After spending hours trying to work out how to get my iPhone to run more than on aPplication at once, I thought sod it, and proceeded to nail my iPhone to a wooden cross.
Three days later, I picked it up again. I wasn't expecting much. I mean, really, I'd shoved a nail right through the almighty touchscreen! To my surprise, the aPple logo popped up. My apps, my contacts, my music and more importantly my life were back.
Life wouldn't be worth living if I hadn't discovered the iPhone.
Right, so today's so-called "Macs" are medium-high specced PCs, including bog-standard features, sold at expensive prices. Apple are just yet another PC seller today. I might as well brag about my new Amiga being a quad core 8GB PC.
And the list of technologies you list were not invented by Apple, nor did they lead in them.
(Seriously, as soon as I read the headline of "What Has Your Phone Survived", I immediately guess that there'd be obligatory advertising for Apple, despite being a niche player in this market. You know what my Nokia 5800's survived? Not being the subject of a major spam campaign by the media, that's what.)
Indeed. It comes across as a rather poor attempt to make the Iphones's sales look good, by comparing them to a produce that's seen as popular, but with smaller sales, yet is in a completely different market.
Let's compare the Tivo to other DVRs. And let's compare the Iphones to other phones - which sells small amounts compared to Nokia, LG, Motorola, Samsung.
I agree - and it's an insult to people who have experience such horrific crimes.
A virtual crime is a crime that happens in a virtual envirnoment - e.g., fraud. Things like harrassment can also constitute crimes, but the crime is still harrassment, and not "rape". This is nothing new - did people refer to dodgy phone callers as "virtual rapists"?
A depiction of a crime is not a virtual crime. By that logic, films show "virtual murders", and when they media report on crimes, they should also be guilty of committing virtual crimes. It is depressing to see the media and politicians conflate depictions of crimes (which should be legal), with crimes that occur in a virtual environment (which is what "virtual crime" implies).
And when the media report on virtual crimes, I guess they must be guilty of a virtual virtual crime...
I agree entirely - these are different markets, how is this comparison irrelvant? Were they just slow for today's obligitary daily Iphone mention?
One might as well say that the TiVo doesn't sell as much as Nokia, or Microsoft (both of whom have shipped far more than Apple - indeed, can we have an article on how Apple don't sell as many phones as most other phone companies, or how Macs don't sell as much as Windows PCs? Of course that would be viewed as flamebait...)
Lumping the Iphone with the Ipod also makes different sense - so the Tivo has to compete against two different families of products, not just one? Why not compare the Iphone to say, every product that Microsoft have ever released...
The comparison also makes no sense in that the Tivo is measured in terms of the number of current users, whilst figures for things like phones are usually total sales. What are the Tivo's total sales, ever?
"My Amiga 500 boots quicker and formats floppies faster than a modern Windows PC!"
Anyhow, you could run Linux on a netbook, doesn't have to be Windows. And you won't be running Mac OS X on the iStaleWhateverIt'sCalledThisWeek, either.
Everyone who has handled one says it's really fast.
Ah yes, the anonymous weasel-worded vague subjective claim about a product that isn't available.
Why don't you wait until you've used one before you go and pan its processor and RAM.
Good idea! Why don't we wait until it's released, before we start making claims about it, or indeed giving it free advertising at all?
No keyboard? Oh no. Neither does the iPhone but it doesn't stop millions of people happily getting things done on it.
Because it's a phone. The lack of keyboard means the device can be phone-sized, which is what people want in a phone. As opposed to the iBrick, which is brick sized, like a throwback to the 80s.
"What's that? You're complaining that my car I'm selling doesn't have any seats? Well, an Iphone doesn't have seats, and that still sells to a small niche in the market".
* Much higher price than phones or netbooks. * Runs applications designed for a phone, and can't even multitask. * Larger screen than a very small screen. * Has a bog standard common port. * Has bog standard years old bluetooth, that every other netbook and phone has. * Has one application worth mentioning. One. * Just like any netbook, where you can use with whatever 3G service you like. * Similar size to netbooks and other tablets. * Half the weight of a laptop that no one even remembers. * Battery life comparable to netbooks, but far less than the ebook readers that people claim this will replace.
