The first thing that immediately springs to mind is -- Exactly how many hours did Ingrid bill the day she was so supposedly "productive"?
And the other thing that springs to mind is that her supposed "productivity" was clearly a factor of long experience with the system, and the wit to recognize the similarity of function that led her to the solution.
In the Real World of plug 'n play coders, where no system is worked with for more than a year, system documentation is an obsolete notion (nobody is willing to pay to maintain it), and the concept of spending time to understand the system from the "Big Picture" down to the details is a fantasy, these things just never happen.
"Productivity", indeed!
Re:Linux versus Mac OS X is not a valid comparison
on
Penguin2Apple
·
· Score: 1
Duh -- I know most of the non-Mac world considers Macs to be "closed" from a hardware expansion perspective, but it simply isn't so. Neither of my Macs has anything original remaining inside but the motherboards, and upgrading those is not impossible (merely nonsensical on a cost basis compared to replacing the machines). My PowerMac 7500 started life with a 100 MHz 601 PPC, and now sports a 466 MHz G3. A G4 (or even dual G4s) is certainly possible on this unit, so I fail to see what's so incredible about a G4 B&W unit.
Please get your facts correct -- they were 400K diskettes, not 720K. No original Mac was ever able to read the 720K double density diskette format. The drives capable of reading that format came with the original Mac "Superdrive", which (I believe) was introduced with the Mac SE line, after the original 512K ROM Macs and the Mac Plus models.
Let's see, if common UI's are best in order to avoid the mental disconnect that comes from switching between different systems, then since Windows is by far the dominant desktop OS (and hence UI), then it would be better if all other OSes (Linux, MacOS, etc) opted to mimic the Windows UI. That would certainly remove the mental gear-shifting and uncertainty that occurs when switching between different systems.
He also seems to be under the delusion that there IS a composite average person out there, and that we are all just like that fictional entity. No leftys, no color blind, no differences in personal taste.
What a Maroon.
Re:complexity of supercomputers approaching brain
on
Arguing A.I.
·
· Score: 1
And maybe you give the brain a bit too much credit -- the last time I checked, "ESP, precognition, and yes, even magick" have never been demonstated to work (please prove me wrong, and give me tomorrow's winning Powerball numbers, using any or all of these methods). Or maybe I'm failing to see the tongue-in-cheek nature of your posting.
But in any event, if AI only becomes equal to mere human thought, it will be a failure. After all, mere human thought is what brought us the 2000 presidential election, radical fundamentalists (of all persuasions), and too many other examples of human lunacy to mention. Not to mention/. posters claiming "ESP, precognition, and yes, even magick" as having documented proof of existence in the real world.
Please remember that if you cannot reproduce it and test it, then ANY explanation is (almost) as good as any other, including that it never happened.
A month? In a single month, they won't be able to get through 10% of the code, let alone recognize (let alone fix) half the bugs in the code they do get through.
As someone who gets to spend a GREAT deal of time eyebrows-deep in crappy code (and not just my own...), I have a deep and abiding understanding of the task they're undertaking that goes far, far beyond the likes of Bill Gates, who has spent his career pumping out crap. It's a LOT easier to create entropy than to turn entropy into order. It's pretty tough to avoid creating crappy code in the first place, and almost impossible to turn the dross into gold once it's instantiated into bits.
I think Chairman Bill is going to be very surprised at the difficulty of this task, because even if it IS just a PR scam, and he really doesn't intend to radically overhaul and clean up his code base, it will be important to be able to show some small amount of progress to get the scam launched past the initial skeptics.
For Redhat 7.2 on Athlon cpus, in some systems similar symptoms can result from different causes (borderline hardware compatibility). The RH 7.2 release notes say to use a boot parm of "noathlon" to disable Athlon-specific optimizations. If "mem=nopentium" does not do the trick, try this one.
This explains why regulatory authority over tech mergers and acquisitions is rumored to be being shifted from the bipartisan FTC to the party-in-power-controlled DOJ so that Microsoft can call the White House and get them to tell the DOJ to veto the acquisition on the grounds that it would create "too great a concentration of power" in the hands of a giant like AOL. Move and counter-move.
And this tells a lot about how it has come to be that people perceive an architecture with a very limited number of registers, requiring a deep pipelined architecture and a ridiculous clock speed to be superior to an architecture with lots of registers, achieving its operational bandwidth of data+instructions through the cpu at a lower cpu clock rate, lessening the demands on every other component in the system.
