Yes, the Swopper rocks. totally. Absolutely awesome for your back, and really fun. I actually discovered long ago that I cannot work while leaning back - my mind just wanders. I could never work in bed, for instance. I always have to lean forward or sit straight up in order to concentrate. Previously I sat on one of those knee chairs for years.
The scientists have not produced a viable AI so far, because they focus on the brain rather than on the mind. Brain function is poorly understood, as brain scientists often admit, and hence, there's no way to deduct an AI from brain function. The right thing to do would be to focus on abstract things, namely the human mind itself, as it is understood by psychology, perhaps.
AI researchers originally focused not on the brain but on mathematical, logical reductionist abstract reasoning. It totally and utterly fails to do anything outside a very specific, narrow problem domain.
Even spirtuality can help. If god existed, how would s/he think? What would a ghost be like? What is the soul? What does our soul feel? These things are those that are the key to artificial intelligence. Not functional elements of a device we don't fully understand.
Those are good questions but they are not useful. Philosophers have pondered these for thousands of years but have failed to produce an AI. The set of possible answers to them won't help you create a system that can make logical deductions or be creative. Consider that we humans build dumb and dead things that can only fall apart, whereas in nature things are the total opposite: they grow, regenerate, and reproduce: they're alive. We humans do not have the knowledge, skill or capacity to replicate even the simplest form of life in nature. And yet our "intelligence" emerged from or rests upon a deeply complex living natural system. What evidence suggests that we can simulate or duplicate or produce an abstract black-box equivalent to it? And we have only one example of "intelligence" : us. What evidence suggests that our intelligence could have been created "in the void" so to speak, without the whole evolutionary history of the Earth? Nothing. We're inextricably linked to it. So it's pretty damn unlikely in my opinion that artificial intelligence will exist without artificial life, even an artificial, complex ecosystem. The properties of living things in general are a far more useful example for us to follow and try to copy for the things we make - and anyway I think a prerequisite for intelligence.
You can reverse engineer anything. Whether it has a well-thought out design or not, its functions can be analyzed and documented and re-implemented and/or tweaked. If anything, the timetable may be in question, but not the question of whether or not it can be done. I have no doubt it can be done, it's just a matter of how long it'll take given the right resources, the right talent, the right technology, and the right knowledge.
Well, I would have to agree, but point out how early we are in the process. In nature we can predict some stuff and mathematically model some relationships. We suspect we understand the simple aspects of nature. But we can't duplicate it. We think people are a lot more complex than ants, for instance, but we cannot make an ant in the way we make anything else. Or simple vegetable matter that has no brain function. Or even the most inconsequential bacteria. The complexity of the simplest natural objects is well beyond our capacity to create, because they're alive. We create dumb things, static things that degrade over time, whereas natural things are alive and grow and change over time, and of course, self-replicate. Human intelligence is overrated as an object of study in nature, as something to try to duplicate; far better to study how individual things grow and change over time and interact in their environment and try to incorporate those processes in our artifacts, even if just in software. I conclude that artificial life is the prerequisite to artificial intelligence.
Granted, I'm just an idiot posting on slashdot, and not an inventor or neuroscientist, but I still think I'm right on this.
Which brings us back to why so many prefer old-fashioned IBM keyboards.;-)
The sound makes it seem like you're getting more work done; they're harder to break, and breaking a keyboard is embarrassing unless you do it from sleeping on the keys too much; they last a really, really long time and who doesn't want to see the numbers wear off, like your karate blackbelt fraying to white. Also with all these curvy keyboards coming out with "multimedia" keys and other luser bullshit, a model M says: oldschool 101. I hear they come packaged with wide striped clip-on ties.
You should look at the Apple bluetooth wireless keyboard. It trims out the numeric keypad, is high quality, looks great, and the feel of the keys is a dream (though not the loud clicky feel this article is talking about).
Actually I'm using one as we type. It's great and I love it. I use it for writing text and stuff - I use several keyboards for different purposes. My HHK is for serious coding sessions - I note that it hasn't been used much lately:-( I also use some kind of generic full keyboard, and also have an older full sized mac bluetooth keyboard. I guess I like my keyboards.
I have to disagree. I have a black Das Keyboard (you know, the one without markings). The numeric keyboard is a life-saver (somehow it's just not possible to touch-type the numbers above the keyboard)...