I can't wait to get one! I'm glad there's so much hype about it, and it's not even available! Only 100 more Slashdot stories to go until release (I wonder if it'll outdo DNF?)
Indeed. It's also interesting that one of the common defences of Apple products is "But look, Apple are making a profit", as if being ripped off is supposedly a good thing for the user...
Even the Mac mini, at $599, is faster than the average PC sold today.
Your citation please?
Anyhow, last time I checked, the Mac Mini was laptop quality, laptop prices, but with desktop portability. The worst of both worlds, and you could get far better on both with any other PC company. If the specs of the "average PC" is actually below that of the Mac Mini, then that just shows that Apple are even more out of touch with the market than I thought.
It isn't comparable to ebook readers, that have better displays and long battery life. (Yes, you can still read on an LCD, but by that logic, any netbook, tablet or phone is a "luxury ebook reader".)
Apple does not makes computers for most people. Apple makes luxury devices that
Indeed, they make money by selling high priced products to a niche. Annoying that the press is all over them all the time, even for a product that doesn't exist, whilst bigger companies in the market (e.g., Nokia) get ignored even when they release actual new products.
Windows uses OpenGL, Linux uses OpenGL, therefore Windows is Linux.
they are exceptionally similar
So now you're arguing that if two different operating systems look "exceptionally similar", they're the same OS?
You're right, however, that they aren't the same OS.
Exactly, so "No, they are both OS X" is incorrect.
But are *both* variants of OS X.
"OS X" and "Mac OS X" are the same thing, and refer to an OS that uses Darwin as its kernel.
Even if you did define these two different operating systems to be labelled as belonging to an "OS X" family, that's purely an artificial categorisation. I can just as easily define Windows and Linux to belong to some made up OS family. They are still different OSs.
And, btw, iPhone OS *IS* OS X. OS X currently comes in two flavors, Mac OS X and iPhone OS.
No, they're not. They run the same kernel, which is called Darwin, not OS X. I'm not sure that pretending that Macs run a phone OS that can't even multitask is a good move, anyway.
If you want to say your phone runs MacOS, good for you, I might as well claim that my PC runs AmigaOS.
So the vaporware (remember, we're still talking about a product that isn't even released yet) went from very overpriced to overpriced.
It's more expensive than other products of that size, that will do all of what most people want (most notably, compared with netbooks, but there are other tablets too).
They get mocked, because as soon as Apple release a phone/tablet/fridge, they act as if phones/tablets/fridges are the best thing ever, and make wild claims that no one ever did these things before.
And now we get it on a product that isn't even released yet. It's the new Duke Nukem Forever in terms of hype preceding a release.
I remember seeing smartphones from around 2002 or before. And handheld PDAs existed before that - it was pretty obvious that we'd get Quake 3 after a matter of time, and that it wouldn't be long.
The reasons against flying cars are to do with laws, liability, and required training, not technology.
I'm not sure why that requires sentience? It requires more general AI (presumably this AI composer has no communication abilities), but language and communication are not beyond the realms of AI, even if they are just following a "mere algorithm", as you originally stated.
As for 4'33", I'm sure that getting computers to create fancy modern art, and then make up some pretentious reason for why it's "art", is probably much easier than most things that humans do...
Most human composers can't do that either. And furthermore, most styles that appear do so gradually, as a result of many composers, who listen to and influence each other.
Furthermore, I'd argue that "new" styles are either fusions of existing styles (e.g., progressive rock combining rock with classical and other styles), or as a result of new technology (in the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s, we all heard music that sounded "new", due to the inventions and development of electric guitar, synthesisers, samplers and computers). Historically, new genres happened far more slowly, e.g., classical music spanning centuries for example.
The question now is how a computer can compare to a single composer. Expecting it to compete with decades or centuries of the evolution of music from large numbers of composers, in a short time, is an awful lot more.
Machines can't know if something entirely new will please humans
I do agree that this is a key feature, as someone commented above - it's more interesting if a computer is able to create music that a significant number of people like. It's less interesting if it's churning out tunes, and a human is having to handpick out the good ones.
Mozart himself, however, did not have a professor directly programming his brain with an algorithm (not even an AI genetic algorithm -- the music itself was not encoded in his DNA), nor a few centuries of academic analysis of his own compositions to derive the algorithms from. He had to start from scratch, learn his own craft, find his own style, with not much more than a piano teacher and a disdain for Salieri.
