I could be wrong since I was only a littleun back then, but I strongly recall all sorts of hexagonal men and robodogs that supposedly would serve your drinks (how extremely...odd) and pick up your underwear. What ever happened to those?
It's a sad commentary on the state of AI that we haven't much progressed in 10 years. All we've succeeded in doing is rendering the creatures a little more anthropomorphic in appearance (think Furby), but their base intellect is still that of a dull chimp. The mean processing power has skyrocketed and there are more skilled people in tech than ever before, yet Teddy Ruxpin is more or less still the undisputed champion of artificial brains.
Is AI a dying field? I'm honestly curious. When I took my lone AI course in college, I was dismayed by the dronelike applications of DFS and BFS when I was expecting something a little more exotic. It seemed as though the professors lacked all spark of imagination - incredible when you consider the flare AI has made in the popular mind. And don't get me started on the affection these dodderers had for the sadly inadequate LISP family of languages.
Even this little robot cylinder thing doesn't do more than navigate a path through a virtual field. Nothing most slashdot readers couldn't code in under an hour. What ever happened to breathroughs in AI? Why are the serious researchers leaving it for other fields? Should we forget the dream?
I can't believe some of these restrictions. It's... almost inconceivable. Consider their ban on "Message/Bulletin Boards" - "Sites that permit semi-permanent messages to be posted and read by others." Heaven forbid the little kiddies should have a free discourse of any kind. Posted and read by others? Why, who knows what those ravening internet users might post! Swear words! Heretical leanings! Thoughts! I wouldn't be surprised to discover/. is banned under this clause. Too free.
Then there's their block on unfiltered searches. Consider this corrupting search string: "http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search?p=women". Egads, cover their sweet little eyes! They might be looking up such horrendous topics as women in the military, or the accomplishments of women! All, no doubt, in a sick demonic attempt to see nude bodies - we all know that women have no interest apart from the sexual.
Of course, they also ban "Free pages". Because of course, unless you have Big Money behind the site, you know it will all end in tears. The entire geocities complex is blocked, including such appalling sites as my blood-and-lust-centric Lucy Test. I don't like the banner ads either, but how many times have I been shunted to a geocities page when researching something that intrested me? Not for Bess users, though. Good old Bess, she doesn't have time to spend, say, THINKING about the worth of certain sites. She'd rather toss a pure white blanket over the lot and be done with it.
Frankly, I can't imagine the distorted hairy-palmed little trolls who rate sites for companies like this one. They spend their days looking at a good sight more porn and dementia than I ever do. Straight-backed Christians of the world - if you believe that information corrupts, then do you really want these polluted individuals deciding what your children see?
How many pathetic wheezy rock star wannabes/has-beens have delivered this line? Japan is the home of the fscking Tamagotchi for chrissake. The average consumer there sure does know technology. I know, they could scrap the penguin and use Pokemon as their new mascot. Hey, maybe TurboLinux will get The Bangles to endorse their software... or even Michael Jackson!
As someone else noted, IPv4 is nowhere near exhausting the supply of IP addresses. The problem is really that the IP#s have been subdivided into hierarchies A-E:
Class A: For big monster domains like ARPAnet 2^7 domains*16 million hosts each Class B: For medium domains like your ISP 2^14 domains*65536 hosts each Class C: For subnets and labs and stuff 2^22 domains*255 hosts each Class D: For subnet-only multicast Class E: nobody ever really used this
Trouble was that everybody wanted something bigger than C, but didn't really need all the addresses in B. So a lot were wasted every time a B class was assigned. There are some kludgy solutions like masking and sewing together lots of C's into one bigger domain, but they all are horribly complicated and a waste of brainpower as anybody who has ever taken a networking course can attest:) So one problem addressed by IPv6 was the expanded IP# values. Lots of room for divisibility.
A second problem was that IPv4 was basically all about sending text from one spot to another, and there was a lack of optimization for high-prio data and multicast data like streaming video. The reason you'll see a lot of patches for IPv6 stuff is not that it isn't backwards compatible with IPv4 so much as that IPv6 has lots of cool features people will want to take advantage of. For example, you can mark the priority of your packets on a scale of (I think?) 1-5, with servers optionally enforcing these values. When a server was in the process of getting slashdotted for example (or some other DoS attack;) it would know which packets were important and which could be dropped safely. You'd probably have to pay extra for high-priority transmissions, which means as an added benefit that crackers would have a harder time taking down machines they didn't like by packet flooding them or whatever.
As another example, the IPv6 packet structure basically lets you chain "extensions" onto your packet, giving you a sort of dynamic packet size.
Another biggie is internet-wide multicasting. A group of people receiving the same streaming video wouldn't have to be sent separate copies from the originating server. It could send one and have intermediate routers spawn copies.
