And abstraction is a facet of logic. The challenge facing most programmers is how to represent their logic and environments/apis in a matter that successfully performs the desired task. Representations can range from simple to complex and the challenge is finding one that efficiently and effectively solves the problem at hand.
As an example, take First-order logic with it's classical statement of:
All men are mortal.
Socrates is a man.
Therefore Socrates is mortal.
For this situation I tend to look at it as a form of simplistic Venn diagram. It could be interpreted in a set theory way of:
A circle (mortal)
inside that circle: (man)
inside that circle: (Socrates)
So writing a program that deduces that Socrates is mortal is simply a matter of following the links from socrates through all the containers/super-sets until you reach mortal or the top level.
If Penrose turns out to be right (The Emperor's New Mind) and quantum-like operations are needed to truly reproduce intelligence then inevitably at some point in the future we will have artificial intelligence even if we have to program some meat to use the same building materials nature used with us.
Other uses could be to adapt humans to non-terran environments. Base-line in brain just tailored to an alternate environment.
I can see the slogan now... Linux: because you don't have to take our word for it!:)
Seriously, imagine if Windows Update pushed a reconnaissance-program to computers based on IP address before beginning other types of warfare. And conveniently I would imagine it would be difficult to detect the early stages of such an attack as Windows itself would no doubt have configured all the necessary permissions (firewall,...) while not reporting payload-activity. Eventually someone would notice that physical and audited network traffic don't match and then the jig-would-be-up. That's when you begin your land assault!
It's easy to get mass off the Moon compared to Earth - remember the moon landings? The LEM blasted back into orbit with only a fraction of the fuel that was used in the rocket to escape Earth's gravity-well. You go to the moon and set up general mining operations to refine many types of material. You could conceivably use the materials to construct things such as orbital hydroponics to provide an extra independent food supply but that idea would probably be too fragile for practical use. The point remains though, getting material off the Moon is significantly easier than getting the same mass off of Earth. So it would only make sense to base your manufacturing capacity where it could achieve your goals with better fiscal efficiency (through higher fuel use returns) than a comparible installation located on Earth.
All the more reason we need to establish reliable mining on the moon. Concentrations on the moon are about 80% higher than on Earth. You know, there is a lot of history ahead of us and maybe Lunar mining would allow future infrastructure that at this point in time boggles the imagination.
I don't care about who's doing what really, what I like is that the cable companies provided the means for competition with the phone companies (skype, vonage, im) and now phone companies are starting to compete back in kind. So hopefully in about ten more years when the services cable and phone companies offer are pretty-much equal with each other then the only thing they'll have left to compete on is price. And that's where you and I win.
I would just like to step away from the conversation for a moment and just focus on one thing. DELL is selling Linux! This is a milestone for FOSS and I just wanted to point that out.
My electricity, my computer, my browser, my choice. If I don't want my browser to disable the context menu then that's my decision. And some company disabling the browser's context menu without Law to back them up really pisses me off. In the IP gold rush the US initiated, people are trying to own every little facet of information that we used to just take for granted being free. Locking everything up may or may-not benefit the economy but it sure-as-hell prunes cultural-enjoyment (ie. a more limited musical taste due to finite resources to acquire content) and development (ie. remixes and interpretations) in the long-term.
And boycotts are for withholding your money from companies that care about the bottom line. Linux is free and based on mutual benefit through cooperation so by not using every opportunity to refine the community in-general - such as the LinuxTag event - the boycott actually detracts from the very qualities that make open-source so nice.
I haven't read the NDA but there is a purpose to them. Every company must accept some basic operating procedures if it is to survive in current markets. Google and all other companies must adopt base practices because every other company has those base practices. Its an evolutionary arms-race; you need the basics or you won't survive. But once you have the basics you can then implement higher level policies that are as closely aligned to your ethical and moral principles as possible. Google tries to be as good as it can within today's market ecosystem.
Most NDAs amount to: you won't steal our knowledge and bring it with you to our competitors if we let you go. If it stays within that context or spirit then personally I'm all for NDAs.
