Either the machine U can compute any computable function, or it can't. If it can, then the brain may be a near Turing equivalent machine; that is, U can do everything that the brain can do, plus a bit more (must be plus a bit more, since U has infinite store and any physical device has finite store). If it can't, then it's possible that the brain can do some things that U can't do. The fact that the brain is entirely or largely analogue in its internal operation doesn't make the least bit of difference to this argument.
So: the brain is a less than perfect computer, or the whole structure of mathematics falls down in a heap, and with it goes the whole of modern physics. If Turing was wrong, it's perfectly possible that the Intelligent Design people are right, there is a God, and the thing that makes our brains different from computers is a soul. I don't believe Turing was wrong. Consequently, I believe that at some point we will develop software which allows machines to become fully self conscious. People like Dr David Ellerman will then start inventing other ways in which 'people' are different from 'machines'.
We aren't. We're just machines whose software has evolved over hundreds of millions of years. If we're as clever as we think we are, it won't take us that long to write software that's as clever as we are.
Could it be possible, does anyone think, that some mischievous and malicious persons are reading stories on Slashdot, waiting a day or two, and then submitting exactly the same articles back to Slashdot in order to dupe the editors into looking incompetent?
Sure it would encourage investment....from large companies like MS and Sun. They of course will reap most of the benefits aswell. Software patents are a bad idea and stifle creativity.
Listen, I understand your point, but you haven't made it here. All you've done is try to vilify MS and Sun, and that may get you karma, it doesn't explain why you think...
A serious point is that both Microsoft and Sun are both US companies. Like other US companies, they already have a huge bank of software patents which, if Europe adopted software patents, would instantly become enforcible here. European companies by and large don't have significant portfolios of software patents, so could not cross license and would be forced to pay large fees to use basic techniques which have been commonplace in the industry for years.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of software patents, it isn't in Europe's strategic interest to adopt them.
I'm slightly concerned about the wording on startup messages (section 5.2c).
Otherwise, the modified work must display this information [an appropriate
copyright notice, and tells the user that there is no warranty for
the program (or that you provide a warranty), that users may
redistribute the modified work under these conditions, and how to
view a copy of this License together with the central list (if any) of
other terms in accord with section 7] at
startup
I've two issues with this. One is prolixity. When a system starts up, dozens and perhaps hundreds of individual components are started. If each component is required to print:
bogosity is Copyright (c) 2006 bogosity associates. This program is distributed without warranty express or implied. You may modify this program, and may redistributes the modified program, according to the terms of the GPL version 3 which you will find at/usr/share/doc/bogosity/GPL3.
then the startup log is going to become unmanageably big, and hard to search for important information.
The other issue is granularity. The stuff I build is webapps, comprising sometimes as many as forty or fifty individual servlets. I don't control which servlet is started first, because servlets are started when they are first required to serve content a user (or other system) has requested. If I'm required to 'show' this at startup, am I required to show it as each servlet starts, or only when the first servlet in a given webapp starts? If the latter, do I have to keep track of which servlet is started first in order that it can know to print the message?
"Hey, I just discovered your site: Tell me WHAT'S loading! Put the name of your site on the page. Direct me to a header page that asks me if I want to see your Flash animation. Put something to read on the page while your dingus loads. Put menus and widgets there, or a graphic, or anything to hold my interest while it loads."
See, thing is, if they didn't put the flash up first, if they routed you to a sensible page first and had a link which said 'check out our cool flash animation', no-one would ever even look at that thing they've poured so much of the time and money that could have been spent on decent web-site design into. So if they don't put it up first, it's a waste. You don't like waste, do you?
6) IBM will get in trouble with its customers as it becomes clear that Sam Palmisano didn't learn much, if anything, from Lou Gerstner. Gerstner's fat-cutting is long forgotten, so all IBM knows how to cut these days is customer service.
*shrug* IBM is cost competitive in the low end.. they seem to be making money and are still on the short list of "laptops that just work"
Those aren't the numbers that matter for 2006. The main reason operating system market share matters is because people build products on top of these platforms. The buying power of the target recipients of these $100 laptops is very low because they are poor and they are children.