Well hang on, now you're changing the goal posts - if you're saying that AI "doesn't count" because they were programmed by humans, then no AI will ever count! Even if they surpass humans in every area.
Obviously AI is originally created by humans - that's what the a means. But it is irrelevant to the question of comparing intelligence or ability.
Mozart did not start from scratch. He did not invent music. He did not create his own brain, or any of the absurd things you are expecting the AI to have done. He was born with a brain, and had experienced other people's music.
The computer has done nothing special at all. It has blindly implemented the algorithm its programmer told it to.
The brain has done nothing special at all. It has blindly just followed the laws of nature, according to the complexity and structure that built up over billions of years of evolution.
They are still just the mechanical implementations of human-derived algorithms that they always were.
Yes and? Machines are created by humans - that has nothing to do with the debate. Even when AIs are programming AIs, you'll still be here telling us how they were originally programmed by humans. No one is disputing that.
Sure, computers are specialised such that although there are some areas they are now better than humans, there are other areas they are way behind. No one is claiming that because a computer can beat a human at chess, it's therefore more intelligent in every respect.
But the point is also that as time goes on, more and more things are being done by computers - and people after the fact inevitably try to claim that it "doesn't count" because it's "bruteforce".
I'd say that humans have a rather unfair advantage - surely we're just bruteforcing things with our billions of neurons, compared to a computer that has to run a program on a single CPU?
Slashdot Mirror
What has my iPhone phone survived?
After spending hours trying to work out how to get my iPhone to run more than on aPplication at once, I thought sod it, and proceeded to nail my iPhone to a wooden cross.
Three days later, I picked it up again. I wasn't expecting much. I mean, really, I'd shoved a nail right through the almighty touchscreen! To my surprise, the aPple logo popped up. My apps, my contacts, my music and more importantly my life were back.
Life wouldn't be worth living if I hadn't discovered the iPhone.
Right, so today's so-called "Macs" are medium-high specced PCs, including bog-standard features, sold at expensive prices. Apple are just yet another PC seller today. I might as well brag about my new Amiga being a quad core 8GB PC.
And the list of technologies you list were not invented by Apple, nor did they lead in them.
Exactly. Today has been the day of "But we couldn't think of anything else for today's obligitary Iphone Slashvertisement".
We've already had the classic of judging the success of a product in a completely different market, by comparing it to how few Iphones have been sold. So here we have Saturday's obligitary Iphone story. Before you know it, there'll be stories about how you can now finally visit a website On Your Iphone, like it's 2001 again. Oh wait, we we already did that one too. Before you know it, there'll be stories about how you can use your Iphone to talk to a complete stranger, as if they were in the same room as you, just like on Star Trek...
(Seriously, as soon as I read the headline of "What Has Your Phone Survived", I immediately guess that there'd be obligatory advertising for Apple, despite being a niche player in this market. You know what my Nokia 5800's survived? Not being the subject of a major spam campaign by the media, that's what.)
So a VCR with two tape decks then...
If that counts as virtual "rape", then the article is guilty of a crime too, as by citing it, it also depicts the crime "virtually".
Indeed. It comes across as a rather poor attempt to make the Iphones's sales look good, by comparing them to a produce that's seen as popular, but with smaller sales, yet is in a completely different market.
Let's compare the Tivo to other DVRs. And let's compare the Iphones to other phones - which sells small amounts compared to Nokia, LG, Motorola, Samsung.
I agree - and it's an insult to people who have experience such horrific crimes.
A virtual crime is a crime that happens in a virtual envirnoment - e.g., fraud. Things like harrassment can also constitute crimes, but the crime is still harrassment, and not "rape". This is nothing new - did people refer to dodgy phone callers as "virtual rapists"?
A depiction of a crime is not a virtual crime. By that logic, films show "virtual murders", and when they media report on crimes, they should also be guilty of committing virtual crimes. It is depressing to see the media and politicians conflate depictions of crimes (which should be legal), with crimes that occur in a virtual environment (which is what "virtual crime" implies).
And when the media report on virtual crimes, I guess they must be guilty of a virtual virtual crime...