Any cross-licensing is a good thing for now. It enables business' to sell and support Linux with reduced risk. They are not going to get sued. For sure. If or when the issues of unlicensed patents comes to a head then go to court but, in the meantime Linux gains more of a foothold. All Linux has to do is reach a critical-mass. Once theres enough people using Linux then more support will exist. More support leads to more users and the cycle feedbacks onto itself.
I'm waiting for the day when in a last-ditch effort Microsoft Open Sources Windows to remain relevant:^)
Just to clarify, absolutely yes. There are only two prerequisites required for a distributed system. Bandwidth and latency. Client/Server architectures were experimented with in the '90s but because of inadequate infrastructure (see prerequisites) and lack of network-centric programming libraries they did not become successful at that time.
Today infrastucture meets minimum standards to permit practical network-applications. The applications can take many forms: they may be embedded within a web-browser using w3c derived standards to run their logic or they could be structured so that a client native application communicates with a corresponding remote server application for the purposes of dynamically updating information such as the contents of listboxes. What I'm describing is basically like this: the variables within a user's program when read or written would transparently be operated on over a network connection. A win32-app could "read" a variable and the variable class' "read" method would encapsulate fetching the information over a network connection versus accessing it in local memory.
Of course they can. All you need is the bandwidth which most people have (VPN anyone?). And you don't need to use a web-browser either, the app could be a hybrid where a client plugs into a server and works from there. So things that web-browsers have trouble with (like updating drop-down list boxes with new items) could be handled indistinguishably from a local application. Basically you could write a custom client that connects to an appropriate web-based server and through your own custom protocol have the local application interact with a remote information base. And if you wait five years probably most or all of the functionality that is missing from web applications versus local applications will become standards based so it will happen.
I own an HP Media Center and it works great. That aside, this is just business. HP wants to address a market of people who want DVR/AVI/MPEG and of course TV abilities. To do this HP must design a platform that aligns with their business model. It used to be MCE and now its a digital media adapter. They perform the same roles. HP is and integrator of tech and one obvious benefit of their new choice will be lower support costs as I suspect it will be more difficult to crash a simpler embedded system than a full blown install of XP. I think this is a means of reducing costs and therefore increasing profits - something every good company tries to do.
Buddy, a screwdriver costs $500 when your dealing with the Government. DoD unit prices for the chips are probably in the high tens-of-thousands per one chip. Interestingly, this chip would be a "Universal Turing Machine" for chip architectures (while today the vast majority of microprocessors are von Neumann types).
Calling a virtual-model a game only serves to denigrate the whole concept.:p Really, interacting with a model sounds a lot less cool than "playing a game" but it is a much more accurate description. Controlling a simulation in this sense sounds, if done properly, like it could be a very engaging form of learning versus rote memorization of books. Complimenting traditional studies this might actually be able to accomplish it's goal: engaging developing-minds in ways linear text doesn't.
The Sun's magnetospere is bigger than the orbit of Pluto if I remember correctly. And it doesn't have to be exclusive, you could use the magnetic "sock" for a stage of the journey and maybe propellents in another stage of the same voyage and then you short range teleport for the last 5000km;). It's just another useful tool to employ from a mission planning perspective.
I wonder if emulation of other hardware architectures would allow developers to try things out on their commodity machines? VMWare and Virtual PC do a good job for x86 emulation and there are many emulators for obsolete machines available so the question comes down to the time and effort required to implement new architectures. Maybe what could be practical is something along the lines of Transmeta's morphable instruction sets technology but with an extra layer of associated hardware (video, sound) emulation/translation.
A machine intelligence isn't even interesting when you look outwards instead of inwards and realize that the networking potential of people can define information processing abilities that make everthing we've accomplished so far seem dull. Basically it's like this: the total-state of the internet is processed through time by the activities of people interpreting the current state's information into the next state. Each state would correspond to a mental step analogous to human reasoning. Or think of each person as a "neuron" in the 'Internet's mind'. A really nice video written by an assistant professor of cultural anthropology is found here and it goes into detail of how a "supernaut" like the 'net can be created through emergence.
Slashdot Mirror
And abstraction is a facet of logic. The challenge facing most programmers is how to represent their logic and environments/apis in a matter that successfully performs the desired task. Representations can range from simple to complex and the challenge is finding one that efficiently and effectively solves the problem at hand.
As an example, take First-order logic with it's classical statement of:
All men are mortal.