The larger, more complex picture of How Things Work befuddle the limited mental capacities of the masses, leaving them vulnerable to the Madison Avenue attack of the single metric evaluation -- i.e., faster cpu clocks are always better. And explains why John Q Public, when faced with the choice of buying System A, with a 4 GHz system clock and frequent pipeline stalls, vs System B, with a 1 GHz clock but lots of internal parallelism and a much lower amount of cpu wait, will always go for System A.
The really sad part is that so much of the supposed "technical" community are no better off than John Q Public in evaluating their choices.
Well, yes -- modern compilers CAN do a bit or reorganizing, moving invariants out of the loop and generally clearing up some of the more sloppy coding techniques, but I believe that if you actually LOOK at the results of crappy code optimized by a compiler and compared it to good code optimized by a compiler, you will find that there are indeed benefits to writing code with a knowledge of the underlying machine architecture.
Generally, the easiest way to understand said underlying machine architecture is via assembly coding (EE's MMV).
"The Terminal Man" (1972) -- implanted electronic circuits (I believe this preceded the term "microprocessors") used to control/manage disorders in the brain. Compare this to recent news stories about electronic cerebral implants being used to manage a variety of brain ailments.
automotive air bags (sorta) in "Safe at Any Speed" (1967)
today's thriving organ transplant market fueled by Chinese prison "donors" and poor people selling kidneys was fortold in "The Jigsaw Man" (also 1967 for Harlan Ellison's "Dangerous Visions" anthology)
The obsolescence of that same organ transplant market by the ability to produce vat-greown organs (stem cell research's future?) is dealt with pretty well in his "Known Space" series (circa 1970's)
And today's robotic surgeons are the clear beginnings of his "autodocs".
Another way to accommodate demands that you move to a platform that supports Outlook calendaring is to consider (try approaching this option with an open mind) moving to an OS X environment.
You get the (sort of) BSD unix environment to work in, and have the ability to install all the Micro$oft apps (Office, Entourage) and interact with the Windows boxen out on the network just as if you were similarly hobbled with Windows.
And it's all native -- no emulation or VM to reduce performance.
Of course, you'd have to change the hardware, but that's usually the cheapest thing to change, and gets replaced on a regular basis anyway...
The niche this makes sense for is all the current Mac PPC users (this includes the 603, 604 series machines) who would like to run OS X, but don't want to pony up the bucks to buy a new system. This would seem to be a good way to achieve many of the benefits of OS X (plus better performance, since YDL does not have the overhead of OS X's overkill GUI layer).
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For all you people who thought the plot of Sneakers (1992) was just silly and impossible... well, not so silly now is it?
The first thing that immediately springs to mind is -- Exactly how many hours did Ingrid bill the day she was so supposedly "productive"?
And the other thing that springs to mind is that her supposed "productivity" was clearly a factor of long experience with the system, and the wit to recognize the similarity of function that led her to the solution.
In the Real World of plug 'n play coders, where no system is worked with for more than a year, system documentation is an obsolete notion (nobody is willing to pay to maintain it), and the concept of spending time to understand the system from the "Big Picture" down to the details is a fantasy, these things just never happen.
"Productivity", indeed!
Duh -- I know most of the non-Mac world considers Macs to be "closed" from a hardware expansion perspective, but it simply isn't so. Neither of my Macs has anything original remaining inside but the motherboards, and upgrading those is not impossible (merely nonsensical on a cost basis compared to replacing the machines). My PowerMac 7500 started life with a 100 MHz 601 PPC, and now sports a 466 MHz G3. A G4 (or even dual G4s) is certainly possible on this unit, so I fail to see what's so incredible about a G4 B&W unit.
Please get your facts correct -- they were 400K diskettes, not 720K. No original Mac was ever able to read the 720K double density diskette format. The drives capable of reading that format came with the original Mac "Superdrive", which (I believe) was introduced with the Mac SE line, after the original 512K ROM Macs and the Mac Plus models.
Let's see, if common UI's are best in order to avoid the mental disconnect that comes from switching between different systems, then since Windows is by far the dominant desktop OS (and hence UI), then it would be better if all other OSes (Linux, MacOS, etc) opted to mimic the Windows UI. That would certainly remove the mental gear-shifting and uncertainty that occurs when switching between different systems.
He also seems to be under the delusion that there IS a composite average person out there, and that we are all just like that fictional entity. No leftys, no color blind, no differences in personal taste.
What a Maroon.
And maybe you give the brain a bit too much credit -- the last time I checked, "ESP, precognition, and yes, even magick" have never been demonstated to work (please prove me wrong, and give me tomorrow's winning Powerball numbers, using any or all of these methods). Or maybe I'm failing to see the tongue-in-cheek nature of your posting.
/. posters claiming "ESP, precognition, and yes, even magick" as having documented proof of existence in the real world.
