bandwagon and mindshare... CIOs have heard of Linux, not all of them have heard of *BSD. That's sad, because the BSDs are far more mature at a system level and I think they probably scale better. Then again, Sun and HP have Solaris and HP-UX for selling scalability.
Something else they're not thinking about is that Linux is not 100% POSIX-compliant. that's going to piss off a lot of senior engineers who have to port legacy apps from HP-UX/Solaris (or, shudder, older Unixes) over to Linux.
It's a marketing strategy.
Solaris is known as "slowaris" because it is optimized for SMP systems. Single CPU boxes are cheap. Sun was getting rejected by potential customers because to get the full benefit of Solaris you have to buy a massive box. If they vend Linux then they can target both the cheapskates/small companies and the huge enterprise vendors.
Java is a raging success at the enterprise level. You can hire H1Bs straight off the boat to bash Java code for half the price of any other programmer.
To implement a Java project you need the following:
1 architect
1 business analyst type
X code monkeys, depending on the size of the project and the timeline.
India supplies the code monkeys at 1/3 to 1/2 the cost of an American, while the two people who have communication skills are paid what they're worth.
I'm sorry it's not PC. I like people from India. Sadly, half of what an american programmer makes is more money than a lot of people from India have ever heard of.
It's a manipulation and a scam on both sides - India farms out its best minds to artificially raise their GNP (and increase their status in the world), while US companies get cheap labor without having to establish an overseas presence. Brought to you by Dubya and the Indian government. Praise Jesus!
If you think this isn't real, talk to any US citizen who is a developer working in a non-Java technology. Talk to any H1B doing Java over here.
liberals understand this, it's libertarians that don't. they tend not to understand the separation of media and content.
If I buy a book, I pay for the paper-based delivery system. I don't own the words. If I buy a movie on a tape or DVD, I don't own the images, I own the right to "experience" [groan] them by procuring media.
The same goes for software. It's not hard to comprehend.
likewise for the lasseiz-faire capitalist feudal lords who think they can suck the labor of the world dry and leave us all to starve.
it's the consequence of my choice, but if the world were a better place - even the place it was before Reagan and Thatcher - the consequences would not be so severe that there is no hope of overcoming them.
If you cage an animal, it will become more angry and agitated and eventually fight back, unless you sedate it artificially. Hence, the entertainment industry, the pharmaceutical industry (to a small extent), and the drug trade.
no, you won't change my mind. move along, but remember what I said...
All of us in IT are slaves indentured to our corporate masters. We are given life by them and can have it taken away in an economy like this.
for a more employee-centric perspective, see the movie "Matewan". If you can find a video store that has it - it's probably considered a terrorism-inciting piece of artwork now.
not so. the Russian Ka-50 has an ejection seat - pull the handle and the rotor blades are blown off by an explosive; when they're clear the seat fires. I've heard rumors that the Comanche will have a similar feature, but there are always rumors about that kind of thing.
I don't have a link, sorry.
Is my Karma up to 50 yet? it's a slow day at work..
Re:complexity of supercomputers approaching brain
on
Arguing A.I.
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· Score: 2
Linux affects Intel more than Microsoft. Linux made Intel's hardware viable for more than just desktop doc-bashing and mild number-crunching.
Microsoft is who they are and honestly, could probably care less about Linux now. They realized that some users valued stability over style, and are working on that.
I bought WinXP (Home, upgrade). Mainly because I expected it to be a POS and I wanted to be a participant in a class-action suit against MS. However, MS did it right. I have some programs that wreck under XP, but I've never had the entire OS go flaky or unstable. I've had that happen on EVERY previous version of Windows, including NT4 and 2000. The interface does the job of getting all the hardware config crap out of my way, since I don't want to have to deal with that stuff at home (I deal with highly technical stuff for 8 hours a day) but I could tweak it further if I wanted to. It's just as wide open as NT under the hood. Sure, I can't recompile it, but thank %DIETY% I don't have to.
MS wins when you just want it to work. That's 99% of the people in the world. Linux hackers are an extreme minority and
I also have a Red Hat box on my network doing SMB for file and print sharing and for those rare times when I want to program at home. It's 7.2 and installed without a hitch, supporting all my hardware. If this was still the slackware days when I had to roll my own kernel after booting from a boot/root floppy combo I wouldn't have even bothered.
Re:complexity of supercomputers approaching brain
on
Arguing A.I.
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· Score: 1
I know I'm replying to my own post, but I just realized something - if the brain runs at 20 Hz, and a StrongARM runs at 20 Hz, then nobody needs anything more powerful than a Palm:)
Re:complexity of supercomputers approaching brain
on
Arguing A.I.
