So, when your app allocates memory in which to load a dynamically-linked library, and this goes on the heap, and the heap is set to RW but not X, how will you make calls to the library?
What if your code, as a fun optimization or hack, wants to store executable code in a variable and execute the code stored in the variable?
Should we disallow an entire class of actions because people are too stupid and lazy to check the length of their data before they write it to memory?
OMG!! The MAN knows my name! The people who issued me a social security number and a birth certificate and whom I pay taxes to!
The birth certificate of course already includes my name, gender and date of birth.
The tax form, of course, involves giving them my address.
So, now they've taken a bunch of information I was already giving them and put it in a central repository and assigned a number (called a KEY! sound scary, doesn't it!) to each record.
So, now I can use that number.
OMG! What is they find me! What if the government that is run by and for the people that I take part in in this great democracy knows my name and address! Maybe they'll come for me next!!
Haha. I enjoyed the dialogue. "No thanks. That's chocolate.":-)
I definitly see what you mean about H(J) remaining intact regardless of it's inherint inconsistancies.
I am one of the few people synacle enough to argue about that whole J being "sane" think though. A part of me wonders if anyone with inconsistant beliefs and no grasp of prepositional logic can truly be considered "sane.":-)
"Normal", definitly. "Average," for sure. "Sane," the synical part of me would argue against.
Although, you appear to be defining "sane" as having your M(J) remain intact regardless of it's inconsistancies. So, with that vantage point, J is, in fact, sane, much to my chagrin.
I would love to believe that there are people with totally consistant beliefs, and even more so that I am one of them! Sometimes I question whether humans are able to truly converge H(x) and M(x). What if it is those very inconsistancies that make us who we are? At the very least inconsistancies help a lot of people to cope with the ups and downs of life.
Religion, for example, tends to be inconsistant both with evidence and half the time with itself. Yet this seems to help people cope with life. Stereotypes are an obvious example of inconsistances. "Chinese people are short." and "Jim, who is Chinese, is 6 feet and 2 inches tall." Stereotypes are one of the many ways that people simplify their lives and make them more manageable by weeding out some of the details and generalizing based on only some of the facts.
So, I guess the ability to have an inconsistant H(x) doesn't surprise me horribly. I really can't imagine any of the people I know having a consistant one. I mean, there is nothing inherintly odd about H(x) != M(x) as long as the rules governing the formation and evolution of H(x) are still grounded in M(x). I mean, assuming that we are in a purely physical world, the means by which H(x) remains inconsistant is itself consistant with M(x), if you catch my drift.
I seem to be having an unusually difficult time voicing my thoughts tonight, no doubt due to unually long 12 hour work day and the fact that I spend way too much free time hacking the Berkely MPEG Encoding library for my own nefarious purposes.
Hence my knowledge of LISP and prepositional logic. I'm a Computer Science major and a Math major at NC State. Although they don't teach LISP in any required undergrad classes, which is truly a shame.
Here's a link you might enjoy to a philosophy website containing a quiz testing the consistancy of your beliefs.
http://www.philosophers.co.uk/games/games.htm
The quiz entitled "Battleground God" is the one I had in mind.
Anyway, have a good night. Oh, and congrats on the awards, the impressive work with Alice, and good luck with further AI research.
Very interesting ideas. The notion of inconsistant "foreground logic" is indeed fascinating and is something I have pondered on occasion as well.
Could you give an example of a robot holding inconsistant beliefs in it's foreground logic? I see that it is possible and understand your point but can not think of a suitable example.
After reading your post and thinking about your example of candy and chocolate the following two ideas spring to mind:
First, you could view "I like candy" as a incomplete verbalization of a far more complicated logic. The rule could actually be "I like candy, aside from the candies in set S", where chocolate is a member of S. This would remove the inconsistancy of the belief structure by introducing the inconsistancy only when the beliefs are vocalized.
Second, you could change your definition of 'logic' and 'consistancy' by providing the ability for more specific rules to override less specific rules.
This form, which is obviously logically inconsistant, would become a new form under which when ambiguities arise such as X being chocolate and hence also a candy the most specific rule would be chosen.
Similar to Generic Methods in many programming languages including Lisp's CLOS.
