well, at least it does tabs. and you could use "screen" to split the terminal window if you really need to, but it won't replicate Tiger's split-window feature exactly.
There are some things in nature, that gradual evolution over vast amounts of time cannot deal with.
Truly, there are mysteries left in the world. However, our inability to wrap our brains around the time scales involved and the difficulty or impossibility of reverse engineering complex systems is not evidence against them.
I've been in the business for more than a couple decades now, and what I see is the same old problem:Interpretive languages vs Compiled or assembly languages.
What's not the same old problem is that we're living in a time of code abundance. Google and you can instantly find tons of code that pretty much almost does whatever you need, ready for you to copy and paste and beat into shape. This is really a game changer. The young kids are good at finding stuff online, and are oriented toward finding lots of variations of the same thing, and pulling things together from many different sources. a major skill in the future of programming is exactly what is decried in the article - rummaging and cobbling together a solution. However, I don't think you can or should teach that in school because it can't be framed in an academic way; it's a purely practical skill in an ever-changing environment. What you can teach, however, are things like code archaeology - how the hell do you dissect a huge, opaque code base? how do you visualize it, analyze it. That is something that really matters now.
Without a leap in the science of Intelligence/Consciousness, it would then be something like the field of Alchemy in the old days.
20th century AI will be seen as a alchemy, through and through, of that I have no doubt.
So my question is how do you set stuff up so that it automatically starts modelling and predicting what it observes (including self observations)?;)
I think we're so far from that. intelligence, imho, is vastly overrated. Nature does things without "intelligence" that we cannot even approximate in the things we build. Like trees growing from seeds - the complexity of that process is beyond anything we do. Our human intelligence rests on this foundation - a platform that we completely fail to grasp and cannot replicate in any way, shape or form, ever, in any context. we're focusing on the wrong thing. we need to grasp the method of nature, not its product. From this perspective, AI seems like trying to build starships with stone age tools. Even if we understood the concepts and knew the answers, we have no ability to make it. Maybe in a thousand years.
It makes me wonder how advanced modern digital audio is compared to special effects.
You don't need to wonder at all. CGI movies are voiced by human actors. I doubt you can voice them by synthetic actors, or add synthetic voices to live action movies. I guess there's no audio equivalent to stick figures.
I'll bet one of the reasons they're putting it out there is the hope that a few kind souls with some time on their hands will submit some patches and work out the kinks
I bought my new apple wireless keyboard exactly for the reason that it lacks the numeric keypad. I switch between this and a happy hacker lite 2 depending on how stressful my work will be. I just don't like the battleship sized keyboards, I guess.
Man, I've been using vi since 1990. I dig it. But there is no way that anything like vi is going to replace my modern editor for creative writing. Writeroom wraps apple's text editing object with a fullscreen GUI. Frankly, I'm glad that other wheels have been invented since the big fricking stone wheel that is vi, useful as it is for crushing grain when you make your own bread with the wheat you grow in your fields, being the Herculean DIYer that I know you must be. Incidentally, the Apple text edit object is a handmedown from NeXT and natively supports emacs key bindings, and therefore, like writeroom, so do all cocoa text fields. I'm using it right now through Safari. hahahahaha.
All hardware used to be "open". The idea of closed hardware is what is new, and the well known analogy is that of car hoods being locked by the manufacturer; nobody would accept that even if we're not all competent mechanics.
Your argument that ANYONE (your word) can modify a device that uses electricity is, for the majority of the population, an argument against, not for, openness.
Better to ban electricity itself because you never know who might try to mod a lamp by cutting the cord with scissors while the lamp is plugged in.
jackson did an excellent job creating the world of lotr, but he fails utterly to understand the nobility in the books.
Yes, yes... but the "nobility" in the LOTR comes off as so much history-written-by-the-victors bullshit. So it's written in the style of an ancient legend, and the good guys are as gods and the bad guys are demonized.... literally. Evil is evil because it is evil. Good is good because it is tall, pure, true and of an ancient noble race with undiluted blood, etc, like the Men of the West. I love LOTR but that aspect makes me laugh. I think that's because I had to explain all this to my daughter as I read it to her.
