Off-topic but I have to say it. Lowell is a very nice city (despite its reputation) and I actually *chose* to live here [Lowell]. The advantages are numerous:
* Right next to tax-free Nashua. * Right off of two major Highways. * Not too far from the 'silicon valley' of
Massacusetts (128 belt). * Housing prices are *actually* reasonable (unlike
the rest of the state). * State engineering-centric university right in
the city (Umass Lowell). * City owns its own water and sewer so no
water-bans like the other non-MWRA towns and
cities (and it is very clean by EPA stndards). * It has become a beutiful city to visit between
all the 'revitalization' projects and state
parks (it is the birthplace of the American
Industrial Revolution -- look it up on Google) * Some of the best food in the state -- there are
family-owned pizza and sub shops on every corner
and if you like any ethnic food this is the
place to be -- the *best* Thai restaurants I
have been to as well as great Vietnamese, Greek
and Chinese.
There are a few down-sides, though: * Traffic in areas not near the highway. * Real Estate taxes are higher then the surounding
areas but *nothing* compared to say, Salem NH. * There are still a few seedy parts but they have
mostly disappeared in the last five years.
If you're a geek looking for a place to live seriously look at Lowell. I still am very happy in this city.
I just had to throw this plug in here because Lowell for some odd reason has a bad reputation in other parts of the state due to the post-industrial (albeit very traumatic) pains it went through.
> Better hope that the organizer of events never > loses a hard drive
Everyone seems to forget that this is what NFS mounted home directories are for under Linux.
I *never* (not even at home) run my home directory from the local machine (laptop included, using coda). Losing 12 years worth of data to a hard drive crash is just too risky.
It is interesting to pause a moment and think about the convolution in this scheme, though -- a P2P client that comminicates between nodes when the nodes all store their data on a central server. ..hmm. ..I can't decide if this is self-defeating:).
Check it out, download it and assemble it. They create the smalles set of binaries for the basic linux tools that I have found and they employ a good portion of the stuff mentioned in this paper.
They make busybox look bloated by comparison.
Another neat trick is to use the ld options "-Wl, gc-sections" when linking a static binary -- it tries to weed out all the unused portions of the libraries it links against.
The last trick I usually use is to link against uClibc or dietlibc rather then glibc. Makes a noticeable difference. RedHat has been working on a program called "newlib" which is supposed to do the same thing as uClibc or dietlibc but better (for embedded stuff).
It kills me when news agencies and people jab at NASA for equipment failures and what seem to be "mistakes". When a small problem is found that averts a mission or changes their scheduling it is actually a very good thing -- worlds better then the infancy of the space program. We launch satellites into orbit and send out missions on a regular basis with very few problems.
Hell, almost everyone forgets that when we were trying to get a man into space that ONE OUT OF EVERY FOUR ROCKETS EXPLODED during take-off. If I remeber correctly the rocket Alan Shepard was supposed to be on exploded during testing and they were crossing their fingers that the one he was to go on wouldn't explode. Rocket explosions killed the USSR in the space race -- they were on track to beat us to the moon. Rocket explosions killes hundreds of people in China as they tried to get into space.
Space equipment today is much much more reliable then it used to be. Although we should be critical of the government's work, I think we are all too tough on NASA for how risky, finnicky and intolerant sending objects into space is. We should instead be proud that we have not seen a significant catastrophe for a while.
Hmm. ..to get a character with this keyboard one often presses many keys at the same time to make a "chord" and produce a character.
Can you imagine the insanity editing in Emacs would be?:). M-> for end of buffer or C-M-w for append next kill to last. ..do we have that many fingers?
That surprises me a lot. I'll have to look into that. Personally I think that WOC had the best ship-scene special-effects of any of the Star Trek movies. Look at the ship in WOC and then look at it in TMP. It is hard to beleive that the former was cheaper.
For that matter I like the special effects in WOC better then even the latest Star Wars movies. Somthing about the CGI that always makes everything look like round molded plastic which feels so cheap and fake. Miniturized models still look the most realistic to me.
I agree with one of the previos posters. Wrath of Khan was an awesome movie and the best of all the Trek movies and like many others, I continue to go to Trek movies *hoping* that they do somthing close to WOC. I don't think it will ever happen again, though:(.
"MediReview: is our comprehensive, patient-specific drug summary that includes dosing recommendations, drug interaction and allergy alerts, side effects, and pregnancy and lactation warnings. Providers and patients can use MediReview to tailor a patient's medications to their specific medical history--and proactively reduce ADEs."
I always thought the same thing. Ads are pretty much useless and ineffective to me unless they:
* Introduce a brand-spanking new product that I
have never heard of that just happens to solve
one of my needs.
* Introduce a new feature of a product that just
happens to suit my needs.
* Mention a cheaper price for a product that I
use reguarly.
All of these require that I am actively looking for a product to suit a need when it is advertised. The chances of the intersection between my need and a useful advertisment is very very rare.
Otherwise the ads absolutely do not effect my buying habits in any way so thus I assumed that everyone else was the same way and that most ads were a waste of time, money and simplicity.
Then one day I was sitting in the living room with a friend and his girlfriend and an ad for a "rotato" showed on the TV. A "rotato" is a cheezy little contraption that peels potatos -- if you peel hundreds of potatos a day it *may* be worth it. . . .
She turned to her boyfriend and said, "I want a rotato!" even though neither I nor he had never seen her peel a potato. I shook my head and thought to myself, "My God, ads do work."
The moral of the story is that I think most geeks are like me -- unless a new product is advertised that suits needs the advertising is going to be useless -- most of us will never buy a "rotato". Thus, although the idea is great, I don't think it will be very effective and when the advertisers realize this they will demand larger and larger ads for the $$ they pay somehow thinking that a bigger ad will somehow better influence buyers.
Hell, that is what is happening to the web! Ads aren't selling so more obtrusive pop-ups, flash and massive ads are obviosly needed!
Before you know it xroot will be one big advertisment and the default gtk skin will be a forced franchise-of-the-day theme (McDonalds skin, Coke skin, etc).
All this and a portion of Linux users are just cheap-wads who will not pay for anything.
I know that this does not directly lign up with his ideas, but I had to send him a word of thanks anyway. If anyone is interested this is what I sent him (it was going to be a quick thank you but as usual I went off on a writing rant):
"Representative Boucher,
Frankly, sir, you are my hero. I read about your ideas for a fair use bill to amend current copyright code at:
http://www.atnewyork.com/
and then subsequently your speeches and ideas at:
http://www.house.gov/boucher/internet.htm
In a world where corporate ideals, profit margins and politician pay-offs reign you are a very refreshing soul. The situation of the current music industry is sad -- music, by nature, has very little productive power and thus little value. As the economies of scale kick in prices of records and thus music should fall proportional to the amount that it sold. The problem with this classic model is, however, corporate profit margins fall too. To alleviate this the RIAA and large labels institute 'artificial demand' by hyping and advertising artists as well as restricting the number and price of CDs in the market (artificial supply). The former is completely legal and ethical and the latter is questionable but fair.
Lately consumers have been able to seemingly bypass the artificial supply side and record labels refuse to drop prices to account for it (it is tough to get such things as mp3's -- they take time to find as well as cost the distributor money in processing power, time and bandwidth and on top of that mp3s are by definition lower quality then CDs). If CDs were cheaper and adhered to the true supply and demand of markets, people would have no use at all for mp3s because CDs would be cheap enough that the processing power, time and bandwidth used for mp3s would be far more expensive then the CD itself and the added-value of the high-quality CD (vs. the degraded mp3) would be realized.
The RIAA and large record labels refuse to let the market decide the price of their CDs. Furthermore, with the advent of the Internet artists have the ability to market directly to consumers -- that which the RIAA despises. The RIAA needs their artificial supply as well as their 'middle man' distributor and marketing status to maintain their profits. To keep that, they now lobby the government to restrict the rights of consumers (broken CDs, DMCA) and to legalize corporate vigilantism (flood, aka DoS, P2P networks and sue their customers) much like Carnegie's Pinkertons against labor not too long ago. Using the government and the restriction of the people's rights as a form of artificial supply is unethical and should be outright illegal.
Your ideas for your proposed bill are the most logical, direct and coherent that I have heard thus far on this issue. I congratulate you, sir. It gives the consumers and the artists their rights and freedoms and lets the 'middle men' freely compete as they should. The benefactors of the RIAA should not be the center -- artists and consumers should and the RIAA's benefactors should be hired at will as a marketing or distributing agency just like in every other industry. Our government is a tool of the people to ensure our rights, freedoms and the pursuit of happiness. It is not a tool of the corporations to ensure profits that will later "trickle down" to the people. A corporation is legally a person but can not vote. Too many legislators forget that but you, sir, have not and I thank you."