> (defclass candy () ()) > (defclass chocolate (candy) ()) > (defmethod like ((x 'candy)) (nil)) > (defmethod like ((x 'chocolate)) (t)) > (like (make-candy)) nil > (like (make-chocolate)) t
Either way, human logic is always enjoyable to think about. Thanks for the thought-provoking response. Have a good day,
They say the interface was unflexible, non-standard, and yes, didn't look like the native interface.
At the very least you must concede that the interface IS non-standard and does NOT look like the native interface.
So, we conclude that:
> This was probably due to a poor understanding > by the authors of XUL.
Explain?!?
They make a valid point. It's true regardless of the technologies involved. So you claim that they are wrong due to ignorance of XUL? I would claim that you were wrong due to ignorance of logic.
Like you said, there are two forms of mathematics. There is the true mathematics on which we support the universe is based. This mathematics gives rise to patterns. We try and model these patterns using our human mathematics.
Let's call the universal mathematics M and the human-sprung mathematics H.
The original post stated that the human brain was good at math H. That it used ballistic equations and calculus to do things. These things are part of math type H. Not M. H.
My response was that he was wrong. The brain does NOT use H to do these things. It uses patten matching. This pattern matching is similar to H in that it is also an attempt to model the true mathematics of the universe, but it is NOT H. It is no inherently modeling the physics and calculus equations we are taught as a kid.
Yes, the brain does speak M, as you said. It uses pattern matching based on M to try and model the world to try and throw and catch balls and understand speech. But it is NOT modeling or replicating H as the original post stated.
This was the crux of my argument. Not what you thought it was. And no, I do not suffer from a misunderstanding of the foundations of mathematics nor a misunderstanding of subject-object dualism. Being a student of Buddhism I am very well aquainted with the notion of dualism and it's role in the world.
I'm just guessing as my CPU isn't spiked as my app runs.
Also, at the ~300k tris/frame we are pushing at the ~30 frames we are getting, that would make 1.2GB/s of bandwidth. That's assuming perfect efficiency. We are probably using over 1.5GB/s of bandwidth.
The triangle we are pushing is stored completely in RAM and is being moved via DMA to the vid card. The scene itself is static, you are correct, but the camera can move, as this doesn't require any changes to the geometry be done by us.
We just push the new Model-View and Projection matricies, and push the same 300k tri scene and let the video card transform the triangles for us.
So, you are right, being AGP-bandwidth limited isn't a certainty. In fact, it is likely that we are video card limited. But, regardless, at 1.5GB/s we are getting close to pushing AGP 4x to the max. And when the next generation of vid cards comes out that can push twice as many tris/sec we will need AGP 8x to keep the vid cards saturated.
If you can find an algorithm that will let me take my 1M triangle scene and cull it down to just the triangles that are visible, which cannot exceed the number of pixels on the screen, so that I can get absolutely NO overdraw and have perfect efficiency then I'd love to have it.
Cause no one else has been able to devise this algorithm. Atlease not so that it will run in real-time.
Also, the math for the triangles is done on the GPU (the CPU on the vid card) rather than your CPU for almost everything. You just push the Model-View and Projection matricies on the matrix stack and push the geometry and OpenGL will make sure your video card does the transformations for you, which it can do in hardware much more efficiently than your CPU can.
Re:AGP4x VS AGP8x.
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AGP4X vs. AGP8X
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· Score: 4, Interesting
With 3D Games, screen resolution isn't really an issue. The screen resolution and how much you need to saturate the AGP bus are completely independant. The only thing that determines the AGP bus saturation is how much geometry you need to send and how efficiently you can send it. How many textures you need to send and how efficiently you can send them.
With texture memory creeping upwards in 3D cards we should eventually see a point where all textures can be stored on the card and sending textures over AGP should be rare.
However, sending geometry is usually done per-frame in most 3D games, and you'd be surprised how much all of those triangles can add up.
1M triangles, with 3 vertecies, 3 texture coordinates, 3 normal vectors and sometimes more per vertex with each vector being comprised of 4 floats and each float of 4 bytes.
1,000,000 * (3 + 3 + 3) * 4 * 4 = 144,000,000
That's 144MB per frame. At 60 frames per second that's 4.22GB per second.
Now, granted, 1M tris per frame is way high for today's games. Most current games push around 30k per frame, never more than 60k. My friend and I are doing closer to 300k and are already starting to become AGP-bandwidth-limited.
