Exactly. We aren't supposed to boot other software on the Wii, XBox360, or Playstation. That doesn't stop us from doing it. In fact, they go through great lengths to ensure it doesn't happen, and it still does. Also, who cares if you can't boot Linux on a "Windows PC" with $25 ARM machines like Raspberry Pi coming out, I don't think we'll have much of a need to using the blessed Windows Logo machines for too long. Something majorly unexpected would have to happen for somebody to not be able to build their own machine and run whichever OS they please on it.
Computers have always been able to beat people at chess. Probably was, is that nobody wanted to wait 6 weeks for the computer to make it's next move. Computers finally got fast enough that they could beat people in a regularly paced game of chess. But I don't think this was anything to do with actually having AI. I'll be convinced when somebody can write a program that can do the same without massive amounts of processing power. Maybe the limitation should be along the lines of, only uses as much energy as a human. When the computer required for Jeopardy or Chess takes up an entire room, we really haven't had a breakthrough in anything, but rather just stuck a bunch of dumb boxes together.
I think the reason that Google isn't releasing Android 3 source is that they don't want it installed on every crappy phone and tablet coming out of China, and giving it a bad name. Android is already known by some for being a bad product, because so many people have a bad impression, because they bought an inferior device. Not releasing the source at all was all they could do to stop it from being put on sub-standard devices. I guess the other option is to just release the source code, but not allow "Android " trademarks to be used on non-approved devices. You'd end up with something like Redhat and CentOS, where you could get the free version, but you wouldn't be able to ruin the Android name, as it has been now. That way people wouldn't confuse official Android with the releases put out by companies who aren't official partners.
The Jeopardy thing was the only machine which actually looked like AI to me. Chess is just brute force calcuation. Spam is simple pattern matching, Vacuuming is a highschool science project, and Voice recognition is so bad in most cases that it is laughable. Even Watson (I believe the name of the Jeopardy computer) didn't use voice recognition, but rather read the clues using a camera as voice recognition is so flakey, even at the level that Watson was operating at. Although Watson was pretty impressive, it still fails at many things (Toronto is a US city) that it seems that AI is just never going to happen. Well be able to hook up electronic interfaces to actual brains and get them to do the calculations before we ever understand them enough to get that done in silicon.
Kind of reminds me of "Ender's Game". #### SPOILER ALERT ####
. The only way to beat the buggers was to have a kid think he was playing a game. I thought it was pretty obvious conclusion, and wasn't the least bit surprised by the ending. Anyway, I think that this just signifies that we aren't anywhere close to AI yet, and that we don't even understand how smart we really are, compared to machines.
Whatever the reason for this, they need to make it work. People don't care about the technological reason for why it can't work. Even if it required moving a hardware card/dongle from the phone to the tablet, it should have been made to work. Instead of making a "Play" book, they should have made a "work" book, as much of their reputation and market was based around business usage. A RIM device that cannot send email though the blackberry service is all but useless. I think the only reason they really don't allow it, is because they don't want people ditching their phones, and just using the tablet for their Blackberry related stuff.
My only question is, why would you assume a 50/50 split for white hat vs. black hat. Certainly in the general population there are not 50/50 good vs. evil. If that was the case, people would be a whole lot worse off than they are now. I would say that a much larger percentage of hackers are white hat. That being said, even a small number of black hat hackers can do a serious amount of damage.
Who are these people that have time to keep a house hospital clean with kids around? I have 3 kids, so maybe my experience is a little different, but even when we just had 1 kid, keeping everything hospital clean would have been a full time job.
I agree with you on the camera issue. A cellphone with an 8 MP camera is nowhere near as goo as a digital camera with 8 MP, which again is nowhere near as good as a DSLR with 8MP. My 10 year old 2 MP FujiFilm digital camera that uses SmartMedia (remember those) for storage blows the pants off any cellphone camera I've ever seen, regardless of how many MP they say they have. I swear half of them just have some 1 or 2 MP sensor and then scale up the image to 8 MP in software and call it 8 MP.
1% of 400 million (made up number, last number I heard for facebook subscribers) is still 4 million users. Writing an application for a million users is still a big enough market. Unless you're writing an app for 5 users, there may not be a point, but if they're paying you for it, why not.
That's death rates. So what I see is that deaths are going down, but I'm not seeing less accidents. This is most likely due to increased safety of cars, and improved crash handling. My guess, just from the number of cars on the road, is that the number of accidents even per capita is probably going up, but that more people are surviving them.
I think you hit the nail on the head. The quote (if it's even real) does not say there is only ever going to be a market for 5 computers, but that there "is" a world market for maybe 5 computers. There is no statement about how that number will change in the futures. In 1943, due to the cost of electonic computers and the complexity of operating them, there probably was a market for about 5 computers.