Socrates is a man.
Therefore Socrates is mortal.
For this situation I tend to look at it as a form of simplistic Venn diagram. It could be interpreted in a set theory way of:
A circle (mortal)
inside that circle: (man)
inside that circle: (Socrates)
So writing a program that deduces that Socrates is mortal is simply a matter of following the links from socrates through all the containers/super-sets until you reach mortal or the top level.
If Penrose turns out to be right (The Emperor's New Mind) and quantum-like operations are needed to truly reproduce intelligence then inevitably at some point in the future we will have artificial intelligence even if we have to program some meat to use the same building materials nature used with us.
Other uses could be to adapt humans to non-terran environments. Base-line in brain just tailored to an alternate environment.
I can see the slogan now... Linux: because you don't have to take our word for it! :)
Seriously, imagine if Windows Update pushed a reconnaissance-program to computers based on IP address before beginning other types of warfare. And conveniently I would imagine it would be difficult to detect the early stages of such an attack as Windows itself would no doubt have configured all the necessary permissions (firewall,...) while not reporting payload-activity. Eventually someone would notice that physical and audited network traffic don't match and then the jig-would-be-up. That's when you begin your land assault!
It's easy to get mass off the Moon compared to Earth - remember the moon landings? The LEM blasted back into orbit with only a fraction of the fuel that was used in the rocket to escape Earth's gravity-well. You go to the moon and set up general mining operations to refine many types of material. You could conceivably use the materials to construct things such as orbital hydroponics to provide an extra independent food supply but that idea would probably be too fragile for practical use. The point remains though, getting material off the Moon is significantly easier than getting the same mass off of Earth. So it would only make sense to base your manufacturing capacity where it could achieve your goals with better fiscal efficiency (through higher fuel use returns) than a comparible installation located on Earth.
Concentrations of Lunar gallium are wrong (actual 3 to 60 ppb Moon; 80 to 100 ppb Earth) but the next sentence is still valid. I suck.
All the more reason we need to establish reliable mining on the moon. Concentrations on the moon are about 80% higher than on Earth. You know, there is a lot of history ahead of us and maybe Lunar mining would allow future infrastructure that at this point in time boggles the imagination.
I don't care about who's doing what really, what I like is that the cable companies provided the means for competition with the phone companies (skype, vonage, im) and now phone companies are starting to compete back in kind. So hopefully in about ten more years when the services cable and phone companies offer are pretty-much equal with each other then the only thing they'll have left to compete on is price. And that's where you and I win.
I would just like to step away from the conversation for a moment and just focus on one thing. DELL is selling Linux! This is a milestone for FOSS and I just wanted to point that out.
gadly = gladly. I suck.
I would gadly buy the second laptop for a child in trade for being able to buy one for me too!
My electricity, my computer, my browser, my choice. If I don't want my browser to disable the context menu then that's my decision. And some company disabling the browser's context menu without Law to back them up really pisses me off. In the IP gold rush the US initiated, people are trying to own every little facet of information that we used to just take for granted being free. Locking everything up may or may-not benefit the economy but it sure-as-hell prunes cultural-enjoyment (ie. a more limited musical taste due to finite resources to acquire content) and development (ie. remixes and interpretations) in the long-term.
And boycotts are for withholding your money from companies that care about the bottom line. Linux is free and based on mutual benefit through cooperation so by not using every opportunity to refine the community in-general - such as the LinuxTag event - the boycott actually detracts from the very qualities that make open-source so nice.
I haven't read the NDA but there is a purpose to them. Every company must accept some basic operating procedures if it is to survive in current markets. Google and all other companies must adopt base practices because every other company has those base practices. Its an evolutionary arms-race; you need the basics or you won't survive. But once you have the basics you can then implement higher level policies that are as closely aligned to your ethical and moral principles as possible. Google tries to be as good as it can within today's market ecosystem.
Most NDAs amount to: you won't steal our knowledge and bring it with you to our competitors if we let you go. If it stays within that context or spirit then personally I'm all for NDAs.