Anyway, you are right. You can't have too much bandwidth to your video card. I'd love to be able to push a full 1M tris/frame, and I'm sure I will be able to soon. Just not yet. And not even with AGP 8x in all likelyhood.
Again, false. It is AGAIN pattern recognition. If it did it using pure mathematics and physics, don't you think you could have gotten it right the first time? Or, if your brain had to learn the physics, and now new it well enough to do all that we do in everyday life, don't you think more people would pass Physics I.:-)
It's a trial-and-error process with the brain's neural network encoding patterns. Inputs that looks like this (i want to throw a ball 10' feet), should be met my outputs like this (throw this hard). Granted, it's far more complicated than that, but it is STILL pattern recognition.
In respond to some other posts I've seen. No the brain does NOT do calculus in order to catch a baseball. It does NOT determine veocities by judging the displacement of the ball over multiple "frames" of vision and then use calculus. It is again PATTERN RECOGNITION.
Notice how you probably missed the first time you tried to catch a ball. And how when you try to catch again it takes a few to get the "feel" for it. This is because you body has changed and the patterns are faded and it takes a few repetitions to get re-trained.
An experiment was performed along these lines. They played catch. People caught the ball. Then, they took the two people and altered the gravity somewhat. I don't remember if they did it by dropping them with a small constant acceleration or what they did, but they changed the effective gravity. The people missed the ball. They wouldn't have missed if they'd been calculating velocities and plugging in to a physics equation. Unless you think the brain encodes the gravitational constant (G), and it had to be recalibrated.... What happened was the throws and catches no longer matched the pattern the brain had learned. After a handful of awkward throws the brain adjusted. New patterns were found and encoded. People could catch again.
Anyway, the brain does NOT do physics, calculus and other assorted advanced computations to keep alive. It just lives. Which you struggled with at first until you learned the way the world works and recorded those patterns.
And yet my comment is modded up to 4 currently, and yours is not. I have won this battle over karma on this, the most ignorant website in existance. w00t.
Note: Nothing I say or do on this site in any way endorses my own opinions nor those of anyone else. I speak only out of the love of the sick game that is slashdot.
American's are, in general, Ameri-centric assholes.
I should know. I live here. I have since birth.
We believe atleast as strongly, if not more strongly than most nations, that our ways are the correct ones and we have the right to make others live by those same beliefs. Whatever we want is good. Whatever opposes us is bad.
Unfortunately, we also have the muscle to back up these stupid claims.
I think one could just argue that this implies an incomplete knowledge of the ruleset. Maybe there was a rule you didn't know about.
Without a way to prove complete knowledge of a ruleset, you can't prove a discovery didn't follow it.
With humans this proof isn't forthcoming. With machines the ruleset is obvious. If you have an example of a machine making a discovery that didn't follow the ruleset, then THAT would be impressive.
Thanks for the feedback. AI is so cool. Always leads to interesting discussion.
I think your view of AI is pretty accurate. Setup the rules. Then try to create a being to best satisfy the rules.
Every computer system has to have rules. Unless is makes up it's own rules, in which case THAT is the rule. Unless it makes up it's own methods for making up rules, in which case THAT is the rule...
The question is, why do you think we are any different? Can you prove that we are different? Can you prove that we are not different? I can't do either.
Justin Dubs
Re:Impressions of eclipse (a few months with it)
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Eclipse 2.0 Released
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· Score: 2
New development on VA IS dropped. Only fixpacks are forthcoming.
All development has moved to WebSphere (WSAD, WSED and so forth).
Support for VA will continue. Handled by the Australians,
I guess that really depends on how you define UNIX.
OS X is almost entirely POSIX complient. We've got the standard C library. We've got pthreads.
We ship with GCC, GNU Make, and such. We ship with BASH.
Yes, OS X is different than solaris. So is BSD. So is linux. They almost all have entirely different startup methods. BSD has it's/etc/rc.conf. Linux has it's/etc/rc.d/rc[0-5].d/ directory structure. OS X has it's/System/StartupItems/ directory.
You still have your/etc/inetd.conf and/etc/samba.conf and/etc/sshd_config.conf and such. You don't have hosts or passwd because they are wrapped up in the whole NextSTEP Network Info database system.
