There has been research in this area being done for years, much of it presented at SIGGRAPH. There are techniques to animate characters through intricate plots just by specifying behavioral charactics, techniques to apply motion dynamics to characters of significantly different shape, and even "video puppetry" that allows images to self-animate in response to speech. All are a number of years old. All were hailed as holy grails. This just seems to be a case of CNN finally noticing.
At last year's SIGGRAPH, everyone already knew about polynomial textures, because there had been a news story about it. To me, though, the highlight of the show was that it is now possible to walk around with an uncalibrated, handheld camera, and completely automatically get a decent 3-D model out of it (textured, of course). No news story about that.
As with.NET, almost everyone seems to be missing the point. "I'll keep buying their games because they're good," "They have the right to protect their property," etc. etc. There are problems with looking at it this way.
First of all, Blizzard doesn't write any games. The designers, developers, and artists who work for Blizzard write the games. This may seem picky, but it is important later.
Second, this action on the part of Blizzard will reduce their sales. One can argue until the cows come home about whether the amount of illegal copies stopped is greater than or less than the increased number of copies due to "revenge" piracy. However, there is a much bigger issue: most of the market outside the United States and Canada will disappear. This is because in Europe and most of the rest of the world, there is no such thing as unlimited telephone access for a monthly fee. Subscribers must pay by the minute. Multiplayer gamers in Europe simply cannot justify the expense of spending hour after hour connecting to a central battle server.
Now, Blizzard obviously is aware of the European market, as there have been legal battles over games translated by a third party.
So, there are really only two possibilities:
Blizzard does not think their sales will go down, in which case they are incredibly stupid.
Blizzard does know their sales will go down, in which case there is another ulterior motive for this action.
You should think about these things, especially if you are a loyal fan of Blizzard. If 1 is true, you should think about whether it is of any benefit to you that good developers who produce games you like continue to work in perpetuity for a stupid company when there are less stupid companies around. If 2 is true, you should think about what the ulterior motive might be and whether it will be of any benefit to you.
Others can argue whether it is 1 or 2, or the possible motivations if it be 2. My point is that it has to be either 1 or 2 (or both).
It's especially problematic for graphics standards. GKS, which was hideously based on ideas from pen plotters, still dominated much of the 1980's. Open GL has been pretty good, but it's stuck in some 1980's ideas. For example, the strict ordering of primitives makes sense in a world of bit blasters where double-buffering and Z-buffering are expensive, but it makes little sense on modern hardware and even worse makes it impossible to implement some of the better modern techniques (such as hierarchical global scanline algorithms). Some day, we're going to have systems that cost less than a million dollars that can do real-time ray-tracing, radiosity, and other solutions of the Rendering Equation.
I used to do scientific visualization in a mult-disciplinary research instutite. You're pretty spot-on when it comes to what physicists think of chemists.
Chemists, however, think of you as an anal-retentive obsessive-compulsive.
If you're an experimental physicist, the theoretical physicists think of you as some boy to do the grunt work.
If you're a theoretical physicist, the experimental physicists think of you as an airy-fairy bigshot who thinks he's too good to get his hands dirty.
I didn't get into Napster, but some time a long time ago somebody gave me a compilation tape.
Due to having listened to that compilation tape, I've probably purchased 30 CD's and LP's all told, of The Residents and Yello, and I still look in every record store I see for a copy of anything by The Flying Lizards (so far unsuccessfully).
Now, how exactly does this amount to screwing over either the artists or the record companies? They recieved considerable money from me that they otherwise would not have, had someone not given me an illegal compilation tape.
I just scanned through the documents on the site and, though I may have missed something in the legalese, this is what I saw.
The responses by Joseph Bast and the Center for the Moral Defense of Capitalism support the settlement but seemingly on the grounds that antitrust is a bad or obselete thing. Therefore, these seem to assert that the settlement is good because it is an ineffective remedy.
The responses by CompTIA and Nicholas S. Economides seem to support the settlement but still allow for some form of antitrust.
The response by John V. Tunney appears to be a clarification of the procedure that bears his name and has little to say about the settlement.
So, I see only two that support the settlement as a remedy. Have I missed something?