I agree that the Hobbit ought to be a lot better though. I hope as additions we get the battle of Moria, Balin & co. returning to reclaim it, and Gandalf and the white council's fight with the Necromancer.
The third reason, only now becoming relevant, is the move to HDTV as opposed to SD. Video over firewire is typically encoded as a DV stream, and that is Standard Definition only.
You don't know what you're talking about. Every single professional HD camera supports firewire.
Until the next great advance in OS technology, the kernel, the core OS is a solved problem by modern standards. Microsoft should build windows around the linux kernel and be done with it. they could refocus their huge resources toward all the great stuff they have cut out in the past. Even the massive wealth of Microsoft can barely compete with their proprietary system against open source developers. Why waste so much time on security issues when the answer is just there for the taking? Of course, they will never do it without a massive shakeup. it's just too threatening. This is their downfall, eventually, at least insofar as platform domination goes. they still have shifting proprietary file formats and forced upgrades, though, at least. what a business.
As with most automated technologies it will make some mistakes, but less than a human on average. The friendly fire rate for most militaries is no where near perfect.
Well, in this case, the robot has to do things that humans are way, way better at, like identifying targets and deciding whether to open fire on them or not. I can't see how a computer will ever be better at that than a human, at least when the targets are human scale, except in the boundary case of kill them all.
So, WTF is wrong with giving people what they want, in the format they want it, at a price they're willing to pay? That a few pretentious clowns lose their status as arbiters of "art"? And what makes them authorities?
a classic rock act enters the digital age by selling ringtones? Whatever it is they're selling, it's not music. - it's more like nostalgia. Nothing is wrong with that, except that they're no longer artists.
Under a series of new agreements expected to be announced today, the band will make its songs available first as ringtones and similar mobile features starting this week in an exclusive deal with Verizon Wireless.
WTF? This to me says one of two things: either they don't care about the artistic integrity of their music at all, or they don't understand or don't have any respect for digital distribution, digital music players. I'm going with the former, as the latter has big $$$ attached now, apparently. mp3 players already devalue music generally, but nothing kills integrity like ringtones. Especially stairway to heaven ringtones. OMFG. kill me now.
What I love the most about the OLPC is the key that lets you show the source code (in python!) of the app in use. Which you can modify. and if you mess it up, revert. I'm astonished to see this concept from smalltalk and Alan Kay live on. It couldn't be a better idea. We were having a discussion in a strategy session at my daughters' small montessori school (which goes thru 6th grade), where we were bemoaning the lack of imaginative uses of technology in the classrooms. Beyond a student-produced newsletter and using word processors to write reports... nothing. Nobody seems to know what to do. But the OLPC is taking the lead in saying kids can and should be allowed to do so much more - the mere fact that here you are given a facility to modify your complex tools should be revolutionary.
Ok, first: he writes as if all choices are equivalent. One jam might as well be the same as another, they just differ by taste. It's not like I walk into the store already invested raspberries. It's not as if Java programmers are going to decide that the Fortran parallel library is better, so why not just switch to Fortran.
Second, I doubt explicit parallel programming is going to be mainstream anytime soon. No, make that ever. Ever! Parallel programming will only happen in the mainstream when it is handled implicitly by the language, like a dataflow language. Asking normal programmers to deal with parallel programming is trouble when basic logic eludes most of them.
Third, all you people, including the author of TFA, who think that more than one or two standards is bad thing ("the great thing about standards is there are so many to choose from!") it's time to wake up: the world is not about to consolidate. The future is going to require C3PO and R2D2: there will be so many fricking languages and standards that your translator is going to require AI and legs to come along with you. For every one thing that fades away, eventually, probably 10 or 100 replace it. The future is a big mess.
I am sure, though, if this was Microsoft, you'd be lambasting them for it. Yet, it's OK because it's Apple. Apple is hip and cool, so whatever they do is justified.
Right. but... What's with the Apple/Microsoft comparisons? You think this somehow exposes a hidden hypocrisy or bias among slashdot readers, that they somehow disapprove of the convicted monopolist in favor of the upstart who has achieved some recent market success? Good lord. You know what? We all expect that if Apple continues on this path that it will one day, maybe in 15 years, be on the level of Microsoft. But it is not there yet. Not even close. Not even a little bit. It's not in the same universe, galaxy, solar system or ball park. The iPhone is cool, but it's not as if Apple has a stranglehold on the cell phone market. It's not as if Apple is breaking the kneecaps of hardware manufacturers if they don't include iPhone OS.
