I'll give you a hint: in business, you have to be ruthless. You won't last five seconds in such a rabidly competitive environment without being ruthless. Microsoft gets such a bad rap not because they are an "evil" company, but because:
a) they are #1
b) they get much more publicity than other companies
c) they are #1
ever wonder why none of the major computer companies, like Sun, MS, or Oracle, give away their source? People love to hate the top dog. Knock MS off, and what you'll get is another MS with a different name, that is all.
What type of propaganda is this? Bloated? It runs faster than any other browser. It is also rock-solid: it _does_not_crash_.
Microsoft won the browser war because Netscape couldn't make a good product to save themselves, not because MS circumvented the W3C. When Netscape was an actual contender (around version 3.x), they BOTH circumvented the standards to add new and better abilities.
Netscape lost because MS wanted it more. Version after version saw IE faster and more stable. The exaxt opposite can be said of Netscape's offering.
Not really. A hardwired solution can always be implemented in software. The "black boxes" of the human brain that you are referring to are in fact doing computation (i.e. they take input and generate output by some obsure, yet predictable (if we only knew how!) function). Therefore, we should be able to find an analagous computation that can be performed on a computer. And therefore, you should be able to do a computation-human brain comparison.
I think they are taking that into consideration. The ability to do calculations is a very high level function (how many dogs can do it?), and we know computers can do that a LOT faster than us (when was the last time you multiplied a billion numbers in a second?). Its all the autonomous functions of the brain (i.e. vision and speech processing, etc) that contribute to our amazing computation abilities.
I can't believe you actually said this. No genetic modifications "jumped" from one plant species to another. Read the article before saying something totally inane.
Taken from another tack, remember that the modifications are usually patented. So, if a crop of genetically modified plants is in close proximity to other crops, it could dirty other farmers' crops. This could cause them to have to destroy their entire crop, for no other reason than being downwind of a genetically modified crop.
Yeah, like all those scary genetically modified bacteria that create insulin for those unfortunate enough to have diabetes. How dare they want to live!
Microsoft is aggresively entering new markets because, when you own 99.9% of one market, further growth in that market can only take place at the rate of growth of the market. And since the OS market is realtiely mature, it does not grow as fast as other, emerging markets. Sorry to burst your bubble, but it has nothing to do with linux being a "major" competitor...
Its not abuse to use net income from one area of operation to finance another. Its only abuse if it forces out competition.
I don't exactly see Palm making money in the handheld market.
In the gaming market, it is a well-known practice to sell your hardware at a discount. It takes a while for a company to actually start seeing net income, and perhaps never from the hardware.
I'm sorry, but you can't begrudge microsoft because they have lots of money. Every company entering new markets loses money. That is why so many startups have negative EPSs. Microsoft aggresively targets new markets, but they have the money to offset their losses.
Re:Artificial "Intelligence"
on
ALICE vs. ALICE
·
· Score: 1
Ahh, but then again, there is the classic philosophical computer science thought-experiment:
Assume you have a person, who does not know chinese, in a room with all the books to all the questions someone could possibly ask. He communicates with the outside world via squiggles written on paper passed through a slot in a wall. The person does not know what is on the paper, but he looks up the appropriate answer in one of his books, writes it on the paper, and passes it back out. He does not know he is in fact communicating in chinese. The question is, does the man know chinese? Some people say, "of course not!" while others think a bit harder, and maybe say, "he doesn't, but the system as a whole does."
No, someone is NOT expecting too much out of a computer program. The whole point of the ALICE project is to pass the Turing test, i.e. to create a computer program that is intelligent. With this in mind, ALICE fails miserably. And as I understand it, ALICE will never become intelligent, because it does not have the capability adapt and learn.
Gee, in a market where both the other major players sell their hardware for prices wildly below what it costs them, is it any wonder MS would have do the same with the xbox to remain economically competitive?
This article isn't even about cybersquatting! It is about some guy who happens to work for this newspaper and who happens to sometimes write about the Rolling Stones. The musical Wyman wants the columnist wyman to put a discalimer on everything he writes that he is in fact NOT the musical Wyman! How ridiculous!
Don't be ridiculous. There are probably more plastic cups and plates thrown away in a single day than disposable DVD thrown away in a year. I'm not saying that it wouldn't be a problem, but it certainly isn't "huge"
Also - so what if you handle it in the dark? The discs are reactive to AIR - not light. You'd have to handle it in a vaccuum.
TVs, monitors, and other CRT devices emit electrons all the time, and at high voltages. As far as I know (and care) they are stopped and rendered harmless by the flimsy plastic casing of the monitor and of course by the phosphors on the screen that luminesce when they are hit by them.