Two things:
A black market in OLPC machines is going to develop very quickly indeed. In third world countries where most people are denied access to technology these are going to become highly desired items, and many of those people are going to need software. They won't be able to pay what we would consider to be 'commercial' prices for it, of course, but they will be a huge potential market
The legitimate users of the machines will not be fools or incompetents. A lot of very good software has been developed by educators, and some of the kids will be no slouches at building software either. Third world people are not stupider than you, they just don't have access to the resources you do. Give them access to computers, software tools, and the net, and they'll start building the software they need.
We'll see new open source projects emerging from OLPC, and new contributers to existing projects. We'll also see new markets in closed source software for the OLPC machines, although how these will work I'm not certain.
A run-from-cd (or run-from-dvd, more likely) version of MacOS has to be technically possible. How long before someone hacks one up and it starts to get noticed around the 'net? What will Apple's response be? Of course their official response will be 'stomp on it hard', but what will their real response be?
A disk which you could shove into a vanilla PC which gave users a flavour of MacOS but which for some reason couldn't be fully installed onto the PC and so always ran at 'run-from-cd' speed would actually be a great marketing ploy.
What he wants is for Toyota to stop infringing his patent. Three ways to do this, 1) stop selling the Prius in the US, 2) Change the technology used, 3) LICENSE THE PATENT.
4: Take the greedy little extortionist to court and have his patent declared invalid. There's been prior art on this one since before the second world war; there's no way any patent on it can still be valid. It's just yet another abuse of the US patent system (which, it has to be said, is scandalously susceptible to abuse).
That's what, thirty years, and these guys are still using toilet plungers and paint rollers for their futuristic space robots?
Even MST3K had better robot props, and they used everyday objects on purpose as a joke (probably a Dr. Who joke, now that I think about it).
Wait till you see that baby in action. Then laugh. In drama, really, the prop doesn't matter, it's how it's used that counts. But when you see how that thing is used, you'll agree it's a very effective bit of design.
Will the US get second season episodes around the same time they're broadcast in the UK (and the rest of the world)?
Considering the second season has already started airing, probably not...
No it hasn't, starts April. First season was mixed, with the best episodes ('Dalek', 'The Empty Child', 'The Doctor Dances') being up there with the best television drama you'll ever see and the worst ('The End of The World') being entertaining and perfectly watchable. This is good stuff - clear your diary now.
If Slashdot wasn't working the way most of us wanted it it wouldn't have the huge success it has. If your editorial style wasn't generally liked we wouldn't be here. There will always be whingers and whiners, malcontents and wreckers. The best thing to do with them is ignore them.
It might not do any harm to institute a filter which automatically added 'nofollow' to all links in submissions.
If Bill was truly philanthropic, then he'd be making anonymous contributions. Nope, they're nice and public.
Maybe he has, and you just don't know about it. Otherwise, they wouldn't be anonymous.
Three things:
If this were just philanthropy, all would be anonymous.
If Gates gave away the whole of the excess of his fortune over the average persons, that would be philanthropy (even if it was public). This still leaves him with more money than he could possibly spend on himself in his lifetime - he cannot notice the difference. So this is just public relations.
Much of this is proceeds of crime, or at least grossly unethical business practices.
This gets modded Informative? What crack are the mods on and please cant I not have any of it?
This gets modded Informative? Oh, the irony... it hurts.
Mods, just bogart that joint! My post (above) wasn't Informative. At best it was (dubiously) Funny. Arguably it was either Flamebait or Troll; and it is now certainly Overrated.
See, these funny little words in the moderation menu, they all have semantic content, you know? Like, they actually mean something... Oh, never mind. As you were.
This gets modded Informative? What crack are the mods on and please cant I not have any of it?
In this day and age, real men write HTML by integrating several streams from databases, RSS feeds, and all manner of other things, and passing the resultant XML through an XSL transform on the fly.