History has shown that disruptive technologies (GUI, small disk drives, flash cards, etc.) have followed this path:
They are developed by large corporations, are initially less cost-effective, but have certain peculiar advantages
The large companies have absolutely no clue how to market them, and they rot
They are taken up by smaller companies and find success in niche markets
Gradually, the technology improves to the point where is is better and cheaper than the old technologies
Large companies suddenly notice them again, and they become standard
Digital film is a classical example of a disruptive technology at stage 2. It won't take off until it is adopted in niche markets.
I suggest for the niche market something I thought of a few years ago for HDTV: small "art" film houses, the ones that now aren't above using projection of standard video at a pinch, who make most of their money from selling beer and espresso, and have small but dedicated clientele. Set up a distribution system where a small theatre can lease such a system and download films. Offer a variety of older films in digital form (possibly scanned from prints but ideally from interpositives). This would provide a nice, steady stream of revenue for older films that were not blockbusters but which will always have a steady market amongst the people who go for this sort of thing.
It is probably too small a market for the studios to notice, so some small entity is going to have to negotiate with studios to provide this service.
As this happens, companies will be able to work to improve the technology, eventually getting it to the point where most of the (currently legitimate) objections will not apply.
Strange that you agree with me substantially but act exasperated.
Those "hate crime" law of which you speak. Just what do you rate the probability that David Brin is going to be convicted of one, even if he wrote something that offended the powerful? I'd put it as pretty close to zero.
Look at the people who do get convicted. For example, there's that case of a 16-year-old convicted of tying a 33-year-old black man to a tree and setting him on fire.
Now, which is more plausible: that a single 16-year-old can manage, single-handedly to tie a fully grown male to a tree, or that he was kind of a loner, a bit outside the community, and handy?
"Hey, Lemuel, we've got to catch somebody for this. How about that weird kid nobody likes?" happens.
"Hey, Lemuel, we've got to catch somebody for this. How about David Brin?" does not happen.
Whenever anybody says that they have nothing to hide, I always say, "OK, then. Drop your trousers." People usually don't, and they act all offended. This proves they don't really mean what they say.
Fortunately, I have a personal full-disclosure policy and no body shame, so I can walk the walk while they just talk the talk.
When people say, "If you haven't done anything illegal, you don't have anything to hide," what they really mean is "I'm all right, Jack. I've got mine. I have enough money for a lawyer and a nice house and 'upstanding member of the community' status. I have white skin, and I'm heterosexual. Maybe I even know some of the guys on the force. I'm not going anywhere."
I like David Brin as an author, a writer of fiction, very much. But he does have white skin and money and a doctorate and an established writing career and a family. Laws that are thinly disguised justifications for racism, etc. are not directed at him.
I know a lot of people just see QuickTime and MPEG4 as movie players and nothing else. This is not for them.
As a developer, I see QuickTime as a nice, clean way of handling any time-dependent data and metadata: movies are just one application. This aspect of QuickTime has been available for implementation free of charge forever.
Normally, it would make technical sense to move to MPEG4 as it becomes a standard. However, this licensing gives me pause.
$0.25 per codec per copy. Does ths mean that if I develop a codec or get a free codec that by some miracle doesn't infringe on some bozo's patent on generating 4 by adding 2 and 2, that MPEG gets a cut on my codec? Or is this only if MPEG codecs are used?
$0.02 per hour. Does this mean that MPEG gets $0.02 for every hour somebody plays a computer game that happens to have an MPEG movie in it? If so, how the hell?
It's beginning to seem that sticking with the QuickTime framework is a better idea. However, are there plans afoot to torpedo that somehow? I would say that they couldn't, except that recent events seem to indicate that logic in law no longer exists.
IANAA, but both my parents were. I did, however, work in a mental hospital.
It's absolutely true that it is extremely difficult to play a mentally ill person. However, it does not therefore follow that actors who do a bad job of it automatically deserve awards. Writing an operating system is hard, too, but that doesn't mean XP is good.
The only reasonably accurate portrayal of the behavior of psychotics I have ever seen on film was Ophelia in Kenneth Branaugh's Hamlet. The character in Pi didn't act like a psychotic, but the film did evoke a reasonable image of mania.
Patch Adams was probably the worst offender in this regard. Absolutely none of the characters were even remotely right, with the possible exception of the catatonic guy in the wheelchair. Crazy People did get the concept of schizophrenic insight (which is real and very common), but that was in the writing, not the acting.
I have seen people cut across three lanes traffic to get off the road because they experienced one of Florida's famous cloudburst in a rental car and couldn't find the windshield wiper in time.