OpenBSD doesn't use/etc/passwd either. It's also stored in a database file. Does that make IT not unix?
We use the Mach microkernel and are based on BSD 4.4. It comes with Apache and Samba installed by default.
A good deal of BSD source will compile unchanged on OS X. (hence fink's ability to port so many packages so quickly)
However, it is different than UNIX. That was kind of the point. UNIX is bad for desktops. It's cryptic for the average user. It requires too much low-level fiddeling. It uses abbreviated names for everything like/usr,/etc,/var, ls, pwd and cd. Most Unix GUI's suck for home use. X11 included. It's not what they were designed for. It IS what Cocoa was designed for.
So, if you define Solaris as being "UNIX", does that make Linux and BSD not "UNIX"? They have differences. What if I install XDarwin to put X11 support on my Mac. Then is it "UNIX"? I just feel that UNIX is such an arbitrary term that OS X is just as close as most other "UNIX" operating systems.
Yeah, I completely agree with your sentiments on C. As well as pretty much everything else you said.:-)
About ANSI Common LISP: In terms of syntax and functionality, there really isn't that much too it. It's beauty is it's simplicity. However, in terms of the available methods and packages, it is a bit of a beast. I'm still wading through it myself.
Honestly, to a certain extent I prefer Scheme. It's a bit more consistant and definitly more simple. The only thing really holding me back is, like I said in my last post, the lack of an Object system of the same quality as CLOS.
If I can find an OO system for scheme that has method-combinations and supports functionality like:initarg and:accessor for slots I'd be thrilled.
I agree with everything you said. C has it's place. It's small and dark and should be avoided by most.
Scheme is a sexy, sexy language. However, why not just use straight ANSI Common LISP. That's my preference for one main reason, CLOS. Scheme has only several mediocre implementations of "CLOS-like" systems. Nothing really on par with CLOS that I can find.
For the uninitiated (you poor, poor people:-)) CLOS is the Common LISP Object System (iirc). It's a fabulous polymorphic, multiple-dispatch OO system written in LISP. It has features that will make C++ and Java programmers head's swim. Namely,:before,:after and:around methods. Plus the whole multiple-dispatch thing.
Anyway, just my suggestion. Unless, of course, someone can suggest a good CLOS system for Scheme.
Yes, but python is not the only, nor the first language to allow for interactive programming.
As Paul Graham once noted, you see the PERL people scoffing at the C people and you see the Python people looking down at the PERL people. You'll notice those languages, in that order, C->Perl->Python are slowly getting closer to becoming LISP. LISP was, as far as I can remember, the first interactive language.
LISP still is, in my opinion, the most powerful language ever devised. What other language can claim that you can make it an OO language, at run-time, via LISP code. You can add type-checking, at run-time, via LISP code. Code is data and data can be used as code. CLOS kicks ass. LISP kicks ass.
Not that I don't like Python. It's a cool language. But it's complete lack of method overloading and type-checking make it less than ideal for large-scale projects or sophisticated OO projects. If you like Python, checkout Stackless Python. Very cool. Great support for tail recursion. Better continuation support. Good stuff.
Anyway, about AsmL. I looked at the example code. For a language based on state machines, it sure was low-level. It looked more like a even-more-verbose pascal. Take a look at the IO example. Good GOD! So many nested if-statements just to open a file and write to it.
Slashdot Mirror
So, when your app allocates memory in which to load a dynamically-linked library, and this goes on the heap, and the heap is set to RW but not X, how will you make calls to the library?
What if your code, as a fun optimization or hack, wants to store executable code in a variable and execute the code stored in the variable?
Should we disallow an entire class of actions because people are too stupid and lazy to check the length of their data before they write it to memory?
Justin Dubs
OMG!! The MAN knows my name! The people who issued me a social security number and a birth certificate and whom I pay taxes to!
The birth certificate of course already includes my name, gender and date of birth.
The tax form, of course, involves giving them my address.
So, now they've taken a bunch of information I was already giving them and put it in a central repository and assigned a number (called a KEY! sound scary, doesn't it!) to each record.
So, now I can use that number.
OMG! What is they find me! What if the government that is run by and for the people that I take part in in this great democracy knows my name and address! Maybe they'll come for me next!!
