I find the bit-twiddling abilities of Common Lisp to be pretty advanced compared to C.
Granted, this depends on what you mean by "bit-twiddling"--smashing memory based on a pointer given to you by the OS is going to be implementation-dependent.
However, for actually pulling bits out of data and re-arranging them, I find the Common Lisp routines to be great. You can assign/extract integer values to/from any consecutive block of bits, without having to compute the masks and shifts yourself. I've found this quite nice in creating code that converts to/from native IEEE floats from/to other floating-point formats.
Interesting comment. I should have said that it was my *impression* that LISP wasn't particularly suited for bit-twiddling; I haven't had much experience with that aspect of it myself. Glad (and not terribly surprised) to hear that it's better than I reported.:)
How bout this recession we are in because any idiot with a half-baked idea could get millions in venture capital and then blew it when the dotbomb mess happened? People lost a LOT of jobs then. When your money is tight, your entertainment expenses tend to drop lower as well. Rather than go buy a new computer, people are making do with what they have. Not to mention the fact that this is a finite market as well. Once everyone has a computer, you can't expect sales and marketing to help much, people won't buy a new pc without a good reason. Napster may have been that reason for some, but I don't buy it. My $0.4
Obviously you're right that some of the dotcom crash was quite necessary and had nothing to do with the Napster ruling. But the point you're forgetting is that the dotcoms started to crash in the spring of 2000, and for a while it was pretty well contained: the dotcoms themselves (mostly just the bad ones) with some collateral damage to Sun and Cisco once they actually started going under in late 2000.
But the huge drop in consumer PC sales and consumer broadband didn't happen until spring 2001--until the Napster decision, almost precisely.
And it makes sense: you take a service that went from 0 people in fall 1999 to IIRC 80 million in spring 2001, many of them buying new computers, new CD burners, and/or broadband connections to use Napster, and then you suddenly take that impetus away, you're going to get a big problem on your hands. Indeed everybody had been saying for years that new computers weren't needed because there was no new killer app...but there *was* a killer app, Napster. Napster is the reason that every computer comes with a CD burner now, and DVD-ROMs are just optional. When I bought my last computer 3.5 years ago, I bought it with a DVD-ROM, because everyone thought they were going to replace CD-ROMs very quickly. But they didn't, and the reasons why were, in 1999, the introduction of the sub-$1000 computer, which kept CD-ROMs standard, and in 2000, Napster, which made CD burners standard.
So, again, the broadband and PC markets dropped in the wake of the Napster decision, like a rock. And of course the most ironic thing is that the music industry's sales did exactly the same thing--they were rising, at a record pace no less, throughout 2000 and Q101...but then, directly after the Napster decision, they turned negative and have plummetted ever since.
Of course everyone attributes this to the lack of good music (except the labels, who somehow attribute it to "piracy" even though it happened just as they killed off most music-sharing). But that just begs the question whether the existence of a free open venue for sharing music didn't help more people learn about more bands, and help more bands get more buzz and make it big. It's surely a better explanation than "all creative people with musical talent died or retired or got writer's block in mid-2001."
The saddest part is that the so-called free-market system does nothing to correct this tremendous self-induced mistake on the part of the record labels. Sure they're getting punished for it, but the end result of that is just that some will sell themselves to others and instead of the big 5, all our music will be controlled by the big 3 or the big 2. An even more concentrated monopoly will only mean increased lobbying power, an even more desperate insistence on rewriting the law to protect their obsolete business model, and even less chance of innovation or competition.
The point is not that the free market cannot coexist with government regulations; I agree with Lessig that some form of copyright is necessary, although I would revert to the pre-1990 style which essentially exempted non-commercial copying from infringement charges. The point is that the free market does not work when the current business leaders are able to buy laws to protect them from future conditions. Perhaps the whole Enron mess will lead some people to question that...but somehow I doubt it.
Re:Rule 1 of Efficient Lisp: Lisp is not functiona
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Common Lisp: Inside Sabre
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· Score: 5, Informative
I'd like to see somone post a couple of brief examples of things that were well-suited to Lisp (and would be much more difficult in C) - anyone have anything handy?
If you're interested is LISP, you should take a look at Paul Graham's excellent ANSI Common LISP, a wonderfully written introduction to LISP which is nonetheless a decent resource which can almost replace the much heftier Steele. If you're not sure you want to spend the cash, the first couplechapters are online.