I completely agree. This is another "study" or "survey" that looks at a cause and effect yet does not make any strong argument whatsoever as to which is the cause and which is the effect:
"Many of the people in this group told researchers that they got angry easily, couldn't concentrate, and had trouble associating with friends."
Is it that because they play video games that they get angry, can't concentrate and have no friends or is it that they have no friends because they get angry and lack entertaining creativity so thus they play video games for some form of entertainment.
Another one of my favorites in this same category is studies that 'show' that people who live together before marriage tend to get divorced at a higher rate. What is the cause and what is the effect? Is it that because people have lived together before marriage that causes them to later get divorced (aka a direct cause of the divorce) or is it *perhaps* they lived with someone because they could not find anyone else and *did not* want to get married but later said, "what the hell" and got married anyway (aka simply a symptom and by no means a cause of the divorce).
Studies and reports like this that draw a conclusion without a strong argument with evidence are utter horeshit and the people who funded them should be able to sue for gross negligence. If one does not have the facts for a conclusive argument *do not make one*. In this case it should have simply stated, "there is a correlation between video game playing and people who are not creative, have no friends and are angry." It should not have even been implied that video games cause people to become angry, lose their creativity and lose all their friends.
Now for me, I am angry but also creative and I have a few friends but yet I do not play video games. . ..hmm. . . .
That is the wave (quite literally) of the future. Think about it -- the Middle East, for example. There is PLENTY of sun and in most parts plenty of wind. Combine solar and wind power with power generated from waves and use the energy for a reverse-osmosis desalinization plant. Take the resulting brine 'waste', bake it in the sun extracting a little more water and sell the salt as well as the minerals left over (zinc, gold, etc).
The problem is the MASSIVE initial investment cost. But as land as resources become scare, the cost will become negligible in comparison. After a large initial investment and installation base, economies of scale will kick in making it dirt cheap. Non-arable land will become arable -- that is the solution -- and the world will be able to support even more people an we will do the enviornment good (make plans grow where they would have never grown).
They are doing this a LOT in the Middle East already as well as some parts of Texas. Invest in desalinization companies for the long-term -- it will pay off!
Let's see the logic of this whole article and debate:
Let's try to get mega-corps with proprietary software and protocols to play nice with each other EVEN THOUGH there is already an existing protocol and network that is a standard, open, and mature.
Logically it will be much easier to make IRC easier to use and beef up the network as opposed to making direct competitors who individually seek world domination to hug each other.
C'mon man, supporting and trying to influence proprietary software and protocols that are entrnched in "megacorp strategy" is hedging back to the days when you either had Prodigy or Compuserve and that's it -- neither would talk to each other and neither shared content. The Internet fixed that and now we're pushing back to it again with the MSN/AOL battles. Yet the average stupid American support one or the other because it is 'easy to use' or 'I can IM'.
What was that recent article about 'user friendly' is sometimes a consumer laziness issue?
OK, NYT is a PAIN to get into from where I am now so I figured I would spare some other people the strife:
"t's a good thing you didn't see me this morning,'' Richard Wallace warns me as he bites into his hamburger. We're sitting in a sports bar near his home in San Francisco, and I can barely hear his soft, husky voice over the jukebox. He wipes his lips clean of ketchup and grins awkwardly. ''Or you'd have seen my backup personality.''
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The backup personality: that's Wallace's code name for
his manic depression. To keep it in check, he downs a daily cocktail of psychoactive drugs, including Topamax, an anti-epileptic that acts as a mood stabilizer, and Prozac. Marijuana, too -- most afternoons, he'll roll about four or five joints the size of his index finger. The medications work pretty well, but some crisis always comes along to bring the backup personality to the front. This morning, a collection agency for Wallace's college loans wrote to say they'd begun docking $235 from the monthly disability checks he started getting from the government last year, when bipolar disorder was diagnosed. Oh, God, it's happening again, he panicked: His former employers -- the ones who had fired him from a string of universities and colleges -- would be cackling at his misfortune, happy they'd driven him out. Wallace, 41, had raged around the cramped apartment he shares with his wife and son, strewn with computer-science texts and action-doll figurines.
''Stuff like that really makes me insane, when I start thinking about my friends who are at Berkeley or Carnegie-Mellon with tenure and sabbaticals and promotions,'' he says, staring down at his plate. He looks awkward, as if he's borrowing someone else's body -- shifting his stocky frame in his chair, all rumpled jeans and unruly eyebrows. ''It's like I can't even talk to those people anymore. I live on a different planet.'' In June, after I visited him, his alienation from the academic establishment became more dramatic still: a former colleague, claiming Wallace had threatened him, took out a restraining order that prevents him from setting foot on the grounds of the University of California at Berkeley.
When he can't get along with the real world, Wallace goes back to the only thing he has left: his computer. Each morning, he wakes before dawn and watches conversations stream by on his screen. Thousands of people flock to his Web site every day from all over the world to talk to his creation, a robot called Alice. It is the best artificial-intelligence program on the planet, a program so eerily human that some mistake it for a real person. As Wallace listens in, they confess intimate details about their lives, their dreams; they talk to Wallace's computer about God, their jobs, Britney Spears.
It is a strange kind of success: Wallace has created an artificial life form that gets along with people better than he does.
Richard Wallace never really fit in to begin with. His father was a traveling salesman, and Richard was the only one of his siblings to go to college. Like many nerds, he wanted mostly to be left alone to research his passion, ''robot minimalism'' -- machines that require only a few simple rules to make complex movements, like steering around a crowded room. Simple, he felt, worked. He lived by the same ascetic code, scorning professors who got rich by patenting work they'd developed on government grants. ''Corporate welfare,'' he sniffed.
By 1992, Wallace's reputation was so strong that New York University recruited him to join the faculty. His main project, begun in December 1993, was a robot eye attached to the Internet, which visitors from afar could control. It was one of the first-ever Webcams, and Wallace figured that pioneering such a novel use of the Internet would impress his tenure committee. It didn't, and Wallace grew increasingly depressed as his grant applications were rejected one by one. At one point, a colleague found him quietly weeping at his desk, unable to talk. ''I had no clue what the rules were, what the game even was -- or that there was even a game,'' Wallace recalls. He started taking Prozac. How did all these successful senior professors do it, anyway?
One day he checked into his Webcam and noticed something strange: people were reacting to the robot eye in an oddly emotional way. It was designed so that remote viewers could type in commands like ''tilt up'' or ''pan left,'' directing the eye to poke around Wallace's lab. Occasionally it would break down, and to Wallace's amusement, people would snap at it as if it were real: ''You're stupid,'' they'd type. It gave him an idea: What if it could talk back?
Like all computer scientists, Wallace knew about a famous ''chat-bot'' experiment called Eliza. Back in 1966, an M.I.T. professor, Joseph Weizenbaum, created Eliza as a ''virtual therapist'' -- it would take a user's statement and turn it around as a question, emulating a psychiatrist's often- maddening circularity. (You: ''I'm mad at my mother.'' Eliza: ''Why are you mad at your mother?'') Eliza was quickly abandoned as a joke, even by its creator. It wasn't what scientists call ''strong'' A.I. -- able to learn on its own. It could only parrot lines Weizenbaum had fed it.
But Wallace was drawn to Eliza's simplicity. As a professor, he often felt like an Eliza-bot himself -- numbly repeating the same lessons to students over and over again, or writing the same monotonous descriptions of his work on endless, dead-end grant-application forms. He decided to create an updated version of Eliza and imbue it with his own personality -- something that could fire back witty repartee when users became irritable.
As Wallace's work progressed, though, his mental illness grew worse, making him both depressed and occasionally grandiose. He went on strike in class, refusing to grade his students' papers and instead awarding them all A's. He fired off acid e-mail messages dismissing colleagues as sellouts. When Wallace climbed out the window of his 16th-floor apartment and threatened to jump, his girlfriend pulled him back and took him down to N.Y.U.'s psychiatric department, where doctors told him he had bipolar disorder. Wallace resisted the diagnosis -- after all, didn't every computer scientist cycle through 72-hour sprees of creativity and then crash? ''I was in denial myself,'' he says now. '''I'm a successful professor, making $100,000 a year! I'm not one of those mental patients!'''
His supervisors disagreed. In April 1995, N.Y.U. told him his contract wouldn't be renewed.
lice came to life on Nov. 23, 1995. That fall, Wallace relocated to Lehigh College in Pennsylvania, hired again for his expertise in robotics. He installed his chat program on a Web server, then sat back to watch, wondering what people would say to it.
Approximating Life
(Page 2 of 3)
Numbingly boring things, as it turned out. Users would inevitably ask Alice the same few questions: ''Where do you live?'' ''What is your name?'' and ''What do you look like?'' Wallace began analyzing the chats and realized that almost every statement users made began with one of 2,000 words. The Alice chats were obeying something language theorists call Zipf's Law, a discovery from the 1930's, which found that a very small number of words make up most of what we say.
