Except the GP is pointing out the fact that what we try to pretend is a capitalist system is in reality a buddy-oriented socialist state. If we would just come out and ADMIT that we want to be socialist, then we could concentrate on making sure that the money propping up corporations is distributed to benefit the citizens at large, not the corporations and the corrupt politicians. In which case, there is no possible way we would consider paying corporations to take choice away from the citizens in the manner this article describes.
Ok, but do you have studies to back that 80%? Or are you just guessing?
That's the problem the grandparent and others have with this whole thing, is we know some people use piracy to benefit everyone, and some just steal, but nobody REALLY knows how many do which.
People who want to find something to bitch about almost always can. He's not convincing me, though, because a year ago my MOM (who is more computer literate than most moms but is not a programmer like most supposed Open Source Users) told me she preferred OOo over MS Word, because it has a much more intuitive interface and is far less buggy. I'm sorry, but nothing any expert says can have more weight than an average user's opinion, and many people have already contradicted this guy.
I knew some people back in high school that were trying to get everyone they knew to call it that... nobody did. Same as this guy in college who insisted on pronouncing unix "oo-nix", as opposed to "you-nix". "yerl" may be more correct than "you-are-el", but damned if it doesn't sound retarded. same thing with "oo-nix"
That's not true... it just takes a little hacking. There's some website that lets you connect as a client to all of the major IM systems, and use it as you would Gaim, essentially. They manage instant communication by using ajax to keep a continual client-side request, let it hang on the server, and then push data back down as soon as something needs to be transfered. You eliminate any lag from polling... essentially you're emulating a socket connection. It's a hack, but it works really well.
Yeah... I'm sure Google is the only tech company that does internal betas of their new products. Microsoft doesn't give their employees ANY betas at all:roll:
well... the whole point of BellSouth rescinding the offer in the first place is that with free wifi, many people will NOT be resubscribing for internet service...
Okay... so that kind of makes sense. But what justification is there for going down a flat stretch of road, at 5 miles over the speed limit, with a clear left lane, and a semi driver tailgating you at 5 feet? If they're so good at knowing their machinery, they should know that they would crush my Civic like a bug if I had to slam on the brakes for any reason, but they apparently don't care.
And of course there's the multiple times you see semis pacing each other in both lanes, at 10 miles under the speed limit, with a stack of 50 cars behind them and nobody in front. These things aren't accidental. Some truck drivers are just assholes. Maybe they're more visible because they're driving larger machines than the rest of us, so we just notice it more, but it still gets everyone else pissed off at them, and makes the rest of us more likely to push for shipping to go by rail.
I know two people from college who had the exact same idea (seperately of each other) a couple years ago. I'm sure tens of thousands of people have had the same idea across the country. Did any of them do it? No. EA did. I'm all for "fuck corporations" as much as the next guy, but this is just ridiculous. Ideas are worthless until you actually implement them. I have some ideas that I'm convinced would make fantastic games, but I'm not in a position to make it happen right now. If someone beats me to the punch, I might be a little pissed that I didn't get to do it first, but it's stupid to sue over it.
not to mention that the REAL turing test is almost never used... most people use the "can you tell the difference between human and computer" version, which isn't it at all. The real one involves mimicking gender as well, which is a much more complex problem.
Or maybe it's not vaporware, not a direct reaction to Google, and somewhere within the 50,000 employees Microsoft just happened to have already been working on this before Google Base was announced...
Bullshit. By your logic, if a top-level programmer does some web work, he suddenly loses his ability to program. No, learning HTML will not teach you programming, but learning HTML doesn't PREVENT you from learning programming.
speaking as someone who has done (and enjoyed) both game development in c++/python and web work with php and javascript, let me be the first to say:
fuck you, buddy:-)
Really, it's not about making some gigantic labyrinthine application... it's about accomplishing the end goal for the user as quickly, efficiently, and correctly as possible. The web happens to provide some tools that enable massive return on very little code, but that doesn't mean that ALL those who work with it are unable to program larger systems, given a reason to do so.
I dunno... somehow the fact that I wore jeans, a t-shirt, and a not-so-new fleece jacket to interviews at both IBM and Microsoft and got offers from both doesn't fill me with fear that not wearing button down shirts will get me canned...
I see your point, but I don't think OOo is the impetus for this. In this market, Microsoft's biggest competitor is quite literally themselves. Think about it... what can convince millions of users to pay hundreds of dollars each to upgrade from the last version of Office, which is working just fine? Only a massive overhaul like this. The other thing they could try is just cramming more features into an already bloated application, but the average user doesn't give two shits about the latest and greatest obscure print layout / macro / collaboration enhancement junk.
