i disagree. 3d is only a natural progression from 1d and then 2d. i guess you could consider the command line 1d, but that isn't a way of representing anything at all. so, why is 3d the natural next thing? data still isn't organized any better than it was before. in fact, since the amount of ways to arrange stuff in a 3d desktop is *so* much higher, it is much easier to lose stuff, just like in the real world. arguably, the desktop metaphor has problems, but going 3d won't really solve that.
plus, antialiasing has nothing to do with 3d. it is a pseudo-analog (vs. digital) not psuedo 3d technology; furthermore, alpha blending is just eye candy.
Perhaps they should start thinking about from the other point of view. i think both lighters and nail clippers should be allowed. i highly doubt the next terrorist act on a plane will be due to nail clippers. for god's sake, it has nothing to do with the weapon. as george carlin said "what if you have very strong hands? shouldn't those be banned too?" michael moore is a hippie who has some good points, but nevertheless exists to profit from the atmosphere around him. his point deals with such a slight detail but in light of much larger absurdities, they seem irrelevant.
not sure whether the license is transferrable or not. all depends on how apple lets you have it. digital music is no different than software in that respect, so you don't actually "own" the song
not true at all. if you let someone use a private road for a period of time (i forget the actual period) and never block it off, it becomes a public road (IANAL but i am almost positive there is such a law). same thing with any other kind of property. that was the reason for my road analogy, because i meant it from a purely legal standpoint.
if microsoft was really concerned with the cost of running a service, particularly the servers, they would adopt a protocol like jabber that allows anyone to run a server. every business aims (or rather should aim) to minimize their cost while maximizing their profits. microsoft clearly just doesn't care
*i'm* sorry, but your last point doesn't make sense. should the people who make roads get money from the people who make cars? that is the logic you seem to be following. they created a service. you are correct that they are losing revenue from banner advertisements, but that should be a matter of the client you use. apart from banners, there is absolutely no difference. as someone else mentioned, it's about control. as soon as you open up the roads, you can't say (100 years later) that only fords can drive on them.
i wholeheartedly agree with you, except for the fact that minsky's proof was done not out of good will to the AI community, but to try to show that what he was doing was useful, and what they were doing was pointless.
problem is, minsky spends too much time debunking good theory than creating new ones. let's take an example. minsky proved that 2-layer neural networks were not capable of generalizing to many tasks. the proof is indeed notable, but then came *gasp* three layer neural networks, and minsky's point was irrelevant. i think he is just pissed that his ideas were mostly abandoned by AI researchers.
but i always liked games where you were actually led through the game. obviously, there are games that offer virtually unlimited complexity like chess and go, but computer games are quite different. obviously, it is harder to guide a player instead of just creating a bunch of levels he has to get through (which isn't easy either), and arguing about controls is not the right way to go, here.
although a lot of games *do* include tuturials and training missions, etc, it can be difficult to pick up a game because of it. arguably, what a game needs is that each mission/level require a limited subset of skills, and as the game progresses, combine those learned skills, instead of just throwing more monsters at you.
probably my favorite computer game of all time was freespace 2. sure, i like simulations better than FPS and many other genres, but at the same time, it really gave you the feeling of being a part of a "war", mission by mission. the only thing it lacked was cooperative campaigns.
anywho, a lot of modern games lack fantasy: innovation in game play. RPGs have lots of spells, FPSs get you to shoot lots of people, etc. if someone has been playing FPSs or RPGs for a long time, they can get into a new game of the same genre easily. however, when i see a new FPS, i think of it as just that: a new FPS. i want something original!
look at it another way: you are marketting to tech geeks a lot of the time. tech geeks like to build things (like carmack and his rockets) why not translate this kind of interest into a game? mindrover was great for this reason. you actually had to think a little to be good at this new type of game.
think about driving a car. sure, you don't need to know how an internal combustion engine works to drive it, but you do have to know a bit of basic physics not to get into an accident. humans are best at pattern recognition, so as long as you show them how something is done, they will remember. if you have front wheel drive, you're much better off accelerating out of a turn than braking. this is counterintuitive, because "going faster" is rarely associated with safety.
some windows advocates might say that if the wheel is turned, then the brake should actually function like the gas pedal and accelerate instead of decelerate to make the intuitive way safer/more correct. this, however, is clearly absurd. it is much easier to tell people to accelerate out of a turn than making the car completely reverse its standard mode of operation in some special situations.
the exact same thing goes for computers. just as with driving, while "most common" operations can indeed be handled, there are quite a few that need a STANDARD mode of operation instead of hacked/pseudo-intuitive one. it is much easier to tell people that files go in a tree than trying to have everything download to the windows desktop, which might (theoretically) not be in the same place all the time.