I smell a money making scam. Why even put the non-performing one online if it performs so badly. It just makes the whole project look like a joke. If they were really serious, they would only put the real bot online, but limit the amount of users who could access it, so as not to overload their servers. The one they put online just makes them look like idiots.
I very much agree with this. IDEs and compilers should just add support to embed SQL directly in the code. Just as other languages allow you to embed Fortran, Assembly, and other languages. In VB.Net you can embed XML Literals which vastly simplifies creating xml documents. If they just let you type SQL inline and type check it, maybe even verify table and column names against the database schema, then things would be great. We wouldn't even need linq, or entity framework. If they were really smart, they could let you write SQL against your objects, arrays, and anything else in your code, just as you can do with Linq, and we wouldn't have to learn another way of doing things, since just about every competant developer already knows SQL.
Seriously. Things are getting much more efficient. I can read a book on my laptop using less power than reading a book by an incandescent lightbulb. You can probably read on an iPad using less power than most fluorescent bulbs. Even though we are getting many new devices, we are using a lot less power. Everything is getting more efficient. Now if electric cars ever come into use, watch household usage skyrocket. I wonder how the authors of this study account for unexpected things such as electric cars. Once everyone switches over to high efficiency applicances, and ditches the CRTs, we should be able to cut down the usage quite a bit. Still, the biggest consumers of power are businesses. Even if the households cut their power significantly, we still have a lot of wasted power to deal with.
I've recently thought that hearing aids should be really cheap, because it's actually become fashionable/accepted to wear bluetooth earpieces. Presently, the devices are expensive because they try to miniaturize everything. However, if they made them bigger, like a standard bluetooth earpiece, and even used bluetooth to communicate with a larger receiver, then they could get the price down really low. Look at the advertisement at the top of the page. Those aren't anything like the hearing aids my grandpa used to have. You probably couldn't even see one of those once it was inserted in the ear.
How does anybody know what HP was actually paying for those pieces. It seems that the prices obtained were for just "Joe Schmoe" buying the parts for a single unit. One of the items, namely "Touch Control / Drive PCB, MCU for touch" says Qty 5. They probably picked those prices out of a catalog. HP buying in the hundreds of thousands for each item most likely got a deal. Unless they have internal knowledge of HPs dealing directly with their suppliers, they have no idea how much these things really cost.
It wasn't specifically designed to be slow, it was designed so the mechanical strikers wouldn't jam, even under high speed typing. The keys were placed such that keys that usually appear close together in words wouldn't jam even if pressed at the same time. There are other ways to develop keyboards if you specifically want them slow. Like put the least used keys z,x,j etc. all on the home row. It's no coincidence that the word typewriter can be typed using only the top row.
If you can get a Netbook for $180, then why not a tablet for $200? There really isn't all the much to a tablet. I guess the expensive part would be the touch screen. But other than that, there isn't much difference. You might start off at a loss, but after the first million units have shipped, and production gets ramped up, they should easily be able to make them much cheaper than they are.
Seriously. I paid $400 for a new laptop last christmas. I got a dual core AMD with 4 GB RAM and 320 HD. Now that It's back to school season I'm just browsing the deals, for that same $400 I can get a 6GB RAM, Intel i3 dual core, and 640 GB hard drive. To get the equivalent of what I have now, I would only have to pay $250-$300. This is why tablets are overpriced. Anything decent is $500, but for $400 you can have a notebook with some pretty amazing specs.
On the other hand, think of what it costs to produce a TV episode, and then try to imagine how much it would cost if it was only pay per episode, with no advertisements. Let's just take the example of the Friends TV Show. Each of the 6 main actors was getting paid $1 million an episode at it's height. This means it would cost at least $6 million just for the main actors salary. Throw in salaries for writers, producers, directors, and you are probably easily at $10 million. The finale, was watched by 50 million people. Now, assuming 2 people per TV (i'm averaging here), that's about 25 million paid views. which would bring the cost per episode somewhere around 40 cents, just for a single half hour show. and that doesn't even count any money going to service providers like NetFlix. So while I think the model could work, we're going to have to see the amount of money that actors, directors, and others make decrease by a significant margin if we ever want to be able to only pay $10 a month for all you can handle streaming TV.
I've "jailbroken" my Wii, but really it's only for the convenience of being able to store the games I already own on a hard drive. No more disk swapping. It's also really nice to use to play videos on my home media server (ripped from DVDs I own) on my TV. Sure I could put a PC under the TV to accomplish the same, but the Wii is already under my TV, and perfectly suited to playing videos.
Slashdot Mirror
How much you want to bet that Dell (anod other major OEMs) will use the same key across all machines to ease installation of media on these machines?