The bigger Apple gets, the more we need to see the roadmap, which I think is part of the problem. They release this super awesome device, but with a limitation that people don't understand. If only we know why.
Having really good interfaces may save lives, but it will also make it easier for troops to take lives, and that's what I think some developers at Apple would have problems with
I agree
However, it is applicable to military intelligence which is used to track people down and kill them which I don't want to have anything to do with. Sure it might save the lives of a few US soldiers, but I'm more worried about the innocent civilians that are in the same building with the target. Soldiers have signed up to fight and possibly dye, however in modern warfare it's civilians who seem to do much of the dying.
Generally, I agree. Don't do something that is against your principles. I have a similar discussion with a doctor friend of mine - do military doctors "support" the war effort? or merely clean up after it. But from a technology standpoint, it's not the technology that is responsible for death and destruction. It's the leader who takes us to war. As I said in a different post, we don't need much in the way of technology to kill with great cruelty and in vast quantities. We have way more technology than we need to fight and kill; technology doesn't make it easier for us to kill. Why not drop daisycutters on civilian neighborhoods, plant nuclear landmines, spray flamethrowers, use the various gases and chemical lasers? We could if we wanted. But we don't. This is a silly thread, anyway, regarding whether Apple should lend user interface help for the battlefield equivalent of google maps.
What is the purpose of your comment? We don't need technology to be vicious. And our worst weapons of all are never used. The flame thrower, for instance, has been retired, because it is too scary and evil, even if that is just for PR purposes. Peace in Iraq would be easy if we rolled back our moral standards to those of the ancients. Ancient generals might cut off the right hand of every male, kill all the babies, etc. Nuclear weapons would be a straightforward solution if we were interested in just killing; we could threaten to nuke Mecca. But you know, we don't. We can't. We have power... and at the end of the day, we're afraid of the power we have, as we should be. Fear the people who aren't.
As much as I want to agree with that sentiment, being anti-war, it should be obvious that it isn't about killing. It's about not getting killed, not killing the wrong people, and getting to our troops that need assistance. The more information and the more communication the better -- always. The fact that we're in Iraq is a reality. We're there and no matter what you want and no matter what you think is right, we're still there. Anything that saves American lives is good with me, even if I think we shouldn't be there and I want us to get out. Getting out is going to suck and I'm sure we'll need all the communication and positioning we can afford when we do it.
Slashdot Mirror
well, at least it does tabs. and you could use "screen" to split the terminal window if you really need to, but it won't replicate Tiger's split-window feature exactly.
ahh, yes, the only game that ever game me nightmares, when the SS burst through into a room (after some poor sod was shot)
kids these days.
20th century AI will be seen as a alchemy, through and through, of that I have no doubt.
I think we're so far from that. intelligence, imho, is vastly overrated. Nature does things without "intelligence" that we cannot even approximate in the things we build. Like trees growing from seeds - the complexity of that process is beyond anything we do. Our human intelligence rests on this foundation - a platform that we completely fail to grasp and cannot replicate in any way, shape or form, ever, in any context. we're focusing on the wrong thing. we need to grasp the method of nature, not its product. From this perspective, AI seems like trying to build starships with stone age tools. Even if we understood the concepts and knew the answers, we have no ability to make it. Maybe in a thousand years.
well the 12inch powerbook, 2400c and duo fans can finally upgrade.
I bought my new apple wireless keyboard exactly for the reason that it lacks the numeric keypad. I switch between this and a happy hacker lite 2 depending on how stressful my work will be. I just don't like the battleship sized keyboards, I guess.
Man, I've been using vi since 1990. I dig it. But there is no way that anything like vi is going to replace my modern editor for creative writing. Writeroom wraps apple's text editing object with a fullscreen GUI. Frankly, I'm glad that other wheels have been invented since the big fricking stone wheel that is vi, useful as it is for crushing grain when you make your own bread with the wheat you grow in your fields, being the Herculean DIYer that I know you must be. Incidentally, the Apple text edit object is a handmedown from NeXT and natively supports emacs key bindings, and therefore, like writeroom, so do all cocoa text fields. I'm using it right now through Safari. hahahahaha.
