Here is my brief take on the history of AI and machine learning:
First, AI ignored the brain. Then, Neural Networks took off in the 80's, and during the 90's were also the 'hot thing' in AI and machine learning. Basically, by using some 'brain-like' considerations, flexible learning systems could be built. These include perceptrons, etc. However, since then, neural networks have basically been made obsolete. Both from a theoretical and a practical standpoint, methods like support vector machines and boosting are far better than neural networks; these are the current state of the art. And they return us to the 'old AI' approach of ignoring the brain, in that they are NOT 'brain-like' in any significant way. Rather, they are natural algorithms that arise once you have a mature theory of machine learning (which, one might argue, science now has, with VC theory and later developments).
Here's my take on it: intelligence is vastly overrated. Look at what is achieved in nature without "intelligence" : natural systems are robust, durable, adaptable and complex in ways that human artifacts cannot remotely approach. It is on that "platform" that our intelligence rests. We don't even have a distant approximation. I doubt it can be short circuited, because I think we underestimate the interconnectedness of life. AI in the abstract is interesting, and these minor developments along the way are useful. But we need those other features first, I think. Far more useful than "intelligence".
So out of curiousity, when he was asked what one must do beyond knowing and following the 10 commandments in order to be admitted to heaven and he replied "One thing you still lack; sell all that you possess and distribute it to the poor", do you think he didn't mean it, or are you just not that interested in eternal life?
To answer that you have to also answer : was Jesus speaking to everyone for all enternity, or was he speaking to the people he was speaking to? Just askin'. I mean, when he said "take up thy bed and walk" does this mean that the followers of Christ should personally do that, every day? Or must we dig through all this nuance about context and translations and metaphor and stuff to get it. Although the character of Jesus as depicted in that book is way cool, it just so happens that I'm not a first century Hebrew nor am I disenfranchised enough to follow a prophet around the desert, so I doubt he was speaking to me. But I can understand many of his points in general... afaik.
I travel, and I don't always have access to a power outlet. Worse, the iPhone is designed to do things other than just being a phone, hence I will need to use it more often. So, whats with this fixed battery?
It's true, especially for such a multiuse device - for me it will replace my current phone, ipod and palm. In effect, that means approximately 1/3 the battery life. two answers - 1) I'm always charging the phone while in the car and frequently at home, so that's no big deal for me (afaik), and 2) there are quite a number of external battery solutions for ipods, from small chargers that take a 9volt to much larger Li-ion battery packs. so there are solutions to your problem. Also, one could argue that plugging in the phone to an external battery for charging while talking or just carrying around in your bag is easier (or at least less disruptive) than powering down the phone to swap the battery.
There are two main directions where search can improve. One is better understanding of natural language, to disambiguate query terms and provide results where the wording on pages is different from the wording of the query.
I'm highly skeptical about this path because NL works best in a specified (narrow) context. So if you can specify the context, then you must have already put web pages into context - driven by what? the semantic web? If you've done that, then NL is almost redundant. Like, maybe I want to search for "reaction" in the context of "chemistry" but not medicine or politics. The ability to say this particular bit of information on the web is 30% political and 70% chemistry related is the kind of thing you want to get to and where NL and AI is ultimately useful for search; contextualizing information when it is gathered (or ideally, created), not during the search process.
The other, which this approach can address, is to improve the term relevance scores and overall page quality metrics that mainstream search engines are based on. Google had its initial success because of two features of this type: one was Page Rank, a measure of overall topic-independent site popularity, and two, bettor use of anchor text, the words people write when linking to other pages.
I hope that for search, "pages" go away and what we have is more structured information. I would say that there is a lot of work being done here, but it seems to be gigantic committee style work... maybe an open source search engine can provide a straightfoward way or standard for information providers to readily adopt that will really move it along instead of simply trying to adapt to all the crud that is already out there. The engine would have a model of the information universe, like a weighted tag graph, which is editable in a wiki style, to which information authors could link in their pages, like HTML meta tags. That's a fairly simple and easy scheme to start with.
Apple locked the iTunes system to iPod and Europe is steaming and wants it to change. What about Mac OS itself. It is a Apple operating system that is LOCKED to Apple's hardware. Why isn't the EU trying to break that lock in???
the market for music and the market for operating systems are pretty different. To equate the music lock-in problem with OS/hardware would imply that I should be able to demand through the EU that Microsoft and Apple support Sun hardware, or IBM mainframes. Or that there be one application standard such that applications run under all operating systems. Or that there be one data format standard such that all word processing files (for instance) would be read and writeable in all word processing applications. I doubt that's what you really mean. Apple's computer products are Macs - not an operating system separate from the hardware. You do not buy OS X: you buy a Mac, and owners of older Macs buy newer versions of the software their Mac came with. Apple gives the OS away with the exception of the proprietary user interface. You can run Darwin on anything it will compile on, and as Apple has made abundantly clear, you can install Windows and Linux on Mac hardware. End of story.
