Yes, perhaps just a link to the article would have sufficed...instead of embedding it in Slashdot giving the feel that it may be Slashdot sponsored. I would expect that we have a feature on the opinion of *GNOME* on this issue coming up soon?
Police Quest, Space Quest, King's Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Quest for Camelot, etc., etc. Sure they had EGA and VGA graphics, but they rocked! What true geek amongst us doesn't get watery eyes thinking about those games?
I see the Police Quest, King's Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry collection packs at Sierra's store, but what about Space Quest, and all the others? I'll probably buy all these up (it would be awesome if they actually came with original manuals, but they probably just come with some lame PDF these days). I guess that's why we have "AbandonWare". These games should be in American history books some day.
Sheesh, assassination is a political *action* not statement. Saying that a political figure is corrupt and should be removed is a *statement*. Showing how CSS works is a *statement*. It's not like the second you see the code you will have deprived somebody of their rights.
Look, the judge had a job: see if this activity is illegal under *CURRENT LAW*. It was, because the current law is *brain-dead*. So hopefully this will be brought to the Supreme Court. But don't think the judge is biased...it was his *job* to find them guilty, if in fact, under the current law they were, even if he didn't like it and that law was unconstitutional. It is the Supreme Court's decision to strike down unconstitutional laws.
So please, don't reinforce any ideas that these were just a bunch of "punk kids" by now flaming the poor guy.
Who's box-cracking?? And what you call whining, others call protesting, boycotting, etc. "Pushing for a change in the law" is not mutually exclusive with "whining" and "name-calling", although there are more effective methods than that. Of course when *corporations* whine and name-call it's called "advertising". Witness the Tobocco ads - "sob sob, the gov slapped our hand", and the Microsoft Ballmer ad - "Bill Gates and I blah blah innovation blah blah children blah blah future".
Damn, and from the transcripts, and with all the testimony from those computer scientists and professors, I though he actually had a clue. He is probably correct in saying this violates the law, but that law needs to be challenged in the supreme court and broken into a billion pieces then thrown in a black hole.
For those confused I believe the point is to highlight what politics has devolved into. Of course it would be outrageous to do such a thing, but essentially the same thing is being done by big corporations pouring money into the system. They're blatently buying legislation and blind eyes, and politicians are even brazenly attesting to this.
Might as well throw the voters a few bucks for the reaming we're getting, right?
I suppose it's dependent on language and libraries. One can easily make a library for an *existing* language to make CORBA look like the former pseudocode example. Never underestimate the value of reusing a language people already know (bindings for whatever language you want).
"Since the late 80s/early 90s" =/= "forever"
Yes it does. And certainly with respect to any new high level language that somebody is going to invent up today for some special purpose.
In any case, why not try and invent something new and potentially better, rather than to stick with an old and potentially obsolete method? "Reinventing the wheel" is worth doing if the wheel already invented is square.
Well CORBA is far from obsolete, and what the poster was suggesting is nothing more than building CORBA-like semantics into Yet Another High Level Language. I don't really see that as reinventing anything. CORBA does its job well.
What do you mean by this? Are you talking about OMG's formal description of the architecture? Or about each ORB's code? Or about each CORBA program's code?
Yes, no, no. The CORBA spec, as far as I can tell, goes through a lot of scrutiny, and is accompanied by detailed documentation (and a lot of vendor support) as the spec is revved. On the other had, if we created a new language to subsume this functionality it would be prone to all the typical new language requirements and features problem, would have to go through ANSI, etc. etc.
But the original poster doesn't want an IPC mechanism - he understands that today's heavyweight processes should be abolished altogether. All the conceptual overhead added by CORBA's architecture is just not worth it, any more than it is using it in a self-contained program.
And how exactly do threads share address space in a "lightweight" manner accross a wire? The "conceptual overhead" of doing this will be the same whether or not you call it "CORBA". *Something* has to format and send stuff over the wire and recieve it on the other end. It will just be built into a language library instead...it's not avoiding the overhead.