A lot of the pain of setting up a new host is also eliminated. There's some kind of dynamic search-and-allocate thing built in that I don't remember well enough to discuss. Something about new hosts asking their neighbors for a globally unique IP address and eventually getting one.
There's more. Get Tanenbaum's book on networking and find out for yourself.
All this self-righteous talk about "choice" and "perfection" utterly miss the mark. Let's not forget two essential points:
1) the feminists are actually trying to protect the right of normal women to choose what they consider is beautiful. When the male and femal population are both inundated with images of a certain type of woman, and both are told millions of times without variation that this sort of woman is beautiful, women suddenly are robbed of that choice. Bizarre as it is, men begin to expect Cindy Crawford (or the latest porn star, you guys) in every woman they date. When they don't get it (surprise!) both the man and the woman are dissatisfied and ultimately the world is a shittier place to live in.
2)"Perfection" is relative. These days, the "choice" hounds on this board don't get a say in what perfection means. I don't get a say, you don't get a say. Who does? The "women's" mags, TV, and movies. They have the money, so naturally they want to protect it. How better to protect their perfectly sculpted asse(t)s than to ensure there is always a very small number of "perfect" women in the world? I should think that on/. of all places, there should be no need to explain the workings of monopoly.
Is there a delay between the uttered "foreign" speech and the translated version or what? Wouldn't this either result in either extremely lenghty conversations or confusing overlap?
Hmm. I wonder whether the original speech could be masked so that it wasn't audible. A little chip could record the wave patterns of the speaker and chirp out their inversion. Original + inversion = silence. That would be so sci-fi!
I can't believe all the huffy posturing people are doing here. They appear to feel threatened by a six-year-old. "Hotwiring a car at six? That's no big deal. I was regularly consulted by MIT at 2 and a half!" Give me a break.
This is just a smart kid people, get over it. He showed a lot more originality than almost anyone here ever did at that age, and so we all become defensive. Calm down. Nobody's going to come and take your Big Brain trophy away.
Next time I hear somebody on this group praising noncomformity, I'm going to know what really to think about it. You people are no more tolerant of unusual thought than the police who arrested him.
I see where you're coming from, but your comment really makes no sense.
> The humans value to the AIs will not be as > batteries!! It's a god damned closed system! > If they can feed those millions of people, > why can't they use that energy to power > themselves?
You've just nixed the entire world power grid with that comment. How about:
"If they can burn enough coal to run the station, why can't we all just get a daily shipment of coal!" or "If the waterfall is big enough to turn those big turbines, why don't we all move to Niagara!"
It's a closed system after all, right? Some forms of energy are just more desireable than others. We don't know what the AI's prefer.
It's been perceptively stated more than once that the articles posted here by JonKatz don't appear to be written for a highly technical audience. Oddly, they seem to be written for release to other journalists, as if Katz were trying to establish himself as the "geek mouthpiece", an eloquent representative of the unwashed geek populace.
But Katz knows he can only succeed at the fame-game if his articles have credibility. And what better claim than to be "Slashdot's Jon Katz". He posts his articles here, probably not even caring especially what our reactions will be, and refers to them as proof that the geek community worships his every typo.
Katz is worse than a clueless newbie. He's is cynically trading on/.'s reputation for his own personal glory.
Yup. I'm a little biased of course because I test MS Outlook crypto, but I'd honestly have to say that Outlook2000 SR2 will be the uncontested champion among secure mail clients, at least for a while. Why?
*Standards based* - that's right, O2k SR2 will be the first and only mail client *in the world* to implement the SMIME v3 protocols. This gives you features like secure labels and secure receipts, as well as full support for the standard-specified algorithms and other cools stuff like FIPS mode. (see http://search.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf- smime-ess-12.txt for the coolest stuff) And I swear it really is exactly implemented, no extensions!
*Autoconfiguration* - Don't know what the feature's going to be called when it goes out the door, but autoconfig rocks. Essentially, it instantly eliminates the hassle of selecting and administering your certificates. You just get a cert, click Sign or Encrypt on the mail, and Outlook does everything else. It will also repair your security profiles if a cert expires. Of course you can still go in and do all this yourself, but autoconfig is so cool, many people never will.
*Performance* - O2k is without contest in its speed and memory footprint. I know this will be greeted with skepticism due to O98, but just try it - you'll see why the perf numbers trash Quaalcom and Lotus.
*Stability* - well, I tested it. Nuff said:)
Now as for PGP, hmm. I guess I personally haven't been testing that and I'm upset that it seems to screw up your systems. I'll DL it tomorrow and see whether I can get those preview bugs fixed.
Slashdot Mirror
You can get a mail order wife from either malaysia or russia for lots less than that
This is so charming. What a fun person you must be.
