I don't know who wrote TrueType but MS using FreeType must burn them up. I know it would tick me off.
Well, I guess it's the Apple software team that should be ticked then, but, I doubt there's any love lost between the Apple and Microsoft guys.
The Apple software team that just had to put out iOS 4.0.2 to fix the FreeType security hole that allowed people to jailbreak their phones (or get hacked by a more evil website with a malicious PDF)? If it's good enough for the company that originally developed TrueType and held the key patents, why not use FreeType?
I don't know who wrote TrueType but MS using FreeType must burn them up. I know it would tick me off.
From Wikipedia: "TrueType is an outline font standard originally developed by Apple Computer in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe's Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. TrueType has become the most common format for fonts on both the Mac OS and Microsoft Windows operating systems."
There was a story on Slashdot back in July talking about FreeType celebrating the expiration of the Apple's TrueType patent.
Well, I guess it's the Apple software team that should be ticked then, but, I doubt there's any love lost between the Apple and Microsoft guys.
The focus on "web inter-op" and publishing. If they are striving for "looks the same on PC, Mac and on the web", their chances are better if they start using a font typeset that is freely distributable to those platforms.
If that's the motivation and MS starts pushing back on some of its other in house technologies substituting OSS versions... if I had been an MS developer writing the original versions I might read that as a vote of "no confidence" from my own managers. That would prompt me to look for other work because what I was doing at MS would not be valuable to either MS or the industry as a whole.
But, I don't work at Microsoft. And other posters have pointed out this may not be at all what is happening in this case.
No, the FreeType guys should be proud. The original Mac TrueType team should be a bit steamed. Presumably there was some Mac TrueType team that just had all their hard work tossed out. Another poster pointed out that there may not be a TrueType implementation in house at Microsoft that works on the Mac.
If there isn't a Microsoft TrueType for Mac team then no harm no foul.
Personally, I think we think too highly of ourselves so most estimations could be over done.
The people at Blue Brain have had some major breakthroughs in the modeling part of the brain and they are legit as it gets.
And their estimates are its going to be 10 years before they can model the brain....
Thank you. You're the first person to actually address my concern. I heard: "million lines of code equals a brain" and I immediately thought: "how complex are those lines of code? how bad is the problem?"
I'm now wondering if you don't need to simulate physiology and environment to be able to interact with a simulated brain... and if you do need to do that how computationally expensive is that... and how far away is that level of simulation?
Does that mean someone who cannot communicate are not conscious?
Obviously not, but we just wouldn't be able to tell.
I think that's a good point. Maybe our machines are some how "conscious" now?
I'm stuck on the whole "brain upload thing"...
The "I" which makes me who "I" am is basically unobservable. A brain "upload" of "me" might convince you but it wouldn't convince me. No matter how perfect my continuity would be broken. I would not view the simulation of myself as myself... I would see it as some "child" of myself. And I suspect if the simulation of me were good enough then so would it. My personality has drifted so much in the course of my life I would expect it wouldn't take long for simulated me and biological me to drift apart any how.
My real concern with the Kurzweil predictions is time complexity. Is this not an issue? What if I have a million lines of code that are all the equivalent of print line statements? What if the million lines of "brain code" are all sophisticated recursions and the cost of executing brain simulations grows at the rate of "n" to the "n" power or something silly?
If brain simulation complexity is linear on the number of neurons then "real time" brain simulations aren't far off. If the complexity is some power of the number of neurons then this approaches the complexity of some physical simulations and that pushes back "real time" quite a bit... non-intuitively quite a bit because some quirk of complexity like that can take it from 20 years away and put it 55 years away. (At which point I'm dead and can't use the brain upload machine... see why I'm upset?)
I think all mammalian brains involve about the same set of development instructions. It would only take a few bits to change the size from a mouse to an elephant.
If you think I am concerned about that you mis-understand. I wondering if merely the number of instructions, "size of the code" as it were indicates the complexity of the computation.
For example which computation has the larger time complexity cost? The code that is 100 lines or the code that is 10 lines?
What if the 100 lines are all print statements and the 10 lines are recursive? What if both blocks do exactly the same job?
So maybe the design of a brain is tiny and simple... execution of the brain simulation might be very complex. I did not see numbers on the complexity cost of that medulla simulation. Perhaps it executes in linear time with the size of the number of neurons? If that's the case I don't really have much of a case right? I mean if it costs 10 clock cycles to print "hello world" then computing 10 places of pi will be just as simple right? Just as simple as solving the traveling sales man problem right?
Of course, a medulla is simpler than a frontal cortex... so how complex is that by comparison?
To paraphrase something somebody wisely said in the previous thread about this topic, you don't need to model the electrons in the circuit of a machine to emulate an NES.
I made a comment under PZ's article to that effect. He seems to think we need to understand protein folding in order to understand the brain. I make software all day long... I don't understand what half my compiler does but I do understand how to debug.