You can argue that the poster is not concerned with over-the-wire IPC (message passing, shared memory, whatever you want to call it), but only doing IPC optimized on the same host. But CORBA can always be trimmed down to do this (like X was modified to optimize for a client and server in the same address space), while also still supporting over-the-wire communication if necessary. On the other hand, if you invent some great novel high level language to do everything CORBA does, except not over the wire, then, when you decide you actually DO want location transparence, you have to create a whole new protocol to deal with that. I say use CORBA, trim it down for local use if necessary (I believe what GNOME has done), but if you need to go over the wire, it's there for you on both ends already.
The revolution I think is that since hardware is now a commodity, we are moving away from a hardware-bound system to a system where the bottleneck is merely *the ability of a user to retrieve and process information*. The user is now the bottle neck. Filesystems, etc., weren't created for the *user*. They were created for the *system*. Well now we are bound by the vast amount of information possible, and we have to find ways of using it effectively. I think we will move away from linear "file" systems, and move more into multi-associative "resource" systems. The web itself is basically a "resource" system that is catalogued. Well the same needs to be done for actual file systems, and other aspects of operating systems. What matters to the user is not where a file is located in *physical* space, but where it is located in *conceptual* space - how related in this aspect is it to this other resource? How related in some other aspect is it to that other resource? What is its types and attributes? I think we'll move to something like a object-relational database of information, and likewise human interfaces will have to change to accomodate that.
You are already seeing it in Evolution, where a "folder" is not just a physical location, but more aptly, an aggregation of information based on a set of criteria. My "friends and family" folder shouldn't just be a physical location, it should be a conceptual location, containing all messages by, from, to, and about "friends and family". Which may also overlap with a "Recent" folder, etc.
But seriously though. I think we're at a very childish stage in AI at this point. We're dreaming up all these wonderful things: hey, we can make these metal things and put some silicon in them and make them act like us and they can colonize the universe! Whoopee! I think the distinction between biological systems and "machines" will blur. We are chemical and biological machines after all.
But most important in this big game is to keep the correct perspective. If we keep thinking in generations of 20 years, we *will* become extinct with only fragile tinny machines to replace us. I believe in order to really play the universal game we have to start thinking long term, *really* long term. We have to stop thinking about what we can accomplish this *week*, and think instead what can we accomplish this *life time*. The pyramids where created in *hundreds* of years (if not more). These weren't a bunch of guys thinking day by day. They were thinking *century by century*. And we're still not even sure how they did it. Same for huge stone cities found on the peaks of mountains, and geological clocks which could only be so accurate due to eons of observation and fine tuning. These people had common goals...these people realized that they could still be fulfilled even if they gave their lives to make tiny incremental improvements. Nowadays we are hard-pressed to be fulfilled in any three hour period. Everything is now now now. I think these guys have the right idea: http://www.longnow.org. Unless we are able to communicate with other civilizations with a round trip of decades and centuries, we'll never make it. We just have to shift our perspective of time. Our lifetimes could be as short compared to ET as flies to us. Flies don't accomplish much. I think as a species, we are acquiring a case of geological-timescale ADD.
That begs the question, what is "natural" and what is "mechanical"/"artificial". I mean, us biological organisms use chemical mechanisms. Perhaps then we want to define "artificial" as created by a "natural" life form. What then if a robot creates a novel biological life form? Is that life form natural/biological, or artificial? It obviously didn't come into existence itself, yet it is not impossible that it would naturally.
Metal robots are just the very first very crude step in "artificial" life. I imagine a much more advanced civilization wouldn't be making metal toys and calling them life. It would probably really be creating new biological lifeforms ad-hoc, to suit the circumstances, e.g., that bacteria that eats oil spills. I'd guess any artificial life that survives its creator will probably be biological.
And on another, totally different topic, I don't exactly buy that whole Tipler/transhumanist thing. We supposedly will send out self-replicating machines that will colonize every planet and then as the universe collapses on itself, supposedly some benevolent super-entity (God) will form from the chaos and allow us to relive billions of lives and scenarios before the universe ends? The first part is a little too Borg-like for me, and the last part is just fruity (and I reserve a good amount of skepticism for most theories that claim to derive the existence of some benevolent God from physics and mathematics).
