Another chance for China to tell us "FU" (by telling us that they're going to do something about this and not) and another chance for us to bend over and take it!
On the other hand, seeing how draconian stuff is getting with ACTA, maybe that's a good thing.
Over the past seven Ubuntu releases, I've needed to (a) dick about with partitions to allow the upgrade packages to fit in/var, (b) never had an upgrade of X that didn't trash my video and make me dick about with xorg.conf, or (c) dick about with fstab to get the system to recognize existing partitions. And don't get me started on the sound software which only started to work about two releases ago. And even then, the players still have no decent networking interface unless you mount your audio file server as an NFS share (how 1980s is that?). I had problems for three releases because I tried to install a development version of an Nvidia driver and it would neither remove nor upgrade properly - for three effing releases! Yeah, as far as distros go, Ubuntu is the pick of the litter, but that's not saying much - and I speak as a person who has rebuilt (and modified) kernels, has used various UNIX systems since the late 1970's, and who has an MSCS to boot. And, if I may rant for a second, UNIX OS'es as a concept are getting so long in the tooth that it's not even funny... but I digress.
However much you dislike Apple as a company, their stuff works with almost no fuss - you get all of the goodness of a UNIX system (actually, even better than Linux because it's a BSD kernel) without the numerous hassles you get with trying to get even the best Linux distros to work consistently.
"But government interference, shortsighted regulators, and indifferent corporate leaders each played a role in the demise of a program that could have lessened US.dependence on Middle East oil."
I take exception with most of this statement from to the Journal. I have a strong suspicion that the first two had very little to do with the decision. According to this capsule history of Chrysler, "Between 1973 and 1974, Chrysler's auto production plummets by 26 percent," due to poor sales of the full-size cars they had invested in (including the turbine car) in the face of the 1970's oil shock. Methinks the Journel doth protest too much about "government interference" when most of the blame lies squarely with the management of Chrysler who, together with the rest of the industry during the day, made crappy decisions on which cars to back. They really didn't have much choice but to scale back on their experimental programs as they were hemorrhaging money. I know it's politically beneficial to the right to bash the government with these sorts of unfounded statements, but it's historically inaccurate. But then, anyone who actually sees Murdoch's Journal as a source of unbiased journalism these days is really a bit of a moron.
If you really want to understand the mind of the auto companies in that day, read The Reckoning by David Halberstam, which gives an insightful view of how auto companies were run in the fifties and sixties and how their bad management led to the supremecy of the foreign car in the US and how it almost led to the demise of the domestic auto industry in the seventies.
As in most software projects, as long as they had.
Really. Software is never completely bug free. You have to ship sometime (otherwise, it's just an example of that old adage "If bits are spewed in a forest and no one is around to ship it..."). You just hope that, at the point which you choose to ship, the product has sufficient quality to not raise too many customer issues. But the amount of time taken to find and fix defects is determined more by schedule and cost considerations than by overall quality levels.
Not enough stubbies in the fridge? Too many sheep to perve? Bosses spewing because too many folks are chucking a sickie? Automatic translation of Aussie into English?
Native apps save cpu cycles and improve response time.
And lock your app store into a specific CPU (or have apps that only run on some platforms...). Assuming you want to build a software platform having an app store where you can deploy to as many potential hardware platforms as you can, you'll need a neutral distribution format - this means either a VM or a translation at upload for each hardware platform (and I know which of these options is simpler to support). Plus, native apps can be larger in size, requiring the hardware platforms to include more memory (which also burns power and increases the cost of the unit). It's a trade-off, not all of which is technical.
Starting a war with [Oracle and IBM] would be a serious mistake, particularly for a company whose major source of income is advertisements.
Ha ha ha ha ha... What the hell are you smoking?!? OK... Got that out of my system.
Oracle and IBM's pull is via the IT side of things, while advertising is handled in sales and marketing. Score: +1 Google (at least for most companies).
I can think of no other way to get a company to re-think it's infrastructure than to start telling them "If you don't let me control how and where you advertise, I won't sell you my hardware/software." Score: +1 Google.
Oracle is roundly hated by most of their customers and IBM is tolerated, while Google is generally seen as a benefit. Score: +0.5 Google (mainly because companies also hate paying for ad words).
Final score: +1.5-2.5 Google. I think I'd feel safe betting on Google here.
... a jvm on a phone serves no purpose other than to burn precious processor cycles and battery life.