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· Score: 1
you'll get +1 Funny from a lot of people for that, but I have to say that that was a sad effort. Keanu isn't that old.
Re:Chinese Rooms and Software Guys
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Arguing A.I.
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· Score: 2
you just proved my point:)
So what makes humans so special? Aren't we then just a less hairy gorilla with a bigger (physically speaking) brain?
[This argument infuriates creationists.]
Re:Chinese Rooms and Software Guys
on
Arguing A.I.
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· Score: 2
The mind is a real thing, even if we have trouble defining it. But you have an "inner monologue," to use a rather hokey term. If you ignore this, you're evading the question. I disagree. The mind is a real thing only because we haven't proven it to be invalid yet. Our concept of the mind is not a definition because it is by nature undefinable.
Therefore, why not make the computer define its own concept of the mind. Give it the ability to think, but don't tell it what to think. If you believe in creationism, you believe that Yahweh/God/Allah did that for humans, so we get to see the results for ourselves. stretching it can prove creationism right or wrong. [nobody has the balls to go there nowadays, though. I wouldn't be surprised if Bush/Ashcroft want to turn the USA into a Christian Fundamentalist Dictatorship no better than Iran - but I digress.]
As for the sense of "I" being prgrammed by society, I respectfully disagree. But, since we've only got a sample set of one species so far, it's hard to say. I only know who I am because the world gives me tools to define myself. The world being other people, history, the physical world, and everything else that I can experience. The first self-aware caveman didn't say "ugg, I am" without something making him think it first.
Re:Has he talked about Rod Brooks?
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Arguing A.I.
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· Score: 2
radical? please. seems pretty self-evident to me or anyone who studies Eastern philosophies. The mind becomes something shaped by the environment it perceives. it is not autonomous and is part of a greater whole.
congratulations to Dr. Brooks for taking the time out of his life to get the Ph.D and build up his credentials so that people would listen to him when he stated the obvious.
Re:complexity of supercomputers approaching brain
on
Arguing A.I.
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· Score: 4, Insightful
the brain runs at 20 Hz, but it's massively parallel. No, I couldn't begin to guess how many 20 Hz processors the brain contains the equivalent of.
Re:Chinese Rooms and Software Guys
on
Arguing A.I.
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· Score: 2
Re the chinese room argument: make the computer understand. Or make each individual unit in our brain understand. talking about how X doesn't do Y is never productive. You CAN fit the square peg in the round hole.
Re dualism - why must philosophers take the logical extremes of every argument? the "mind" is a concept invented by humans to make themselves feel special. We have no proof that other animals aren't thinking in the abstract and just haven't figured out how to express it yet.
If you must insist that the concept of the mind refers to a real thing, then why is it something that has to be a presence? can it not be the sum of a brain working in concert with sensory organs to produce a set of electrical impulses? Why does it have to be this great concept of consciousness?
The sense of "I" is programmed into you by society and tradition. I'm of a firm belief that socialization is more responsible for creating a self-concept than anything innate. We're just animals and humanity is all one huge feedback loop.
Re:Chinese Rooms and Software Guys
on
Arguing A.I.
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· Score: 2
what's the chinese room argument?
The mind is what the brain creates through its functions. the brain is an organ. its job is to store and process information. if it's not doing that (i.e. I'm dead or in a mechanically-sustained state, a coma), do I have a mind? the two are interdependent.
Anyone who is not a creationist type "humans are special" is going to consider the brain just to be an organ. Or so I thought.
Re:Von Neumann Architecture Can't Do It.
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· Score: 2
I'm hopeful that sometime in the future we can define all the parameters of intelligence, and the filtering of years of learning down to one level, so we can determine exactly what the peak level of intelligence for human beings is.
That will lead to a holocaust of unintelligent people, which will only serve to make our world a better place. We've ran out the utility of the individualism paradigm. It has no usefulness as far as getting things done is concerned. Humanity increasingly engages in such complex tasks that one person can't do anything to affect them by themselves. It's sad but humanity's only chance to survive is to merge into one entity and AI and intelligence research is the only way to do it.
oh, we know it's lighthearted, but someone who doesn't pay attention (most people in the world, and IT types especially) will skim the story, see that someone has put a lot of work into making Linux have games in the bootloader, and then their premature assumptions will be "proven" - Linux is written by 31337 hax0rs just for fun and it's not a real OS. People don't trust things that aren't created under duress, and no GPL idealism will cure that!! jeez.. look around outside somewhere besides your fellow Linux geeks.
The geek qualities of linux will never be lost as long as there are alternative distributions. As long as someone wants Linux to be a geek toy- it will be. use Debian so can you get geekness without having to feel like you've been queered by a splintered broomstick after you install? Debian's install is ridiculous. I've installed *BSD and Solaris, and Debian blew my mind. I quit in the middle and went with RedHat.