In this very small, very chatty book for beginners with not too much code, Graham nonetheless manages to include examples such as a ray tracer (90 lines of code); a program to dynamically generate HTML pages (119 lines of code; this program (very much expanded, but without a single rewrite) now powers Yahoo! Stores); and a complete, seperate object-oriented language with multiple inheritence (89 lines; but a much more powerful OO language, CLOS, is already included with Common LISP). The last two in particular would be impossible to do as quickly or easily in C.
A much bigger LISP book I happen to have at the moment is Peter Norvig's Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming : Case Studies in Common Lisp, which includes a whole lot of impressive and/or historically interesting examples, including ELIZA, STUDENT (solves algebraic word problems) MACSYMA (symbolic integration ala Mathematica), a Prolog interpreter and compiler, a Scheme interpreter, an optimizing LISP compiler, a natural language grammar parser, and a couple other things. I just finished (well, turned in...) a project which extended Norvig's code to play the game Othello, also from this book, to use trained neural nets (which unfortunately didn't train all that well). The coding part of this was made darn easy by the fact that Norvig's Othello function takes as inputs two functions which provide the move-selection strategies for black and white respectively--something that can't be done in a language without functional closures.
I certainly wouldn't want to do any of these in C; although all of them could be so done, it would only be at the cost of a good deal of length, functionality and elegence.
In general, LISP is great for anything involving GOFAI (good old fasioned AI, i.e. non-stochastic), anything that needs to generate hierarchically nested text (e.g. HTML, XML, or LISP programs), anything that needs to be written quickly (or LISP can be used as a rapid-prototyping language), any sort of interpreter, or for any time you wished you could modify the available programming languages to build one that really suits your problem. LISP is also great for extending existing programs, which is why almost every user-extensible application uses a dialect of LISP to do the job. (e.g. emacs, AutoCAD, etc. No, VB macros for Word don't count, although it is noteworthy that LISP is useful over such a wide range of programming tasks as to be a replacement for VB and C.)
What is LISP bad at? Well, its libraries can be rather weak and nonstandard (although ANSI Common LISP itself comes with a large array of useful functions); GUI stuff, multithreading, and networking all fit in this category and are often implementation specific. (Of course, this is nothing to do with the language itself but just with what tools are available.) Its use for really low level bit-twiddling stuff is somewhat awkward. Iteration in LISP suffers somewhat from being only a little bit more powerful than iteration in C; the upside is you can still combine it with all the other great stuff in LISP, but the downside is that the parenthisis-style syntax, which is so much better for writing macros and functional code, only clutters up iterative code.
And, certain of the most powerful features of LISP, like macros and closures-as-first-level-objects, take a bit of experience to wrap your mind around, as does the functional programming paradigm. (LISP does not in any way require functional programming; it's just that while there are other languages as good as LISP at iterative code and arguably as good as LISP at OO code, there is nothing as good for functional code.) This is usually taken to mean that LISP is only suitable for CS students and AI researchers, because ordinary programmers are too dumb to get this stuff. I'm just a CS student, and I haven't had much experience with how dumb ordinary programmers are or aren't, but intuitively I think this argument is bunk.
Personally I think these techniques are just new things to learn; subtle and powerful, sure, but so is simple recursion the first time you learn it and every programmer knows how to use that. Indeed, once you understand recursion well, functional programming and function closures are not very large conceptual leaps at all. Sometimes the mechanics of lambda closures can be slightly tricky, but no more so than referencing and dereferencing pointers in C, and with a lot greater payoff. Hell, the most complicated uses of functions as objects in LISP are a lot easier to get right IMO than even simple uses of templates in C++, and "templates" (i.e. generic funcions) come for free in LISP, due to runtime type checking. (Of course, this is why no one uses C++ templates, but whatever.)
Macros are difficult to write. But then again, they are incredibly powerful, and not "necessary" very often. And it's usually *extremely* easy to understand someone else's macro code, which is all a novice would have to do anyways.
Plus there are lots of features of LISP which make it incredibly easy for beginners. Debugging in LISP is ridiculously easy, at least for programs which don't use too many functional closures or complex objects. Instead of the C paradigm where you only have one big executable main(), LISP programs are made up of lots of little functions, all of which are callable (and thus extraordinarily easily debuggable) from the top-level evaluator. There's no write-save-compile-test-debug loop; it's all together, and all very fast. Immediate feedback means more willingness to take chances, try out things, and make mistakes.