Get a grip people,
Justin Dubs
Haha. I enjoyed the dialogue. "No thanks. That's chocolate." :-)
:-)
I definitly see what you mean about H(J) remaining intact regardless of it's inherint inconsistancies.
I am one of the few people synacle enough to argue about that whole J being "sane" think though. A part of me wonders if anyone with inconsistant beliefs and no grasp of prepositional logic can truly be considered "sane."
"Normal", definitly. "Average," for sure. "Sane," the synical part of me would argue against.
Although, you appear to be defining "sane" as having your M(J) remain intact regardless of it's inconsistancies. So, with that vantage point, J is, in fact, sane, much to my chagrin.
I would love to believe that there are people with totally consistant beliefs, and even more so that I am one of them! Sometimes I question whether humans are able to truly converge H(x) and M(x). What if it is those very inconsistancies that make us who we are? At the very least inconsistancies help a lot of people to cope with the ups and downs of life.
Religion, for example, tends to be inconsistant both with evidence and half the time with itself. Yet this seems to help people cope with life. Stereotypes are an obvious example of inconsistances. "Chinese people are short." and "Jim, who is Chinese, is 6 feet and 2 inches tall." Stereotypes are one of the many ways that people simplify their lives and make them more manageable by weeding out some of the details and generalizing based on only some of the facts.
So, I guess the ability to have an inconsistant H(x) doesn't surprise me horribly. I really can't imagine any of the people I know having a consistant one. I mean, there is nothing inherintly odd about H(x) != M(x) as long as the rules governing the formation and evolution of H(x) are still grounded in M(x). I mean, assuming that we are in a purely physical world, the means by which H(x) remains inconsistant is itself consistant with M(x), if you catch my drift.
I seem to be having an unusually difficult time voicing my thoughts tonight, no doubt due to unually long 12 hour work day and the fact that I spend way too much free time hacking the Berkely MPEG Encoding library for my own nefarious purposes.
Hence my knowledge of LISP and prepositional logic. I'm a Computer Science major and a Math major at NC State. Although they don't teach LISP in any required undergrad classes, which is truly a shame.
Here's a link you might enjoy to a philosophy website containing a quiz testing the consistancy of your beliefs.
http://www.philosophers.co.uk/games/games.htm
The quiz entitled "Battleground God" is the one I had in mind.
Anyway, have a good night. Oh, and congrats on the awards, the impressive work with Alice, and good luck with further AI research.
Justin Dubs
Very interesting ideas. The notion of inconsistant "foreground logic" is indeed fascinating and is something I have pondered on occasion as well.
Could you give an example of a robot holding inconsistant beliefs in it's foreground logic? I see that it is possible and understand your point but can not think of a suitable example.
After reading your post and thinking about your example of candy and chocolate the following two ideas spring to mind:
First, you could view "I like candy" as a incomplete verbalization of a far more complicated logic. The rule could actually be "I like candy, aside from the candies in set S", where chocolate is a member of S. This would remove the inconsistancy of the belief structure by introducing the inconsistancy only when the beliefs are vocalized.
Second, you could change your definition of 'logic' and 'consistancy' by providing the ability for more specific rules to override less specific rules.
In other words
R1: chocolate(X) -> candy(X)
R2: candy(X) -> like(X)
R3: chocolate(X) -> !like(X)
This form, which is obviously logically inconsistant, would become a new form under which when ambiguities arise such as X being chocolate and hence also a candy the most specific rule would be chosen.
Similar to Generic Methods in many programming languages including Lisp's CLOS.
> (defclass candy () ())
> (defclass chocolate (candy) ())
> (defmethod like ((x 'candy)) (nil))
> (defmethod like ((x 'chocolate)) (t))
> (like (make-candy))
nil
> (like (make-chocolate))
t
Either way, human logic is always enjoyable to think about. Thanks for the thought-provoking response. Have a good day,
Justin Dubs
If that was the case then my original flame on this, the worst day in the history of the universe, was for not.
Please forgive your humble servant, Bob. Oh, Bob, please forgive me! Pleeeasssee!!!!
They say the interface was unflexible, non-standard, and yes, didn't look like the native interface.
At the very least you must concede that the interface IS non-standard and does NOT look like the native interface.