I think that's funny. I love the idea of das keyboard, but I think it would be better if it had embossed braille.
I see you've never had to enter a long series of numbers into a database. Entering numbers from the number row above the letters is slow, cumbersome, and error-prone.
I have several keyboards for different purposes, actually. In general I just can't stand reaching halfway across the room for the mouse.
Why should it matter to some poor kid, just needing a way to afford schoolbooks, what OS his laptop is running?
How very neocolonialist of you.
This is the same as the question: why do poor farmers care who owns the patents for their seeds? As long as farmers are good obey copyright law, they don't have to worry about being crushed like a bug. Now: when in the world have dirt-poor kids been at risk of accidentally violating copyright law by inspecting an educational instrument that they have been given ? Never before. Let's keep it that way. They might learn something by opening it up and modifying it to suit. Who knows where that could lead. after all, the computer is a useful tool and nobody knows where or how it will really end up being used. With the freedom to inspect and modify, it will be far more useful: it is not a mere book.
'm shocked to discover that Knuth is taking an opportunity to push literate programming, given that he's been pushing literate programming at every opportunity for at least 25 years.
I didn't notice him "pushing" literate programming. I don't think the submitter really read the interview very well, in fact, and misread most of what Knuth actually said. Did you read the same article I did? He simply answered the questions. First, in answer to the question about why hasn't literate programming become popular, he said:
Literate programming is a very personal thing. I think it's terrific, but that might well be because I'm a very strange person.
But then he said basically, but he thinks it rocks and works for him very well. Then:
Jon Bentley probably hit the nail on the head when he once was asked why literate programming hasn't taken the whole world by storm. He observed that a small percentage of the world's population is good at programming, and a small percentage is good at writing; apparently I am asking everybody to be in both subsets.
Ok so far we have 1) it's probably personal and I'm strange; 2) but it works for me; 3) literate programming requires a very weird person.. But, finally we get:
But I don't believe in forcing ideas on anybody. If literate programming isn't your style, please forget it and do what you like. If nobody likes it but me, let it die.
How in the hell does this count as pushing literate programming? I don't mean to sound like I'm flaming you here, but seriously. Reread it without being influenced by the awful description by the submitter. Nowhere did I see Don "rip" on anything.
I find the LOTR characters "shallow" and undeveloped.
That is because they are.
I understand that LOTR is immensely popular--I just found the books bordering on boring (which is a shame, I really wanted to like them).
I must have read LOTR at exactly the right point in time - when I was 33 or so - and it was as great a reading experience as I've ever had. Even though all the negatives people point out about the books, er most of them, I agree with. The biggest problem I have with it is that it is written in the style of old epics, in which the victors are as gods and the bad guys are as demons (literally, in this case, right?) The men of the West, you know, are tall, wise, serious, and of pure bloodlines. Lesser men are of impure blood - shorter, slant-eyed southerners, swarthy, etc. It is absurd. It is not even fantasy, when I look at it from this point of view. It's ridiculous retro epicpunk.
But I love it still. I like the fact that some mysterious things aren't explained, like that Tom Bombadil guy (I haven't read any of the backstories, and don't really intend to). I like the fact that when walking through the barrow downs Tom paused as if he remembered something sad about the ruins there. 'Cause he was there, he said, even before those long-gone warring kingdoms that were there. There are enough details there to wonder about, with an interesting setup and environment, and I suppose I like to think about what it could be.
But then there is the perpetual question of how much your time is worth. It is well known that Apple has one of the best customer service departments in any industry, while many think Lenovo sucks. Think about why that might be - think how low the margins are on PC hardware. These manufacturers can't afford customer service, while Apple, being the outlier, can't afford not to have great service.
They can heavily encourage updates, but forcing? No, they can't.
Oh please. Their file formats do that for them. You don't have to read that word doc someone emailed you, after all, created by the new version of Office you don't have yet. But it's true, their hold on that is fading. But if they get their groove back, though...
Oh, right - it's harder for force upgrades like that.
troll modded? There must be at least a few people who think MS doesn't force upgrades. Apparently one of them had mod points at the time. Now that's a coincidence.
I looked around, and the Nuvo essentia system looks like it would allow pretty good house audio for $4-5k. Not cheap, but not really insane either - a lot of that is getting 6 sets of decent speakers.