In the 1930's, back when about half of all European intellectuals were in favor of Fascism, my cousin Wassel was in a Biergarten badmouthing Hitler. The next day he came home to find that the authorities had ransacked his house, including cutting open all the pillows ostensibly searching for "subversive documents." The week after that, he was drafted into the army. Also, the best geneaological evidence indicates that this branch of my family converted from Judaism some time in the 19th century, so they would have gotten around to us eventually.
When I tell people this, they usually say, "gee, that was stupid of him."
Hindsight is 20-20, folks. It's really easy to look back on history and assign clear moral categories. It isn't so easy to do while the history is happening. A lot of people think that a Holocaust cannot happen again, but I think they're wrong. It can and probably will happen, because people are stupid. No genocide ever starts off horrible; it happens over time.
All these documents need to be put in the context of their times in order to make sense. Look at the time of the meeting, what had happened, and what was still in the future.
If you want to know where the next world-threatening Holocaust is going to come from, don't look for Nazis; look for the places that were like Germany between the wars: horrible unemployment, poverty, and inflation, hopelessness and despair, anger at treatment by their neighbors. These are invariably places that most liberal intellectuals loudly defend. There's a lot of "they're just responding to someone else's foreign policy" or "they have good reasons" or "how do you think they feel when they see..." There's a lot of rationalizing of madness. But these are the places that Holocaust-forming madness can take root, precisely because people want to view it all as rational and justifiable and will burn itself out once they get some control over their destiny. Ironically, it is this rationalization that makes it possible for madmen to get away with murder, but by then it's too late.
C# is just Microsoft's imitation of Db. Once again, they take something that's been around since the equally tempered scale and claim it's an innovation.
The exciting thing about the GeForce 4 is not that it's faster or cheaper, it's that finally the programmability is at an appropriate level.
Uh-huh. 15%. Yawn. Don' need that. I can play Deus Ex just fine. Well, guess what. Even if you think that games are the entire universe, some day you might just need an MRI and need someone to be able to look at it and find something that will keep you from dying. Medical imaging is one of the things that the GeForce 4 will be good enough to do. Scientific visualization, volumetric rendering, that sort of stuff.
Why is this? About a decade ago, everything was basically SGI. These were big, expensive machines, suitable for vertical markets. It was possible to get the engineers to work with the microcode for the sales of a small number of units.
Then various card companies came along (NVidea has a lot of ex-SGI engineers) and started making cards for the horizontal gaming market. They concentrated, of course, on satisfying the needs of their biggest customers/promoters, which were the gaming people. Many of these cards were customizable, but at a level of abstruseness that made it so that maybe three people in the world could really hack them up the wazoo.
In the mean time, SGI suffered, because even people who should know better make decisions on the basis of "gee whiz." No magazine is going to benchmark a card on how accurately it shows a tumor from real data. A perception rose that the graphics problem had been solved for cheap, when it really hadn't been.
The GeForce 4 finally brings little-card graphics up to the point where mere mortals can actually do customization for vertical markets.
OS X is quite a tasty piece of work. I'm in the middle of a Cocoa project (which I am simultaneously developing with a plain text UI) and was wondering if it might not be worthwhile to try to resurrect and improve Open Step. It seems to me that opening a compatibility wire that way might be a good idea. At minimum, it might unsimplify the target.
I think we'll manage it
on
Arguing A.I.
·
· Score: 2
There has been one big stumbling block in the advancement of natural language processing over the past several decades: Noam Chomsky. He isn't dead yet. Even after he dies, it will take some time for his disciples to die. After that happens, there's a pretty good chance that an academic community will form to look at structural linguistics for real this time. Some good work has been done on the fringes, as with Fillmore's deep case structure and various head-based approaches, but the spectre of Noam Chomsky has so far prevented a large enough coalition of researchers to get this very hard problem done.
The point seems to me to be that, no matter how close to human a built machine would be, people would still insist that it's Not Really AI, and if you tried to explain otherwise, they'd either stick their fingers in their ears or insist upon tests that cannot be satisfied even in the case of humans. This will all be really stupid, of course, but that's what people will do.
The most obvious problem with the Chinese Room metaphor is that it confuses the properties of a system with the properties of an element of the system. Asserting that the guy in the room does not know Chinese is about as interesting as asserting that a single neuron in your brain does not know English. Since we've known not to make that mistake for at least 3000 years, there really isn't much excuse.