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bandwagon and mindshare... CIOs have heard of Linux, not all of them have heard of *BSD. That's sad, because the BSDs are far more mature at a system level and I think they probably scale better. Then again, Sun and HP have Solaris and HP-UX for selling scalability.
Something else they're not thinking about is that Linux is not 100% POSIX-compliant. that's going to piss off a lot of senior engineers who have to port legacy apps from HP-UX/Solaris (or, shudder, older Unixes) over to Linux.
"enterprise vendors" should be "enterprise customers" in paragraph 2
It's a marketing strategy.
Solaris is known as "slowaris" because it is optimized for SMP systems. Single CPU boxes are cheap. Sun was getting rejected by potential customers because to get the full benefit of Solaris you have to buy a massive box. If they vend Linux then they can target both the cheapskates/small companies and the huge enterprise vendors.
Linux runs well on Sparc chips, BTW.
Java is a raging success at the enterprise level. You can hire H1Bs straight off the boat to bash Java code for half the price of any other programmer.
To implement a Java project you need the following:
1 architect
1 business analyst type
X code monkeys, depending on the size of the project and the timeline.
India supplies the code monkeys at 1/3 to 1/2 the cost of an American, while the two people who have communication skills are paid what they're worth.
I'm sorry it's not PC. I like people from India. Sadly, half of what an american programmer makes is more money than a lot of people from India have ever heard of.
It's a manipulation and a scam on both sides - India farms out its best minds to artificially raise their GNP (and increase their status in the world), while US companies get cheap labor without having to establish an overseas presence. Brought to you by Dubya and the Indian government. Praise Jesus!
If you think this isn't real, talk to any US citizen who is a developer working in a non-Java technology. Talk to any H1B doing Java over here.
*spit*
liberals understand this, it's libertarians that don't. they tend not to understand the separation of media and content.
If I buy a book, I pay for the paper-based delivery system. I don't own the words. If I buy a movie on a tape or DVD, I don't own the images, I own the right to "experience" [groan] them by procuring media.
The same goes for software. It's not hard to comprehend.
what defines a border you say? REAL WORLD LAND MASS.
Define "real world". Prepare to be argued with at length, because there are no real definitions.
likewise for the lasseiz-faire capitalist feudal lords who think they can suck the labor of the world dry and leave us all to starve.
it's the consequence of my choice, but if the world were a better place - even the place it was before Reagan and Thatcher - the consequences would not be so severe that there is no hope of overcoming them.
If you cage an animal, it will become more angry and agitated and eventually fight back, unless you sedate it artificially. Hence, the entertainment industry, the pharmaceutical industry (to a small extent), and the drug trade.
no, you won't change my mind. move along, but remember what I said...
All of us in IT are slaves indentured to our corporate masters. We are given life by them and can have it taken away in an economy like this.
for a more employee-centric perspective, see the movie "Matewan". If you can find a video store that has it - it's probably considered a terrorism-inciting piece of artwork now.
funny you should mention that. this idea is not so fresh :)
not so. the Russian Ka-50 has an ejection seat - pull the handle and the rotor blades are blown off by an explosive; when they're clear the seat fires. I've heard rumors that the Comanche will have a similar feature, but there are always rumors about that kind of thing.
I don't have a link, sorry.
Is my Karma up to 50 yet? it's a slow day at work..
I'm just karma 'hoing, nothing personal :)
Linux affects Intel more than Microsoft. Linux made Intel's hardware viable for more than just desktop doc-bashing and mild number-crunching.
Microsoft is who they are and honestly, could probably care less about Linux now. They realized that some users valued stability over style, and are working on that.
I bought WinXP (Home, upgrade). Mainly because I expected it to be a POS and I wanted to be a participant in a class-action suit against MS. However, MS did it right. I have some programs that wreck under XP, but I've never had the entire OS go flaky or unstable. I've had that happen on EVERY previous version of Windows, including NT4 and 2000. The interface does the job of getting all the hardware config crap out of my way, since I don't want to have to deal with that stuff at home (I deal with highly technical stuff for 8 hours a day) but I could tweak it further if I wanted to. It's just as wide open as NT under the hood. Sure, I can't recompile it, but thank %DIETY% I don't have to.
MS wins when you just want it to work. That's 99% of the people in the world. Linux hackers are an extreme minority and
I also have a Red Hat box on my network doing SMB for file and print sharing and for those rare times when I want to program at home. It's 7.2 and installed without a hitch, supporting all my hardware. If this was still the slackware days when I had to roll my own kernel after booting from a boot/root floppy combo I wouldn't have even bothered.