Heh, now THAT I will wholeheartedly agree with. Running XP on my laptop, I have to flatten my box once a year at the longest, or else it starts getting crufty and things break... I can tell the current install is nearing the end of its usefull lifecycle because the volume icon randomly disappears from the taskbar, and certain windows magically gain "always on top" status all by themselves.
Honestly... I'm not sure how much of it is Windows' fault, though. I've felt the same urge to reinstall Gentoo on my desktop. I just start feeling like there's little things here and there that aren't getting cleaned up as I follow the upgrade path over a year or so. Maybe I'm just super paranoid about cruft, but I haven't seen an OS yet that really makes me feel like it keeps itself in an "as new" state forever.
You know, there are exceptions to the rule... I ran Windows ME for two years, on a motherboard and graphics card that were known to be buggy as hell together (I found out too late after buying them). I never saw one bluescreen, never had the registry corrupt itself, never actually had anything go wrong. By all logic, that computer should have been a smoldering pile of garbage within six months, but it worked just fine for me playing games, doing dev work, audio recording, divx encoding, you name it. Neither I nor the parent to my first post are saying that the problem doesn't exist for anyone just because it didn't happen to us, but it's worth pointing out that not every user will experience catastrophic failure.
It depends what you do with it. The neat thing is, it basically adds disk access to javascript, which was the one thing it didn't have before. No, it's not exactly like desktop apps, but it has all the important features, given a programmer who will use it correctly.
I don't think that quite follows... while millions of people can't contribute to the codebase whenever they want, they CAN go in and look at the code, and check for security problems. That's amazingly valuable. With closed software, even if you suspect there's a security problem, you can't go into the code and check.
So no, OSS doesn't _guarantee_ better security. But IF people take advantage of the openness and DO go in and check it over, it can be a tool that _allows_ better security than with closed source software. The correct statement would be "OSS inherently has the potential to be more secure".
This is something I've seen come up a lot... it's part of open source that a lot of people are confused about.
Just because you have access to the code, and can change whatever you like, DOES NOT MEAN that you will be allowed to contribute to the official project code yourself. Firefox is a closed development house. They keep strict control over what code goes in, who's allowed to touch it, what features go on the UI and how they're organized. If they want to keep it that way, they're perfectly within their rights -- and given the quality of the product, it seems to be a good idea. If everyone were allowed to drop in code, or tack things on to the UI, the project would soon be a total mess.
But just because they keep a tight reign on the project code doesn't mean they aren't following the ideals of open source. You still have access to the code. You can go in and change whatever you like, fork the project, release your own competing version based on the original codebase, etc. That's where the true value of OSS comes from. If the Mozilla foundation ever went away, the community could pick up the code from the last release and run with it. If your company wants to release a custom version with support for some weird proprietary graphics format that Mozilla would never in a million years devote time to, you can. That's what open source is about.
Allowing everybody with even a vague interest to contribute to THEIR fork of the code, however... was never any open source license. At some point, once you get past the warm fuzzies of releasing something Open, you still have to sit down and actually code the project. And keeping an invitation only group makes a lot of sense, from that perspective.
Seems there's two points here. I'm going to address them in reverse order: on the "regurgitation" issue, well, Mozart's compositions at 10 weren't as mature or rich as his compositions at 30, but they are quite good enough that they're still played, and people still listen to them with pleasure. One of the frustrating things about being a prodigy (one you don't understand at the time) is that you're not an adult, and so you can't quite simulate it --- just as you can't quite simulate being a child either. But, for all that, unless you want to argue that Mozart's early compositions were "just regurgitating" Leopold (which would be a hard one to sell to me, at least), the lack of maturity in this kid's ideas is no reason to assume there's something suspect about his intellectual abilities.
I'm not saying he's not smart. Just that anybody who thinks, "we're gonna have flying cars in ten years, based on superstring theory, because this genius kid said so" is in for a rude awakening. And also that trying to take on university with such a child-like level of synthesis is probably going to result in him not getting as much out of it as older students might. At some point, you just need time to experience the world, and connect reality with the things you've learned by being told. No amount of genius can make up for that (unless you're talking about savants).
On the other point about the Chinese Room --- this would make one hell of an exercise in a Theory of Computation course. What you argue here seems to come around to the notion that the Chinese Room can "respond" with apparent understanding by the application of simple rules to inputs and stored information in order to generate outputs -- but that this is not "understanding". But this model of using simple rules and stored data to generate outputs given inputs is precisely Turing's model of computation... so it would appear that Searle is denying the Church-Turing thesis.