Perhaps people are fooled because there's a guy in there, and despite all evidence to the contrary, people expect guys to know what they're doing. Or, perhaps people don't know how to think. In any event, "refuting" an argument requires that it be an argument, and that is not the case here. It also requires that the person recieving the refutation have a certain grasp, and I find it difficult to believe anyone with such a grasp could fail to see it as bogus during the first read-through. It is hard to refute "deedle deedle queep."
But, anyway, my favorite discussion of this is "Backtracking: the Chinese food problem,"
Lou Hoebel, Chris Welty,
intelligence March 1999, 10:1.
There was a significant amount of research done in AI Poker about a decade ago. Sorry, no references.
One of the interesting things about the instance where Big Blue beat Kasparov was how it happened. Kasparov became freaked out, saying that the moves were like a human player and not a machine. Whether they were or not, or even whether "like a human player" is a meaningful concept, is not the point. The point is that, effectively, Big Blue psyched Kasparov out.
The problem, as I see it, isn't that there are too many inexperienced programmers, just too few of the good ones.
Sorry, this is a rant. It bugs me to hear people say this.
There are plenty of good, experienced programmers. They just have a hard time getting hired, because they are older than 25. When you interview them, what they talk about are good, solid development strategies, such as proving programs. This is different from and far less impressive than a spew of hot new buzzwords.
So you have some idiots who don't understand the basics of stacks. OK. Someone hired them instead of a 40-year-old like me who has grokked stacks since his and/or her teens. The reason they made this hiring decision is that's who they wanted to hire.
Even worse, they're going to keep on hiring these idiots, because people have been so beaten into submission to accept bugs that they hardly notice the difference between a well designed and badly designed piece of code.
The original 128K Macintosh came with a thin manual and a casette tape (which you played along with a movie running on the screen). This was enough. One of the first Mac commercials showed a PC, with a stack of books falling on the table, and a Mac, with the thin manual floating down.
However, they made the same error that you make: thinking that people select for ease of use. They don't. This is what happens:
Businesses select for difficulty of use, because that makes a product seem more "professional."
People who have spent time learning an arcane system have a lot of investment to justify.
People who know nothing about such systems ask the person in 2 for advice.
People assume something that is easy to use is of little value, because it isn't impressive.
People assume something that is easy to use was easy to develop and therefore of less value.
People make their living in niches that ameliorate needlessly complex systems.
People who make software purchases in business are seldom the ones who use the software, and usually the last thing they want is for their employees to be less than miserable all the time.
The sum total of this is what I call "the Acolyte effect." An Acolyte is someone studying for the priesthood. Computer acolytes are attracted by the pseudo-mystical nature of software; learning its ins and outs is for them a rush. The choice of computers and software becomes a social hierarchy.
Slashdot Mirror
I can compress any Britney Spears song down to zero bits without loss of quality.
There has been research in this area being done for years, much of it presented at SIGGRAPH. There are techniques to animate characters through intricate plots just by specifying behavioral charactics, techniques to apply motion dynamics to characters of significantly different shape, and even "video puppetry" that allows images to self-animate in response to speech. All are a number of years old. All were hailed as holy grails. This just seems to be a case of CNN finally noticing.
At last year's SIGGRAPH, everyone already knew about polynomial textures, because there had been a news story about it. To me, though, the highlight of the show was that it is now possible to walk around with an uncalibrated, handheld camera, and completely automatically get a decent 3-D model out of it (textured, of course). No news story about that.
As with .NET, almost everyone seems to be missing the point. "I'll keep buying their games because they're good," "They have the right to protect their property," etc. etc. There are problems with looking at it this way.
First of all, Blizzard doesn't write any games. The designers, developers, and artists who work for Blizzard write the games. This may seem picky, but it is important later.
Second, this action on the part of Blizzard will reduce their sales. One can argue until the cows come home about whether the amount of illegal copies stopped is greater than or less than the increased number of copies due to "revenge" piracy. However, there is a much bigger issue: most of the market outside the United States and Canada will disappear. This is because in Europe and most of the rest of the world, there is no such thing as unlimited telephone access for a monthly fee. Subscribers must pay by the minute. Multiplayer gamers in Europe simply cannot justify the expense of spending hour after hour connecting to a central battle server.
Now, Blizzard obviously is aware of the European market, as there have been legal battles over games translated by a third party.
