robot "research" seems to be crap like this. We have software that can solve problem X in simulation. To do the same thing in the "real world" you'd need hardware capable of these 3 things, all of which we can do. Unless you need to solve problem X for some reason in the real world, you're done. There's no need to build that thing.
It's like saying "can we make a computer that can control an oven and use a webcam to see when the pie is done?". Yes. We can. But unless we actually want to do that, there's literally no point in building the thing. There will be no useful theory produced in actually building a pie watching computer. The only thing you'll get is to have built the first pie watching computer, and - apparently - an article on Slashdot.
Yeah. Some executive did an interview at BoingBoing a while back. He was joking about how people give these suggestions but "they just don't get it". Apparently, people don't understand that the way SYFIE is currently being run is literally the only possible way to run it, that the revenue streams they have now are the only revenue streams they could ever possibly have, that there must be no variance from how things have always been done, that people who want different shows actually, uh, don't, etc...
It was terribly sad - guy was clearly intent on business as usual until business as failure (which I assume he'll blame on everyone/anyone else).
Meh. I always go back to the Windows 2000 era theme. The only UI perk I'd miss in vanilla Windows 2000 would be the "quick launch" area (which I think was added with the release of IE 4). That said, I don't have any real objection to, say, the Windows 7 default interface. But also nothing real good to say about it. I guess the little window preview could conceivably be handy - but it's not terribly exciting, and certainly doesn't "pay" for the cost of not knowing where crap is and exactly how it works.
If there was an install option for "leave the UI how it was", I'd take it most of the time. I just don't have a lot of UI problems, and haven't had them for years - not since I worked/played in DOS and it was a pain to go back and forth between Windows and DOS stuff (and rebooting to different memory schemes). For a decade and a half, I've been able to efficiently go about my business without thinking about the OS/Windowing system UI.
So I don't understand how people spend so much time fiddling with basic window, launch, and dock interfaces - and how reviews always seem to give a massive crap about how slick this or that crap is - and how they never deduct enough points for the fact that lots of stuff was shaken up for no good reason.
I know our corporate users would never accept the amount of dicking around that, for example, MS does with Office. We'd be asked to explain what the benefits of moving "that button they always use" are.
If you have a big change with real benefits: cool. But enough wanking around with interface changes/experiments that might make for 2% more available screen width or 3% shorter mouse travel (in exchange for 100 problems, user confusion, and 40 hours of moving 10% slower while you acclimatize to the new interface).
Fair enough. You're not a big fan. I'm not a huge fan either (though I really enjoyed "How To Train Your Dragon", and I think the tech will likely be successful in terms of penetration).
The posts that have me interested have a much clearer, much angrier/obsessive bent. But again, maybe I'm just over-reading emotion when people are ranting for comedic or some other effect.
What I find interesting about this story is that the Slashdot majority seems to have changed its mind (or perhaps the rabid anti-3d crowd just got tired of posting on every one of these stories?).
Anyways, I think it's an interesting phenomenon that generally "techy" people seem to sometimes get really bent out of shape about new tech. We saw the same thing with HD TVs. We used to see it more with new versions of OS's and software.
I'd like to figure it out more, but I can't find anyone in real life who has or had this kind of anti-3d anger, and when you talk to someone online they stick to their talking points (despite the fact that none of the talking points seem likely to inspire the kinds of emotion they obviously have). Perhaps I'm just misreading people who are stuck in "angry rant" mode for all their posts.
Now 99% unemployment isn't a bad thing. But when we inevitably get to the point where we simply don't need very many workers anymore we're going to need to shift our views on compensation so that those who simply are useless don't suffer.
I agree. Eventually, full employment just isn't going to be possible. I think that'll be a good thing; however, I'd also agree that the transition will be awkward. But the way to deal with this isn't to try to halt technological progress. If we're going to artificially prop up jobs in order to smooth the transition, they might as well be more interesting jobs. People could build out public infrastructure, grow food (for the starving, of which there's still no shortage), create art, do research, increase services, or who knows what - but moving boxes of books is pointless.
In any case, we're not at this point yet, and won't be soon. For example, I think supporting (and replacing) aging boomers is going to create a lot of labor shortage in the next 25 years (especially in, for example, Japan).
Uhh... moved where?
At best, you're making a "broken windows" argument. Perhaps we could make book distribution even less efficient, requiring more people to be involved? Would that be positive?
But even that's missing the point. The important job, the one we should focus on here, isn't "clerk at bookstore", it's "author". Because books are costly to produce, because money from sales has to be divided among so many, and because there is limited shelf space at a book store, very few people can make a living as an author. With e-books, there's the potential for many more authors to find niches, and I think the total money value of the industry could grow significantly as the breadth of subject matter, sales logistics, and means of discovery improves.
Jobs generating ideas are the future, and having an efficient, vibrant market for books is great for that.
..but I have to say it's ironic that you're posting about this algorithm on Slashdot, a site whose moderation system has incorporated the best of your ideas for years, and yet that doesn't seem to come up when you're asking for ideas.
I like the Slashdot system. Moderators are assigned points at times beyond their control, to prevent just the kind of abuses you mention. There's appropriate feedback control on how moderators behave. The job of moderating (and meta-moderating) is presented and appreciated in such a way that people actually do it. People are picked to do moderation in a reasonable way. The process is transparent, and the proof that it works is that the Slashdot comments you typically see are actually not horrible (usually) and sometimes are quite informative.
'In school, intelligence is a measurement,' he said. 'If you have the same answer as everyone else in math or science, you're intelligent.'"
Well.. not really. Schools don't measure intelligence, they measure compliance and effort. If you're intelligent and willing, it's easier to comply with "memorize this crap" and "be able to solve math problems in this form" - but grades are not intended to measure intelligence, nor are they good at doing so. Nor would it make sense. The feedback mechanism grading is requires something you can change - and that's why grades usually target things that all students are capable of and that are easy to evaluate: memorization, putting time into a report, etc..
At issue, he said, are rules that tell each student exactly what they should be studying and when.
Everyone knows there's more effective ways to teach, but it's also clear why teachers have structure: how else are you going to address the needs of 30 different students - many of whom don't want to be there - and keep them all doing something vaguely productive?
Yes I do, thanks for asking!
But I don't intend to. All I'm saying is Microsoft could make Indie games a lot more successful with a bit of quality control, some loosening of restrictions, and some better discovery tools (to be fair, all the "app stores" need better discovery/categorization tools).
I'd say their larger problem with Indie Games is the lack of quality control.
I'm happy to play a small game. But there are many games on there that are pretty much "I figured out how to draw a sprite, time to publish!", or worthless variants on other trivial games.
More content is fine - the problem is that these little turds take up spaces in the new release list (a valuable source of advertising) - and the problem feeds on itself. I think a lot of gamers have given up looking through the new Indie games - and that makes developers less likely to have a go at the platform.
I know if I was developing an XBox Live game, I'd try to find out how to get listed as a "real" arcade game and do what it takes to get there.
OK - you're either fantastically stupid or you're just pretending not to understand him (which is also fantastically stupid). Obviously he didn't mean a chain of moves 1,000,000 moves long. He meant the computers consider millions of individual moves. Which they do. Some of those moves might be 10 moves away, the bulk of them will be much closer. And you, despite obviously doing some Googling, apparently haven't given up on the idea that consulting a database is in any way the prime technique a computer chess program uses (beyond the opening).
All in all, this article has had some of the stupidest, most depressing Slashdot comments I've ever seen. It's like reading the comments on a Youtube video.