it seems that "intelligent machines" is a bit too much of a generalization. what they are doing is teaching a machine/software how to do something correctly, then have it correct humans when they do it wrong, based on their cognitive model. this is all well and good, but "intelligence" implies some sort of learning. this learning has to be online, i.e. the machine learns how to do something without a stimilus to learn it specifically. what sandia labs has done is get software to infer how a human made decisions to get a certain "state", but this is not exactly "intelligence". just my $0.02
wxWindows is just another toolkit. it's no different than the others. if, on *nix, someone wants the software to interface with Qt, i need to write a wrapper; same for every other toolkit. the problem is not ease of use here, it's a matter of using one toolkit over another. by suggesting a toolkit, you clearly misunderstand the problem. also, linux and windows are by far the minority of the operating systems the sofware is deployed on, and gtk isn't so hot on other unices, as it is much more difficult to get systems up to date and run gtk. as i said, it is far easier to make our own widgets than to use any given toolkit. that way, no one can complain, and can imbed the graphics into any application they want.
one of the biggest problems in writing a RAD graphics software is that lots of users want it to interface with a lot of different toolkits, such as motif, qt, gtk, tk, xt, etc. obviously, it would be nice if they all just chose one, but that will not happen anytime soon. now, we[the company in mind] are thinking of writing our own low level toolkit (since the software currently doesn't have its own widgets). this is basically how new toolkits come into existence and the user base is forced to choose at yet another fork in the road. *sigh*
what exactly is so *cool* about.net? and how exactly does ms bend over backwards for developers? one of our customers was using vb with our activex control, and wanted to use.net. sadly, half the compilation options changed and furthermore,.net does not support the type of project he was using before. this isn't what i call "bending over backwards for developers" or being "very cool." also,.net isn't terribly generic either. unlike java, they do not encourage generic solutions, but rather promote invokation of native code.
that is the same as adding another digit to the 2-digit representation of years. yes, it will solve the problem at hand, but while you are at it, you might as well redo the system, since you are going to have to change anyway.
ok, this is just enough. someone "in my vicinity" called "goatse" with a profile of "first post" has a picture of the BAM. damn, it's been a few hours and already being abused horridly.
because of it [the legal system], things are no fun anymore. you can't call anyone's bluff anymore, you can't just pull out a six-shooter after you walk out of a saloon and settle everything like men, and you can't ride away into the sunset on your horse to another town and forget about it. nowadays, everyone is afraid of being sued, so no-one is truly willing to step up and call SCO's bluff. there really should be a way to prevent such a blatent buyout from ocurring.
i must say, even though some of the scenarios are interesting, the book reads a bit too much like a dale carnegie self-help book. there is no narrative whatsoever, just details of fictionalized phone calls. most importantly, the chapters are all structured identically. he details the scenario, then analyzes the con, then says how to prevent it. i think it is a good read for trusting americans, i.e. people who really do trust their neighbors. but, having come from the ussr, none of this is new. i always say NO to phone surveys and always go out of my way to be suspicious. i must admit that i have gotten caught doing things with my computer that could have been avoided, but that was mostly cause i was just curious what the obviously-a-trojan-or-a-virus download was. about the only thing i can away with was: large corporations are bad. i work in a small company and 95% of the things he describes could never happen because everybody knows everybody. most of his hacks presume there exists a person whose voice you might have never heard before or you do not know personally. otherwise, nothing terribly surprising...
i suggest you read history;-) the electronic computer, as we know it was not invented by atanosoff for one simple reason: it did not have the conditional if...else. also, it used capacitors in a drum to store information, which limited it to the rotation of the drum, i.e. 60 cycles a second.
well, i was placing SCO in the position of honeywell. the reason they had any objection at all was because the patent's details had supposedly become so broad that they said they invented the first computer. yes, i am aware what the lawsuit established, although i would argue that a machine such as the ABC which does not have a conditional if...else is not really a computer in the modern sense of the word. but hey, it just wasn't their lucky day.
This whole thing has really started to remind me of the eniac patent suit. As soon as some technology starts to take off (long after it has actually been created), some larger adversary comes out and tries to threaten the validity of the original claims.
The exact same thing happened when Sperry (the company that bough Eckert and Mauchly's company, which made UNIVAC) was sued for rights to the ENIAC patent (that Mauchly and Eckert at the time held). No one had contested that Eckert and Mauchly had designed the first electronic computer, but instead had hooked onto details in the patent file. Ironically, IBM was in a very similar position as it is with the SCO/Linux problem. IBM has cooperated with open source to a great degree, just as it had licensed Eckert and Mauchly's products and was seen as a supported of the "dark side" by SCO, just as they were seen by those trying to strip E & M of their patents.