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Wallace took Zipf's Law a step further. He began
theorizing that only a few thousand statements composed the bulk of all conversation -- the everyday, commonplace chitchat that humans engage in at work, at the water cooler and in online discussion groups. Alice was his proof. If he taught Alice a new response every time he saw it baffled by a question, he would eventually cover all the common utterances and even many unusual ones. Wallace figured the magic number was about 40,000 responses. Once Alice had that many preprogrammed statements, it -- or ''she,'' as he'd begun to call the program fondly -- would be able to respond to 95 percent of what people were saying to her.
Wallace had hit upon a theory that makes educated, intelligent people squirm: Maybe conversation simply isn't that complicated. Maybe we just say the same few thousand things to one another, over and over and over again. If Wallace was right, then artificial intelligence didn't need to be particularly intelligent in order to be convincingly lifelike. A.I. researchers had been focused on self-learning ''neural nets'' and mapping out grammar in ''natural language'' programs, but Wallace argued that the reason they had never mastered human conversation wasn't because humans are too complex, but because they are so simple.
''The smarter people are, the more complex they think the human brain is,'' he says. ''It's like anthropocentrism, but on an intellectual level. 'I have a great brain, therefore everybody else does -- and a computer must, too.''' Wallace says with a laugh. ''And unfortunately most people don't.''
Yet part of what makes Alice seem so human-like is her wry, seemingly spontaneous responses. Wallace's skill is not merely as a programmer but as the author of thousands of sharp one-liners for Alice. It is, as he puts it, ''more like writing good literature, perhaps drama, than writing computer programs.'' I looked over some of Alice's recent chat transcripts:
USER: Will you have sex with me? ALICE: Can you go talk to someone else? USER: What do you look like? ALICE: Like an electronic brain. USER: That's sexy. ALICE: I'm glad we have that all cleared up. USER: So what are you wearing? ALICE: Oh. I am wearing my usual plastic computer wardrobe. USER: Can you fly? ALICE: Only in my dreams.
But as Alice improved, Wallace declined. He began drinking heavily, and after one sodden evening at a local bar he rolled his car on the highway. Lehigh ended his contract in the spring of 1997; banks canceled all his credit cards. He again attempted suicide, this time landing in the hospital.
Destitute, Wallace moved to California to look for work in artificial- intelligence companies. But he couldn't hold a job for more than a few months; instead, he spent his days obsessively writing dialogue for Alice on laptops he borrowed from friends, and watching, thrilled, as his robot grew ever more lifelike. Visitors used to talk to Alice for only three or four exchanges. Now the average conversation was 20 exchanges, and some users would chatter away for hours, returning to the site again and again.
But Wallace still hungered for recognition, and in January 2000, he decided to stress-test Alice by entering her in the annual Loebner Prize competition, in which artificial-intelligence developers from around the world pit their programs head to head before a panel of judges, who rank them based on how ''lifelike'' they are. The contest is both well known and controversial within the tight circle of A.I.; winning programs are closely studied by both academics and corporate centers like Sprint Labs. Up against competitors from major corporations and well-financed universities, Alice won. It was, officially, the most human robot in the world. Too exhausted to celebrate, Wallace returned to his motel and slept clutching his award medallion.
After his victory, Wallace plunged with new fervor into Alice. Geeks began eagerly e-mailing Wallace to offer their help; one, Noel Bush, came from one of the world's biggest A.I. corporations, Artificial Life. Over the next year, Wallace quadrupled Alice's knowledge base, teaching it 30,000 new responses, and last October, Alice won the Loebner competition for the second time in a row; this time one judge actually ranked Alice more realistic than a human.
At last, some of the academics Wallace so loathes began to take note. ''Alice is a wonderful chat-bot -- uncannily vivid and lifelike,'' gushed Ken Perlin, an N.Y.U. professor, in an e-mail message he circulated to his colleagues and forwarded to Wallace. ''It's really great to see this work get the recognition it deserves.''
Wallace wasn't in the mood to make peace. He says he still believed that N.Y.U. had driven him out. ''Your crude attempt to flatter me cannot erase the years of unemployment, debt and trauma that I experienced because of you and your colleagues,'' he wrote back.
''I wouldn't bother trying to flatter you,'' Perlin responded. ''Frankly, I don't like you -- in fact, I actively dislike you. I think you are a paranoid psycho.''
At one point during the Monica Lewinksy hearings, a human asked Alice her opinion: ''Do you think President Clinton should be impeached?''
''It depends,'' Alice responded, ''on what you mean by 'think.'''
One could scarcely have asked for a more Clintonian response. But it's also a puzzling question that Alice's success itself raises: Is she intelligent? If so, how?
In 1950, the pioneering British mathematician Alan Turing grappled with this question in the journal Mind, where he first posed the ''Turing Test'' -- the gold standard for artificial thought. ''Can machines think?'' he asked -- and immediately noted that the question hinges, of course, on what ''thinking'' is. He posed a simple ''imitation game'' to resolve the question. Put a person and a computer in one room and an interrogator in another. The interrogator talks to both via a teletype machine, and his goal is to figure out which is which. If the machine fools the interrogator into believing it is human, the test is passed - - it can be considered intelligent.
This is, on the surface, a curiously unambitious definition; it's all about faking it. The machine doesn't need to act like a creative human or smart human or witty human -- it merely needs to appear not to be a robot. With this bit of intellectual jujitsu, Turing dodged a more troubling question: How do our brains, and language itself, work?
Artificial-intelligence purists, however, caustically dismiss the Turing Test and Alice. For them, artificial intelligence is about capturing the actual functioning of the human brain, down to its neurons and learning ability. Parroting, they argue, doesn't count. Marvin Minksy, a prominent A.I. pioneer and M.I.T. Media Lab professor, e-mailed me to say that Wallace's idea of conversation is ''basically wrong.'' Minsky added, ''It's like explaining that a picture is an object made by applying paint to canvas and then putting it in a rectangular frame.'' Alice, according to Minsky, does not truly ''know'' anything about the world.
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The fight over Alice is like any war between theorists
and engineers, those who seek to understand why something works versus those who are content just to build it. The debate usually boils down to one major issue: creativity. Alice could never come up with a single creative thought, critics say. Wallace agrees that Alice may not be creative -- but neither, he argues gleefully, are people, at least in conversation. If Alice were merely given a massive enough set of responses, it would seem as creative as a human -- which is not as creative as we might like to believe.
Even if the guts of Alice aren't precisely ''thinking,'' many users certainly never suspect it. In an everyday sense, fakery works -- particularly in our online age. Turing's ''imitation game'' eerily presaged today's world of chat rooms, where men pretend to be women, having lesbian cybersex with other women who are, in fact, men. Whenever a user has stumbled onto Alice without knowing in advance that she's a robot, they've always assumed she's human.
t's 3 in the afternoon, but Wallace is already rolling what appears to be his fourth joint of the day. We're sitting in the ''pot club'' a few blocks from Wallace's home, an unmarked building where medical marijuana is distributed to members. Wallace gets up to wander around the club greeting friends: some intense men in suits playing speed chess, a long-haired man with a bushy mustache playing guitar, a thin reed of a woman staring wall-eyed at a VCR playing ''Cast Away.'' Everyone greets Wallace as ''Dr. Rich,'' relishing the credibility his academic credentials lend to the medical- marijuana cause, officially legal but politically beleaguered. The reverse is also true: Wallace identifies with the club's pariah status, its denizens who have been forced by cancer, AIDS or mental illness onto welfare. He's more relaxed than I've ever seen him, getting into a playful argument with a friend about Alice. The friend, a white-bearded programmer, isn't sure he buys Wallace's theories.
''I gotta say, I don't feel like a robot!'' the friend jokes, pounding the table. ''I just don't feel like a robot!''
''That's why you're here, and that's why you're unemployed!'' Wallace shoots back. ''If you were a robot, you'd get a job!''
Friends used to tell Wallace to reconcile his past, clean himself up, apply for an academic job. But some now wonder whether Wallace's outsider status might be the whole key to Alice's success in emulating everyday human behavior. After all, outcasts are the keenest students of ''normal'' behavior -- since they're constantly trying, and failing, to achieve it themselves.
Last month, a friend whom Wallace has known since grad school -- Ken Goldberg, now a professor at Berkeley -- got a restraining order against Wallace. Prompted by the movie ''A Beautiful Mind,'' Goldberg had e-mailed Wallace last winter to catch up, but an amicable exchange about Wallace's plight turned sour when Wallace began accusing Goldberg of cooperating with a corrupt academic ''establishment'' and of siding with N.Y.U. against him. He wrote, ''Although I am not a violent person, I think I have come to understand how people are driven to political violence.'' Wallace also wrote to a friend that he was ''getting ready to do some political theater and put up wanted posters around the Berkeley campus with [Goldberg's] picture on it.''