Actually, a VM can, depending on the native processor, save memory footprint, allowing more apps to run on the phone at once and cut down on the amount of memory needed, which can burn as much power as a CPU (DRAM needs to be on periodically to refresh, even when the phone is idle). Plus, Dalvik is a specialized register-oriented version of the JVM which has even denser instruction encodings, and optimizations for combining multiple classes that pared even more space. Dalvik-based systems can save a significant number of bytes doing this when compared with a "standard" (if there was one) JME implementation. Plus, if you ever might want to switch hardware and maintain an independent app store, a VM makes a lot of sense, as apps don't need to be refreshed each time you ship hardware based on a new chip-type. In short, there were a lot of technical reasons to do this involving a lot of different trade-offs, some of which were not technical in nature. The fact that they saved a buttload of money not paying Sun/Oracle for JME was just icing on the cake.
A bacterium, being a highly complex, somewhat random, biochemical mechanism, makes "decisions" based on complex, somewhat random, internal biochemical processing of external chemical and environmental messages. When growing together in large colonies, since this processing is happening in a complex stochastic environment, it is hard to understand the ultimate outcome for the colony and the individuals inside it and, thus, the system seems "mysterious and magical" to us. When bacteria are under high stress levels, one way they compensate is to "sporulate", hardening the cell membrane and going into a type of hibernation which they will wake up from becoming healthy, frisky bacteria again if the environment becomes suitable again. One of the possible intermediate states during this process is called "competence", where the bacterium makes its cell wall permeable to absorb additional nutrients. But it might kill them, too, as the environment is, admittedly, high-stress. We really don't know how they decide to do that. Isn't science wild, wacky, mysterious, and magical?
Of course, it wouldn't seem like that to you if you had to wash all these damn Petri dishes and try to make idiot reporters understand "competence" - which is what you're really studying after all.
Kidding, but only a bit. As far as I can see, NELL's not building conceptual hierarchies very well, nor is it showing particular focus in important categories that would lead it to learn more quickly.
Right now, NELL is like a child whose entire world view comes from sitting in front of a TV with no guidance from anyone. I guess if you want to see how a feral sentient entity would develop, it's a good experiment. Anything good or useful to coming of it is probably not in the cards.
They would have gotten more interesting findings by starting with the CYC knowledge base and figuring out how to best develop and incorporate counter-factual evidence automatically or how to focus on or integrate specialized knowledge domains in an efficient manner. But then, when we in technology tend to forget what's happened every twenty-five years or so, what do you expect?
Right now it's another "Let's start an ab initio learning process and see if we now have enough computer processing to deal with it" project - the answer is "no". But, what the hell... it'll get a couple more CS PhDs cranked out and keep CMU in building maintenance funds for a few months. Better than a video-game programming curriculum.
Today's government instead would have scrapped these types of projects in favor of repainting federal buildings in Washington, hiring analysts to make sure that homes didn't get foreclosed, while at the same time forking over more money to the banks.Or, more to the point, to fight wars of choice or give tax cuts to the wealthy.
Natural gas is only cheaper because we are using less of it. As soon as the economy rebounds the price will increase. This is the short sighted view that has gotten us into this mess over the last 30 years.
Don't worry - the free market will fix everything! It has magical healing powers.
... to a political rally near you. You probably don't need particularly accurate microphone placement and, in fact, if you had precise position and velocity coordinates of each of the mikes at any given time, they could even be moving.
If you had been awake in your Civics class you would know that NASA is under the executive branch. Congress does not lead NASA, its role is to raise money and pass laws. Telling NASA what to do is overstepping its bounds.
And, if you had been awake, you'd note that "passing laws and raising money (and allocating said money)" is something that could be done very much more to the detriment of NASA, should it not comply with the wishes of Congress. In fact, laws are written all the time that put limitations on how money raised by Congress can be spent (otherwise, we'd just shovel truckloads of money to the Executive Branch to do with what they wished and not even pass budgets that allocate funds to specific departments). Your notion about "telling NASA what to do is overstepping its bounds" is laughable both in a constitutional sense and a practical sense.
Now maybe we'll get Voice of Korea (was Radio Pyongyang) streamed on the internets! That's some good agitprop: "Today, Glorious Leader stated that he is pleased at the 3000% increase in rice production announced by the Ministry of Agriculture. The running dog capitalist Western press had no comment on our great achievement." Really! They still broadcast stuff like this. It really doesn't get any better, comedy-wise.
He actually understands what the hell is going on (and what should be done about it). The increase of moral hazard of supporting bad creditors is much less bad than the economic certainty of a depressed economy for the next twenty years if nothing is done.
Slashdot Mirror
Another chance for China to tell us "FU" (by telling us that they're going to do something about this and not) and another chance for us to bend over and take it!
On the other hand, seeing how draconian stuff is getting with ACTA, maybe that's a good thing.