You're over-analyzing what I wrote. You asked what the difference is between regurgitation and understanding, and I pointed out that the Chinese Room construct already contains the answer... the Room can't apply rulesets; it can't synthesize any new information. It can only give an answer to an exact question in its library.
As for Searle... I guess. Since the Room doesn't take instructions into account, it's not a very good analogy for a computer. Don't really see what that has to do with this kid, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Except the GP is pointing out the fact that what we try to pretend is a capitalist system is in reality a buddy-oriented socialist state. If we would just come out and ADMIT that we want to be socialist, then we could concentrate on making sure that the money propping up corporations is distributed to benefit the citizens at large, not the corporations and the corrupt politicians. In which case, there is no possible way we would consider paying corporations to take choice away from the citizens in the manner this article describes.
I dunno... Jolie was the one keeping a vial of her boyfriend's blood on a necklace... I don't think the GP is too far off base
Ok, but do you have studies to back that 80%? Or are you just guessing?
That's the problem the grandparent and others have with this whole thing, is we know some people use piracy to benefit everyone, and some just steal, but nobody REALLY knows how many do which.
People who want to find something to bitch about almost always can. He's not convincing me, though, because a year ago my MOM (who is more computer literate than most moms but is not a programmer like most supposed Open Source Users) told me she preferred OOo over MS Word, because it has a much more intuitive interface and is far less buggy. I'm sorry, but nothing any expert says can have more weight than an average user's opinion, and many people have already contradicted this guy.
I knew some people back in high school that were trying to get everyone they knew to call it that... nobody did. Same as this guy in college who insisted on pronouncing unix "oo-nix", as opposed to "you-nix". "yerl" may be more correct than "you-are-el", but damned if it doesn't sound retarded. same thing with "oo-nix"
Wow... the one and only moderation for the above comment was "(-1) Overrated"... that's just weird...
That's not true... it just takes a little hacking. There's some website that lets you connect as a client to all of the major IM systems, and use it as you would Gaim, essentially. They manage instant communication by using ajax to keep a continual client-side request, let it hang on the server, and then push data back down as soon as something needs to be transfered. You eliminate any lag from polling... essentially you're emulating a socket connection. It's a hack, but it works really well.
Yeah... I'm sure Google is the only tech company that does internal betas of their new products. Microsoft doesn't give their employees ANY betas at all :roll:
well... the whole point of BellSouth rescinding the offer in the first place is that with free wifi, many people will NOT be resubscribing for internet service...
Okay... so that kind of makes sense. But what justification is there for going down a flat stretch of road, at 5 miles over the speed limit, with a clear left lane, and a semi driver tailgating you at 5 feet? If they're so good at knowing their machinery, they should know that they would crush my Civic like a bug if I had to slam on the brakes for any reason, but they apparently don't care.
And of course there's the multiple times you see semis pacing each other in both lanes, at 10 miles under the speed limit, with a stack of 50 cars behind them and nobody in front. These things aren't accidental. Some truck drivers are just assholes. Maybe they're more visible because they're driving larger machines than the rest of us, so we just notice it more, but it still gets everyone else pissed off at them, and makes the rest of us more likely to push for shipping to go by rail.
Take back the highways!!!
I know two people from college who had the exact same idea (seperately of each other) a couple years ago. I'm sure tens of thousands of people have had the same idea across the country. Did any of them do it? No. EA did. I'm all for "fuck corporations" as much as the next guy, but this is just ridiculous. Ideas are worthless until you actually implement them. I have some ideas that I'm convinced would make fantastic games, but I'm not in a position to make it happen right now. If someone beats me to the punch, I might be a little pissed that I didn't get to do it first, but it's stupid to sue over it.
not to mention that the REAL turing test is almost never used... most people use the "can you tell the difference between human and computer" version, which isn't it at all. The real one involves mimicking gender as well, which is a much more complex problem.
Or maybe it's not vaporware, not a direct reaction to Google, and somewhere within the 50,000 employees Microsoft just happened to have already been working on this before Google Base was announced...
Bullshit. By your logic, if a top-level programmer does some web work, he suddenly loses his ability to program. No, learning HTML will not teach you programming, but learning HTML doesn't PREVENT you from learning programming.
speaking as someone who has done (and enjoyed) both game development in c++/python and web work with php and javascript, let me be the first to say:
:-)
fuck you, buddy
Really, it's not about making some gigantic labyrinthine application... it's about accomplishing the end goal for the user as quickly, efficiently, and correctly as possible. The web happens to provide some tools that enable massive return on very little code, but that doesn't mean that ALL those who work with it are unable to program larger systems, given a reason to do so.