But in any event, if AI only becomes equal to mere human thought, it will be a failure. After all, mere human thought is what brought us the 2000 presidential election, radical fundamentalists (of all persuasions), and too many other examples of human lunacy to mention. Not to mention
Please remember that if you cannot reproduce it and test it, then ANY explanation is (almost) as good as any other, including that it never happened.
Hahahahahahaha...
A month? In a single month, they won't be able to get through 10% of the code, let alone recognize (let alone fix) half the bugs in the code they do get through.
As someone who gets to spend a GREAT deal of time eyebrows-deep in crappy code (and not just my own...), I have a deep and abiding understanding of the task they're undertaking that goes far, far beyond the likes of Bill Gates, who has spent his career pumping out crap. It's a LOT easier to create entropy than to turn entropy into order. It's pretty tough to avoid creating crappy code in the first place, and almost impossible to turn the dross into gold once it's instantiated into bits.
I think Chairman Bill is going to be very surprised at the difficulty of this task, because even if it IS just a PR scam, and he really doesn't intend to radically overhaul and clean up his code base, it will be important to be able to show some small amount of progress to get the scam launched past the initial skeptics.
THAT simply ain't gonna happen.
For Redhat 7.2 on Athlon cpus, in some systems similar symptoms can result from different causes (borderline hardware compatibility). The RH 7.2 release notes say to use a boot parm of "noathlon" to disable Athlon-specific optimizations. If "mem=nopentium" does not do the trick, try this one.
This explains why regulatory authority over tech mergers and acquisitions is rumored to be being shifted from the bipartisan FTC to the party-in-power-controlled DOJ so that Microsoft can call the White House and get them to tell the DOJ to veto the acquisition on the grounds that it would create "too great a concentration of power" in the hands of a giant like AOL. Move and counter-move.
We don't care how it works so long as it works.
And this tells a lot about how it has come to be that people perceive an architecture with a very limited number of registers, requiring a deep pipelined architecture and a ridiculous clock speed to be superior to an architecture with lots of registers, achieving its operational bandwidth of data+instructions through the cpu at a lower cpu clock rate, lessening the demands on every other component in the system.
The larger, more complex picture of How Things Work befuddle the limited mental capacities of the masses, leaving them vulnerable to the Madison Avenue attack of the single metric evaluation -- i.e., faster cpu clocks are always better. And explains why John Q Public, when faced with the choice of buying System A, with a 4 GHz system clock and frequent pipeline stalls, vs System B, with a 1 GHz clock but lots of internal parallelism and a much lower amount of cpu wait, will always go for System A.
The really sad part is that so much of the supposed "technical" community are no better off than John Q Public in evaluating their choices.
Well, yes -- modern compilers CAN do a bit or reorganizing, moving invariants out of the loop and generally clearing up some of the more sloppy coding techniques, but I believe that if you actually LOOK at the results of crappy code optimized by a compiler and compared it to good code optimized by a compiler, you will find that there are indeed benefits to writing code with a knowledge of the underlying machine architecture.
Generally, the easiest way to understand said underlying machine architecture is via assembly coding (EE's MMV).
"The Terminal Man" (1972) -- implanted electronic circuits (I believe this preceded the term "microprocessors") used to control/manage disorders in the brain. Compare this to recent news stories about electronic cerebral implants being used to manage a variety of brain ailments.
just a few:
automotive air bags (sorta) in "Safe at Any Speed" (1967)
today's thriving organ transplant market fueled by Chinese prison "donors" and poor people selling kidneys was fortold in "The Jigsaw Man" (also 1967 for Harlan Ellison's "Dangerous Visions" anthology)
The obsolescence of that same organ transplant market by the ability to produce vat-greown organs (stem cell research's future?) is dealt with pretty well in his "Known Space" series (circa 1970's)
And today's robotic surgeons are the clear beginnings of his "autodocs".
Another way to accommodate demands that you move to a platform that supports Outlook calendaring is to consider (try approaching this option with an open mind) moving to an OS X environment.
You get the (sort of) BSD unix environment to work in, and have the ability to install all the Micro$oft apps (Office, Entourage) and interact with the Windows boxen out on the network just as if you were similarly hobbled with Windows.
And it's all native -- no emulation or VM to reduce performance.
Of course, you'd have to change the hardware, but that's usually the cheapest thing to change, and gets replaced on a regular basis anyway...
The niche this makes sense for is all the current Mac PPC users (this includes the 603, 604 series machines) who would like to run OS X, but don't want to pony up the bucks to buy a new system. This would seem to be a good way to achieve many of the benefits of OS X (plus better performance, since YDL does not have the overhead of OS X's overkill GUI layer).