I don't think I'm assuming that... I'm trying to not assume things. For example when I modeled Newtonian gravity the gravitational effect is instantaneous meaning each object in the system must be updated with the position and mass of every other object in the system to compute the total effect of gravity. So... if brain modeling is about that hard... or a bit harder then exponential growth in computing power doesn't bring the problem closer nearly as fast. Of course... I have no idea.
I think I was talking about the overall idea of "uploading minds" and all that. Probably conflating the issue of "human level AI" which I don't think is nearly as big a problem. But then... it's hard to know what I was thinking... and even harder to read what I wrote and extract anything intelligent.
I'd be more worried about concurrency issues. If you have to treat each neuron as its own processor in order to simulate it correctly to get a mind even if computers are fast enough to do it they might not be able to with out deadlocking.
I think this is the gist of my argument. I like how you could sum it up so simply.
A good point. I think Kurzweil is one of those that would say "consciousness is computing" so all you need is enough of the right computations. This is definitely something brain simulations would have to explore. We simply have no idea yet.
Myers may have been focused on the "reverse engineer from the genome" argument but really the main issue is whether Kurzweil is within a few orders of magnitude of guessing the right level of complexity necessary to simulate a brain. The gist of the Myers argument isn't so much about genomics and ontogeny as it is about the emergent complexity of inter-related systems and I think the real nugget there might be something like: "We could model a brain but that wouldn't mean we modeled a mind. To model a mind you need to model a great deal of the environment the mind lives in... and that is many many orders of magnitude more complex."
For the record: I hope Kurzweil is right but I rather doubt he is. I don't think he's wrong about how powerful machines will be in 2050 I think he may be wrong about whether those machines can simulate a mind well enough because I really wonder if the complexity of a mind is actually a superpolynomial problem due to the hyper connected-ness of a mind and its environment.
While there is some merit to the argument that many scientists can be poor communicators, the best communication skills are going to be stumped when faced with massive cognitive dissonance. Far too many of the US public wallow in deliberate ignorance or the rants of people who cater to their prejudices. You have a huge segment of the media industry there that is based around stimulating emotional reactions to trump reasoned arguments. Their opponents hold most of the media propagation cards, but it's the scientists' fault for being poor communicators. Talk about blaming the victim.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess the Apple guys just got dissed on by the Microsoft guys then... but that's certainly not news.
Well, I guess it's the Apple software team that should be ticked then, but, I doubt there's any love lost between the Apple and Microsoft guys.
The Apple software team that just had to put out iOS 4.0.2 to fix the FreeType security hole that allowed people to jailbreak their phones (or get hacked by a more evil website with a malicious PDF)? If it's good enough for the company that originally developed TrueType and held the key patents, why not use FreeType?
I'm not saying they shouldn't.
From Wikipedia: "TrueType is an outline font standard originally developed by Apple Computer in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe's Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. TrueType has become the most common format for fonts on both the Mac OS and Microsoft Windows operating systems."
There was a story on Slashdot back in July talking about FreeType celebrating the expiration of the Apple's TrueType patent.
Well, I guess it's the Apple software team that should be ticked then, but, I doubt there's any love lost between the Apple and Microsoft guys.
The focus on "web inter-op" and publishing. If they are striving for "looks the same on PC, Mac and on the web", their chances are better if they start using a font typeset that is freely distributable to those platforms.
If that's the motivation and MS starts pushing back on some of its other in house technologies substituting OSS versions... if I had been an MS developer writing the original versions I might read that as a vote of "no confidence" from my own managers. That would prompt me to look for other work because what I was doing at MS would not be valuable to either MS or the industry as a whole.
But, I don't work at Microsoft. And other posters have pointed out this may not be at all what is happening in this case.
No, the FreeType guys should be proud. The original Mac TrueType team should be a bit steamed. Presumably there was some Mac TrueType team that just had all their hard work tossed out. Another poster pointed out that there may not be a TrueType implementation in house at Microsoft that works on the Mac.
If there isn't a Microsoft TrueType for Mac team then no harm no foul.
If they were switching the Windows version to Freetype that would actually be a story.
Good point. I was presuming there already was a Mac version of TrueType. If there isn't one already, you are absolutely right.
I don't know who wrote TrueType but MS using FreeType must burn them up. I know it would tick me off.
the ivory scientist in the mad tower.
They should sell before it hits $4.20
Personally, I think we think too highly of ourselves so most estimations could be over done.
The people at Blue Brain have had some major breakthroughs in the modeling part of the brain and they are legit as it gets.
And their estimates are its going to be 10 years before they can model the brain....
Thank you. You're the first person to actually address my concern. I heard: "million lines of code equals a brain" and I immediately thought: "how complex are those lines of code? how bad is the problem?"
I'm now wondering if you don't need to simulate physiology and environment to be able to interact with a simulated brain ... and if you do need to do that how computationally expensive is that... and how far away is that level of simulation?
It's an interesting point.
Does that mean someone who cannot communicate are not conscious?
Obviously not, but we just wouldn't be able to tell.
I think that's a good point. Maybe our machines are some how "conscious" now?
I'm stuck on the whole "brain upload thing" ...