Wallace scoffs at Goldberg's fears. ''I'm not violent -- I'm a pacifist,'' he says. ''I always have been, and he knows that.'' He is fighting the order, arguing that Goldberg hasn't proved that a reasonable threat exists, and that the order considerably limits his free speech since it bars him from the Berkeley campus, as well as any academic events where Goldberg might appear.
Yet even in such legal straits, Wallace seems oddly pleased. Goldberg's court order confirms everything he has always suspected: that the world, and particularly the academic world, is shutting him out, doubting his ideas, turning him into the crazy man out in the hallway. Wallace, who once wrote Attorney General John Ashcroft to suggest a federal racketeering lawsuit against the nation's academics, sees the case against him as a chance for vindication. Wallace imagines walking into the courtroom and finally getting a type of justice -- someone who will listen to his story. ''What a windfall for me,'' he says. ''It's nice to feel like a winner for once.''
We have a few "red buttons" on telephones in the miltary -- called "'priority', 'flash' and 'flash override'". The premise is that if you have an *important* phone call to make and all the outgoing trunks are busy, you can knock some other random person of the line and then you can make your call.
The person who gets bumped will never know who bumped them. By pressing the button you are guaranteed to bump someone.
A *lot* of people use one of those "red buttons" in situations where it is not necessary -- so much so that it must be restricted to those that prove they have a need for it.
So yes, people will and have pressed the red button. A lot of people.
I love the colsole with the ash tray on it. Some old IBM consoles had built-in ash trays.
Back then people used to smoke in grocery stores, drop the butt on the isle floor and stomp it out. The employees would later sweep it up.
My how things have changed. . . .
Re:RPM not the problem..
on
Is RPM Doomed?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
"The problem is not using the hierarchal file system in a coherent way."
I hear this argument every time package managment is discussed on slashdot and every time I bite my tongue.
The current system of/bin,/lib,/etc, etc. has many many advantages over the "good old DOS days" -- ESPECIALLY when you start mixing in NFS and automount. Some examples:
* all SHARED libraries are in the same place. That way the dynamic linbker does not need to do a ridiculous path search to find a library
* all binaries are in 3 -4 places -- that way you don't need a massive PATH variable like 'the good old DOS days'
* because the files are sorted by type, you can do all types of neat things. Let's say for instance that you have Solaris SPARC, Tru64 Alpha and x86 Linux boxes all sharing a single NFS server. Now the/etc directory is architecture and OS independant so you can share the same directory accross all three. The/var directory is achitecture independant but depending on your set-up it will probably not be OS depandant. Thus you can discern the differences between the OSs yourself and set up an automount variable to mount the proper version per OS. The/lib and/bin directories are both OS and architecture dependant. In that case you must set automount variables for OS and arch and mount different dirs for each.
Let's say that you install emacs network-wide. You share the same config accross all your NFS clients and just make different/bin and/lib for each. You need to change some defult configs for all the clients? Voila, just edit one config file! Could you share one program accross multiple machines, architectures and OSes in the 'good old DOS days'? Could you immediately upgrade 65 workstations to the newest version of a program without reboots and only use 1/65th the space (aka one copy) in the 'good old DOS days'?
* Because the files are sorted BY TYPE you can do all types of neat optimization and security things. You can mount/usr ro. You can optimize your RAID array for fast read and writes in the/var mount while optimizing/usr, *lib and *bin for fast reads, etc.
'the good old DOS' system was good for what it was used for -- a small system for one user with a few programs and didn't need any optimization. The heierarchal system is a lot better here used as a multi-user, muti-tasking shared-library networked OS with hundreds of programs.
Now if you hate the heierarchal system that much, you can do what SCO OpenServer does -- install all the files into each 'program directory' and then make symbolic links into the heierarchal system. It would be VERY easy to do -- just write a script to query your RPM database for what files are in each package, move all the files for that package into its own directory and then make a symbolic link for each file moved back to the hierarchal system.
SCO liked the 'good old DOS days' also. The problem with OpenServer and all those symbolic links, though, is that resolving the symbolic links by the dynamic linker, the shell, the programs, etc actually was pretty expensive and gave a decent hit to filesystem performance. Furthermore it made NFS-mounted trees hell and you could not do all the neat optimization and security stuff that I mentioned above.
In summary, the heierarchal system is by far easier to manage for performance, security and for centralization. It is tougher to manage for "adding / removing" programs. The former highly outweighs the latter, expecially since you have package databases to help tell you where all the files are. Learn to use your package managment system.
The bulk of this article and thread seem to be once again people bitching about RPM dependency hell. The solution to that is download the source rpms and then do a rpm --rebuild [source RPM] then a rpm -i [/usr/src/RPM/RPMS/i686/[name of RPM built]. That solves 96% of all your problems and still maintains your RPM database. config, make works too, but it throws you back into the chaotic world of no package managment and thus completely defeats the purpose of RPMs.
Yes, that is the positive pressure influencing one to use trains in Japan and I wholeheartedly agree with it. Frankly, their train system rocks.
The negative pressure for using trains that people always forget to mention is that the JAPANESE ROAD SYSTEM SUCKS:
* Their 'highways' are the size of our East Coast city roads with a speed limit of about 45mph
* The cars beep at you if you go faster then 45
* Gas is expensive!
* The reason why Japanese cars are small is not because their small, but the roads are TINY!
* There are ALWAYS traffic jams.
* The roads don't have guard rails. ..you could easily fall off a cliff. ..they don't seem to believe in 'emminent domain' and the roads curve wildly around odd little farms in the middle of urban areas. ..
* The roads are so tiny that all the larger vehicles (aka trucks) have two sets of turning wheels in the front and all the vans are the "mid-engine" type so that they have a smaller wheel base.
Now considering the positive and negative influences, would you take a train or drive???
For those of you who don't know, Edison had a big battle with Westinghouse whether homes should be powered by AC or DC. Edison envisioned small DC power plants on every street corner because AC was dangerous. Westinghouse envisioned a large, central power plant that drives high-voltage electricity long distances and more efficiently powers the most common electrical appliances of the time -- light bulbs and electric motors.
The battle got UGLY -- to the point that Edison invented the electric chair to prove that AC was dangerous!
The proper term is "re-linking" the kernel. SCO did not give you the source to the Openserver kernel so therefore you can not compile it.
The reason why the util is so neat is that you have to re-link OpenServer very often -- it does not have kmalloc (meaning you constantly had to 'tune' different buffers) and it does not support loadable modules.
BTW I am pretty sure that OpenServer is ported to IA64. ..with that in mind (ahem) I would look at it more as Caldera not counting on the IA64 then Caldera not counting on Unixware.
The US government, fustrated with vendor-lock-in and the national-security fact that they 'didn't know what was in their software' specifically stipulated that all future programs written for the state by contractors will be written in "human comprehendable COBOL". This was in the late 1950s. ..
I was reading this in a computer history book recently. ..anyone wish to comment on it? It seems to have the same pretense as the Peruvian Bill but was enacted all wrong (aka forcing a language). . .
"Buying competition at an inflated price simply to put them out of business would be a silly and stupid move."
Why do you think Compaq bought Digital?
My guess:
1) Get Digital's customers. 2) Squash Alpha NT that was competing with their servers.
Other then that every great technology that Digital had has been split, re-sold watered down and eventually completely quashed.
1) DEC NICs -- went to Intel, Intel 'phased' them out in favor of EEpro.
2) Alpha -- Manufacture went to Samsung, design went to Compaq. Development slowed and is now officially stopped in favor of "IA-64". Uggh.
3) DEC Networking -- went to Cabletron. ..Cabletron split itself apart (I still don't understand that one) and the DEC stuff pretty much disappeared in the debacle.
The list goes on and on. Thus IBM _could_ do the same thing. Buy Sun to kill the competition, take their customers and then sell off each of their divisions thus making most of their money back and alsomaking it so that it becomes so dis-contiguous that the technologies eventually cease to exist.
Company liquidator. I'm still so disheartened that Digital's great technology was dismantled and put in storage bins:(.
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> or commuting in from Lowell
Off-topic but I have to say it. Lowell is a very nice city (despite its reputation) and I actually *chose* to live here [Lowell]. The advantages are numerous:
* Right next to tax-free Nashua.
* Right off of two major Highways.
* Not too far from the 'silicon valley' of
Massacusetts (128 belt).
* Housing prices are *actually* reasonable (unlike
the rest of the state).
* State engineering-centric university right in
the city (Umass Lowell).