Exactly. We aren't supposed to boot other software on the Wii, XBox360, or Playstation. That doesn't stop us from doing it. In fact, they go through great lengths to ensure it doesn't happen, and it still does. Also, who cares if you can't boot Linux on a "Windows PC" with $25 ARM machines like Raspberry Pi coming out, I don't think we'll have much of a need to using the blessed Windows Logo machines for too long. Something majorly unexpected would have to happen for somebody to not be able to build their own machine and run whichever OS they please on it.
Also forked here.
Computers have always been able to beat people at chess. Probably was, is that nobody wanted to wait 6 weeks for the computer to make it's next move. Computers finally got fast enough that they could beat people in a regularly paced game of chess. But I don't think this was anything to do with actually having AI. I'll be convinced when somebody can write a program that can do the same without massive amounts of processing power. Maybe the limitation should be along the lines of, only uses as much energy as a human. When the computer required for Jeopardy or Chess takes up an entire room, we really haven't had a breakthrough in anything, but rather just stuck a bunch of dumb boxes together.
I think the reason that Google isn't releasing Android 3 source is that they don't want it installed on every crappy phone and tablet coming out of China, and giving it a bad name. Android is already known by some for being a bad product, because so many people have a bad impression, because they bought an inferior device. Not releasing the source at all was all they could do to stop it from being put on sub-standard devices. I guess the other option is to just release the source code, but not allow "Android " trademarks to be used on non-approved devices. You'd end up with something like Redhat and CentOS, where you could get the free version, but you wouldn't be able to ruin the Android name, as it has been now. That way people wouldn't confuse official Android with the releases put out by companies who aren't official partners.
The Jeopardy thing was the only machine which actually looked like AI to me. Chess is just brute force calcuation. Spam is simple pattern matching, Vacuuming is a highschool science project, and Voice recognition is so bad in most cases that it is laughable. Even Watson (I believe the name of the Jeopardy computer) didn't use voice recognition, but rather read the clues using a camera as voice recognition is so flakey, even at the level that Watson was operating at. Although Watson was pretty impressive, it still fails at many things (Toronto is a US city) that it seems that AI is just never going to happen. Well be able to hook up electronic interfaces to actual brains and get them to do the calculations before we ever understand them enough to get that done in silicon.
Kind of reminds me of "Ender's Game". #### SPOILER ALERT ####
. The only way to beat the buggers was to have a kid think he was playing a game. I thought it was pretty obvious conclusion, and wasn't the least bit surprised by the ending. Anyway, I think that this just signifies that we aren't anywhere close to AI yet, and that we don't even understand how smart we really are, compared to machines.
Whatever the reason for this, they need to make it work. People don't care about the technological reason for why it can't work. Even if it required moving a hardware card/dongle from the phone to the tablet, it should have been made to work. Instead of making a "Play" book, they should have made a "work" book, as much of their reputation and market was based around business usage. A RIM device that cannot send email though the blackberry service is all but useless. I think the only reason they really don't allow it, is because they don't want people ditching their phones, and just using the tablet for their Blackberry related stuff.
My only question is, why would you assume a 50/50 split for white hat vs. black hat. Certainly in the general population there are not 50/50 good vs. evil. If that was the case, people would be a whole lot worse off than they are now. I would say that a much larger percentage of hackers are white hat. That being said, even a small number of black hat hackers can do a serious amount of damage.
Who are these people that have time to keep a house hospital clean with kids around? I have 3 kids, so maybe my experience is a little different, but even when we just had 1 kid, keeping everything hospital clean would have been a full time job.
I agree with you on the camera issue. A cellphone with an 8 MP camera is nowhere near as goo as a digital camera with 8 MP, which again is nowhere near as good as a DSLR with 8MP. My 10 year old 2 MP FujiFilm digital camera that uses SmartMedia (remember those) for storage blows the pants off any cellphone camera I've ever seen, regardless of how many MP they say they have. I swear half of them just have some 1 or 2 MP sensor and then scale up the image to 8 MP in software and call it 8 MP.
1% of 400 million (made up number, last number I heard for facebook subscribers) is still 4 million users. Writing an application for a million users is still a big enough market. Unless you're writing an app for 5 users, there may not be a point, but if they're paying you for it, why not.
That's death rates. So what I see is that deaths are going down, but I'm not seeing less accidents. This is most likely due to increased safety of cars, and improved crash handling. My guess, just from the number of cars on the road, is that the number of accidents even per capita is probably going up, but that more people are surviving them.
I think you hit the nail on the head. The quote (if it's even real) does not say there is only ever going to be a market for 5 computers, but that there "is" a world market for maybe 5 computers. There is no statement about how that number will change in the futures. In 1943, due to the cost of electonic computers and the complexity of operating them, there probably was a market for about 5 computers.