I use the MacBook but I must say I hate being artificially forced via DRM, or any other system to prevent me (the customer) from options after I purchase a product.
And let me add that there is no DRM with OS X on Mac hardware, no licence keys. They trust that you will install it on one mac and one mac only, and they don't restrict you to a certain hardware configuration and they don't check. And they trust that if you intend to upgrade multiple computers that you will purchase a license that covers multiple computers such as the Family Pack.
Free market means a place where the strong take advantage of the weak. Rich of the poor. Employers of employees. Developed nations of less developed nations. On ever level the story is the same, and the people praising free markets are typically those that are with the strong directly benefiting. Don't believe the hype.
actually you're describing a laissez-faire or anarcho-capitalist economy which take the.gov out of the picture and allows massive wealth concentration, leading to a kind of feudalism complete with company towns, private armies, etc. We've been there, and it's bad. When the weak are under the thumb of the strong, that's obviously not a free market, hence the need for actual laws and regulation, not to mention transparency. Even Adam Smith wrote about the necessity of a strong central government to regulate the economy, something many seem to have forgotten. But back in the real world, the kinds of things we need to do are not on the level of restructuring the economy from capitalism to something else. No, the kinds of things we need to fix are inbreeding among lobbyists, pundits, politicians, and the media. The famous revolving door from government to private industry. We can't have industry lobbyists writing legislation. We can't have four corporations owning all the newspapers in the country, or one corporation owning most of the radio stations. But these problems aren't the result of "free market principles" ; they're the result of the powerful abusing their influence to protect it and acquire more. And it's not as if people seeking power is unique to capitalism. No theoretical ideas are going to stop the will to power. The system requires constant and vigilant maintenance and at the moment there's a lot of work to do.
Seems pretty obvious to me. Yahoo has a standard way of doing things. Maintaining an old non-standard alternate way of doing things is a bitch. It can clash with current security protocols. While I'm sure that Yahoo wants to market their other services, I suspect there are more pragmatic reasons for making this change.
True, and that's what users hate most about IT. standards that crush everything in their path, including the people. actual users hate an IT that pragmatically serves the interests of IT, rather than the real needs of users. Not that I have any inside info here.
I'm won't claim they were the "founders" of mashups, but what they espoused and taught was mashup technology, and they were teaching it in 1986 (that's when I attended the consortium). The more things change, the more they stay the same.
The techniques may be the same or similar. The difference is the vast amount of information and software available on the internet today, along with the power and variety of tools available on any random pc to work with it. Just about any question an individual has can be answered twenty different ways on the net, and just about anything you need to do can be found online. This is a power that individuals basically did not have before the web. So while you may have practiced the techniques you described, and they may not be "new" from a technical standpoint, the gulf between the 80s and today from this point of view is so great that they really are entirely different ways of thinking and working.
A highway tend to give people many more of the right ideas - lane sizes, packetization with small and big vechicles, one packet moving independently of the other and so on.
Yes. The highway analogy is better when considered from the scope and benefits of the project rather than information flow, though. The federal highways system united all the disparate road systems across the country, brought national standards like signs, lanes, markings, naming, maps, and of course, federal funding. It allowed you to drive around the country much more efficiently and enabled the trucking system of interstate commerce we have today. This is why it's so easy for geeks to criticize/misunderstand politicians and business people - the geek is thinking literal functional implementation details, the politician is thinking benefits and funding.
But... $500 for a 4gig and $600 for an 8gig? My MP3 collection is 13gigs. I'd have to shell out $500 and I'd *still* have to carry around my iPod. Oh, and also, I'd probably also have to switch from T-Mobile to Cingular
It is expensive. I carry the three devices - ipod, phone, palm. I think I would be totally willing to make a couple of phone-only playlists to combine these three devices...
But what if its simply not possible to make things so simple that average Joe can "just do it"?
He can do it, it's just that for him, things are changing too fast. if it would just stay stable long enough he'd get it. But he's perpetually a novice because everything always seems to be new.
Wouldn't using languages like Lisp do basically the same job?
Yes.
But it's not a practical solution for about 185 different reasons starting with the fact that very few commercial apps are written in any kind of dynamic language, let alone LISP, and they're not likely to be rewritten anytime soon for such an intangible reason as security. rpg was right that worse is better, and the last language will be C. he wrote that before java, ruby, etc., but I think it's still right. Like it or hate it.
Style is not just looks. it's sliding out of bed, lookin' awesome, smoothly puttin on your stylin' clothes, hoppin into your sports car and zooming off. In contrast, a lack of style is stumbling out of bed, not being able to find your glasses, forgetting to shave, accidentally brushing your teeth with the preparation H, burning the breakfast, and sighing as you get into the minivan with the broken muffler. Yeah, they both get the job done. One of them sucks though.