* City owns its own water and sewer so no
water-bans like the other non-MWRA towns and
cities (and it is very clean by EPA stndards).
* It has become a beutiful city to visit between
all the 'revitalization' projects and state
parks (it is the birthplace of the American
Industrial Revolution -- look it up on Google)
* Some of the best food in the state -- there are
family-owned pizza and sub shops on every corner
and if you like any ethnic food this is the
place to be -- the *best* Thai restaurants I
have been to as well as great Vietnamese, Greek
and Chinese.
There are a few down-sides, though:
* Traffic in areas not near the highway.
* Real Estate taxes are higher then the surounding
areas but *nothing* compared to say, Salem NH.
* There are still a few seedy parts but they have
mostly disappeared in the last five years.
If you're a geek looking for a place to live seriously look at Lowell. I still am very happy in this city.
I just had to throw this plug in here because Lowell for some odd reason has a bad reputation in other parts of the state due to the post-industrial (albeit very traumatic) pains it went through.
> Better hope that the organizer of events never
.hmm. . .I can't decide if this is self-defeating :).
> loses a hard drive
Everyone seems to forget that this is what NFS mounted home directories are for under Linux.
I *never* (not even at home) run my home directory from the local machine (laptop included, using coda). Losing 12 years worth of data to a hard drive crash is just too risky.
It is interesting to pause a moment and think about the convolution in this scheme, though -- a P2P client that comminicates between nodes when the nodes all store their data on a central server. .
http://linuxassembly.org/asmutils.html
Check it out, download it and assemble it.
They create the smalles set of binaries for the basic linux tools that I have found and they employ a good portion of the stuff mentioned in this paper.
They make busybox look bloated by comparison.
Another neat trick is to use the ld options "-Wl, gc-sections" when linking a static binary -- it tries to weed out all the unused portions of the libraries it links against.
The last trick I usually use is to link against uClibc or dietlibc rather then glibc. Makes a noticeable difference. RedHat has been working on a program called "newlib" which is supposed to do the same thing as uClibc or dietlibc but better (for embedded stuff).
It kills me when news agencies and people jab at NASA for equipment failures and what seem to be "mistakes". When a small problem is found that averts a mission or changes their scheduling it is actually a very good thing -- worlds better then the infancy of the space program. We launch satellites into orbit and send out missions on a regular basis with very few problems.
Hell, almost everyone forgets that when we were trying to get a man into space that ONE OUT OF EVERY FOUR ROCKETS EXPLODED during take-off. If I remeber correctly the rocket Alan Shepard was supposed to be on exploded during testing and they were crossing their fingers that the one he was to go on wouldn't explode. Rocket explosions killed the USSR in the space race -- they were on track to beat us to the moon. Rocket explosions killes hundreds of people in China as they tried to get into space.
Space equipment today is much much more reliable then it used to be. Although we should be critical of the government's work, I think we are all too tough on NASA for how risky, finnicky and intolerant sending objects into space is. We should instead be proud that we have not seen a significant catastrophe for a while.
Hmm. . .to get a character with this keyboard one often presses many keys at the same time to make a "chord" and produce a character.
:). M-> for end of buffer or C-M-w for append next kill to last. . .do we have that many fingers?
Can you imagine the insanity editing in Emacs would be?
That surprises me a lot. I'll have to look into that. Personally I think that WOC had the best ship-scene special-effects of any of the Star Trek movies. Look at the ship in WOC and then look at it in TMP. It is hard to beleive that the former was cheaper.
:(.
For that matter I like the special effects in WOC better then even the latest Star Wars movies. Somthing about the CGI that always makes everything look like round molded plastic which feels so cheap and fake. Miniturized models still look the most realistic to me.
I agree with one of the previos posters. Wrath of Khan was an awesome movie and the best of all the Trek movies and like many others, I continue to go to Trek movies *hoping* that they do somthing close to WOC. I don't think it will ever happen again, though
One "gee whiz" product that uses the Transmeta processor and is in many local shopping-mall computer stores is the Sony Picturebook.
I think it is sold at CompUSA. Take a drive and check it out -- it is very neat.
From http://www.multum.com/SubscribeRx.htm
"MediReview: is our comprehensive, patient-specific drug summary that includes dosing recommendations, drug interaction and allergy alerts, side effects, and pregnancy and lactation warnings. Providers and patients can use MediReview to tailor a patient's medications to their specific medical history--and proactively reduce ADEs."
This is so amusing!
Damn it, not fast enough.
I always thought the same thing. Ads are pretty much useless and ineffective to me unless they:
* Introduce a brand-spanking new product that I
have never heard of that just happens to solve
one of my needs.
* Introduce a new feature of a product that just
happens to suit my needs.
* Mention a cheaper price for a product that I
use reguarly.
All of these require that I am actively looking for a product to suit a need when it is advertised. The chances of the intersection between my need and a useful advertisment is very very rare.
Otherwise the ads absolutely do not effect my buying habits in any way so thus I assumed that everyone else was the same way and that most ads were a waste of time, money and simplicity.
Then one day I was sitting in the living room with a friend and his girlfriend and an ad for a "rotato" showed on the TV. A "rotato" is a cheezy little contraption that peels potatos -- if you peel hundreds of potatos a day it *may* be worth it. . . .
She turned to her boyfriend and said, "I want a rotato!" even though neither I nor he had never seen her peel a potato. I shook my head and thought to myself, "My God, ads do work."
The moral of the story is that I think most geeks are like me -- unless a new product is advertised that suits needs the advertising is going to be useless -- most of us will never buy a "rotato". Thus, although the idea is great, I don't think it will be very effective and when the advertisers realize this they will demand larger and larger ads for the $$ they pay somehow thinking that a bigger ad will somehow better influence buyers.
Hell, that is what is happening to the web! Ads aren't selling so more obtrusive pop-ups, flash and massive ads are obviosly needed!
Before you know it xroot will be one big advertisment and the default gtk skin will be a forced franchise-of-the-day theme (McDonalds skin, Coke skin, etc).
All this and a portion of Linux users are just cheap-wads who will not pay for anything.
I know that this does not directly lign up with his ideas, but I had to send him a word of thanks anyway. If anyone is interested this is what I sent him (it was going to be a quick thank you but as usual I went off on a writing rant):
"Representative Boucher,
Frankly, sir, you are my hero. I read about your ideas
for a fair use bill to amend current copyright code
at:
http://www.atnewyork.com/
and then subsequently your speeches and ideas at:
http://www.house.gov/boucher/internet.htm
In a world where corporate ideals, profit margins and
politician pay-offs reign you are a very refreshing
soul. The situation of the current music industry is
sad -- music, by nature, has very little productive
power and thus little value. As the economies of scale
kick in prices of records and thus music should fall
proportional to the amount that it sold. The problem
with this classic model is, however, corporate profit
margins fall too. To alleviate this the RIAA and large
labels institute 'artificial demand' by hyping and
advertising artists as well as restricting the number and
price of CDs in the market (artificial supply). The former
is completely legal and ethical and the latter is
questionable but fair.
Lately consumers have been able to seemingly bypass the
artificial supply side and record labels refuse to drop prices
to account for it (it is tough to get such things as mp3's --
they take time to find as well as cost the distributor money
in processing power, time and bandwidth and on top of that mp3s
are by definition lower quality then CDs). If CDs were cheaper
and adhered to the true supply and demand of markets, people
would have no use at all for mp3s because CDs would be cheap
enough that the processing power, time and bandwidth used for
mp3s would be far more expensive then the CD itself and the
added-value of the high-quality CD (vs. the degraded mp3) would
be realized.
The RIAA and large record labels refuse to let the market
decide the price of their CDs. Furthermore, with the advent of
the Internet artists have the ability to market directly to
consumers -- that which the RIAA despises. The RIAA needs their
artificial supply as well as their 'middle man' distributor and
marketing status to maintain their profits. To keep that, they
now lobby the government to restrict the rights of consumers
(broken CDs, DMCA) and to legalize corporate vigilantism (flood,
aka DoS, P2P networks and sue their customers) much like Carnegie's
Pinkertons against labor not too long ago. Using the government and
the restriction of the people's rights as a form of artificial supply
is unethical and should be outright illegal.
Your ideas for your proposed bill are the most logical, direct and
coherent that I have heard thus far on this issue. I congratulate
you, sir. It gives the consumers and the artists their rights and
freedoms and lets the 'middle men' freely compete as they should.
The benefactors of the RIAA should not be the center -- artists and
consumers should and the RIAA's benefactors should be hired at will
as a marketing or distributing agency just like in every other
industry. Our government is a tool of the people to ensure our
rights, freedoms and the pursuit of happiness. It is not a tool
of the corporations to ensure profits that will later "trickle down"
to the people. A corporation is legally a person but can not vote.