I think I have just barely decent speakers. But then, I'd rather have super quality headphones than super quality house speakers (except in a home theater). Life in my house is just too noisy for me to care all that much, especially outside. I'm no audiophile, as anyone could tell by my ipod comment...
I guess you missed the part (mentioned throughout the GP's comment) about playing/searching the 2 million+ tracks from a subscription music service. The GP mentioned that playing from just a personal library is not enough.
Well I do have a computer with audio out to an amp, so I could subscribe to a service. The important thing here is that the amp goes to an analog speaker selector not terribly unlike this which goes to a lot of speakers wired throughout the house (ceiling speakers). In my case, I don't need or want separate audio sources for different rooms, so I can get away with this. Wouldn't I need a separate amplifier for each set of speakers otherwise, if I wanted independent music streams to different rooms?
So a little more expensive than your solution, but a hell of a lot more functionality. Oh and it's all open source.
Yes, the additional functionality I'd get would be a centralized music repository. I'm not ready to run a server or a NAS at my house though. When I am, the slim devices thing is definitely the way I'd go. But still, consider the cost of the two end points and one server, the UPS, the backups, etc. Is it our fate to run a datacenter in our house just to manage music and movies (and photos)? Save me, seriously. Plus you still have to wander around to manually power on your amps. I'm all over the slimserver and the squeezebox in principle, but I just can't justify it yet. Till then, it's an old ipod or three.
I have music throughout my house. . Lots of ceiling speakers indoors, and six outdoor speakers as well. Two amps - one run via iPod, one connected to a computer. It's wired up the good old fashioned analog way. But I suppose you mean and with the ability for any room to have its own different audio. That is still very expensive. And the fact is, I think it is absurd because it just cannot be cost justified versus a bunch of second-hand iPods each sync'd to a common computer. Ok, maybe you have a terabyte of music: well, then, have a few iPods. While I'd love to splurge on some fantastic super automated remote control solution, the bunch-of-ipods solution is still by far cheaper. It's easy and reliable to sync an iPod. Plus you don't need a media server running 24/7 when that one time you really, really need to access it, the network is down or it's crashed. You know it.
At times they've been very slow to respond to new technologies they did not invent (prior to OS X, their OS was a dinosaur only the dedicated could love).
Surely you know they were trying to replace the OS for years. The rewrite failed. So they bought NeXT. They'd had a Unix offering in the form of A/UX since '88, as did Microsoft with xenix which became SCO unix. Nobody was just sitting on their hands in this area in the 90s.
As for proprietary technology - sure, except for SCSI. And USB. and the PPC, the x86, PCI, FireWire, VGA, DVI, PCMCIA, PostScript, PDF, expresscard, SATA. Oh that's right, and that whole open source OS thing. X windows. cdrom. Apache, PHP, Python, Perl, unicode, zfs, webkit.
OMG, so proprietary. And so slow with that USB move in 1998, PostScript and SCSI in the 80s. Oh and that whole WIMP thing from xerox.
With all this proprietariness, I feel lucky to be using a QWERTY keyboard layout on my mac. At least Lord Steve allowed us to have arrow keys added to the 512k mac keyboard, but you know, I would have been happy without them because what apple says is the word and the law.:-P
If we drop Microsoft and flock to Apple, we have stopped worshipping one devil just for another.
perhaps, but at least the Apple devil has taste and design skills and they care about all the little details. May I offer apple-crushing advice to microsoft? 1. give real designers real power, 2. replace windows with the linux kernel.
That being said, I can't imagine paying for a keyboard with the LED picture keys. That makes no sense at all to me. To get any kind of speed out of typing, you have to NOT look at the keys, not be forever distracted by the "Ooooooo shiny!" keys.
Others have pointed this out, but it bears repeating when you claim it makes NO SENSE to you. It would be terribly useful for the Optimus to display key icons for apps that have many key equivalents, like for instance Final Cut, After Effects, etc. What's interesting is that although the pros (that I know) fly on their keyboards, they all want custom keyboards for their main app (like this and these). While I would never put key caps for, say, vi, I can see it for video editing. It would be nice to highlight certain key combos in different modes, and change as modifier keys are pushed.