So, we conclude that:
> This was probably due to a poor understanding
> by the authors of XUL.
Explain?!?
They make a valid point. It's true regardless of the technologies involved. So you claim that they are wrong due to ignorance of XUL? I would claim that you were wrong due to ignorance of logic.
Justin Dubs
Well, actually, no.
Like you said, there are two forms of mathematics. There is the true mathematics on which we support the universe is based. This mathematics gives rise to patterns. We try and model these patterns using our human mathematics.
Let's call the universal mathematics M and the human-sprung mathematics H.
The original post stated that the human brain was good at math H. That it used ballistic equations and calculus to do things. These things are part of math type H. Not M. H.
My response was that he was wrong. The brain does NOT use H to do these things. It uses patten matching. This pattern matching is similar to H in that it is also an attempt to model the true mathematics of the universe, but it is NOT H. It is no inherently modeling the physics and calculus equations we are taught as a kid.
Yes, the brain does speak M, as you said. It uses pattern matching based on M to try and model the world to try and throw and catch balls and understand speech. But it is NOT modeling or replicating H as the original post stated.
This was the crux of my argument. Not what you thought it was. And no, I do not suffer from a misunderstanding of the foundations of mathematics nor a misunderstanding of subject-object dualism. Being a student of Buddhism I am very well aquainted with the notion of dualism and it's role in the world.
Justin Dubs
Of course in Quantum Physics where gravity is explained as an exchange of gravitons (a type of particle) it could be possible to block them...
Justin Dubs
I'm just guessing as my CPU isn't spiked as my app runs.
Also, at the ~300k tris/frame we are pushing at the ~30 frames we are getting, that would make 1.2GB/s of bandwidth. That's assuming perfect efficiency. We are probably using over 1.5GB/s of bandwidth.
The triangle we are pushing is stored completely in RAM and is being moved via DMA to the vid card. The scene itself is static, you are correct, but the camera can move, as this doesn't require any changes to the geometry be done by us.
We just push the new Model-View and Projection matricies, and push the same 300k tri scene and let the video card transform the triangles for us.
So, you are right, being AGP-bandwidth limited isn't a certainty. In fact, it is likely that we are video card limited. But, regardless, at 1.5GB/s we are getting close to pushing AGP 4x to the max. And when the next generation of vid cards comes out that can push twice as many tris/sec we will need AGP 8x to keep the vid cards saturated.
Justin Dubs
If you can find an algorithm that will let me take my 1M triangle scene and cull it down to just the triangles that are visible, which cannot exceed the number of pixels on the screen, so that I can get absolutely NO overdraw and have perfect efficiency then I'd love to have it.
Cause no one else has been able to devise this algorithm. Atlease not so that it will run in real-time.
Also, the math for the triangles is done on the GPU (the CPU on the vid card) rather than your CPU for almost everything. You just push the Model-View and Projection matricies on the matrix stack and push the geometry and OpenGL will make sure your video card does the transformations for you, which it can do in hardware much more efficiently than your CPU can.
Justin Dubs
Amen brother...
Justin Dubs
With 3D Games, screen resolution isn't really an issue. The screen resolution and how much you need to saturate the AGP bus are completely independant. The only thing that determines the AGP bus saturation is how much geometry you need to send and how efficiently you can send it. How many textures you need to send and how efficiently you can send them.
With texture memory creeping upwards in 3D cards we should eventually see a point where all textures can be stored on the card and sending textures over AGP should be rare.
However, sending geometry is usually done per-frame in most 3D games, and you'd be surprised how much all of those triangles can add up.
1M triangles, with 3 vertecies, 3 texture coordinates, 3 normal vectors and sometimes more per vertex with each vector being comprised of 4 floats and each float of 4 bytes.
1,000,000 * (3 + 3 + 3) * 4 * 4 = 144,000,000
That's 144MB per frame. At 60 frames per second that's 4.22GB per second.
Now, granted, 1M tris per frame is way high for today's games. Most current games push around 30k per frame, never more than 60k. My friend and I are doing closer to 300k and are already starting to become AGP-bandwidth-limited.
Anyway, you are right. You can't have too much bandwidth to your video card. I'd love to be able to push a full 1M tris/frame, and I'm sure I will be able to soon. Just not yet. And not even with AGP 8x in all likelyhood.