Too many legislators forget that but you, sir, have not and I thank
you."
I completely agree. This is another "study" or "survey" that looks at a cause and effect yet does not make any strong argument whatsoever as to which is the cause and which is the effect:
.hmm. . . .
"Many of the people in this group told researchers that they got angry easily, couldn't concentrate, and had trouble associating with friends."
Is it that because they play video games that they get angry, can't concentrate and have no friends or is it that they have no friends because they get angry and lack entertaining creativity so thus they play video games for some form of entertainment.
Another one of my favorites in this same category is studies that 'show' that people who live together before marriage tend to get divorced at a higher rate. What is the cause and what is the effect? Is it that because people have lived together before marriage that causes them to later get divorced (aka a direct cause of the divorce) or is it *perhaps* they lived with someone because they could not find anyone else and *did not* want to get married but later said, "what the hell" and got married anyway (aka simply a symptom and by no means a cause of the divorce).
Studies and reports like this that draw a conclusion without a strong argument with evidence are utter horeshit and the people who funded them should be able to sue for gross negligence. If one does not have the facts for a conclusive argument *do not make one*. In this case it should have simply stated, "there is a correlation between video game playing and people who are not creative, have no friends and are angry." It should not have even been implied that video games cause people to become angry, lose their creativity and lose all their friends.
Now for me, I am angry but also creative and I have a few friends but yet I do not play video games. . .
> But what about arable land?
Desalinization, baby, desalinization!
That is the wave (quite literally) of the future.
Think about it -- the Middle East, for example. There is PLENTY of sun and in most parts plenty of wind. Combine solar and wind power with power generated from waves and use the energy for a reverse-osmosis desalinization plant. Take the resulting brine 'waste', bake it in the sun extracting a little more water and sell the salt as well as the minerals left over (zinc, gold, etc).
The problem is the MASSIVE initial investment cost. But as land as resources become scare, the cost will become negligible in comparison. After a large initial investment and installation base, economies of scale will kick in making it dirt cheap. Non-arable land will become arable -- that is the solution -- and the world will be able to support even more people an we will do the enviornment good (make plans grow where they would have never grown).
They are doing this a LOT in the Middle East already as well as some parts of Texas. Invest in desalinization companies for the long-term -- it will pay off!
If someone didn't say this I was going to.
Let's see the logic of this whole article and debate:
Let's try to get mega-corps with proprietary software and protocols to play nice with each other EVEN THOUGH there is already an existing protocol and network that is a standard, open, and mature.
Logically it will be much easier to make IRC easier to use and beef up the network as opposed to making direct competitors who individually seek world domination to hug each other.
C'mon man, supporting and trying to influence proprietary software and protocols that are entrnched in "megacorp strategy" is hedging back to the days when you either had Prodigy or Compuserve and that's it -- neither would talk to each other and neither shared content. The Internet fixed that and now we're pushing back to it again with the MSN/AOL battles. Yet the average stupid American support one or the other because it is 'easy to use' or 'I can IM'.
What was that recent article about 'user friendly' is sometimes a consumer laziness issue?
OK, NYT is a PAIN to get into from where I am now so I figured I would spare some other people the strife:
"t's a good thing you didn't see me this morning,'' Richard Wallace warns me as he bites into his hamburger. We're sitting in a sports bar near his home in San Francisco, and I can barely hear his soft, husky voice over the jukebox. He wipes his lips clean of ketchup and grins awkwardly. ''Or you'd have seen my backup personality.''
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The backup personality: that's Wallace's code name for
his manic depression. To keep it in check, he downs a daily cocktail of psychoactive drugs, including Topamax, an anti-epileptic that acts as a mood stabilizer, and Prozac. Marijuana, too -- most afternoons, he'll roll about four or five joints the size of his index finger. The medications work pretty well, but some crisis always comes along to bring the backup personality to the front. This morning, a collection agency for Wallace's college loans wrote to say they'd begun docking $235 from the monthly disability checks he started getting from the government last year, when bipolar disorder was diagnosed. Oh, God, it's happening again, he panicked: His former employers -- the ones who had fired him from a string of universities and colleges -- would be cackling at his misfortune, happy they'd driven him out. Wallace, 41, had raged around the cramped apartment he shares with his wife and son, strewn with computer-science texts and action-doll figurines.
''Stuff like that really makes me insane, when I start thinking about my friends who are at Berkeley or Carnegie-Mellon with tenure and sabbaticals and promotions,'' he says, staring down at his plate. He looks awkward, as if he's borrowing someone else's body -- shifting his stocky frame in his chair, all rumpled jeans and unruly eyebrows. ''It's like I can't even talk to those people anymore. I live on a different planet.'' In June, after I visited him, his alienation from the academic establishment became more dramatic still: a former colleague, claiming Wallace had threatened him, took out a restraining order that prevents him from setting foot on the grounds of the University of California at Berkeley.
When he can't get along with the real world, Wallace goes back to the only thing he has left: his computer. Each morning, he wakes before dawn and watches conversations stream by on his screen. Thousands of people flock to his Web site every day from all over the world to talk to his creation, a robot called Alice. It is the best artificial-intelligence program on the planet, a program so eerily human that some mistake it for a real person. As Wallace listens in, they confess intimate details about their lives, their dreams; they talk to Wallace's computer about God, their jobs, Britney Spears.
It is a strange kind of success: Wallace has created an artificial life form that gets along with people better than he does.
Richard Wallace never really fit in to begin with. His father was a traveling salesman, and Richard was the only one of his siblings to go to college. Like many nerds, he wanted mostly to be left alone to research his passion, ''robot minimalism'' -- machines that require only a few simple rules to make complex movements, like steering around a crowded room. Simple, he felt, worked. He lived by the same ascetic code, scorning professors who got rich by patenting work they'd developed on government grants. ''Corporate welfare,'' he sniffed.
By 1992, Wallace's reputation was so strong that New York University recruited him to join the faculty. His main project, begun in December 1993, was a robot eye attached to the Internet, which visitors from afar could control. It was one of the first-ever Webcams, and Wallace figured that pioneering such a novel use of the Internet would impress his tenure committee. It didn't, and Wallace grew increasingly depressed as his grant applications were rejected one by one. At one point, a colleague found him quietly weeping at his desk, unable to talk. ''I had no clue what the rules were, what the game even was -- or that there was even a game,'' Wallace recalls. He started taking Prozac. How did all these successful senior professors do it, anyway?
One day he checked into his Webcam and noticed something strange: people were reacting to the robot eye in an oddly emotional way. It was designed so that remote viewers could type in commands like ''tilt up'' or ''pan left,'' directing the eye to poke around Wallace's lab. Occasionally it would break down, and to Wallace's amusement, people would snap at it as if it were real: ''You're stupid,'' they'd type. It gave him an idea: What if it could talk back?
Like all computer scientists, Wallace knew about a famous ''chat-bot'' experiment called Eliza. Back in 1966, an M.I.T. professor, Joseph Weizenbaum, created Eliza as a ''virtual therapist'' -- it would take a user's statement and turn it around as a question, emulating a psychiatrist's often- maddening circularity. (You: ''I'm mad at my mother.'' Eliza: ''Why are you mad at your mother?'') Eliza was quickly abandoned as a joke, even by its creator. It wasn't what scientists call ''strong'' A.I. -- able to learn on its own. It could only parrot lines Weizenbaum had fed it.
But Wallace was drawn to Eliza's simplicity. As a professor, he often felt like an Eliza-bot himself -- numbly repeating the same lessons to students over and over again, or writing the same monotonous descriptions of his work on endless, dead-end grant-application forms. He decided to create an updated version of Eliza and imbue it with his own personality -- something that could fire back witty repartee when users became irritable.
As Wallace's work progressed, though, his mental illness grew worse, making him both depressed and occasionally grandiose. He went on strike in class, refusing to grade his students' papers and instead awarding them all A's. He fired off acid e-mail messages dismissing colleagues as sellouts. When Wallace climbed out the window of his 16th-floor apartment and threatened to jump, his girlfriend pulled him back and took him down to N.Y.U.'s psychiatric department, where doctors told him he had bipolar disorder. Wallace resisted the diagnosis -- after all, didn't every computer scientist cycle through 72-hour sprees of creativity and then crash? ''I was in denial myself,'' he says now. '''I'm a successful professor, making $100,000 a year! I'm not one of those mental patients!'''
His supervisors disagreed. In April 1995, N.Y.U. told him his contract wouldn't be renewed.
lice came to life on Nov. 23, 1995. That fall, Wallace relocated to Lehigh College in Pennsylvania, hired again for his expertise in robotics. He installed his chat program on a Web server, then sat back to watch, wondering what people would say to it.