I dunno... somehow the fact that I wore jeans, a t-shirt, and a not-so-new fleece jacket to interviews at both IBM and Microsoft and got offers from both doesn't fill me with fear that not wearing button down shirts will get me canned...
I see your point, but I don't think OOo is the impetus for this. In this market, Microsoft's biggest competitor is quite literally themselves. Think about it... what can convince millions of users to pay hundreds of dollars each to upgrade from the last version of Office, which is working just fine? Only a massive overhaul like this. The other thing they could try is just cramming more features into an already bloated application, but the average user doesn't give two shits about the latest and greatest obscure print layout / macro / collaboration enhancement junk.
Heh, now THAT I will wholeheartedly agree with. Running XP on my laptop, I have to flatten my box once a year at the longest, or else it starts getting crufty and things break... I can tell the current install is nearing the end of its usefull lifecycle because the volume icon randomly disappears from the taskbar, and certain windows magically gain "always on top" status all by themselves. Honestly... I'm not sure how much of it is Windows' fault, though. I've felt the same urge to reinstall Gentoo on my desktop. I just start feeling like there's little things here and there that aren't getting cleaned up as I follow the upgrade path over a year or so. Maybe I'm just super paranoid about cruft, but I haven't seen an OS yet that really makes me feel like it keeps itself in an "as new" state forever.
You know, there are exceptions to the rule... I ran Windows ME for two years, on a motherboard and graphics card that were known to be buggy as hell together (I found out too late after buying them). I never saw one bluescreen, never had the registry corrupt itself, never actually had anything go wrong. By all logic, that computer should have been a smoldering pile of garbage within six months, but it worked just fine for me playing games, doing dev work, audio recording, divx encoding, you name it. Neither I nor the parent to my first post are saying that the problem doesn't exist for anyone just because it didn't happen to us, but it's worth pointing out that not every user will experience catastrophic failure.
Yep... anybody that has had not horrible experiences with Windows just HAS to be a troll :roll:
It depends what you do with it. The neat thing is, it basically adds disk access to javascript, which was the one thing it didn't have before. No, it's not exactly like desktop apps, but it has all the important features, given a programmer who will use it correctly.
I don't think that quite follows... while millions of people can't contribute to the codebase whenever they want, they CAN go in and look at the code, and check for security problems. That's amazingly valuable. With closed software, even if you suspect there's a security problem, you can't go into the code and check.
So no, OSS doesn't _guarantee_ better security. But IF people take advantage of the openness and DO go in and check it over, it can be a tool that _allows_ better security than with closed source software. The correct statement would be "OSS inherently has the potential to be more secure".
This is something I've seen come up a lot... it's part of open source that a lot of people are confused about.
Just because you have access to the code, and can change whatever you like, DOES NOT MEAN that you will be allowed to contribute to the official project code yourself. Firefox is a closed development house. They keep strict control over what code goes in, who's allowed to touch it, what features go on the UI and how they're organized. If they want to keep it that way, they're perfectly within their rights -- and given the quality of the product, it seems to be a good idea. If everyone were allowed to drop in code, or tack things on to the UI, the project would soon be a total mess.
But just because they keep a tight reign on the project code doesn't mean they aren't following the ideals of open source. You still have access to the code. You can go in and change whatever you like, fork the project, release your own competing version based on the original codebase, etc. That's where the true value of OSS comes from. If the Mozilla foundation ever went away, the community could pick up the code from the last release and run with it. If your company wants to release a custom version with support for some weird proprietary graphics format that Mozilla would never in a million years devote time to, you can. That's what open source is about.
Allowing everybody with even a vague interest to contribute to THEIR fork of the code, however... was never any open source license. At some point, once you get past the warm fuzzies of releasing something Open, you still have to sit down and actually code the project. And keeping an invitation only group makes a lot of sense, from that perspective.
But then YOU should be modded redundant... but then so should I... oh crap, recursion!
You're over-analyzing what I wrote. You asked what the difference is between regurgitation and understanding, and I pointed out that the Chinese Room construct already contains the answer... the Room can't apply rulesets; it can't synthesize any new information. It can only give an answer to an exact question in its library.
As for Searle... I guess. Since the Room doesn't take instructions into account, it's not a very good analogy for a computer. Don't really see what that has to do with this kid, though.