Well, I think it's obvious that this site is a little bit more than *just* news for nerds. If it was, we might as well just read the register or wired or something. It's more like "News for Geeks". And I think a "geek" party (somewhat pathetically) qualifies. I conclude by begging for karma by saying "cool off".
And conversely, since the US doesn't have an "economic necessity", we happily percieve the world revolving around us. I'm an American, but I'd imagine any person from another country who is bilingual or trilingual by necessity would percieve Americans as being arrogant and elitist (the usual American solution to someone who doesn't know English is to SHOUT LOUDER).
I guess it's like the large dictionary/more terse, small dictionary/more verbose tradeoff. If you can stick a larger dictionary in your head, then things that are written can be shorter. E.g., English has an alphabet of 26 letters which we have to arrange into words. We have to read each character of a word before we understand what is being said. If Japanese has 2000 "characters", and on top of that an even higher-level meaning, I can see that books would be much much shorter. It would be as if every letter in the english alphabet had a meaning unto itself.
But what people fail to do is to examine why most Americans rarely speak more than one language. It is one thing for a Belgian to be multilingual. There are likely five native languages spoken within 200 miles. Me, I live over 800 miles from the nearest place a foreign language might actually be useful. So obviously the need just isn't as high.
What about in the middle of Russia or China or Saudi Arabia? I suspect you'd find a higher percentage of people who could speak English than one could find speaking Russian or Chinese or Arabic in the middle of the US (although those figures may be slanted in the US's favor in the first place because so many people from other nations immigrate here). Since we don't have to, it's just easiest to not learn any other languages, and measure things in units of 3 and 12 instead of 10. It's also a point of leverage: other nations that deal with the US, consume American (a)culture, language and products, and become "Americanized" (France has fought this tooth and nail, and I can't say they don't have good reason).
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, perhaps just a link to the article would have sufficed...instead of embedding it in Slashdot giving the feel that it may be Slashdot sponsored. I would expect that we have a feature on the opinion of *GNOME* on this issue coming up soon?
Unpossible? That's a completely gromulent word.
Police Quest, Space Quest, King's Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Quest for Camelot, etc., etc. Sure they had EGA and VGA graphics, but they rocked! What true geek amongst us doesn't get watery eyes thinking about those games?
I see the Police Quest, King's Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry collection packs at Sierra's store, but what about Space Quest, and all the others? I'll probably buy all these up (it would be awesome if they actually came with original manuals, but they probably just come with some lame PDF these days). I guess that's why we have "AbandonWare". These games should be in American history books some day.
Sheesh, assassination is a political *action* not statement. Saying that a political figure is corrupt and should be removed is a *statement*. Showing how CSS works is a *statement*. It's not like the second you see the code you will have deprived somebody of their rights.
How about:
C) DeCSS is legal, AND linking is constitutionally protected as a newspaper
Really? I think I'll have to consult with a first grader before trusting you on that.
Look, the judge had a job: see if this activity is illegal under *CURRENT LAW*. It was, because the current law is *brain-dead*. So hopefully this will be brought to the Supreme Court. But don't think the judge is biased...it was his *job* to find them guilty, if in fact, under the current law they were, even if he didn't like it and that law was unconstitutional. It is the Supreme Court's decision to strike down unconstitutional laws.
So please, don't reinforce any ideas that these were just a bunch of "punk kids" by now flaming the poor guy.
Who's box-cracking?? And what you call whining, others call protesting, boycotting, etc. "Pushing for a change in the law" is not mutually exclusive with "whining" and "name-calling", although there are more effective methods than that. Of course when *corporations* whine and name-call it's called "advertising". Witness the Tobocco ads - "sob sob, the gov slapped our hand", and the Microsoft Ballmer ad - "Bill Gates and I blah blah innovation blah blah children blah blah future".
Damn, and from the transcripts, and with all the testimony from those computer scientists and professors, I though he actually had a clue. He is probably correct in saying this violates the law, but that law needs to be challenged in the supreme court and broken into a billion pieces then thrown in a black hole.
Methinks ANONYMOUS EMILY DICKINSON has been taking lessons from OOG OPEN SOURCE CAVEMAN.