Might I recommend the book Mac OS X for Unix Geeks. Try the System Overview at Apple (that doc is a PDF so I linked to the search results instead). And check out Darwin guides.
You sure wasted a lot of time writing that. I've been using a mac since 1987, X off and on since 1991. Integrating X Windows apps into your mac workflow is about as good as it can get, which is to say, it still sucks deeply when compared to using j.random mac application. End of story. no offence, but your opinion of OS X keyboard equivalents or window management is irrelevant.
Heaven forbid any parent is responsible for what their child does anymore; no, it's clearly because of games.
parents' and kids' social situations need to be included. True. My two-parent, well-off suburban kids don't have problem profiles; but the kids who do simply don't have the parental supervision. So "better parenting" as an answer to the problem is pretty much irrelevant. So then what? What are we going to do, legislate better parenting? How about educating people about the effects of video games on humans? Hmm, maybe we should do studies . . .
the roll-up "indestructable keyboard" comes to mind. I think there is also a mouse made the same way. Something like it could be easily sterilized nightly, and maybe with a UV light on it during the day it could stay put. Or maybe they need regular disposable keyboard/mouse subscriptions. There's something humorous about tossing the keyboard in the biohazard disposal bin.
So now I'm waiting for the perfect combination iPod-friendliness + ogg support.
Not gonna happen. But answer me this: in this age of cheap storage, why not keep your stuff in ogg format, but get that ipod and convert everything you want to put on the ipod into mp3? just for the purpose of listening to it on the player? So you're not actually listening to ogg on the ipod: big deal. you get to keep the ogg, and apple doesn't add drm to files you create.
I actually think the German system is safer. There are a lot more rules to learn(but the drivers ed requirements are also a lot more stringent) but everything is very cut and dry once you learn them. There is no "yielding the right of way", either you have it or you don't. Unlike say in Pennsylvania where the law actually states that "nobody has the right away".
Do you live in PA? it's an obligation to yield rather than the right of way. Sounds Quakerish, doesn't it? well suited to all the one lane bridges and tunnels, and one-and-a-half lane roads winding through the woods that pass for main commuter routes around here.
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the market for music and the market for operating systems are pretty different. To equate the music lock-in problem with OS/hardware would imply that I should be able to demand through the EU that Microsoft and Apple support Sun hardware, or IBM mainframes. Or that there be one application standard such that applications run under all operating systems. Or that there be one data format standard such that all word processing files (for instance) would be read and writeable in all word processing applications. I doubt that's what you really mean. Apple's computer products are Macs - not an operating system separate from the hardware. You do not buy OS X: you buy a Mac, and owners of older Macs buy newer versions of the software their Mac came with. Apple gives the OS away with the exception of the proprietary user interface. You can run Darwin on anything it will compile on, and as Apple has made abundantly clear, you can install Windows and Linux on Mac hardware. End of story.
And let me add that there is no DRM with OS X on Mac hardware, no licence keys. They trust that you will install it on one mac and one mac only, and they don't restrict you to a certain hardware configuration and they don't check. And they trust that if you intend to upgrade multiple computers that you will purchase a license that covers multiple computers such as the Family Pack.
Yes.
But it's not a practical solution for about 185 different reasons starting with the fact that very few commercial apps are written in any kind of dynamic language, let alone LISP, and they're not likely to be rewritten anytime soon for such an intangible reason as security. rpg was right that worse is better, and the last language will be C. he wrote that before java, ruby, etc., but I think it's still right. Like it or hate it.
Style is not just looks. it's sliding out of bed, lookin' awesome, smoothly puttin on your stylin' clothes, hoppin into your sports car and zooming off. In contrast, a lack of style is stumbling out of bed, not being able to find your glasses, forgetting to shave, accidentally brushing your teeth with the preparation H, burning the breakfast, and sighing as you get into the minivan with the broken muffler. Yeah, they both get the job done. One of them sucks though.
Might I recommend the book Mac OS X for Unix Geeks. Try the System Overview at Apple (that doc is a PDF so I linked to the search results instead). And check out Darwin guides.
I saw headplay at DEMOfall 2006. it does 1024x768. Don't think it's ready yet tho.
You sure wasted a lot of time writing that. I've been using a mac since 1987, X off and on since 1991. Integrating X Windows apps into your mac workflow is about as good as it can get, which is to say, it still sucks deeply when compared to using j.random mac application. End of story. no offence, but your opinion of OS X keyboard equivalents or window management is irrelevant.
the roll-up "indestructable keyboard" comes to mind. I think there is also a mouse made the same way. Something like it could be easily sterilized nightly, and maybe with a UV light on it during the day it could stay put. Or maybe they need regular disposable keyboard/mouse subscriptions. There's something humorous about tossing the keyboard in the biohazard disposal bin.
xroach comes to mind...