Over the past seven Ubuntu releases, I've needed to (a) dick about with partitions to allow the upgrade packages to fit in /var, (b) never had an upgrade of X that didn't trash my video and make me dick about with xorg.conf, or (c) dick about with fstab to get the system to recognize existing partitions. And don't get me started on the sound software which only started to work about two releases ago. And even then, the players still have no decent networking interface unless you mount your audio file server as an NFS share (how 1980s is that?). I had problems for three releases because I tried to install a development version of an Nvidia driver and it would neither remove nor upgrade properly - for three effing releases! Yeah, as far as distros go, Ubuntu is the pick of the litter, but that's not saying much - and I speak as a person who has rebuilt (and modified) kernels, has used various UNIX systems since the late 1970's, and who has an MSCS to boot. And, if I may rant for a second, UNIX OS'es as a concept are getting so long in the tooth that it's not even funny... but I digress.
However much you dislike Apple as a company, their stuff works with almost no fuss - you get all of the goodness of a UNIX system (actually, even better than Linux because it's a BSD kernel) without the numerous hassles you get with trying to get even the best Linux distros to work consistently.
"But government interference, shortsighted regulators, and indifferent corporate leaders each played a role in the demise of a program that could have lessened US.dependence on Middle East oil."
I take exception with most of this statement from to the Journal. I have a strong suspicion that the first two had very little to do with the decision. According to this capsule history of Chrysler, "Between 1973 and 1974, Chrysler's auto production plummets by 26 percent," due to poor sales of the full-size cars they had invested in (including the turbine car) in the face of the 1970's oil shock. Methinks the Journel doth protest too much about "government interference" when most of the blame lies squarely with the management of Chrysler who, together with the rest of the industry during the day, made crappy decisions on which cars to back. They really didn't have much choice but to scale back on their experimental programs as they were hemorrhaging money. I know it's politically beneficial to the right to bash the government with these sorts of unfounded statements, but it's historically inaccurate. But then, anyone who actually sees Murdoch's Journal as a source of unbiased journalism these days is really a bit of a moron.
If you really want to understand the mind of the auto companies in that day, read The Reckoning by David Halberstam, which gives an insightful view of how auto companies were run in the fifties and sixties and how their bad management led to the supremecy of the foreign car in the US and how it almost led to the demise of the domestic auto industry in the seventies.
In addition, you can get to Branson, MO in 30 minutes...
Well, if that's not a selling point, nothing is. Be still my heart! I get to see Yakov Smirnoff again!
And before anyone else says this, "In Soviet Russia, Yakov Smirnoff sees you!"
... how long did it this massive job take?
As in most software projects, as long as they had.
Really. Software is never completely bug free. You have to ship sometime (otherwise, it's just an example of that old adage "If bits are spewed in a forest and no one is around to ship it..."). You just hope that, at the point which you choose to ship, the product has sufficient quality to not raise too many customer issues. But the amount of time taken to find and fix defects is determined more by schedule and cost considerations than by overall quality levels.
Not enough stubbies in the fridge? Too many sheep to perve? Bosses spewing because too many folks are chucking a sickie? Automatic translation of Aussie into English?
Native apps save cpu cycles and improve response time.
And lock your app store into a specific CPU (or have apps that only run on some platforms...). Assuming you want to build a software platform having an app store where you can deploy to as many potential hardware platforms as you can, you'll need a neutral distribution format - this means either a VM or a translation at upload for each hardware platform (and I know which of these options is simpler to support). Plus, native apps can be larger in size, requiring the hardware platforms to include more memory (which also burns power and increases the cost of the unit). It's a trade-off, not all of which is technical.
Starting a war with [Oracle and IBM] would be a serious mistake, particularly for a company whose major source of income is advertisements.
Ha ha ha ha ha... What the hell are you smoking?!? OK... Got that out of my system.
Oracle and IBM's pull is via the IT side of things, while advertising is handled in sales and marketing. Score: +1 Google (at least for most companies).
I can think of no other way to get a company to re-think it's infrastructure than to start telling them "If you don't let me control how and where you advertise, I won't sell you my hardware/software." Score: +1 Google.
Oracle is roundly hated by most of their customers and IBM is tolerated, while Google is generally seen as a benefit. Score: +0.5 Google (mainly because companies also hate paying for ad words).
Final score: +1.5-2.5 Google. I think I'd feel safe betting on Google here.
... a jvm on a phone serves no purpose other than to burn precious processor cycles and battery life.
Actually, a VM can, depending on the native processor, save memory footprint, allowing more apps to run on the phone at once and cut down on the amount of memory needed, which can burn as much power as a CPU (DRAM needs to be on periodically to refresh, even when the phone is idle). Plus, Dalvik is a specialized register-oriented version of the JVM which has even denser instruction encodings, and optimizations for combining multiple classes that pared even more space. Dalvik-based systems can save a significant number of bytes doing this when compared with a "standard" (if there was one) JME implementation. Plus, if you ever might want to switch hardware and maintain an independent app store, a VM makes a lot of sense, as apps don't need to be refreshed each time you ship hardware based on a new chip-type. In short, there were a lot of technical reasons to do this involving a lot of different trade-offs, some of which were not technical in nature. The fact that they saved a buttload of money not paying Sun/Oracle for JME was just icing on the cake.