Fair enough, you probably write your XSL in a text editor.
One of the reason so few developers test in Opera is because Opera on the whole does standards so well. If you build your site in a standards compliant way, it will work in Opera. Which is how it should be.
A company (and a product) I admire very much. Aside, it's interesting - for such a small country - how many world-class software companies Norway has. I wish we had one half as many here in Scotland.
From previous Opera related posts on Slashdot, it has come to my attention that you have some real babes working for you in Norway. Are any of them single and if so, would they be interested in dating a guy who reads slashdot?
Last time I was over in Scandinavia (Sweden, actually, but... (much too long ago)) I met a very real babe who worked for Opera (and still does). Sadly, she's married. Even more sadly, happily. If you're reading, you know who you are... and I still wear the T shirt!
I fully agree with you about using RSS for articles. It seems I can find things I'm interested in faster by hitting 2 or 3 of my regular news aggregator sites and opening tabs.
<sigh/> <fx action="beats desktop in despair"/>
and where did you think the aggregators got their news from? 'I don't use RSS because I can find things faster using RSS'? There was a day, far back in the mists of history, when Slashdot was a place the cluefull hung out. Not any more, it seems.
You're missing the point. If you go to my blog, as well as my content, you'll see current headlines from other sites I find interesting. How do you think they get there? Do you imagine I sit up every night carefully editing my pages and putting in new links? Hint: I don't. A little fragment of XSL pulls the current RSS from the sites I'm interested in, and integrates it into the page as it rebuilds it. And guess what? Those sidebars on Slashdot are just the same.
RSS may not be interesting to you on your browser (although with plugins like Wizz RSS for Firefox you may be missing something). But whether or not you know you're using RSS, you are using RSS.
And so you should, because it is exceedingly good stuff.
Revisionist bullshit. Computers were not all ugly off-white boxes "back in the day", and Apple has made some damn ugly hardware over the years.
First, I am not an Apple fan and most especially I am not a Steve Jobs fan. Not only did I program for the original Mac back in the early eighties, I had the deep joy of administering some NeXT boxes in the nineties. They were always, at least from a software point of view, a triumph of surface gloss over good engineering. I've never spent my own money on an Apple box, and I've never advised a customer to do so.
But.
OK, it's true that there have been very occasional ugly Apples. OK, it's true that there have been very occasional attractive case designs by other makers (I particularly like some of the mid 90s SiliconGraphics case designs, and, of course, the NeXT cubes were fantastically good to look at). But - and I say this with a very expensive designer PC case sitting under my desk - I've never seen a PC case design that didn't look awful, whereas by contrast some of the Apple case designs (Lisa; PowerMac G4 and G4 cube; Mac Mini) have been really excellent.
So no. Steve Jobs has excellent visual taste, has a history of employing good industrial designers, and generally of producing better looking products (and often better physically engineered products) than anyone else in the consumer computer industry.
I go through 2 laptops per year, and I generally go through about 3 PDAs. After 3-5 months of use, they're not really functional:)
You're proud of being careless with your tools? I, too, need fairly up to the minute phones because I need to test systems on them. But I've never broken one, and my hand-me-down phones are now used by everyone in the household. Similarly, while my this-years laptop is on the table behind me, in current use, my seven-year-old laptop is on the desk beside me (for testing things on Win95/IE 4).
Developers, including myself, have a tendency to spend time learning admin skills, while ignoring powerful stuff that would actually make us better programmers.
Sometimes we have to. I'm not really a disciplined enough person to make a good sysadmin, but we don't have budget to hire one so I have to do it. Still, knowing you're not the right person for the job does have the benefit of making you extra careful.
... to do the things they are authorised to do, and never, ever let them have root. Seriously. Also, if you're doing anything at all important on the machine, record every root login including who did it, what was done, when, and why in a log which is not kept on the machine. A paper log book is not a bad idea, although a log kept on a separate server will also serve.