Plus, because there's no main(), your programs are always extensible. If you want to, once you're done with a function it's trivial to make a larger function which calls the other function, takes it as an input, etc.
There is no need to manage memory, no need to futz around with pointers, and no way to cause a segfault until you start optimizing. Buffer overflows are impossible. You can start with a skeleton of a program, gradually add functionality, and only add optimizations at the end when you have tested your code; and you can test every new function or optimization, so you know exactly what goes wrong when something does.
And it's fast: once you put in proper optimizations, compiled LISP is nearly as fast as C. Of course this wasn't always the case, and it's not the case for LISP before you put in type declarations. And a compiled LISP file will probably be bigger than compiled C code, especially when you add the LISP top-level eval to it. On the other hand, C is usually not as fast or small as well optimized assembly code, but there is a good reason very few people program in that anymore: because programming in C makes your code less buggy and much faster to develop. Similarly, programming LISP will almost always make your code less buggy and much faster to develop than using C. Now that compiler technology and computer hardware have made those differences almost moot, it probably makes much more sense to use LISP than C.
Of course, the result of this change has not been to drive more people to LISP, but instead to drive LISP's features into other languages. Thus we have C++ with attempts at generic functions; Java with decent OO and automatic garbage collection; Python showing the usefullness of an interactive top-level. Nowadays Perl and Python are getting functional closures and the list datastructure, although their functions are not quite first-level objects and so not quite as powerful. Plus it will probably take another prefix-syntax language for macros to be copied properly.
Whether the world will realize that LISP already exists (and indeed has since the late 50's) or continue to reinvent it, I dunno. Probably the latter so long as LISP remains short of libraries that tie it down to modern computers. (Again, GUIs, multithreading, networking.) Still, it's probably worth learning LISP just so that when the same ideas come out in more "mainstream" languages years from now you'll already know and understand them.
I think this was meant as a joke. I've just started reading Lessig's latest book where he talks about how the Internet having an e2e architecture makes it an innovation commons. Microsoft and especially Disney would like to put restrictions on that e2e design by limiting what an attached device could do.
It's not a joke. If you pay attention to Lessig's recent pronouncements on the subject, he's decided that the biggest threat to the Internet comes from those who would change it from its current topology--i.e. a dumb network with smart terminals--into a smart network with dumb terminals. The companies Lessig figures are trying to do this are, not surprisingly, the ones that own the network (or parts thereof): AOLTW and the rest of the cable co.'s. Since most of these companies are either connected with the copyright cartels or in the business of making distribution deals with them, they would like nothing more than to be able to control what content passes over their section of "the Internet".
MS and Disney, on the other hand, and for all the horrible things which can rightfully be said about them, do *not* want a switch to a smart network with dumb terminals...because they don't control the network, and would thus be at the mercy of those who do. Indeed, Lessig is apparently quite optimistic about.NET from this standpoint, as it most certainly involves a way to increase the power terminals get from communicating over the Internet without changing the rules of the network itself (even to the point of exploiting the few restrictions already part of those rules, but I digress). Yes, you might need to sell your credit cards, pets, soul, mortgage, etc. to MS in order to access any Passport-enabled websites, but at least in order for.NET to work it will require leaving the Internet intact for non-.NET websites to talk to non-MS computers quite happily.
Microsoft and especially Disney would like to put restrictions on that e2e design by limiting what an attached device could do.
Perhaps they would, but they don't control the network, so they can't. Instead, they need to push for the network to stay open in order to allow their attached devices to do whatever they want them to do. The cable companies, on the other hand, do control the network, and have been itching for years and years to limit what an attached device can do in order to eliminate competition for their own attached devices, or in order to extort content providers for the privilige of getting their stuff on the "approved list".
Lessig argues that these sorts of issues of telecommunications law are in fact the most dire threat posed to the Internet in the near future, and that most politechies misplace their energies by not realizing this fact. Dunno if he's at all right about this, but he's certainly proved insightful in the past.
The pics weren't in the original story anyways, just on the home page. Here's the cover pic--on another site, so no worry that it will be taken down--and here's a nice pic which is still accessible on timecanada.com.