A bacterium, being a highly complex, somewhat random, biochemical mechanism, makes "decisions" based on complex, somewhat random, internal biochemical processing of external chemical and environmental messages. When growing together in large colonies, since this processing is happening in a complex stochastic environment, it is hard to understand the ultimate outcome for the colony and the individuals inside it and, thus, the system seems "mysterious and magical" to us. When bacteria are under high stress levels, one way they compensate is to "sporulate", hardening the cell membrane and going into a type of hibernation which they will wake up from becoming healthy, frisky bacteria again if the environment becomes suitable again. One of the possible intermediate states during this process is called "competence", where the bacterium makes its cell wall permeable to absorb additional nutrients. But it might kill them, too, as the environment is, admittedly, high-stress. We really don't know how they decide to do that. Isn't science wild, wacky, mysterious, and magical?
Of course, it wouldn't seem like that to you if you had to wash all these damn Petri dishes and try to make idiot reporters understand "competence" - which is what you're really studying after all.
... due to the new technology called "Fox News".
I can't imagine anyone would argue that doctors contribute much more to society than lawyers ever could.
Everyone thinks lawyers are useless until they need one.
By the time it gets around to Michael Moore, it'll need a logic bypass.
By the time it gets around to Glenn Beck, it'll need a lobotomy.
... how is this different from Cyc?
Cyc had a chance to be useful before 2050.
Kidding, but only a bit. As far as I can see, NELL's not building conceptual hierarchies very well, nor is it showing particular focus in important categories that would lead it to learn more quickly.
Right now, NELL is like a child whose entire world view comes from sitting in front of a TV with no guidance from anyone. I guess if you want to see how a feral sentient entity would develop, it's a good experiment. Anything good or useful to coming of it is probably not in the cards.
They would have gotten more interesting findings by starting with the CYC knowledge base and figuring out how to best develop and incorporate counter-factual evidence automatically or how to focus on or integrate specialized knowledge domains in an efficient manner. But then, when we in technology tend to forget what's happened every twenty-five years or so, what do you expect?
Right now it's another "Let's start an ab initio learning process and see if we now have enough computer processing to deal with it" project - the answer is "no". But, what the hell... it'll get a couple more CS PhDs cranked out and keep CMU in building maintenance funds for a few months. Better than a video-game programming curriculum.
Today's government instead would have scrapped these types of projects in favor of repainting federal buildings in Washington, hiring analysts to make sure that homes didn't get foreclosed, while at the same time forking over more money to the banks.Or, more to the point, to fight wars of choice or give tax cuts to the wealthy.
Natural gas is only cheaper because we are using less of it. As soon as the economy rebounds the price will increase. This is the short sighted view that has gotten us into this mess over the last 30 years.
Don't worry - the free market will fix everything! It has magical healing powers.
I am a dwarf, you insensitive clod!
... to a political rally near you. You probably don't need particularly accurate microphone placement and, in fact, if you had precise position and velocity coordinates of each of the mikes at any given time, they could even be moving.
... the economy doesn't fix itself when corporations do things consumers don't like.
Yeah. That's why there's ACTA.
If you had been awake in your Civics class you would know that NASA is under the executive branch. Congress does not lead NASA, its role is to raise money and pass laws. Telling NASA what to do is overstepping its bounds.
And, if you had been awake, you'd note that "passing laws and raising money (and allocating said money)" is something that could be done very much more to the detriment of NASA, should it not comply with the wishes of Congress. In fact, laws are written all the time that put limitations on how money raised by Congress can be spent (otherwise, we'd just shovel truckloads of money to the Executive Branch to do with what they wished and not even pass budgets that allocate funds to specific departments). Your notion about "telling NASA what to do is overstepping its bounds" is laughable both in a constitutional sense and a practical sense.
Yeah, they always say that if you have a small genome.
Now maybe we'll get Voice of Korea (was Radio Pyongyang) streamed on the internets! That's some good agitprop: "Today, Glorious Leader stated that he is pleased at the 3000% increase in rice production announced by the Ministry of Agriculture. The running dog capitalist Western press had no comment on our great achievement." Really! They still broadcast stuff like this. It really doesn't get any better, comedy-wise.
Oooohhh! List to the idealist Libertarian whine. It's so sad when reality runs up against your fantasy ideology.
He actually understands what the hell is going on (and what should be done about it). The increase of moral hazard of supporting bad creditors is much less bad than the economic certainty of a depressed economy for the next twenty years if nothing is done.
If it is a matter of the Democrats having no backbone or order, then how does voting for them help anything?
Because it keeps the Republitards from doing even stupider crap.