-konstant
I could be wrong since I was only a littleun back then, but I strongly recall all sorts of hexagonal men and robodogs that supposedly would serve your drinks (how extremely...odd) and pick up your underwear. What ever happened to those?
It's a sad commentary on the state of AI that we haven't much progressed in 10 years. All we've succeeded in doing is rendering the creatures a little more anthropomorphic in appearance (think Furby), but their base intellect is still that of a dull chimp. The mean processing power has skyrocketed and there are more skilled people in tech than ever before, yet Teddy Ruxpin is more or less still the undisputed champion of artificial brains.
Is AI a dying field? I'm honestly curious. When I took my lone AI course in college, I was dismayed by the dronelike applications of DFS and BFS when I was expecting something a little more exotic. It seemed as though the professors lacked all spark of imagination - incredible when you consider the flare AI has made in the popular mind. And don't get me started on the affection these dodderers had for the sadly inadequate LISP family of languages.
Even this little robot cylinder thing doesn't do more than navigate a path through a virtual field. Nothing most slashdot readers couldn't code in under an hour. What ever happened to breathroughs in AI? Why are the serious researchers leaving it for other fields? Should we forget the dream?
-konstant
I can't believe some of these restrictions. It's... almost inconceivable. Consider their ban on "Message/Bulletin Boards" - "Sites that permit semi-permanent messages to be posted and read by others." Heaven forbid the little kiddies should have a free discourse of any kind. Posted and read by others? Why, who knows what those ravening internet users might post! Swear words! Heretical leanings! Thoughts! I wouldn't be surprised to discover /. is banned under this clause. Too free.
Then there's their block on unfiltered searches. Consider this corrupting search string:
"http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search?p=women". Egads, cover their sweet little eyes! They might be looking up such horrendous topics as women in the military, or the accomplishments of women! All, no doubt, in a sick demonic attempt to see nude bodies - we all know that women have no interest apart from the sexual.
Of course, they also ban "Free pages". Because of course, unless you have Big Money behind the site, you know it will all end in tears. The entire geocities complex is blocked, including such appalling sites as my blood-and-lust-centric Lucy Test. I don't like the banner ads either, but how many times have I been shunted to a geocities page when researching something that intrested me? Not for Bess users, though. Good old Bess, she doesn't have time to spend, say, THINKING about the worth of certain sites. She'd rather toss a pure white blanket over the lot and be done with it.
Frankly, I can't imagine the distorted hairy-palmed little trolls who rate sites for companies like this one. They spend their days looking at a good sight more porn and dementia than I ever do. Straight-backed Christians of the world - if you believe that information corrupts, then do you really want these polluted individuals deciding what your children see?
This has ruined my day.
-konstant
How many pathetic wheezy rock star wannabes/has-beens have delivered this line? Japan is the home of the fscking Tamagotchi for chrissake. The average consumer there sure does know technology. I know, they could scrap the penguin and use Pokemon as their new mascot. Hey, maybe TurboLinux will get The Bangles to endorse their software... or even Michael Jackson!
-konstant
As someone else noted, IPv4 is nowhere near exhausting the supply of IP addresses. The problem is really that the IP#s have been subdivided into hierarchies A-E:
:) So one problem addressed by IPv6 was the expanded IP# values. Lots of room for divisibility.
;) it would know which packets were important and which could be dropped safely. You'd probably have to pay extra for high-priority transmissions, which means as an added benefit that crackers would have a harder time taking down machines they didn't like by packet flooding them or whatever.
Class A: For big monster domains like ARPAnet
2^7 domains*16 million hosts each
Class B: For medium domains like your ISP
2^14 domains*65536 hosts each
Class C: For subnets and labs and stuff
2^22 domains*255 hosts each
Class D: For subnet-only multicast
Class E: nobody ever really used this
Trouble was that everybody wanted something bigger than C, but didn't really need all the addresses in B. So a lot were wasted every time a B class was assigned. There are some kludgy solutions like masking and sewing together lots of C's into one bigger domain, but they all are horribly complicated and a waste of brainpower as anybody who has ever taken a networking course can attest
A second problem was that IPv4 was basically all about sending text from one spot to another, and there was a lack of optimization for high-prio data and multicast data like streaming video. The reason you'll see a lot of patches for IPv6 stuff is not that it isn't backwards compatible with IPv4 so much as that IPv6 has lots of cool features people will want to take advantage of. For example, you can mark the priority of your packets on a scale of (I think?) 1-5, with servers optionally enforcing these values. When a server was in the process of getting slashdotted for example (or some other DoS attack
As another example, the IPv6 packet structure basically lets you chain "extensions" onto your packet, giving you a sort of dynamic packet size.
Another biggie is internet-wide multicasting. A group of people receiving the same streaming video wouldn't have to be sent separate copies from the originating server. It could send one and have intermediate routers spawn copies.