I smell a money making scam. Why even put the non-performing one online if it performs so badly. It just makes the whole project look like a joke. If they were really serious, they would only put the real bot online, but limit the amount of users who could access it, so as not to overload their servers. The one they put online just makes them look like idiots.
I very much agree with this. IDEs and compilers should just add support to embed SQL directly in the code. Just as other languages allow you to embed Fortran, Assembly, and other languages. In VB.Net you can embed XML Literals which vastly simplifies creating xml documents. If they just let you type SQL inline and type check it, maybe even verify table and column names against the database schema, then things would be great. We wouldn't even need linq, or entity framework. If they were really smart, they could let you write SQL against your objects, arrays, and anything else in your code, just as you can do with Linq, and we wouldn't have to learn another way of doing things, since just about every competant developer already knows SQL.
Seriously. Things are getting much more efficient. I can read a book on my laptop using less power than reading a book by an incandescent lightbulb. You can probably read on an iPad using less power than most fluorescent bulbs. Even though we are getting many new devices, we are using a lot less power. Everything is getting more efficient. Now if electric cars ever come into use, watch household usage skyrocket. I wonder how the authors of this study account for unexpected things such as electric cars. Once everyone switches over to high efficiency applicances, and ditches the CRTs, we should be able to cut down the usage quite a bit. Still, the biggest consumers of power are businesses. Even if the households cut their power significantly, we still have a lot of wasted power to deal with.
I've recently thought that hearing aids should be really cheap, because it's actually become fashionable/accepted to wear bluetooth earpieces. Presently, the devices are expensive because they try to miniaturize everything. However, if they made them bigger, like a standard bluetooth earpiece, and even used bluetooth to communicate with a larger receiver, then they could get the price down really low. Look at the advertisement at the top of the page. Those aren't anything like the hearing aids my grandpa used to have. You probably couldn't even see one of those once it was inserted in the ear.
Get some studded tires, some nice warm clothes, are you're set. Maybe even cross country ski.
How does anybody know what HP was actually paying for those pieces. It seems that the prices obtained were for just "Joe Schmoe" buying the parts for a single unit. One of the items, namely "Touch Control / Drive PCB, MCU for touch" says Qty 5. They probably picked those prices out of a catalog. HP buying in the hundreds of thousands for each item most likely got a deal. Unless they have internal knowledge of HPs dealing directly with their suppliers, they have no idea how much these things really cost.
It wasn't specifically designed to be slow, it was designed so the mechanical strikers wouldn't jam, even under high speed typing. The keys were placed such that keys that usually appear close together in words wouldn't jam even if pressed at the same time. There are other ways to develop keyboards if you specifically want them slow. Like put the least used keys z,x,j etc. all on the home row. It's no coincidence that the word typewriter can be typed using only the top row.
If you can get a Netbook for $180, then why not a tablet for $200? There really isn't all the much to a tablet. I guess the expensive part would be the touch screen. But other than that, there isn't much difference. You might start off at a loss, but after the first million units have shipped, and production gets ramped up, they should easily be able to make them much cheaper than they are.
Seriously. I paid $400 for a new laptop last christmas. I got a dual core AMD with 4 GB RAM and 320 HD. Now that It's back to school season I'm just browsing the deals, for that same $400 I can get a 6GB RAM, Intel i3 dual core, and 640 GB hard drive. To get the equivalent of what I have now, I would only have to pay $250-$300. This is why tablets are overpriced. Anything decent is $500, but for $400 you can have a notebook with some pretty amazing specs.
On the other hand, think of what it costs to produce a TV episode, and then try to imagine how much it would cost if it was only pay per episode, with no advertisements. Let's just take the example of the Friends TV Show. Each of the 6 main actors was getting paid $1 million an episode at it's height. This means it would cost at least $6 million just for the main actors salary. Throw in salaries for writers, producers, directors, and you are probably easily at $10 million. The finale, was watched by 50 million people. Now, assuming 2 people per TV (i'm averaging here), that's about 25 million paid views. which would bring the cost per episode somewhere around 40 cents, just for a single half hour show. and that doesn't even count any money going to service providers like NetFlix. So while I think the model could work, we're going to have to see the amount of money that actors, directors, and others make decrease by a significant margin if we ever want to be able to only pay $10 a month for all you can handle streaming TV.
I've "jailbroken" my Wii, but really it's only for the convenience of being able to store the games I already own on a hard drive. No more disk swapping. It's also really nice to use to play videos on my home media server (ripped from DVDs I own) on my TV. Sure I could put a PC under the TV to accomplish the same, but the Wii is already under my TV, and perfectly suited to playing videos.