The "I" which makes me who "I" am is basically unobservable. A brain "upload" of "me" might convince you but it wouldn't convince me. No matter how perfect my continuity would be broken. I would not view the simulation of myself as myself... I would see it as some "child" of myself. And I suspect if the simulation of me were good enough then so would it. My personality has drifted so much in the course of my life I would expect it wouldn't take long for simulated me and biological me to drift apart any how.
My real concern with the Kurzweil predictions is time complexity. Is this not an issue? What if I have a million lines of code that are all the equivalent of print line statements? What if the million lines of "brain code" are all sophisticated recursions and the cost of executing brain simulations grows at the rate of "n" to the "n" power or something silly?
If brain simulation complexity is linear on the number of neurons then "real time" brain simulations aren't far off. If the complexity is some power of the number of neurons then this approaches the complexity of some physical simulations and that pushes back "real time" quite a bit... non-intuitively quite a bit because some quirk of complexity like that can take it from 20 years away and put it 55 years away. (At which point I'm dead and can't use the brain upload machine... see why I'm upset?)
I think all mammalian brains involve about the same set of development instructions. It would only take a few bits to change the size from a mouse to an elephant.
If you think I am concerned about that you mis-understand. I wondering if merely the number of instructions, "size of the code" as it were indicates the complexity of the computation.
For example which computation has the larger time complexity cost? The code that is 100 lines or the code that is 10 lines?
What if the 100 lines are all print statements and the 10 lines are recursive? What if both blocks do exactly the same job?
So maybe the design of a brain is tiny and simple... execution of the brain simulation might be very complex. I did not see numbers on the complexity cost of that medulla simulation. Perhaps it executes in linear time with the size of the number of neurons? If that's the case I don't really have much of a case right? I mean if it costs 10 clock cycles to print "hello world" then computing 10 places of pi will be just as simple right? Just as simple as solving the traveling sales man problem right?
Of course, a medulla is simpler than a frontal cortex ... so how complex is that by comparison?
To paraphrase something somebody wisely said in the previous thread about this topic, you don't need to model the electrons in the circuit of a machine to emulate an NES.
I made a comment under PZ's article to that effect. He seems to think we need to understand protein folding in order to understand the brain. I make software all day long ... I don't understand what half my compiler does but I do understand how to debug.
I was thinking "quantum computing" or "hand waving" either one. They seem interchangeable to me.
I've been here so long I feel like a noob.
I don't think I'm assuming that... I'm trying to not assume things. For example when I modeled Newtonian gravity the gravitational effect is instantaneous meaning each object in the system must be updated with the position and mass of every other object in the system to compute the total effect of gravity. So ... if brain modeling is about that hard ... or a bit harder then exponential growth in computing power doesn't bring the problem closer nearly as fast. Of course... I have no idea.
I think I was talking about the overall idea of "uploading minds" and all that. Probably conflating the issue of "human level AI" which I don't think is nearly as big a problem. But then... it's hard to know what I was thinking... and even harder to read what I wrote and extract anything intelligent.
I'd be more worried about concurrency issues. If you have to treat each neuron as its own processor in order to simulate it correctly to get a mind even if computers are fast enough to do it they might not be able to with out deadlocking.
I think this is the gist of my argument. I like how you could sum it up so simply.
A good point. I think Kurzweil is one of those that would say "consciousness is computing" so all you need is enough of the right computations. This is definitely something brain simulations would have to explore. We simply have no idea yet.
In retrospect, maybe I should have read both articles and thought about what I was writing first instead of just spouting off.
Myers may have been focused on the "reverse engineer from the genome" argument but really the main issue is whether Kurzweil is within a few orders of magnitude of guessing the right level of complexity necessary to simulate a brain. The gist of the Myers argument isn't so much about genomics and ontogeny as it is about the emergent complexity of inter-related systems and I think the real nugget there might be something like: "We could model a brain but that wouldn't mean we modeled a mind. To model a mind you need to model a great deal of the environment the mind lives in... and that is many many orders of magnitude more complex."
For the record: I hope Kurzweil is right but I rather doubt he is. I don't think he's wrong about how powerful machines will be in 2050 I think he may be wrong about whether those machines can simulate a mind well enough because I really wonder if the complexity of a mind is actually a superpolynomial problem due to the hyper connected-ness of a mind and its environment.
While there is some merit to the argument that many scientists can be poor communicators, the best communication skills are going to be stumped when faced with massive cognitive dissonance. Far too many of the US public wallow in deliberate ignorance or the rants of people who cater to their prejudices. You have a huge segment of the media industry there that is based around stimulating emotional reactions to trump reasoned arguments. Their opponents hold most of the media propagation cards, but it's the scientists' fault for being poor communicators. Talk about blaming the victim.
When dealing with hoomans:
'Microsoft has insisted that its browser is part of Windows'
Is "is" was or is "is" is? It is possible it was but is not. It is most likely "is" wasn't... but all us technical people knew that.
It's not necessary to use herbs, spices or condiments with food either. Have fun with your plain potato language.
that's a very anti-tuber attitude. You must be a closet tuberist.