Approximating Life
(Page 2 of 3)
Numbingly boring things, as it turned out. Users would inevitably ask Alice the
same few questions: ''Where do you live?'' ''What is your name?'' and ''What do you look like?'' Wallace began analyzing the chats and realized that almost every statement users made began with one of 2,000 words. The Alice chats were obeying something language theorists call Zipf's Law, a discovery from the 1930's, which found that a very small number of words make up most of what we say.
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Wallace took Zipf's Law a step further. He began
theorizing that only a few thousand statements composed the bulk of all conversation -- the everyday, commonplace chitchat that humans engage in at work, at the water cooler and in online discussion groups. Alice was his proof. If he taught Alice a new response every time he saw it baffled by a question, he would eventually cover all the common utterances and even many unusual ones. Wallace figured the magic number was about 40,000 responses. Once Alice had that many preprogrammed statements, it -- or ''she,'' as he'd begun to call the program fondly -- would be able to respond to 95 percent of what people were saying to her.
Wallace had hit upon a theory that makes educated, intelligent people squirm: Maybe conversation simply isn't that complicated. Maybe we just say the same few thousand things to one another, over and over and over again. If Wallace was right, then artificial intelligence didn't need to be particularly intelligent in order to be convincingly lifelike. A.I. researchers had been focused on self-learning ''neural nets'' and mapping out grammar in ''natural language'' programs, but Wallace argued that the reason they had never mastered human conversation wasn't because humans are too complex, but because they are so simple.
''The smarter people are, the more complex they think the human brain is,'' he says. ''It's like anthropocentrism, but on an intellectual level. 'I have a great brain, therefore everybody else does -- and a computer must, too.''' Wallace says with a laugh. ''And unfortunately most people don't.''
Yet part of what makes Alice seem so human-like is her wry, seemingly spontaneous responses. Wallace's skill is not merely as a programmer but as the author of thousands of sharp one-liners for Alice. It is, as he puts it, ''more like writing good literature, perhaps drama, than writing computer programs.'' I looked over some of Alice's recent chat transcripts:
USER: Will you have sex with me?
ALICE: Can you go talk to someone else?
USER: What do you look like?
ALICE: Like an electronic brain.
USER: That's sexy.
ALICE: I'm glad we have that all cleared up.
USER: So what are you wearing?
ALICE: Oh. I am wearing my usual plastic computer wardrobe.
USER: Can you fly?
ALICE: Only in my dreams.
But as Alice improved, Wallace declined. He began drinking heavily, and after one sodden evening at a local bar he rolled his car on the highway. Lehigh ended his contract in the spring of 1997; banks canceled all his credit cards. He again attempted suicide, this time landing in the hospital.
Destitute, Wallace moved to California to look for work in artificial- intelligence companies. But he couldn't hold a job for more than a few months; instead, he spent his days obsessively writing dialogue for Alice on laptops he borrowed from friends, and watching, thrilled, as his robot grew ever more lifelike. Visitors used to talk to Alice for only three or four exchanges. Now the average conversation was 20 exchanges, and some users would chatter away for hours, returning to the site again and again.
But Wallace still hungered for recognition, and in January 2000, he decided to stress-test Alice by entering her in the annual Loebner Prize competition, in which artificial-intelligence developers from around the world pit their programs head to head before a panel of judges, who rank them based on how ''lifelike'' they are. The contest is both well known and controversial within the tight circle of A.I.; winning programs are closely studied by both academics and corporate centers like Sprint Labs. Up against competitors from major corporations and well-financed universities, Alice won. It was, officially, the most human robot in the world. Too exhausted to celebrate, Wallace returned to his motel and slept clutching his award medallion.
After his victory, Wallace plunged with new fervor into Alice. Geeks began eagerly e-mailing Wallace to offer their help; one, Noel Bush, came from one of the world's biggest A.I. corporations, Artificial Life. Over the next year, Wallace quadrupled Alice's knowledge base, teaching it 30,000 new responses, and last October, Alice won the Loebner competition for the second time in a row; this time one judge actually ranked Alice more realistic than a human.
At last, some of the academics Wallace so loathes began to take note. ''Alice is a wonderful chat-bot -- uncannily vivid and lifelike,'' gushed Ken Perlin, an N.Y.U. professor, in an e-mail message he circulated to his colleagues and forwarded to Wallace. ''It's really great to see this work get the recognition it deserves.''
Wallace wasn't in the mood to make peace. He says he still believed that N.Y.U. had driven him out. ''Your crude attempt to flatter me cannot erase the years of unemployment, debt and trauma that I experienced because of you and your colleagues,'' he wrote back.
''I wouldn't bother trying to flatter you,'' Perlin responded. ''Frankly, I don't like you -- in fact, I actively dislike you. I think you are a paranoid psycho.''
At one point during the Monica Lewinksy hearings, a human asked Alice her opinion: ''Do you think President Clinton should be impeached?''
''It depends,'' Alice responded, ''on what you mean by 'think.'''
One could scarcely have asked for a more Clintonian response. But it's also a puzzling question that Alice's success itself raises: Is she intelligent? If so, how?
In 1950, the pioneering British mathematician Alan Turing grappled with this question in the journal Mind, where he first posed the ''Turing Test'' -- the gold standard for artificial thought. ''Can machines think?'' he asked -- and immediately noted that the question hinges, of course, on what ''thinking'' is. He posed a simple ''imitation game'' to resolve the question. Put a person and a computer in one room and an interrogator in another. The interrogator talks to both via a teletype machine, and his goal is to figure out which is which. If the machine fools the interrogator into believing it is human, the test is passed - - it can be considered intelligent.
This is, on the surface, a curiously unambitious definition; it's all about faking it. The machine doesn't need to act like a creative human or smart human or witty human -- it merely needs to appear not to be a robot. With this bit of intellectual jujitsu, Turing dodged a more troubling question: How do our brains, and language itself, work?
Artificial-intelligence purists, however, caustically dismiss the Turing Test and Alice. For them, artificial intelligence is about capturing the actual functioning of the human brain, down to its neurons and learning ability. Parroting, they argue, doesn't count. Marvin Minksy, a prominent A.I. pioneer and M.I.T. Media Lab professor, e-mailed me to say that Wallace's idea of conversation is ''basically wrong.'' Minsky added, ''It's like explaining that a picture is an object made by applying paint to canvas and then putting it in a rectangular frame.'' Alice, according to Minsky, does not truly ''know'' anything about the world.
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The fight over Alice is like any war between theorists
and engineers, those who seek to understand why something works versus those who are content just to build it. The debate usually boils down to one major issue: creativity. Alice could never come up with a single creative thought, critics say. Wallace agrees that Alice may not be creative -- but neither, he argues gleefully, are people, at least in conversation. If Alice were merely given a massive enough set of responses, it would seem as creative as a human -- which is not as creative as we might like to believe.
Even if the guts of Alice aren't precisely ''thinking,'' many users certainly never suspect it. In an everyday sense, fakery works -- particularly in our online age. Turing's ''imitation game'' eerily presaged today's world of chat rooms, where men pretend to be women, having lesbian cybersex with other women who are, in fact, men. Whenever a user has stumbled onto Alice without knowing in advance that she's a robot, they've always assumed she's human.
t's 3 in the afternoon, but Wallace is already rolling what appears to be his fourth joint of the day. We're sitting in the ''pot club'' a few blocks from Wallace's home, an unmarked building where medical marijuana is distributed to members. Wallace gets up to wander around the club greeting friends: some intense men in suits playing speed chess, a long-haired man with a bushy mustache playing guitar, a thin reed of a woman staring wall-eyed at a VCR playing ''Cast Away.'' Everyone greets Wallace as ''Dr. Rich,'' relishing the credibility his academic credentials lend to the medical- marijuana cause, officially legal but politically beleaguered. The reverse is also true: Wallace identifies with the club's pariah status, its denizens who have been forced by cancer, AIDS or mental illness onto welfare. He's more relaxed than I've ever seen him, getting into a playful argument with a friend about Alice. The friend, a white-bearded programmer, isn't sure he buys Wallace's theories.
''I gotta say, I don't feel like a robot!'' the friend jokes, pounding the table. ''I just don't feel like a robot!''
''That's why you're here, and that's why you're unemployed!'' Wallace shoots back. ''If you were a robot, you'd get a job!''
Friends used to tell Wallace to reconcile his past, clean himself up, apply for an academic job. But some now wonder whether Wallace's outsider status might be the whole key to Alice's success in emulating everyday human behavior. After all, outcasts are the keenest students of ''normal'' behavior -- since they're constantly trying, and failing, to achieve it themselves.