I agree entirely - these are different markets, how is this comparison irrelvant? Were they just slow for today's obligitary daily Iphone mention?
One might as well say that the TiVo doesn't sell as much as Nokia, or Microsoft (both of whom have shipped far more than Apple - indeed, can we have an article on how Apple don't sell as many phones as most other phone companies, or how Macs don't sell as much as Windows PCs? Of course that would be viewed as flamebait...)
Lumping the Iphone with the Ipod also makes different sense - so the Tivo has to compete against two different families of products, not just one? Why not compare the Iphone to say, every product that Microsoft have ever released...
The comparison also makes no sense in that the Tivo is measured in terms of the number of current users, whilst figures for things like phones are usually total sales. What are the Tivo's total sales, ever?
Religions make many claims that are testable. And I still don't see why the unfalsifiable claims mean they can't be considered fraudulent.
"My Amiga 500 boots quicker and formats floppies faster than a modern Windows PC!"
Anyhow, you could run Linux on a netbook, doesn't have to be Windows. And you won't be running Mac OS X on the iStaleWhateverIt'sCalledThisWeek, either.
Everyone who has handled one says it's really fast.
Ah yes, the anonymous weasel-worded vague subjective claim about a product that isn't available.
Why don't you wait until you've used one before you go and pan its processor and RAM.
Good idea! Why don't we wait until it's released, before we start making claims about it, or indeed giving it free advertising at all?
No keyboard? Oh no. Neither does the iPhone but it doesn't stop millions of people happily getting things done on it.
Because it's a phone. The lack of keyboard means the device can be phone-sized, which is what people want in a phone. As opposed to the iBrick, which is brick sized, like a throwback to the 80s.
"What's that? You're complaining that my car I'm selling doesn't have any seats? Well, an Iphone doesn't have seats, and that still sells to a small niche in the market".
* Much higher price than phones or netbooks.
* Runs applications designed for a phone, and can't even multitask.
* Larger screen than a very small screen.
* Has a bog standard common port.
* Has bog standard years old bluetooth, that every other netbook and phone has.
* Has one application worth mentioning. One.
* Just like any netbook, where you can use with whatever 3G service you like.
* Similar size to netbooks and other tablets.
* Half the weight of a laptop that no one even remembers.
* Battery life comparable to netbooks, but far less than the ebook readers that people claim this will replace.
I can't wait to get one! I'm glad there's so much hype about it, and it's not even available! Only 100 more Slashdot stories to go until release (I wonder if it'll outdo DNF?)
Indeed. It's also interesting that one of the common defences of Apple products is "But look, Apple are making a profit", as if being ripped off is supposedly a good thing for the user...
Even the Mac mini, at $599, is faster than the average PC sold today.
Your citation please?
Anyhow, last time I checked, the Mac Mini was laptop quality, laptop prices, but with desktop portability. The worst of both worlds, and you could get far better on both with any other PC company. If the specs of the "average PC" is actually below that of the Mac Mini, then that just shows that Apple are even more out of touch with the market than I thought.
Apple's iPad is a luxury eBook reader
It isn't comparable to ebook readers, that have better displays and long battery life. (Yes, you can still read on an LCD, but by that logic, any netbook, tablet or phone is a "luxury ebook reader".)
Apple does not makes computers for most people. Apple makes luxury devices that
Indeed, they make money by selling high priced products to a niche. Annoying that the press is all over them all the time, even for a product that doesn't exist, whilst bigger companies in the market (e.g., Nokia) get ignored even when they release actual new products.
"A uses X, and B uses X, therefore A is B".
Spot the logical fallacy.
Windows uses OpenGL, Linux uses OpenGL, therefore Windows is Linux.
they are exceptionally similar
So now you're arguing that if two different operating systems look "exceptionally similar", they're the same OS?
You're right, however, that they aren't the same OS.
Exactly, so "No, they are both OS X" is incorrect.
But are *both* variants of OS X.
"OS X" and "Mac OS X" are the same thing, and refer to an OS that uses Darwin as its kernel.
Even if you did define these two different operating systems to be labelled as belonging to an "OS X" family, that's purely an artificial categorisation. I can just as easily define Windows and Linux to belong to some made up OS family. They are still different OSs.