Justin Dubs
Ahhhhrg. This is the third or forth post I've seen so far spouting these lies.
...
:-)
> it does complex waveform analysis so that you can understand speech,
No, it does NOT. There is no complex waveform analysis. There are no fourier transforms. It is pattern recognition.
>and ballistic calculations involving dynamically changing multi-jointed launchers
Again, false. It is AGAIN pattern recognition. If it did it using pure mathematics and physics, don't you think you could have gotten it right the first time? Or, if your brain had to learn the physics, and now new it well enough to do all that we do in everyday life, don't you think more people would pass Physics I.
It's a trial-and-error process with the brain's neural network encoding patterns. Inputs that looks like this (i want to throw a ball 10' feet), should be met my outputs like this (throw this hard). Granted, it's far more complicated than that, but it is STILL pattern recognition.
In respond to some other posts I've seen. No the brain does NOT do calculus in order to catch a baseball. It does NOT determine veocities by judging the displacement of the ball over multiple "frames" of vision and then use calculus. It is again PATTERN RECOGNITION.
Notice how you probably missed the first time you tried to catch a ball. And how when you try to catch again it takes a few to get the "feel" for it. This is because you body has changed and the patterns are faded and it takes a few repetitions to get re-trained.
An experiment was performed along these lines. They played catch. People caught the ball. Then, they took the two people and altered the gravity somewhat. I don't remember if they did it by dropping them with a small constant acceleration or what they did, but they changed the effective gravity. The people missed the ball. They wouldn't have missed if they'd been calculating velocities and plugging in to a physics equation. Unless you think the brain encodes the gravitational constant (G), and it had to be recalibrated.... What happened was the throws and catches no longer matched the pattern the brain had learned. After a handful of awkward throws the brain adjusted. New patterns were found and encoded. People could catch again.
Anyway, the brain does NOT do physics, calculus and other assorted advanced computations to keep alive. It just lives. Which you struggled with at first until you learned the way the world works and recorded those patterns.
Justin Dubs
The correct answer of course:
"Whatever state you are from... Ass..."
Justin Dubs
And yet my comment is modded up to 4 currently, and yours is not. I have won this battle over karma on this, the most ignorant website in existance. w00t.
Note: Nothing I say or do on this site in any way endorses my own opinions nor those of anyone else. I speak only out of the love of the sick game that is slashdot.
Arrrr matey. Bitten by a troll are we? Yarrrr...
Justin Dubs
But true in a lot of cases.
American's are, in general, Ameri-centric assholes.
I should know. I live here. I have since birth.
We believe atleast as strongly, if not more strongly than most nations, that our ways are the correct ones and we have the right to make others live by those same beliefs. Whatever we want is good. Whatever opposes us is bad.
Unfortunately, we also have the muscle to back up these stupid claims.
Justin Dubs
I think one could just argue that this implies an incomplete knowledge of the ruleset. Maybe there was a rule you didn't know about.
Without a way to prove complete knowledge of a ruleset, you can't prove a discovery didn't follow it.
With humans this proof isn't forthcoming. With machines the ruleset is obvious. If you have an example of a machine making a discovery that didn't follow the ruleset, then THAT would be impressive.
Thanks for the feedback. AI is so cool. Always leads to interesting discussion.
Justin Dubs
I think your view of AI is pretty accurate. Setup the rules. Then try to create a being to best satisfy the rules.
Every computer system has to have rules. Unless is makes up it's own rules, in which case THAT is the rule. Unless it makes up it's own methods for making up rules, in which case THAT is the rule...
The question is, why do you think we are any different? Can you prove that we are different? Can you prove that we are not different? I can't do either.
Justin Dubs
New development on VA IS dropped. Only fixpacks are forthcoming.
All development has moved to WebSphere (WSAD, WSED and so forth).
Support for VA will continue. Handled by the Australians,
Justin Dubs
I guess that really depends on how you define UNIX.
/etc/rc.conf. Linux has it's /etc/rc.d/rc[0-5].d/ directory structure. OS X has it's /System/StartupItems/ directory.
/etc/inetd.conf and /etc/samba.conf and /etc/sshd_config.conf and such. You don't have hosts or passwd because they are wrapped up in the whole NextSTEP Network Info database system.