So, there are really only two possibilities:
You should think about these things, especially if you are a loyal fan of Blizzard. If 1 is true, you should think about whether it is of any benefit to you that good developers who produce games you like continue to work in perpetuity for a stupid company when there are less stupid companies around. If 2 is true, you should think about what the ulterior motive might be and whether it will be of any benefit to you.
Others can argue whether it is 1 or 2, or the possible motivations if it be 2. My point is that it has to be either 1 or 2 (or both).
It's especially problematic for graphics standards. GKS, which was hideously based on ideas from pen plotters, still dominated much of the 1980's. Open GL has been pretty good, but it's stuck in some 1980's ideas. For example, the strict ordering of primitives makes sense in a world of bit blasters where double-buffering and Z-buffering are expensive, but it makes little sense on modern hardware and even worse makes it impossible to implement some of the better modern techniques (such as hierarchical global scanline algorithms). Some day, we're going to have systems that cost less than a million dollars that can do real-time ray-tracing, radiosity, and other solutions of the Rendering Equation.
Microsoft DOES have innovation, quality, and bug-free code, just not TRADITIONAL innovation, quality, and bug-free code.
I used to do scientific visualization in a mult-disciplinary research instutite. You're pretty spot-on when it comes to what physicists think of chemists.
Chemists, however, think of you as an anal-retentive obsessive-compulsive.
If you're an experimental physicist, the theoretical physicists think of you as some boy to do the grunt work.
If you're a theoretical physicist, the experimental physicists think of you as an airy-fairy bigshot who thinks he's too good to get his hands dirty.
I didn't get into Napster, but some time a long time ago somebody gave me a compilation tape.
Due to having listened to that compilation tape, I've probably purchased 30 CD's and LP's all told, of The Residents and Yello, and I still look in every record store I see for a copy of anything by The Flying Lizards (so far unsuccessfully).
Now, how exactly does this amount to screwing over either the artists or the record companies? They recieved considerable money from me that they otherwise would not have, had someone not given me an illegal compilation tape.
I just scanned through the documents on the site and, though I may have missed something in the legalese, this is what I saw.
The responses by Joseph Bast and the Center for the Moral Defense of Capitalism support the settlement but seemingly on the grounds that antitrust is a bad or obselete thing. Therefore, these seem to assert that the settlement is good because it is an ineffective remedy.
The responses by CompTIA and Nicholas S. Economides seem to support the settlement but still allow for some form of antitrust.
The response by John V. Tunney appears to be a clarification of the procedure that bears his name and has little to say about the settlement.
So, I see only two that support the settlement as a remedy. Have I missed something?
History has shown that disruptive technologies (GUI, small disk drives, flash cards, etc.) have followed this path:
Digital film is a classical example of a disruptive technology at stage 2. It won't take off until it is adopted in niche markets.
I suggest for the niche market something I thought of a few years ago for HDTV: small "art" film houses, the ones that now aren't above using projection of standard video at a pinch, who make most of their money from selling beer and espresso, and have small but dedicated clientele. Set up a distribution system where a small theatre can lease such a system and download films. Offer a variety of older films in digital form (possibly scanned from prints but ideally from interpositives). This would provide a nice, steady stream of revenue for older films that were not blockbusters but which will always have a steady market amongst the people who go for this sort of thing.
It is probably too small a market for the studios to notice, so some small entity is going to have to negotiate with studios to provide this service.
As this happens, companies will be able to work to improve the technology, eventually getting it to the point where most of the (currently legitimate) objections will not apply.
Strange that you agree with me substantially but act exasperated.
Those "hate crime" law of which you speak. Just what do you rate the probability that David Brin is going to be convicted of one, even if he wrote something that offended the powerful? I'd put it as pretty close to zero.
Look at the people who do get convicted. For example, there's that case of a 16-year-old convicted of tying a 33-year-old black man to a tree and setting him on fire.
Now, which is more plausible: that a single 16-year-old can manage, single-handedly to tie a fully grown male to a tree, or that he was kind of a loner, a bit outside the community, and handy?
"Hey, Lemuel, we've got to catch somebody for this. How about that weird kid nobody likes?" happens.
"Hey, Lemuel, we've got to catch somebody for this. How about David Brin?" does not happen.
Whenever anybody says that they have nothing to hide, I always say, "OK, then. Drop your trousers." People usually don't, and they act all offended. This proves they don't really mean what they say.