History really has a funny way of repeating itself
Slashdot Mirror
i disagree. 3d is only a natural progression from 1d and then 2d. i guess you could consider the command line 1d, but that isn't a way of representing anything at all. so, why is 3d the natural next thing? data still isn't organized any better than it was before. in fact, since the amount of ways to arrange stuff in a 3d desktop is *so* much higher, it is much easier to lose stuff, just like in the real world. arguably, the desktop metaphor has problems, but going 3d won't really solve that.
plus, antialiasing has nothing to do with 3d. it is a pseudo-analog (vs. digital) not psuedo 3d technology; furthermore, alpha blending is just eye candy.
Perhaps they should start thinking about from the other point of view. i think both lighters and nail clippers should be allowed. i highly doubt the next terrorist act on a plane will be due to nail clippers. for god's sake, it has nothing to do with the weapon. as george carlin said "what if you have very strong hands? shouldn't those be banned too?" michael moore is a hippie who has some good points, but nevertheless exists to profit from the atmosphere around him. his point deals with such a slight detail but in light of much larger absurdities, they seem irrelevant.
or is it ironic that a linux ad is in windows media format?
not sure whether the license is transferrable or not. all depends on how apple lets you have it. digital music is no different than software in that respect, so you don't actually "own" the song
not true at all. if you let someone use a private road for a period of time (i forget the actual period) and never block it off, it becomes a public road (IANAL but i am almost positive there is such a law). same thing with any other kind of property. that was the reason for my road analogy, because i meant it from a purely legal standpoint.
if microsoft was really concerned with the cost of running a service, particularly the servers, they would adopt a protocol like jabber that allows anyone to run a server. every business aims (or rather should aim) to minimize their cost while maximizing their profits. microsoft clearly just doesn't care
*i'm* sorry, but your last point doesn't make sense. should the people who make roads get money from the people who make cars? that is the logic you seem to be following. they created a service. you are correct that they are losing revenue from banner advertisements, but that should be a matter of the client you use. apart from banners, there is absolutely no difference. as someone else mentioned, it's about control. as soon as you open up the roads, you can't say (100 years later) that only fords can drive on them.
looks like the dinosaur stomped on their server *ducks*
i wholeheartedly agree with you, except for the fact that minsky's proof was done not out of good will to the AI community, but to try to show that what he was doing was useful, and what they were doing was pointless.
problem is, minsky spends too much time debunking good theory than creating new ones. let's take an example. minsky proved that 2-layer neural networks were not capable of generalizing to many tasks. the proof is indeed notable, but then came *gasp* three layer neural networks, and minsky's point was irrelevant. i think he is just pissed that his ideas were mostly abandoned by AI researchers.
it's no mystery as to how they stay afloat. the big question was how they propel themselves
but i always liked games where you were actually led through the game. obviously, there are games that offer virtually unlimited complexity like chess and go, but computer games are quite different. obviously, it is harder to guide a player instead of just creating a bunch of levels he has to get through (which isn't easy either), and arguing about controls is not the right way to go, here.
although a lot of games *do* include tuturials and training missions, etc, it can be difficult to pick up a game because of it. arguably, what a game needs is that each mission/level require a limited subset of skills, and as the game progresses, combine those learned skills, instead of just throwing more monsters at you.
probably my favorite computer game of all time was freespace 2. sure, i like simulations better than FPS and many other genres, but at the same time, it really gave you the feeling of being a part of a "war", mission by mission. the only thing it lacked was cooperative campaigns.
anywho, a lot of modern games lack fantasy: innovation in game play. RPGs have lots of spells, FPSs get you to shoot lots of people, etc. if someone has been playing FPSs or RPGs for a long time, they can get into a new game of the same genre easily. however, when i see a new FPS, i think of it as just that: a new FPS. i want something original!
look at it another way: you are marketting to tech geeks a lot of the time. tech geeks like to build things (like carmack and his rockets) why not translate this kind of interest into a game? mindrover was great for this reason. you actually had to think a little to be good at this new type of game.
think about driving a car. sure, you don't need to know how an internal combustion engine works to drive it, but you do have to know a bit of basic physics not to get into an accident. humans are best at pattern recognition, so as long as you show them how something is done, they will remember. if you have front wheel drive, you're much better off accelerating out of a turn than braking. this is counterintuitive, because "going faster" is rarely associated with safety.
some windows advocates might say that if the wheel is turned, then the brake should actually function like the gas pedal and accelerate instead of decelerate to make the intuitive way safer/more correct. this, however, is clearly absurd. it is much easier to tell people to accelerate out of a turn than making the car completely reverse its standard mode of operation in some special situations.
the exact same thing goes for computers. just as with driving, while "most common" operations can indeed be handled, there are quite a few that need a STANDARD mode of operation instead of hacked/pseudo-intuitive one. it is much easier to tell people that files go in a tree than trying to have everything download to the windows desktop, which might (theoretically) not be in the same place all the time.