Slashdot Mirror
Either the machine U can compute any computable function, or it can't. If it can, then the brain may be a near Turing equivalent machine; that is, U can do everything that the brain can do, plus a bit more (must be plus a bit more, since U has infinite store and any physical device has finite store). If it can't, then it's possible that the brain can do some things that U can't do. The fact that the brain is entirely or largely analogue in its internal operation doesn't make the least bit of difference to this argument.
So: the brain is a less than perfect computer, or the whole structure of mathematics falls down in a heap, and with it goes the whole of modern physics. If Turing was wrong, it's perfectly possible that the Intelligent Design people are right, there is a God, and the thing that makes our brains different from computers is a soul. I don't believe Turing was wrong. Consequently, I believe that at some point we will develop software which allows machines to become fully self conscious. People like Dr David Ellerman will then start inventing other ways in which 'people' are different from 'machines'.
We aren't. We're just machines whose software has evolved over hundreds of millions of years. If we're as clever as we think we are, it won't take us that long to write software that's as clever as we are.
Could it be possible, does anyone think, that some mischievous and malicious persons are reading stories on Slashdot, waiting a day or two, and then submitting exactly the same articles back to Slashdot in order to dupe the editors into looking incompetent?
Surely not.
Nononononononononono. News for nerds. Not news for geeks.
The true geeks are all somewhere else, having much more fun.
A serious point is that both Microsoft and Sun are both US companies. Like other US companies, they already have a huge bank of software patents which, if Europe adopted software patents, would instantly become enforcible here. European companies by and large don't have significant portfolios of software patents, so could not cross license and would be forced to pay large fees to use basic techniques which have been commonplace in the industry for years.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of software patents, it isn't in Europe's strategic interest to adopt them.
I'm slightly concerned about the wording on startup messages (section 5.2c).
I've two issues with this. One is prolixity. When a system starts up, dozens and perhaps hundreds of individual components are started. If each component is required to print:
then the startup log is going to become unmanageably big, and hard to search for important information.
The other issue is granularity. The stuff I build is webapps, comprising sometimes as many as forty or fifty individual servlets. I don't control which servlet is started first, because servlets are started when they are first required to serve content a user (or other system) has requested. If I'm required to 'show' this at startup, am I required to show it as each servlet starts, or only when the first servlet in a given webapp starts? If the latter, do I have to keep track of which servlet is started first in order that it can know to print the message?
See, thing is, if they didn't put the flash up first, if they routed you to a sensible page first and had a link which said 'check out our cool flash animation', no-one would ever even look at that thing they've poured so much of the time and money that could have been spent on decent web-site design into. So if they don't put it up first, it's a waste. You don't like waste, do you?
Except that IBM doesn't make or sell laptops any more.
Two things:
We'll see new open source projects emerging from OLPC, and new contributers to existing projects. We'll also see new markets in closed source software for the OLPC machines, although how these will work I'm not certain.
A run-from-cd (or run-from-dvd, more likely) version of MacOS has to be technically possible. How long before someone hacks one up and it starts to get noticed around the 'net? What will Apple's response be? Of course their official response will be 'stomp on it hard', but what will their real response be?
A disk which you could shove into a vanilla PC which gave users a flavour of MacOS but which for some reason couldn't be fully installed onto the PC and so always ran at 'run-from-cd' speed would actually be a great marketing ploy.
4: Take the greedy little extortionist to court and have his patent declared invalid. There's been prior art on this one since before the second world war; there's no way any patent on it can still be valid. It's just yet another abuse of the US patent system (which, it has to be said, is scandalously susceptible to abuse).
Wait till you see that baby in action. Then laugh. In drama, really, the prop doesn't matter, it's how it's used that counts. But when you see how that thing is used, you'll agree it's a very effective bit of design.
No it hasn't, starts April. First season was mixed, with the best episodes ('Dalek', 'The Empty Child', 'The Doctor Dances') being up there with the best television drama you'll ever see and the worst ('The End of The World') being entertaining and perfectly watchable. This is good stuff - clear your diary now.
It might not do any harm to institute a filter which automatically added 'nofollow' to all links in submissions.