Fortunately, I have a personal full-disclosure policy and no body shame, so I can walk the walk while they just talk the talk.
When people say, "If you haven't done anything illegal, you don't have anything to hide," what they really mean is "I'm all right, Jack. I've got mine. I have enough money for a lawyer and a nice house and 'upstanding member of the community' status. I have white skin, and I'm heterosexual. Maybe I even know some of the guys on the force. I'm not going anywhere."
I like David Brin as an author, a writer of fiction, very much. But he does have white skin and money and a doctorate and an established writing career and a family. Laws that are thinly disguised justifications for racism, etc. are not directed at him.
I know a lot of people just see QuickTime and MPEG4 as movie players and nothing else. This is not for them.
As a developer, I see QuickTime as a nice, clean way of handling any time-dependent data and metadata: movies are just one application. This aspect of QuickTime has been available for implementation free of charge forever.
Normally, it would make technical sense to move to MPEG4 as it becomes a standard. However, this licensing gives me pause.
IANAA, but both my parents were. I did, however, work in a mental hospital.
It's absolutely true that it is extremely difficult to play a mentally ill person. However, it does not therefore follow that actors who do a bad job of it automatically deserve awards. Writing an operating system is hard, too, but that doesn't mean XP is good.
The only reasonably accurate portrayal of the behavior of psychotics I have ever seen on film was Ophelia in Kenneth Branaugh's Hamlet. The character in Pi didn't act like a psychotic, but the film did evoke a reasonable image of mania.
Patch Adams was probably the worst offender in this regard. Absolutely none of the characters were even remotely right, with the possible exception of the catatonic guy in the wheelchair. Crazy People did get the concept of schizophrenic insight (which is real and very common), but that was in the writing, not the acting.
I have seen people cut across three lanes traffic to get off the road because they experienced one of Florida's famous cloudburst in a rental car and couldn't find the windshield wiper in time.
In the 1930's, back when about half of all European intellectuals were in favor of Fascism, my cousin Wassel was in a Biergarten badmouthing Hitler. The next day he came home to find that the authorities had ransacked his house, including cutting open all the pillows ostensibly searching for "subversive documents." The week after that, he was drafted into the army. Also, the best geneaological evidence indicates that this branch of my family converted from Judaism some time in the 19th century, so they would have gotten around to us eventually.
When I tell people this, they usually say, "gee, that was stupid of him."
Hindsight is 20-20, folks. It's really easy to look back on history and assign clear moral categories. It isn't so easy to do while the history is happening. A lot of people think that a Holocaust cannot happen again, but I think they're wrong. It can and probably will happen, because people are stupid. No genocide ever starts off horrible; it happens over time.
All these documents need to be put in the context of their times in order to make sense. Look at the time of the meeting, what had happened, and what was still in the future.
If you want to know where the next world-threatening Holocaust is going to come from, don't look for Nazis; look for the places that were like Germany between the wars: horrible unemployment, poverty, and inflation, hopelessness and despair, anger at treatment by their neighbors. These are invariably places that most liberal intellectuals loudly defend. There's a lot of "they're just responding to someone else's foreign policy" or "they have good reasons" or "how do you think they feel when they see..." There's a lot of rationalizing of madness. But these are the places that Holocaust-forming madness can take root, precisely because people want to view it all as rational and justifiable and will burn itself out once they get some control over their destiny. Ironically, it is this rationalization that makes it possible for madmen to get away with murder, but by then it's too late.
C# is just Microsoft's imitation of Db. Once again, they take something that's been around since the equally tempered scale and claim it's an innovation.
The exciting thing about the GeForce 4 is not that it's faster or cheaper, it's that finally the programmability is at an appropriate level.
Uh-huh. 15%. Yawn. Don' need that. I can play Deus Ex just fine. Well, guess what. Even if you think that games are the entire universe, some day you might just need an MRI and need someone to be able to look at it and find something that will keep you from dying. Medical imaging is one of the things that the GeForce 4 will be good enough to do. Scientific visualization, volumetric rendering, that sort of stuff.
Why is this? About a decade ago, everything was basically SGI. These were big, expensive machines, suitable for vertical markets. It was possible to get the engineers to work with the microcode for the sales of a small number of units.