Man, that and the printer-friendly version of the article? If timecanada doesn't fire their webmaster for posting too early, they sure as hell should fire him for being unable to even take the story and picture down successfully!
And several billion dollars says Napster shouldn't exist
Several more billion dollars says Napster should exist. However, the PC and broadband industries--both of which collapsed in the wake of the Napster decision--do not spend their billions buying Congressmen. (Well, the surviving portion of the broadband industry does, but only because it has been consolidated into the hands of content owners, who of course contributed their billions against Napster.)
The sad thing is that there was another industry which collapsed, though not quite as precipitously, at exactly the time of the Napster decision. I'm speaking, of course, about the recording industry. All throughout 2000, when Napster grew from almost-zero to 80 million users, IIRC, record sales increased to record levels (yay, a pun!). Sure the economy was good, but 2000 had IIRC the largest rate of increase in something like a decade. (And the economy was good for most of that decade.) Now 2001 is a terrible year for the record industry--which they blame on "piracy", of course, completely disregarding the fact that the decline started almost precisely when Napster got shut down.
Of course there are other interpretations for why record sales sucked this year, e.g. "the music available sucked." But this is precisely the point--the music you heard about sucked. Maybe the fact that it was suddenly much more difficult (not just Napster, but even more the demise of independent online radio, also due to RIAA lawsuits) to hear about new bands and sample their music had something to do with this??
The Napster case was just like the Sony Betamax case...the only difference was which side won. We know what the long-term consequences of losing the Betamax case were for the MPAA--roughly half of their income. The comparison with the RIAA's "victory" over Napster should prove enlightening...
But the freaking name is obviously a rip-off of Windows. There is no question that it would create market confusion. For him to claim otherwise is just nonsense. After all, why call it Lindows if you're not trying to piggyback on Windows?
It is obvious that the name makes a reference to Microsoft Windows. But that's not a violation of trademark; nor is being "a rip-off" enough to violate a trademark. It's only a violation if the name is likely to confuse anybody, which, clearly, it is not.
The name is meant to convey that the product is a combination of LINux and wINDOWS, which, indeed, it is (functionality-wise). Just like copyright does not prevent someone from copying a CD, trademark does not prevent someone from basing a name or a logo on another company's name or logo. Instead, copyright prevents someone from *distributing* that copied CD, and trademark prevents someone from choosing a name or logo so similar as to invite *confusion*.
The fact that people confuse such issues is a result of the fact that people think the rights due to the "owner" of Intellectual "Property" are at all akin to the rights due to the owner of real property, which they are not. In fact, it's too bad that the term "property" isn't trademarked, because it could sue "Intellectual Property" for definition-infringement and win!
EV7 will come out, but so far its performance doesn't look so competitive.
Huh????? EV7 will almost certainly be the fastest MPU available at the time of its launch (by this I mean highest scores in SPEC2k int and fp), even ahead of the extremely expensive POWER4 (which sort of "cheats" on the single-threaded SPEC2k because then the one active core on the device gets the entire 128MB of shared L3 cache to itself).
Of course Compaq's support is questionable, the upgrade path is zero, and there's no telling how quickly they'll get out the high-end 32 and 64-way boxes out, but in terms of plain old CPU performance the EV7 is going to be the chip to beat. (BTW, sounds like you didn't read the article if you didn't get this point.)
And I bet it will cost more then 10%. AMD will still have the better ratio of performance/price.
Certainly Northwood will (rightly) carry a bit of a price premium over Willamette, but mainly because Willy prices will drop by a lot. Northwood will almost certainly improve Intel's price/performance relative to AMD, for the simple reason that in addition to being able to clock faster and getting better performance at equivalent clock speeds, Northwoods are cheaper to make than Willamettes, because they're a lot smaller. (~130mm^2 vs. 217mm^2)
AMD will still offer better performance/price, of course, but mainly because they will cut prices in response. (And they had an awfully large lead to start with.)
Our problem is that we think like the humans we are.. That includes a pretty large amount of overestimation of our own abilities. The human kind of intelligence is probably *not* the only one that can exist....Let's not be too arrogant and conclude that because our first attempts of creating intelligence failed we'll never achieve it.. Maybe just rethink what intelligence actually is.