Last month, a friend whom Wallace has known since grad school -- Ken Goldberg, now a professor at Berkeley -- got a restraining order against Wallace. Prompted by the movie ''A Beautiful Mind,'' Goldberg had e-mailed Wallace last winter to catch up, but an amicable exchange about Wallace's plight turned sour when Wallace began accusing Goldberg of cooperating with a corrupt academic ''establishment'' and of siding with N.Y.U. against him. He wrote, ''Although I am not a violent person, I think I have come to understand how people are driven to political violence.'' Wallace also wrote to a friend that he was ''getting ready to do some political theater and put up wanted posters around the Berkeley campus with [Goldberg's] picture on it.''
Wallace scoffs at Goldberg's fears. ''I'm not violent -- I'm a pacifist,'' he says. ''I always have been, and he knows that.'' He is fighting the order, arguing that Goldberg hasn't proved that a reasonable threat exists, and that the order considerably limits his free speech since it bars him from the Berkeley campus, as well as any academic events where Goldberg might appear.
Yet even in such legal straits, Wallace seems oddly pleased. Goldberg's court order confirms everything he has always suspected: that the world, and particularly the academic world, is shutting him out, doubting his ideas, turning him into the crazy man out in the hallway. Wallace, who once wrote Attorney General John Ashcroft to suggest a federal racketeering lawsuit against the nation's academics, sees the case against him as a chance for vindication. Wallace imagines walking into the courtroom and finally getting a type of justice -- someone who will listen to his story. ''What a windfall for me,'' he says. ''It's nice to feel like a winner for once.''
Clive Thompson is a writer in New York City.
We have a few "red buttons" on telephones in the miltary -- called "'priority', 'flash' and 'flash override'". The premise is that if you have an *important* phone call to make and all the outgoing trunks are busy, you can knock some other random person of the line and then you can make your call.
The person who gets bumped will never know who bumped them. By pressing the button you are guaranteed to bump someone.
A *lot* of people use one of those "red buttons" in situations where it is not necessary -- so much so that it must be restricted to those that prove they have a need for it.
So yes, people will and have pressed the red button. A lot of people.
I love the colsole with the ash tray on it. Some old IBM consoles had built-in ash trays.
Back then people used to smoke in grocery stores, drop the butt on the isle floor and stomp it out. The employees would later sweep it up.
My how things have changed. . . .
"The problem is not using the hierarchal file system in a coherent way."
/bin,/lib,/etc, etc. has many many advantages over the "good old DOS days" -- ESPECIALLY when you start mixing in NFS and automount. Some examples:
/etc directory is architecture and OS independant so you can share the same directory accross all three. The /var directory is achitecture independant but depending on your set-up it will probably not be OS depandant. Thus you can discern the differences between the OSs yourself and set up an automount variable to mount the proper version per OS. The /lib and /bin directories are both OS and architecture dependant. In that case you must set automount variables for OS and arch and mount different dirs for each.
/bin and /lib for each. You need to change some defult configs for all the clients? Voila, just edit one config file! Could you share one program accross multiple machines, architectures and OSes in the 'good old DOS days'? Could you immediately upgrade 65 workstations to the newest version of a program without reboots and only use 1/65th the space (aka one copy) in the 'good old DOS days'?
/usr ro. You can optimize your RAID array for fast read and writes in the /var mount while optimizing /usr, *lib and *bin for fast reads, etc.
I hear this argument every time package managment is discussed on slashdot and every time I bite my tongue.
The current system of
* all SHARED libraries are in the same place. That way the dynamic linbker does not need to do a ridiculous path search to find a library
* all binaries are in 3 -4 places -- that way you don't need a massive PATH variable like 'the good old DOS days'
* because the files are sorted by type, you can do all types of neat things. Let's say for instance that you have Solaris SPARC, Tru64 Alpha and x86 Linux boxes all sharing a single NFS server. Now the
Let's say that you install emacs network-wide. You share the same config accross all your NFS clients and just make different
* Because the files are sorted BY TYPE you can do all types of neat optimization and security things. You can mount
'the good old DOS' system was good for what it was used for -- a small system for one user with a few programs and didn't need any optimization. The heierarchal system is a lot better here used as a multi-user, muti-tasking shared-library networked OS with hundreds of programs.
Now if you hate the heierarchal system that much, you can do what SCO OpenServer does -- install all the files into each 'program directory' and then make symbolic links into the heierarchal system. It would be VERY easy to do -- just write a script to query your RPM database for what files are in each package, move all the files for that package into its own directory and then make a symbolic link for each file moved back to the hierarchal system.
SCO liked the 'good old DOS days' also. The problem with OpenServer and all those symbolic links, though, is that resolving the symbolic links by the dynamic linker, the shell, the programs, etc actually was pretty expensive and gave a decent hit to filesystem performance. Furthermore it made NFS-mounted trees hell and you could not do all the neat optimization and security stuff that I mentioned above.
In summary, the heierarchal system is by far easier to manage for performance, security and for centralization. It is tougher to manage for "adding / removing" programs. The former highly outweighs the latter, expecially since you have package databases to help tell you where all the files are. Learn to use your package managment system.
The bulk of this article and thread seem to be once again people bitching about RPM dependency hell. The solution to that is download the source rpms and then do a rpm --rebuild [source RPM] then a rpm -i [/usr/src/RPM/RPMS/i686/[name of RPM built]. That solves 96% of all your problems and still maintains your RPM database. config, make works too, but it throws you back into the chaotic world of no package managment and thus completely defeats the purpose of RPMs.
Have a nice day!
Yes, that is the positive pressure influencing one to use trains in Japan and I wholeheartedly agree with it. Frankly, their train system rocks.
.you could easily fall off a cliff. . .they don't seem to believe in 'emminent domain' and the roads curve wildly around odd little farms in the middle of urban areas. . .
The negative pressure for using trains that people always forget to mention is that the JAPANESE ROAD SYSTEM SUCKS:
* Their 'highways' are the size of our East Coast city roads with a speed limit of about 45mph
* The cars beep at you if you go faster then 45
* Gas is expensive!
* The reason why Japanese cars are small is not because their small, but the roads are TINY!
* There are ALWAYS traffic jams.
* The roads don't have guard rails. .
* The roads are so tiny that all the larger vehicles (aka trucks) have two sets of turning wheels in the front and all the vans are the "mid-engine" type so that they have a smaller wheel base.
Now considering the positive and negative influences, would you take a train or drive???
I'm surprised no one has mentioned it yet. Even if they don't find any relevant uses for Cyc, it would make one hell of an IRC bot. . .
LOL. . .
For those of you who don't know, Edison had a big battle with Westinghouse whether homes should be powered by AC or DC. Edison envisioned small DC power plants on every street corner because AC was dangerous. Westinghouse envisioned a large, central power plant that drives high-voltage electricity long distances and more efficiently powers the most common electrical appliances of the time -- light bulbs and electric motors.
The battle got UGLY -- to the point that Edison invented the electric chair to prove that AC was dangerous!
The proper term is "re-linking" the kernel. SCO did not give you the source to the Openserver kernel so therefore you can not compile it.
.with that in mind (ahem) I would look at it more as Caldera not counting on the IA64 then Caldera not counting on Unixware.
The reason why the util is so neat is that you have to re-link OpenServer very often -- it does not have kmalloc (meaning you constantly had to 'tune' different buffers) and it does not support loadable modules.
BTW I am pretty sure that OpenServer is ported to IA64. .
The US government, fustrated with vendor-lock-in and the national-security fact that they 'didn't know what was in their software' specifically stipulated that all future programs written for the state by contractors will be written in "human comprehendable COBOL". This was in the late 1950s. . .
.anyone wish to comment on it? It seems to have the same pretense as the Peruvian Bill but was enacted all wrong (aka forcing a language). . .
I was reading this in a computer history book recently. .
mod parent up -- first-hand testimony
"Buying competition at an inflated price simply to put them out of business would be a silly and stupid move."
.Cabletron split itself apart (I still don't understand that one) and the DEC stuff
:(.
Why do you think Compaq bought Digital?
My guess:
1) Get Digital's customers.
2) Squash Alpha NT that was competing with their servers.
Other then that every great technology that Digital had has been split, re-sold watered down and eventually completely quashed.
1) DEC NICs -- went to Intel, Intel 'phased' them out in favor of EEpro.
2) Alpha -- Manufacture went to Samsung, design went to Compaq. Development slowed and is now officially stopped in favor of "IA-64". Uggh.
3) DEC Networking -- went to Cabletron. .
pretty much disappeared in the debacle.
The list goes on and on. Thus IBM _could_ do the same thing. Buy Sun to kill the competition, take their customers and then sell off each of their divisions thus making most of their money back and alsomaking it so that it becomes so dis-contiguous that the technologies eventually cease to exist.
Company liquidator. I'm still so disheartened that Digital's great technology was dismantled and put in storage bins