Any cross-licensing is a good thing for now. It enables business' to sell and support Linux with reduced risk. They are not going to get sued. For sure. If or when the issues of unlicensed patents comes to a head then go to court but, in the meantime Linux gains more of a foothold. All Linux has to do is reach a critical-mass. Once theres enough people using Linux then more support will exist. More support leads to more users and the cycle feedbacks onto itself.
:^)
I'm waiting for the day when in a last-ditch effort Microsoft Open Sources Windows to remain relevant
Just to clarify, absolutely yes. There are only two prerequisites required for a distributed system. Bandwidth and latency. Client/Server architectures were experimented with in the '90s but because of inadequate infrastructure (see prerequisites) and lack of network-centric programming libraries they did not become successful at that time.
Today infrastucture meets minimum standards to permit practical network-applications. The applications can take many forms: they may be embedded within a web-browser using w3c derived standards to run their logic or they could be structured so that a client native application communicates with a corresponding remote server application for the purposes of dynamically updating information such as the contents of listboxes. What I'm describing is basically like this: the variables within a user's program when read or written would transparently be operated on over a network connection. A win32-app could "read" a variable and the variable class' "read" method would encapsulate fetching the information over a network connection versus accessing it in local memory.
Of course they can. All you need is the bandwidth which most people have (VPN anyone?). And you don't need to use a web-browser either, the app could be a hybrid where a client plugs into a server and works from there. So things that web-browsers have trouble with (like updating drop-down list boxes with new items) could be handled indistinguishably from a local application. Basically you could write a custom client that connects to an appropriate web-based server and through your own custom protocol have the local application interact with a remote information base. And if you wait five years probably most or all of the functionality that is missing from web applications versus local applications will become standards based so it will happen.
For once Skynet jokes will be on topic!
I own an HP Media Center and it works great. That aside, this is just business. HP wants to address a market of people who want DVR/AVI/MPEG and of course TV abilities. To do this HP must design a platform that aligns with their business model. It used to be MCE and now its a digital media adapter. They perform the same roles. HP is and integrator of tech and one obvious benefit of their new choice will be lower support costs as I suspect it will be more difficult to crash a simpler embedded system than a full blown install of XP. I think this is a means of reducing costs and therefore increasing profits - something every good company tries to do.
Buddy, a screwdriver costs $500 when your dealing with the Government. DoD unit prices for the chips are probably in the high tens-of-thousands per one chip. Interestingly, this chip would be a "Universal Turing Machine" for chip architectures (while today the vast majority of microprocessors are von Neumann types).
Calling a virtual-model a game only serves to denigrate the whole concept. :p Really, interacting with a model sounds a lot less cool than "playing a game" but it is a much more accurate description. Controlling a simulation in this sense sounds, if done properly, like it could be a very engaging form of learning versus rote memorization of books. Complimenting traditional studies this might actually be able to accomplish it's goal: engaging developing-minds in ways linear text doesn't.
magnetospere == magnetosphere. /. will integrate a checker and there will be much rejoicing.
One of these days I'll actually learn to spell or
The Sun's magnetospere is bigger than the orbit of Pluto if I remember correctly. And it doesn't have to be exclusive, you could use the magnetic "sock" for a stage of the journey and maybe propellents in another stage of the same voyage and then you short range teleport for the last 5000km ;). It's just another useful tool to employ from a mission planning perspective.
I wonder if emulation of other hardware architectures would allow developers to try things out on their commodity machines? VMWare and Virtual PC do a good job for x86 emulation and there are many emulators for obsolete machines available so the question comes down to the time and effort required to implement new architectures. Maybe what could be practical is something along the lines of Transmeta's morphable instruction sets technology but with an extra layer of associated hardware (video, sound) emulation/translation.
A machine intelligence isn't even interesting when you look outwards instead of inwards and realize that the networking potential of people can define information processing abilities that make everthing we've accomplished so far seem dull. Basically it's like this: the total-state of the internet is processed through time by the activities of people interpreting the current state's information into the next state. Each state would correspond to a mental step analogous to human reasoning. Or think of each person as a "neuron" in the 'Internet's mind'. A really nice video written by an assistant professor of cultural anthropology is found here and it goes into detail of how a "supernaut" like the 'net can be created through emergence.
So 20 years from now when I'm emulating Vista (cause I'm like that) I'll have to make sure to pirate the correct version... ;)