Duh! He said it was in America, were "your" is a correct form of "you are". Why don't you correct *you're* grammer?
For those confused I believe the point is to highlight what politics has devolved into. Of course it would be outrageous to do such a thing, but essentially the same thing is being done by big corporations pouring money into the system. They're blatently buying legislation and blind eyes, and politicians are even brazenly attesting to this.
Might as well throw the voters a few bucks for the reaming we're getting, right?
heh, I thought up another slogan: "Bush and Cheney: marching backwards into the future!". Can't think of one for the Democrats though.
I suppose it's dependent on language and libraries. One can easily make a library for an *existing* language to make CORBA look like the former pseudocode example. Never underestimate the value of reusing a language people already know (bindings for whatever language you want).
Yes it does. And certainly with respect to any new high level language that somebody is going to invent up today for some special purpose.
Well CORBA is far from obsolete, and what the poster was suggesting is nothing more than building CORBA-like semantics into Yet Another High Level Language. I don't really see that as reinventing anything. CORBA does its job well.
Yes, no, no. The CORBA spec, as far as I can tell, goes through a lot of scrutiny, and is accompanied by detailed documentation (and a lot of vendor support) as the spec is revved. On the other had, if we created a new language to subsume this functionality it would be prone to all the typical new language requirements and features problem, would have to go through ANSI, etc. etc.
And how exactly do threads share address space in a "lightweight" manner accross a wire? The "conceptual overhead" of doing this will be the same whether or not you call it "CORBA". *Something* has to format and send stuff over the wire and recieve it on the other end. It will just be built into a language library instead...it's not avoiding the overhead.
You can argue that the poster is not concerned with over-the-wire IPC (message passing, shared memory, whatever you want to call it), but only doing IPC optimized on the same host. But CORBA can always be trimmed down to do this (like X was modified to optimize for a client and server in the same address space), while also still supporting over-the-wire communication if necessary. On the other hand, if you invent some great novel high level language to do everything CORBA does, except not over the wire, then, when you decide you actually DO want location transparence, you have to create a whole new protocol to deal with that. I say use CORBA, trim it down for local use if necessary (I believe what GNOME has done), but if you need to go over the wire, it's there for you on both ends already.
Yeah, I know, I'm still waiting to buy a UHaul and inordinately large amounts of fertilizer anonymously...
The revolution I think is that since hardware is now a commodity, we are moving away from a hardware-bound system to a system where the bottleneck is merely *the ability of a user to retrieve and process information*. The user is now the bottle neck. Filesystems, etc., weren't created for the *user*. They were created for the *system*. Well now we are bound by the vast amount of information possible, and we have to find ways of using it effectively. I think we will move away from linear "file" systems, and move more into multi-associative "resource" systems. The web itself is basically a "resource" system that is catalogued. Well the same needs to be done for actual file systems, and other aspects of operating systems. What matters to the user is not where a file is located in *physical* space, but where it is located in *conceptual* space - how related in this aspect is it to this other resource? How related in some other aspect is it to that other resource? What is its types and attributes? I think we'll move to something like a object-relational database of information, and likewise human interfaces will have to change to accomodate that.
You are already seeing it in Evolution, where a "folder" is not just a physical location, but more aptly, an aggregation of information based on a set of criteria. My "friends and family" folder shouldn't just be a physical location, it should be a conceptual location, containing all messages by, from, to, and about "friends and family". Which may also overlap with a "Recent" folder, etc.
Ok, obligatory link: http://www.theonion.com/onion3522/robots_are_the_f uture.html
But seriously though. I think we're at a very childish stage in AI at this point. We're dreaming up all these wonderful things: hey, we can make these metal things and put some silicon in them and make them act like us and they can colonize the universe! Whoopee! I think the distinction between biological systems and "machines" will blur. We are chemical and biological machines after all.