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Yes, the Swopper rocks. totally. Absolutely awesome for your back, and really fun. I actually discovered long ago that I cannot work while leaning back - my mind just wanders. I could never work in bed, for instance. I always have to lean forward or sit straight up in order to concentrate. Previously I sat on one of those knee chairs for years.
Cut off the numeric keypad and we'll talk. Till then, I can live with my happy hacker ..
I didn't notice him "pushing" literate programming. I don't think the submitter really read the interview very well, in fact, and misread most of what Knuth actually said. Did you read the same article I did? He simply answered the questions. First, in answer to the question about why hasn't literate programming become popular, he said:
But then he said basically, but he thinks it rocks and works for him very well. Then:
Ok so far we have 1) it's probably personal and I'm strange; 2) but it works for me; 3) literate programming requires a very weird person.. But, finally we get:
How in the hell does this count as pushing literate programming? I don't mean to sound like I'm flaming you here, but seriously. Reread it without being influenced by the awful description by the submitter. Nowhere did I see Don "rip" on anything.
That is because they are.
I must have read LOTR at exactly the right point in time - when I was 33 or so - and it was as great a reading experience as I've ever had. Even though all the negatives people point out about the books, er most of them, I agree with. The biggest problem I have with it is that it is written in the style of old epics, in which the victors are as gods and the bad guys are as demons (literally, in this case, right?) The men of the West, you know, are tall, wise, serious, and of pure bloodlines. Lesser men are of impure blood - shorter, slant-eyed southerners, swarthy, etc. It is absurd. It is not even fantasy, when I look at it from this point of view. It's ridiculous retro epicpunk.
But I love it still. I like the fact that some mysterious things aren't explained, like that Tom Bombadil guy (I haven't read any of the backstories, and don't really intend to). I like the fact that when walking through the barrow downs Tom paused as if he remembered something sad about the ruins there. 'Cause he was there, he said, even before those long-gone warring kingdoms that were there. There are enough details there to wonder about, with an interesting setup and environment, and I suppose I like to think about what it could be.
But then there is the perpetual question of how much your time is worth. It is well known that Apple has one of the best customer service departments in any industry, while many think Lenovo sucks. Think about why that might be - think how low the margins are on PC hardware. These manufacturers can't afford customer service, while Apple, being the outlier, can't afford not to have great service.
I have music throughout my house. . Lots of ceiling speakers indoors, and six outdoor speakers as well. Two amps - one run via iPod, one connected to a computer. It's wired up the good old fashioned analog way. But I suppose you mean and with the ability for any room to have its own different audio. That is still very expensive. And the fact is, I think it is absurd because it just cannot be cost justified versus a bunch of second-hand iPods each sync'd to a common computer. Ok, maybe you have a terabyte of music: well, then, have a few iPods. While I'd love to splurge on some fantastic super automated remote control solution, the bunch-of-ipods solution is still by far cheaper. It's easy and reliable to sync an iPod. Plus you don't need a media server running 24/7 when that one time you really, really need to access it, the network is down or it's crashed. You know it.
Someone should tell these people it's cheaper to take the cube apart and reassemble it correctly.
Surely you know they were trying to replace the OS for years. The rewrite failed. So they bought NeXT. They'd had a Unix offering in the form of A/UX since '88, as did Microsoft with xenix which became SCO unix. Nobody was just sitting on their hands in this area in the 90s.
As for proprietary technology - sure, except for SCSI. And USB. and the PPC, the x86, PCI, FireWire, VGA, DVI, PCMCIA, PostScript, PDF, expresscard, SATA. Oh that's right, and that whole open source OS thing. X windows. cdrom. Apache, PHP, Python, Perl, unicode, zfs, webkit.
OMG, so proprietary. And so slow with that USB move in 1998, PostScript and SCSI in the 80s. Oh and that whole WIMP thing from xerox. With all this proprietariness, I feel lucky to be using a QWERTY keyboard layout on my mac. At least Lord Steve allowed us to have arrow keys added to the 512k mac keyboard, but you know, I would have been happy without them because what apple says is the word and the law. :-P
perhaps, but at least the Apple devil has taste and design skills and they care about all the little details. May I offer apple-crushing advice to microsoft? 1. give real designers real power, 2. replace windows with the linux kernel.See this. It's pretty damn good.