Yes, yes... but the "nobility" in the LOTR comes off as so much history-written-by-the-victors bullshit. So it's written in the style of an ancient legend, and the good guys are as gods and the bad guys are demonized.... literally. Evil is evil because it is evil. Good is good because it is tall, pure, true and of an ancient noble race with undiluted blood, etc, like the Men of the West. I love LOTR but that aspect makes me laugh. I think that's because I had to explain all this to my daughter as I read it to her.
I agree that the Hobbit ought to be a lot better though. I hope as additions we get the battle of Moria, Balin & co. returning to reclaim it, and Gandalf and the white council's fight with the Necromancer.
Until the next great advance in OS technology, the kernel, the core OS is a solved problem by modern standards. Microsoft should build windows around the linux kernel and be done with it. they could refocus their huge resources toward all the great stuff they have cut out in the past. Even the massive wealth of Microsoft can barely compete with their proprietary system against open source developers. Why waste so much time on security issues when the answer is just there for the taking? Of course, they will never do it without a massive shakeup. it's just too threatening. This is their downfall, eventually, at least insofar as platform domination goes. they still have shifting proprietary file formats and forced upgrades, though, at least. what a business.
What I love the most about the OLPC is the key that lets you show the source code (in python!) of the app in use. Which you can modify. and if you mess it up, revert. I'm astonished to see this concept from smalltalk and Alan Kay live on. It couldn't be a better idea. We were having a discussion in a strategy session at my daughters' small montessori school (which goes thru 6th grade), where we were bemoaning the lack of imaginative uses of technology in the classrooms. Beyond a student-produced newsletter and using word processors to write reports... nothing. Nobody seems to know what to do. But the OLPC is taking the lead in saying kids can and should be allowed to do so much more - the mere fact that here you are given a facility to modify your complex tools should be revolutionary.
and I say that as an atheist.
Ok, first: he writes as if all choices are equivalent. One jam might as well be the same as another, they just differ by taste. It's not like I walk into the store already invested raspberries. It's not as if Java programmers are going to decide that the Fortran parallel library is better, so why not just switch to Fortran.
Second, I doubt explicit parallel programming is going to be mainstream anytime soon. No, make that ever. Ever! Parallel programming will only happen in the mainstream when it is handled implicitly by the language, like a dataflow language. Asking normal programmers to deal with parallel programming is trouble when basic logic eludes most of them.
Third, all you people, including the author of TFA, who think that more than one or two standards is bad thing ("the great thing about standards is there are so many to choose from!") it's time to wake up: the world is not about to consolidate. The future is going to require C3PO and R2D2: there will be so many fricking languages and standards that your translator is going to require AI and legs to come along with you. For every one thing that fades away, eventually, probably 10 or 100 replace it. The future is a big mess.
The bigger Apple gets, the more we need to see the roadmap, which I think is part of the problem. They release this super awesome device, but with a limitation that people don't understand. If only we know why.
What is the purpose of your comment? We don't need technology to be vicious. And our worst weapons of all are never used. The flame thrower, for instance, has been retired, because it is too scary and evil, even if that is just for PR purposes. Peace in Iraq would be easy if we rolled back our moral standards to those of the ancients. Ancient generals might cut off the right hand of every male, kill all the babies, etc. Nuclear weapons would be a straightforward solution if we were interested in just killing; we could threaten to nuke Mecca. But you know, we don't. We can't. We have power... and at the end of the day, we're afraid of the power we have, as we should be. Fear the people who aren't.
As much as I want to agree with that sentiment, being anti-war, it should be obvious that it isn't about killing. It's about not getting killed, not killing the wrong people, and getting to our troops that need assistance. The more information and the more communication the better -- always. The fact that we're in Iraq is a reality. We're there and no matter what you want and no matter what you think is right, we're still there. Anything that saves American lives is good with me, even if I think we shouldn't be there and I want us to get out. Getting out is going to suck and I'm sure we'll need all the communication and positioning we can afford when we do it.