Then various card companies came along (NVidea has a lot of ex-SGI engineers) and started making cards for the horizontal gaming market. They concentrated, of course, on satisfying the needs of their biggest customers/promoters, which were the gaming people. Many of these cards were customizable, but at a level of abstruseness that made it so that maybe three people in the world could really hack them up the wazoo.
In the mean time, SGI suffered, because even people who should know better make decisions on the basis of "gee whiz." No magazine is going to benchmark a card on how accurately it shows a tumor from real data. A perception rose that the graphics problem had been solved for cheap, when it really hadn't been.
The GeForce 4 finally brings little-card graphics up to the point where mere mortals can actually do customization for vertical markets.
OS X is quite a tasty piece of work. I'm in the middle of a Cocoa project (which I am simultaneously developing with a plain text UI) and was wondering if it might not be worthwhile to try to resurrect and improve Open Step. It seems to me that opening a compatibility wire that way might be a good idea. At minimum, it might unsimplify the target.
There has been one big stumbling block in the advancement of natural language processing over the past several decades: Noam Chomsky. He isn't dead yet. Even after he dies, it will take some time for his disciples to die. After that happens, there's a pretty good chance that an academic community will form to look at structural linguistics for real this time. Some good work has been done on the fringes, as with Fillmore's deep case structure and various head-based approaches, but the spectre of Noam Chomsky has so far prevented a large enough coalition of researchers to get this very hard problem done.
The point seems to me to be that, no matter how close to human a built machine would be, people would still insist that it's Not Really AI, and if you tried to explain otherwise, they'd either stick their fingers in their ears or insist upon tests that cannot be satisfied even in the case of humans. This will all be really stupid, of course, but that's what people will do.
The most obvious problem with the Chinese Room metaphor is that it confuses the properties of a system with the properties of an element of the system. Asserting that the guy in the room does not know Chinese is about as interesting as asserting that a single neuron in your brain does not know English. Since we've known not to make that mistake for at least 3000 years, there really isn't much excuse.
Perhaps people are fooled because there's a guy in there, and despite all evidence to the contrary, people expect guys to know what they're doing. Or, perhaps people don't know how to think. In any event, "refuting" an argument requires that it be an argument, and that is not the case here. It also requires that the person recieving the refutation have a certain grasp, and I find it difficult to believe anyone with such a grasp could fail to see it as bogus during the first read-through. It is hard to refute "deedle deedle queep."
But, anyway, my favorite discussion of this is "Backtracking: the Chinese food problem," Lou Hoebel, Chris Welty, intelligence March 1999, 10:1.
There is also a decent discussion in The Universal Computer: The Road from Leibniz to Turing, Martin Davis. This is an excellent book all around.
There was a significant amount of research done in AI Poker about a decade ago. Sorry, no references.
One of the interesting things about the instance where Big Blue beat Kasparov was how it happened. Kasparov became freaked out, saying that the moves were like a human player and not a machine. Whether they were or not, or even whether "like a human player" is a meaningful concept, is not the point. The point is that, effectively, Big Blue psyched Kasparov out.
The problem, as I see it, isn't that there are too many inexperienced programmers, just too few of the good ones.
Sorry, this is a rant. It bugs me to hear people say this.
There are plenty of good, experienced programmers. They just have a hard time getting hired, because they are older than 25. When you interview them, what they talk about are good, solid development strategies, such as proving programs. This is different from and far less impressive than a spew of hot new buzzwords.
So you have some idiots who don't understand the basics of stacks. OK. Someone hired them instead of a 40-year-old like me who has grokked stacks since his and/or her teens. The reason they made this hiring decision is that's who they wanted to hire.
Even worse, they're going to keep on hiring these idiots, because people have been so beaten into submission to accept bugs that they hardly notice the difference between a well designed and badly designed piece of code.
on March 1, depending on what they accomplish. I've heard Microsoft say they were going to do things before.
The original 128K Macintosh came with a thin manual and a casette tape (which you played along with a movie running on the screen). This was enough. One of the first Mac commercials showed a PC, with a stack of books falling on the table, and a Mac, with the thin manual floating down.
However, they made the same error that you make: thinking that people select for ease of use. They don't. This is what happens:
The sum total of this is what I call "the Acolyte effect." An Acolyte is someone studying for the priesthood. Computer acolytes are attracted by the pseudo-mystical nature of software; learning its ins and outs is for them a rush. The choice of computers and software becomes a social hierarchy.