A lot of the pain of setting up a new host is also eliminated. There's some kind of dynamic search-and-allocate thing built in that I don't remember well enough to discuss. Something about new hosts asking their neighbors for a globally unique IP address and eventually getting one.
There's more. Get Tanenbaum's book on networking and find out for yourself.
-konstant
All this self-righteous talk about "choice" and "perfection" utterly miss the mark. Let's not forget two essential points:
/. of all places, there should be no need to explain the workings of monopoly.
1) the feminists are actually trying to protect the right of normal women to choose what they consider is beautiful. When the male and femal population are both inundated with images of a certain type of woman, and both are told millions of times without variation that this sort of woman is beautiful, women suddenly are robbed of that choice. Bizarre as it is, men begin to expect Cindy Crawford (or the latest porn star, you guys) in every woman they date. When they don't get it (surprise!) both the man and the woman are dissatisfied and ultimately the world is a shittier place to live in.
2)"Perfection" is relative. These days, the "choice" hounds on this board don't get a say in what perfection means. I don't get a say, you don't get a say. Who does? The "women's" mags, TV, and movies. They have the money, so naturally they want to protect it. How better to protect their perfectly sculpted asse(t)s than to ensure there is always a very small number of "perfect" women in the world? I should think that on
-konstant
Is there a delay between the uttered "foreign" speech and the translated version or what? Wouldn't this either result in either extremely lenghty conversations or confusing overlap?
Hmm. I wonder whether the original speech could be masked so that it wasn't audible. A little chip could record the wave patterns of the speaker and chirp out their inversion. Original + inversion = silence. That would be so sci-fi!
I can't believe all the huffy posturing people are doing here. They appear to feel threatened by a six-year-old. "Hotwiring a car at six? That's no big deal. I was regularly consulted by MIT at 2 and a half!" Give me a break.
This is just a smart kid people, get over it. He showed a lot more originality than almost anyone here ever did at that age, and so we all become defensive. Calm down. Nobody's going to come and take your Big Brain trophy away.
Next time I hear somebody on this group praising noncomformity, I'm going to know what really to think about it. You people are no more tolerant of unusual thought than the police who arrested him.
Sheesh.
I see where you're coming from, but your comment really makes no sense.
> The humans value to the AIs will not be as
> batteries!! It's a god damned closed system!
> If they can feed those millions of people,
> why can't they use that energy to power
> themselves?
You've just nixed the entire world power grid with that comment. How about:
"If they can burn enough coal to run the station, why can't we all just get a daily shipment of coal!" or "If the waterfall is big enough to turn those big turbines, why don't we all move to Niagara!"
It's a closed system after all, right? Some forms of energy are just more desireable than others. We don't know what the AI's prefer.
-konstant
~I speak for a vast shadow government~
It's been perceptively stated more than once that the articles posted here by JonKatz don't appear to be written for a highly technical audience. Oddly, they seem to be written for release to other journalists, as if Katz were trying to establish himself as the "geek mouthpiece", an eloquent representative of the unwashed geek populace.
/.'s reputation for his own personal glory.
But Katz knows he can only succeed at the fame-game if his articles have credibility. And what better claim than to be "Slashdot's Jon Katz". He posts his articles here, probably not even caring especially what our reactions will be, and refers to them as proof that the geek community worships his every typo.
Katz is worse than a clueless newbie. He's is cynically trading on
DO WE WANT TO BE REPRESENTED BY JON KATZ?
Yup. I'm a little biased of course because I test MS Outlook crypto, but I'd honestly have to say that Outlook2000 SR2 will be the uncontested champion among secure mail clients, at least for a while. Why?
- smime-ess-12.txt for the coolest stuff) And I swear it really is exactly implemented, no extensions!
:)
*Standards based* - that's right, O2k SR2 will be the first and only mail client *in the world* to implement the SMIME v3 protocols. This gives you features like secure labels and secure receipts, as well as full support for the standard-specified algorithms and other cools stuff like FIPS mode. (see http://search.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf
*Autoconfiguration* - Don't know what the feature's going to be called when it goes out the door, but autoconfig rocks. Essentially, it instantly eliminates the hassle of selecting and administering your certificates. You just get a cert, click Sign or Encrypt on the mail, and Outlook does everything else. It will also repair your security profiles if a cert expires. Of course you can still go in and do all this yourself, but autoconfig is so cool, many people never will.
*Performance* - O2k is without contest in its speed and memory footprint. I know this will be greeted with skepticism due to O98, but just try it - you'll see why the perf numbers trash Quaalcom and Lotus.
*Stability* - well, I tested it. Nuff said
Now as for PGP, hmm. I guess I personally haven't been testing that and I'm upset that it seems to screw up your systems. I'll DL it tomorrow and see whether I can get those preview bugs fixed.
-konstant