There have been rumours of an Apple tablet for at least 5 years (as vaporware goes, it's pretty high up on the list), including that it would be a "Mac".
And, btw, iPhone OS *IS* OS X. OS X currently comes in two flavors, Mac OS X and iPhone OS.
No, they're not. They run the same kernel, which is called Darwin, not OS X. I'm not sure that pretending that Macs run a phone OS that can't even multitask is a good move, anyway.
If you want to say your phone runs MacOS, good for you, I might as well claim that my PC runs AmigaOS.
So the vaporware (remember, we're still talking about a product that isn't even released yet) went from very overpriced to overpriced.
It's more expensive than other products of that size, that will do all of what most people want (most notably, compared with netbooks, but there are other tablets too).
They get mocked, because as soon as Apple release a phone/tablet/fridge, they act as if phones/tablets/fridges are the best thing ever, and make wild claims that no one ever did these things before.
And now we get it on a product that isn't even released yet. It's the new Duke Nukem Forever in terms of hype preceding a release.
I remember seeing smartphones from around 2002 or before. And handheld PDAs existed before that - it was pretty obvious that we'd get Quake 3 after a matter of time, and that it wouldn't be long.
The reasons against flying cars are to do with laws, liability, and required training, not technology.
I'm not sure why that requires sentience? It requires more general AI (presumably this AI composer has no communication abilities), but language and communication are not beyond the realms of AI, even if they are just following a "mere algorithm", as you originally stated.
As for 4'33", I'm sure that getting computers to create fancy modern art, and then make up some pretentious reason for why it's "art", is probably much easier than most things that humans do...
Most human composers can't do that either. And furthermore, most styles that appear do so gradually, as a result of many composers, who listen to and influence each other.
Furthermore, I'd argue that "new" styles are either fusions of existing styles (e.g., progressive rock combining rock with classical and other styles), or as a result of new technology (in the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s, we all heard music that sounded "new", due to the inventions and development of electric guitar, synthesisers, samplers and computers). Historically, new genres happened far more slowly, e.g., classical music spanning centuries for example.
The question now is how a computer can compare to a single composer. Expecting it to compete with decades or centuries of the evolution of music from large numbers of composers, in a short time, is an awful lot more.
Machines can't know if something entirely new will please humans
I do agree that this is a key feature, as someone commented above - it's more interesting if a computer is able to create music that a significant number of people like. It's less interesting if it's churning out tunes, and a human is having to handpick out the good ones.
Mozart himself, however, did not have a professor directly programming his brain with an algorithm (not even an AI genetic algorithm -- the music itself was not encoded in his DNA), nor a few centuries of academic analysis of his own compositions to derive the algorithms from. He had to start from scratch, learn his own craft, find his own style, with not much more than a piano teacher and a disdain for Salieri.
Well hang on, now you're changing the goal posts - if you're saying that AI "doesn't count" because they were programmed by humans, then no AI will ever count! Even if they surpass humans in every area.
Obviously AI is originally created by humans - that's what the a means. But it is irrelevant to the question of comparing intelligence or ability.
Mozart did not start from scratch. He did not invent music. He did not create his own brain, or any of the absurd things you are expecting the AI to have done. He was born with a brain, and had experienced other people's music.
The computer has done nothing special at all. It has blindly implemented the algorithm its programmer told it to.
The brain has done nothing special at all. It has blindly just followed the laws of nature, according to the complexity and structure that built up over billions of years of evolution.
They are still just the mechanical implementations of human-derived algorithms that they always were.
Yes and? Machines are created by humans - that has nothing to do with the debate. Even when AIs are programming AIs, you'll still be here telling us how they were originally programmed by humans. No one is disputing that.
Yes, I think that was his point :)
focused on one particular instance
Sure, computers are specialised such that although there are some areas they are now better than humans, there are other areas they are way behind. No one is claiming that because a computer can beat a human at chess, it's therefore more intelligent in every respect.
But the point is also that as time goes on, more and more things are being done by computers - and people after the fact inevitably try to claim that it "doesn't count" because it's "bruteforce".
I'd say that humans have a rather unfair advantage - surely we're just bruteforcing things with our billions of neurons, compared to a computer that has to run a program on a single CPU?