/etc/passwd either. It's also stored in a database file. Does that make IT not unix?
/usr, /etc, /var, ls, pwd and cd. Most Unix GUI's suck for home use. X11 included. It's not what they were designed for. It IS what Cocoa was designed for.
OS X is almost entirely POSIX complient. We've got the standard C library. We've got pthreads.
We ship with GCC, GNU Make, and such. We ship with BASH.
Yes, OS X is different than solaris. So is BSD. So is linux. They almost all have entirely different startup methods. BSD has it's
You still have your
OpenBSD doesn't use
We use the Mach microkernel and are based on BSD 4.4. It comes with Apache and Samba installed by default.
A good deal of BSD source will compile unchanged on OS X. (hence fink's ability to port so many packages so quickly)
However, it is different than UNIX. That was kind of the point. UNIX is bad for desktops. It's cryptic for the average user. It requires too much low-level fiddeling. It uses abbreviated names for everything like
So, if you define Solaris as being "UNIX", does that make Linux and BSD not "UNIX"? They have differences. What if I install XDarwin to put X11 support on my Mac. Then is it "UNIX"? I just feel that UNIX is such an arbitrary term that OS X is just as close as most other "UNIX" operating systems.
Anyway, just my thoughts.
Justin Dubs
Thanks a lot. I'll definitly do some looking into Scheme--. I appreciate the reply. Have a good day,
Justin Dubs
It's still objective. He didn't say: ...."
...."
"No one should buy this game because Blizzard X
Nor did he say:
"Everyone should buy this game because Blizzard X
All he asked was that you keep it in mind when making your own decision. Geez, even the whining is sub-par on slashdot...
Justin Dubs
Yeah, I completely agree with your sentiments on C. As well as pretty much everything else you said. :-)
:initarg and :accessor for slots I'd be thrilled.
About ANSI Common LISP: In terms of syntax and functionality, there really isn't that much too it. It's beauty is it's simplicity. However, in terms of the available methods and packages, it is a bit of a beast. I'm still wading through it myself.
Honestly, to a certain extent I prefer Scheme. It's a bit more consistant and definitly more simple. The only thing really holding me back is, like I said in my last post, the lack of an Object system of the same quality as CLOS.
If I can find an OO system for scheme that has method-combinations and supports functionality like
Do you have any recommendations?
Anyway. Thanks for the reply. Have a good night,
Justin Dubs
I'm also a language zealot. :-)
:-)) CLOS is the Common LISP Object System (iirc). It's a fabulous polymorphic, multiple-dispatch OO system written in LISP. It has features that will make C++ and Java programmers head's swim. Namely, :before, :after and :around methods. Plus the whole multiple-dispatch thing.
I agree with everything you said. C has it's place. It's small and dark and should be avoided by most.
Scheme is a sexy, sexy language. However, why not just use straight ANSI Common LISP. That's my preference for one main reason, CLOS. Scheme has only several mediocre implementations of "CLOS-like" systems. Nothing really on par with CLOS that I can find.
For the uninitiated (you poor, poor people
Anyway, just my suggestion. Unless, of course, someone can suggest a good CLOS system for Scheme.
Regardless, have a great day guys,
Justin Dubs
Yes, but python is not the only, nor the first language to allow for interactive programming.
As Paul Graham once noted, you see the PERL people scoffing at the C people and you see the Python people looking down at the PERL people. You'll notice those languages, in that order, C->Perl->Python are slowly getting closer to becoming LISP. LISP was, as far as I can remember, the first interactive language.
LISP still is, in my opinion, the most powerful language ever devised. What other language can claim that you can make it an OO language, at run-time, via LISP code. You can add type-checking, at run-time, via LISP code. Code is data and data can be used as code. CLOS kicks ass. LISP kicks ass.
Not that I don't like Python. It's a cool language. But it's complete lack of method overloading and type-checking make it less than ideal for large-scale projects or sophisticated OO projects. If you like Python, checkout Stackless Python. Very cool. Great support for tail recursion. Better continuation support. Good stuff.
Anyway, about AsmL. I looked at the example code. For a language based on state machines, it sure was low-level. It looked more like a even-more-verbose pascal. Take a look at the IO example. Good GOD! So many nested if-statements just to open a file and write to it.
Anyway, have a good day,
Justin Dubs