Three things:
This gets modded Informative? Oh, the irony... it hurts.
Mods, just bogart that joint! My post (above) wasn't Informative . At best it was (dubiously) Funny . Arguably it was either Flamebait or Troll ; and it is now certainly Overrated .
See, these funny little words in the moderation menu, they all have semantic content, you know? Like, they actually mean something... Oh, never mind. As you were.
This gets modded Informative? What crack are the mods on and please cant I not have any of it?
In this day and age, real men write HTML by integrating several streams from databases, RSS feeds, and all manner of other things, and passing the resultant XML through an XSL transform on the fly.
Fair enough, you probably write your XSL in a text editor.
Despite our much stronger data protection legislation, exactly the same trick works in the UK. Which just demonstrates that the whole data protection hoo hah is nonsense...
One of the reason so few developers test in Opera is because Opera on the whole does standards so well. If you build your site in a standards compliant way, it will work in Opera. Which is how it should be.
A company (and a product) I admire very much. Aside, it's interesting - for such a small country - how many world-class software companies Norway has. I wish we had one half as many here in Scotland.
Last time I was over in Scandinavia (Sweden, actually, but... (much too long ago)) I met a very real babe who worked for Opera (and still does). Sadly, she's married. Even more sadly, happily. If you're reading, you know who you are... and I still wear the T shirt!
<sigh/>
<fx action="beats desktop in despair"/>
and where did you think the aggregators got their news from? 'I don't use RSS because I can find things faster using RSS'? There was a day, far back in the mists of history, when Slashdot was a place the cluefull hung out. Not any more, it seems.
You're missing the point. If you go to my blog, as well as my content, you'll see current headlines from other sites I find interesting. How do you think they get there? Do you imagine I sit up every night carefully editing my pages and putting in new links? Hint: I don't. A little fragment of XSL pulls the current RSS from the sites I'm interested in, and integrates it into the page as it rebuilds it. And guess what? Those sidebars on Slashdot are just the same.
RSS may not be interesting to you on your browser (although with plugins like Wizz RSS for Firefox you may be missing something). But whether or not you know you're using RSS, you are using RSS.
And so you should, because it is exceedingly good stuff.
First, I am not an Apple fan and most especially I am not a Steve Jobs fan. Not only did I program for the original Mac back in the early eighties, I had the deep joy of administering some NeXT boxes in the nineties. They were always, at least from a software point of view, a triumph of surface gloss over good engineering. I've never spent my own money on an Apple box, and I've never advised a customer to do so.
But.
OK, it's true that there have been very occasional ugly Apples. OK, it's true that there have been very occasional attractive case designs by other makers (I particularly like some of the mid 90s Silicon Graphics case designs, and, of course, the NeXT cubes were fantastically good to look at). But - and I say this with a very expensive designer PC case sitting under my desk - I've never seen a PC case design that didn't look awful, whereas by contrast some of the Apple case designs (Lisa; PowerMac G4 and G4 cube; Mac Mini) have been really excellent.
So no. Steve Jobs has excellent visual taste, has a history of employing good industrial designers, and generally of producing better looking products (and often better physically engineered products) than anyone else in the consumer computer industry.
It's just a shame about the software engineering.
You're proud of being careless with your tools? I, too, need fairly up to the minute phones because I need to test systems on them. But I've never broken one, and my hand-me-down phones are now used by everyone in the household. Similarly, while my this-years laptop is on the table behind me, in current use, my seven-year-old laptop is on the desk beside me (for testing things on Win95/IE 4).
Breaking things is not big, and it's not clever.
Sometimes we have to. I'm not really a disciplined enough person to make a good sysadmin, but we don't have budget to hire one so I have to do it. Still, knowing you're not the right person for the job does have the benefit of making you extra careful.
... to do the things they are authorised to do, and never, ever let them have root. Seriously. Also, if you're doing anything at all important on the machine, record every root login including who did it, what was done, when, and why in a log which is not kept on the machine. A paper log book is not a bad idea, although a log kept on a separate server will also serve.