I know I'm replying to my own post, but I just realized something - if the brain runs at 20 Hz, and a StrongARM runs at 20 Hz, then nobody needs anything more powerful than a Palm :)
you'll get +1 Funny from a lot of people for that, but I have to say that that was a sad effort. Keanu isn't that old.
you just proved my point :)
So what makes humans so special? Aren't we then just a less hairy gorilla with a bigger (physically speaking) brain?
[This argument infuriates creationists.]
The mind is a real thing, even if we have trouble defining it. But you have an "inner monologue," to use a rather hokey term. If you ignore this, you're evading the question.
I disagree. The mind is a real thing only because we haven't proven it to be invalid yet. Our concept of the mind is not a definition because it is by nature undefinable.
Therefore, why not make the computer define its own concept of the mind. Give it the ability to think, but don't tell it what to think. If you believe in creationism, you believe that Yahweh/God/Allah did that for humans, so we get to see the results for ourselves. stretching it can prove creationism right or wrong. [nobody has the balls to go there nowadays, though. I wouldn't be surprised if Bush/Ashcroft want to turn the USA into a Christian Fundamentalist Dictatorship no better than Iran - but I digress.]
As for the sense of "I" being prgrammed by society, I respectfully disagree. But, since we've only got a sample set of one species so far, it's hard to say.
I only know who I am because the world gives me tools to define myself. The world being other people, history, the physical world, and everything else that I can experience. The first self-aware caveman didn't say "ugg, I am" without something making him think it first.
radical? please. seems pretty self-evident to me or anyone who studies Eastern philosophies. The mind becomes something shaped by the environment it perceives. it is not autonomous and is part of a greater whole.
congratulations to Dr. Brooks for taking the time out of his life to get the Ph.D and build up his credentials so that people would listen to him when he stated the obvious.
the brain runs at 20 Hz, but it's massively parallel. No, I couldn't begin to guess how many 20 Hz processors the brain contains the equivalent of.
Re the chinese room argument: make the computer understand. Or make each individual unit in our brain understand. talking about how X doesn't do Y is never productive. You CAN fit the square peg in the round hole.
Re dualism - why must philosophers take the logical extremes of every argument? the "mind" is a concept invented by humans to make themselves feel special. We have no proof that other animals aren't thinking in the abstract and just haven't figured out how to express it yet.
If you must insist that the concept of the mind refers to a real thing, then why is it something that has to be a presence? can it not be the sum of a brain working in concert with sensory organs to produce a set of electrical impulses? Why does it have to be this great concept of consciousness?
The sense of "I" is programmed into you by society and tradition. I'm of a firm belief that socialization is more responsible for creating a self-concept than anything innate. We're just animals and humanity is all one huge feedback loop.
what's the chinese room argument?
The mind is what the brain creates through its functions. the brain is an organ. its job is to store and process information. if it's not doing that (i.e. I'm dead or in a mechanically-sustained state, a coma), do I have a mind? the two are interdependent.
Anyone who is not a creationist type "humans are special" is going to consider the brain just to be an organ. Or so I thought.
I'm hopeful that sometime in the future we can define all the parameters of intelligence, and the filtering of years of learning down to one level, so we can determine exactly what the peak level of intelligence for human beings is.
That will lead to a holocaust of unintelligent people, which will only serve to make our world a better place. We've ran out the utility of the individualism paradigm. It has no usefulness as far as getting things done is concerned. Humanity increasingly engages in such complex tasks that one person can't do anything to affect them by themselves. It's sad but humanity's only chance to survive is to merge into one entity and AI and intelligence research is the only way to do it.
I'm half joking..
I'm sorry, but I can't accept technical advice from someone who quotes Jesus in their sig.
oh, we know it's lighthearted, but someone who doesn't pay attention (most people in the world, and IT types especially) will skim the story, see that someone has put a lot of work into making Linux have games in the bootloader, and then their premature assumptions will be "proven" - Linux is written by 31337 hax0rs just for fun and it's not a real OS. People don't trust things that aren't created under duress, and no GPL idealism will cure that!! jeez.. look around outside somewhere besides your fellow Linux geeks.
The geek qualities of linux will never be lost as long as there are alternative distributions. As long as someone wants Linux to be a geek toy- it will be. use Debian
so can you get geekness without having to feel like you've been queered by a splintered broomstick after you install? Debian's install is ridiculous. I've installed *BSD and Solaris, and Debian blew my mind. I quit in the middle and went with RedHat.
I'm going to get -infinity for this but, OK.
this is too much. crap like this, thrown in because it's "kewl", is why the real world doesn't take Linux seriously.
I want LILO to load my OS, and no more. I can wait until I boot to play games and see the pretty colors.