But most important in this big game is to keep the correct perspective. If we keep thinking in generations of 20 years, we *will* become extinct with only fragile tinny machines to replace us. I believe in order to really play the universal game we have to start thinking long term, *really* long term. We have to stop thinking about what we can accomplish this *week*, and think instead what can we accomplish this *life time*. The pyramids where created in *hundreds* of years (if not more). These weren't a bunch of guys thinking day by day. They were thinking *century by century*. And we're still not even sure how they did it. Same for huge stone cities found on the peaks of mountains, and geological clocks which could only be so accurate due to eons of observation and fine tuning. These people had common goals...these people realized that they could still be fulfilled even if they gave their lives to make tiny incremental improvements. Nowadays we are hard-pressed to be fulfilled in any three hour period. Everything is now now now. I think these guys have the right idea: http://www.longnow.org. Unless we are able to communicate with other civilizations with a round trip of decades and centuries, we'll never make it. We just have to shift our perspective of time. Our lifetimes could be as short compared to ET as flies to us. Flies don't accomplish much. I think as a species, we are acquiring a case of geological-timescale ADD.
Anyway, rant over...
That begs the question, what is "natural" and what is "mechanical"/"artificial". I mean, us biological organisms use chemical mechanisms. Perhaps then we want to define "artificial" as created by a "natural" life form. What then if a robot creates a novel biological life form? Is that life form natural/biological, or artificial? It obviously didn't come into existence itself, yet it is not impossible that it would naturally.
Metal robots are just the very first very crude step in "artificial" life. I imagine a much more advanced civilization wouldn't be making metal toys and calling them life. It would probably really be creating new biological lifeforms ad-hoc, to suit the circumstances, e.g., that bacteria that eats oil spills. I'd guess any artificial life that survives its creator will probably be biological.
And on another, totally different topic, I don't exactly buy that whole Tipler/transhumanist thing. We supposedly will send out self-replicating machines that will colonize every planet and then as the universe collapses on itself, supposedly some benevolent super-entity (God) will form from the chaos and allow us to relive billions of lives and scenarios before the universe ends? The first part is a little too Borg-like for me, and the last part is just fruity (and I reserve a good amount of skepticism for most theories that claim to derive the existence of some benevolent God from physics and mathematics).
Well, I think it's obvious that this site is a little bit more than *just* news for nerds. If it was, we might as well just read the register or wired or something. It's more like "News for Geeks". And I think a "geek" party (somewhat pathetically) qualifies. I conclude by begging for karma by saying "cool off".
sylvia plath rules, dickinson drools! manic depression beats detached and pathetic loneliness any time!
(lameness filter prevented me from being more lame by capitalizing all this)
Seemed to have gotten my analogy mixed up, try:
"Interestingly, he also says he sees good things for American-made motors in foreign cars."
Yet yesterday, 90% of American-made motor owners berated German-made fan radiators.
*What's it to be?*
"Interestingly, he also says he sees good things for American-made motors in foreign cars."
Yet yesterday, 90% of foreign car owners berated German-made radios in their cars.
What's it to be ?
The point: these are completely orthogonal
And conversely, since the US doesn't have an "economic necessity", we happily percieve the world revolving around us. I'm an American, but I'd imagine any person from another country who is bilingual or trilingual by necessity would percieve Americans as being arrogant and elitist (the usual American solution to someone who doesn't know English is to SHOUT LOUDER).
I guess it's like the large dictionary/more terse, small dictionary/more verbose tradeoff. If you can stick a larger dictionary in your head, then things that are written can be shorter. E.g., English has an alphabet of 26 letters which we have to arrange into words. We have to read each character of a word before we understand what is being said. If Japanese has 2000 "characters", and on top of that an even higher-level meaning, I can see that books would be much much shorter. It would be as if every letter in the english alphabet had a meaning unto itself.
What about in the middle of Russia or China or Saudi Arabia? I suspect you'd find a higher percentage of people who could speak English than one could find speaking Russian or Chinese or Arabic in the middle of the US (although those figures may be slanted in the US's favor in the first place because so many people from other nations immigrate here). Since we don't have to, it's just easiest to not learn any other languages, and measure things in units of 3 and 12 instead of 10. It's also a point of leverage: other nations that deal with the US, consume American (a)culture, language and products, and become "Americanized" (France has fought this tooth and nail, and I can't say they don't have good reason).