So when they say they don't have to worry "as much" they are probably saying that 3" lead casings will not be necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
a) they are #1
b) they get much more publicity than other companies
c) they are #1
ever wonder why none of the major computer companies, like Sun, MS, or Oracle, give away their source? People love to hate the top dog. Knock MS off, and what you'll get is another MS with a different name, that is all.
This article is about SERVER costs. It is not about switching the computers in the classrooms, that the students actually sit down and use, to linux.
What type of propaganda is this? Bloated? It runs faster than any other browser. It is also rock-solid: it _does_not_crash_.
Microsoft won the browser war because Netscape couldn't make a good product to save themselves, not because MS circumvented the W3C. When Netscape was an actual contender (around version 3.x), they BOTH circumvented the standards to add new and better abilities.
Netscape lost because MS wanted it more. Version after version saw IE faster and more stable. The exaxt opposite can be said of Netscape's offering.
Not really. A hardwired solution can always be implemented in software. The "black boxes" of the human brain that you are referring to are in fact doing computation (i.e. they take input and generate output by some obsure, yet predictable (if we only knew how!) function). Therefore, we should be able to find an analagous computation that can be performed on a computer. And therefore, you should be able to do a computation-human brain comparison.
I think they are taking that into consideration. The ability to do calculations is a very high level function (how many dogs can do it?), and we know computers can do that a LOT faster than us (when was the last time you multiplied a billion numbers in a second?). Its all the autonomous functions of the brain (i.e. vision and speech processing, etc) that contribute to our amazing computation abilities.
Actually, its only about $290,000,000
I can't believe you actually said this. No genetic modifications "jumped" from one plant species to another. Read the article before saying something totally inane.
Because you might want to create more than a token amount of the product. Imagine covering several square miles of fields with greenhouse glass!
Taken from another tack, remember that the modifications are usually patented. So, if a crop of genetically modified plants is in close proximity to other crops, it could dirty other farmers' crops. This could cause them to have to destroy their entire crop, for no other reason than being downwind of a genetically modified crop.
Yeah, like all those scary genetically modified bacteria that create insulin for those unfortunate enough to have diabetes. How dare they want to live!
Microsoft is aggresively entering new markets because, when you own 99.9% of one market, further growth in that market can only take place at the rate of growth of the market. And since the OS market is realtiely mature, it does not grow as fast as other, emerging markets. Sorry to burst your bubble, but it has nothing to do with linux being a "major" competitor...
Its not abuse to use net income from one area of operation to finance another. Its only abuse if it forces out competition.
I don't exactly see Palm making money in the handheld market.
In the gaming market, it is a well-known practice to sell your hardware at a discount. It takes a while for a company to actually start seeing net income, and perhaps never from the hardware.
I'm sorry, but you can't begrudge microsoft because they have lots of money. Every company entering new markets loses money. That is why so many startups have negative EPSs. Microsoft aggresively targets new markets, but they have the money to offset their losses.
Ahh, but then again, there is the classic philosophical computer science thought-experiment:
Assume you have a person, who does not know chinese, in a room with all the books to all the questions someone could possibly ask. He communicates with the outside world via squiggles written on paper passed through a slot in a wall. The person does not know what is on the paper, but he looks up the appropriate answer in one of his books, writes it on the paper, and passes it back out. He does not know he is in fact communicating in chinese. The question is, does the man know chinese? Some people say, "of course not!" while others think a bit harder, and maybe say, "he doesn't, but the system as a whole does."
No, someone is NOT expecting too much out of a computer program. The whole point of the ALICE project is to pass the Turing test, i.e. to create a computer program that is intelligent. With this in mind, ALICE fails miserably. And as I understand it, ALICE will never become intelligent, because it does not have the capability adapt and learn.
Gee, in a market where both the other major players sell their hardware for prices wildly below what it costs them, is it any wonder MS would have do the same with the xbox to remain economically competitive?
This article isn't even about cybersquatting! It is about some guy who happens to work for this newspaper and who happens to sometimes write about the Rolling Stones. The musical Wyman wants the columnist wyman to put a discalimer on everything he writes that he is in fact NOT the musical Wyman! How ridiculous!
Don't be ridiculous. There are probably more plastic cups and plates thrown away in a single day than disposable DVD thrown away in a year. I'm not saying that it wouldn't be a problem, but it certainly isn't "huge"
Also - so what if you handle it in the dark? The discs are reactive to AIR - not light. You'd have to handle it in a vaccuum.
This technology will never catch on for DVD rental companies. They make WAY too much money off of late fees!
TVs, monitors, and other CRT devices emit electrons all the time, and at high voltages. As far as I know (and care) they are stopped and rendered harmless by the flimsy plastic casing of the monitor and of course by the phosphors on the screen that luminesce when they are hit by them. So when they say they don't have to worry "as much" they are probably saying that 3" lead casings will not be necessary.