it seems that "intelligent machines" is a bit too much of a generalization. what they are doing is teaching a machine/software how to do something correctly, then have it correct humans when they do it wrong, based on their cognitive model. this is all well and good, but "intelligence" implies some sort of learning. this learning has to be online, i.e. the machine learns how to do something without a stimilus to learn it specifically. what sandia labs has done is get software to infer how a human made decisions to get a certain "state", but this is not exactly "intelligence". just my $0.02
wxWindows is just another toolkit. it's no different than the others. if, on *nix, someone wants the software to interface with Qt, i need to write a wrapper; same for every other toolkit. the problem is not ease of use here, it's a matter of using one toolkit over another. by suggesting a toolkit, you clearly misunderstand the problem. also, linux and windows are by far the minority of the operating systems the sofware is deployed on, and gtk isn't so hot on other unices, as it is much more difficult to get systems up to date and run gtk. as i said, it is far easier to make our own widgets than to use any given toolkit. that way, no one can complain, and can imbed the graphics into any application they want.
one of the biggest problems in writing a RAD graphics software is that lots of users want it to interface with a lot of different toolkits, such as motif, qt, gtk, tk, xt, etc. obviously, it would be nice if they all just chose one, but that will not happen anytime soon. now, we[the company in mind] are thinking of writing our own low level toolkit (since the software currently doesn't have its own widgets). this is basically how new toolkits come into existence and the user base is forced to choose at yet another fork in the road. *sigh*
what exactly is so *cool* about .net? and how exactly does ms bend over backwards for developers? one of our customers was using vb with our activex control, and wanted to use .net. sadly, half the compilation options changed and furthermore, .net does not support the type of project he was using before. this isn't what i call "bending over backwards for developers" or being "very cool." also, .net isn't terribly generic either. unlike java, they do not encourage generic solutions, but rather promote invokation of native code.
"hacking is always better on tuesdays" don't know why hacking got me thinking about sex, but that is probably slashdot's fault.
that is the same as adding another digit to the 2-digit representation of years. yes, it will solve the problem at hand, but while you are at it, you might as well redo the system, since you are going to have to change anyway.
ok, this is just enough. someone "in my vicinity" called "goatse" with a profile of "first post" has a picture of the BAM. damn, it's been a few hours and already being abused horridly.
because of it [the legal system], things are no fun anymore. you can't call anyone's bluff anymore, you can't just pull out a six-shooter after you walk out of a saloon and settle everything like men, and you can't ride away into the sunset on your horse to another town and forget about it. nowadays, everyone is afraid of being sued, so no-one is truly willing to step up and call SCO's bluff. there really should be a way to prevent such a blatent buyout from ocurring.
i must say, even though some of the scenarios are interesting, the book reads a bit too much like a dale carnegie self-help book. there is no narrative whatsoever, just details of fictionalized phone calls. most importantly, the chapters are all structured identically. he details the scenario, then analyzes the con, then says how to prevent it. i think it is a good read for trusting americans, i.e. people who really do trust their neighbors. but, having come from the ussr, none of this is new. i always say NO to phone surveys and always go out of my way to be suspicious. i must admit that i have gotten caught doing things with my computer that could have been avoided, but that was mostly cause i was just curious what the obviously-a-trojan-or-a-virus download was. about the only thing i can away with was: large corporations are bad. i work in a small company and 95% of the things he describes could never happen because everybody knows everybody. most of his hacks presume there exists a person whose voice you might have never heard before or you do not know personally. otherwise, nothing terribly surprising...
i suggest you read history ;-) the electronic computer, as we know it was not invented by atanosoff for one simple reason: it did not have the conditional if...else. also, it used capacitors in a drum to store information, which limited it to the rotation of the drum, i.e. 60 cycles a second.
well, i was placing SCO in the position of honeywell. the reason they had any objection at all was because the patent's details had supposedly become so broad that they said they invented the first computer. yes, i am aware what the lawsuit established, although i would argue that a machine such as the ABC which does not have a conditional if...else is not really a computer in the modern sense of the word. but hey, it just wasn't their lucky day.
This whole thing has really started to remind me of the eniac patent suit. As soon as some technology starts to take off (long after it has actually been created), some larger adversary comes out and tries to threaten the validity of the original claims.
The exact same thing happened when Sperry (the company that bough Eckert and Mauchly's company, which made UNIVAC) was sued for rights to the ENIAC patent (that Mauchly and Eckert at the time held). No one had contested that Eckert and Mauchly had designed the first electronic computer, but instead had hooked onto details in the patent file. Ironically, IBM was in a very similar position as it is with the SCO/Linux problem. IBM has cooperated with open source to a great degree, just as it had licensed Eckert and Mauchly's products and was seen as a supported of the "dark side" by SCO, just as they were seen by those trying to strip E & M of their patents.
History really has a funny way of repeating itself