But that's precisely the problem with trying to "achieve AI"--defining what the hell "intelligence" is. For better or worse, people have traditionally defined "intelligence" roughly as "the things people can do but animals can't," or, "the things people can do but it makes our noggins hurt after a while." When put this way, the deficiencies in this definition become pretty apparent, but no one has come up with an obviously better version. Instead we usually approach the question of whether a thing is "intelligent" using the standards of the old Supreme Court decision defining obscenity--we think we know it when we see it.
Or more often, we think we know what it isn't when we see that. The history of "the quest for AI" (I put that in quotes very advisedly) is full of problems that, if solved, would surely be proof of AI...until they are solved, in which case it's still a dumb computer. Computers are now the world champions or competitive with world champions in chess, checkers, backgammon, othello, poker, bridge, and almost any game of mental skill with the significant exception of go. Computers have both proven several important and previously unproved mathematical theorems (e.g. the 4 color map coloring conjecture) and have come up with elegant and/or novel proofs for existing theorems (e.g. a computer proof of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem which "invented" Cantor's diagonalization technique on its own).
On the other hand, we have yet to make a computer which can navigate and react to its environment as well as, say, a pet dog can (sorry AIBO), nor one which can understand human language in any but the most limited domains. (Of course "understand" is a similarly difficult to define term. As an example of what I mean, look at CYC, a company which gets its name from its initial mission when it was founded IIRC back in 1984--to program a computer which understood enough concepts to understand language well enough that it could read an enCYClopedia (or any other descriptions in natural language) and learn what it didn't already know. While CYC has developed a useful system, it's still a ways from passing the encyclopedia test.)
Even though we're used to thinking of playing championship-level chess or doing advanced mathematics as hallmarks of particularly intelligent humans, while navigating an environment or understanding language is something that even the dumbest people can do, we find that computers are good at different things. (Or rather, we know how to program computers to be good at some things but not other things.)
The "problem" has been that in the early days of computers and on into the "golden age" of AI, we didn't know squat about how the human brain worked, nor even about what sorts of steps were needed in order to e.g. understand natural language. Back then, most AI researchers--brilliant people, mind you--figured all that would be necessary for a computer to understand language would be a link to a dictionary and maybe some rudimentary ability to parse grammar. Indeed, in many ways the field of linguistics arose as a result of the attempts and failures of computer scientists to get computers to understand language. Similarly, the successes and failures of AI have been instrumental in guiding or even creating the field of computational neuroscience.
What we are coming to understand is that the things that only "more intelligent" people can do are not really the hallmarks of "intelligence" but rather are examples of people fitting their brains to tasks they were not really designed for. For AI to truly "be achieved", we will have to get much better at making computers succeed at the tasks which a monkey can do just as well as a human, rather than those which humans can do but monkeys can't.
Also, we're learning that our instinctive idea of "intelligence" demands that techniques be general rather than specific. In other words, we don't consider exhaustive depth-limited minimax search with static evaluation to be a truly intelligent game playing technique--even though it can allow a computer to become the world chess champion--because it really sucks at go. The fact that go has a branching factor (i.e. avg. # of legal moves) of over 300 while chess has one of around 30 doesn't mean that similar thinking techniques (so far as we can tell) can't be used for a human to play both, but it does mean that exhaustive search is a feasible technique for a chess-playing computer but not a go-playing computer; we tend to interpret this (rightly or wrongly) as saying that exhaustive search is not an "intelligent" technique.
Next, it's time to stop tossing around that crap about how computers are so much faster or more powerful than human brains. That's complete hogwash. A modern CPU has roughly 10^6 gates, compared to ~10^11 neurons in a human brain. A computer might have 10^9 bits of memory (or even 10^10 if we go really high-end), and 10^11 bits of storage space, but a human brain has ~10^14 synapses, which can be viewed as encoding part of what the brain knows. A human brain has a remarkable 10^14 bits/sec of data bandwidth, compared to ~10^10 bps for a PC and 10^11 bps for e.g. the upcoming Alpha EV7. The only category computers lead in is cycle time, roughly 10^-9 for computers compared to ~10^-3 for the human brain. The upshot of all this is that, when it comes to computers programed as neural networks, a computer can only perform about 10^6 neuron updates/sec compared with 10^14 for a human brain, and the largest computer networks (limited by feasibility not by space) are maybe 10^5 neurons compared to 10^11 in the brain. So, roughly 100,000,000 times slower and 1,000,000,000 times smaller than a brain. (Figures based upon those in _Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach_, updated for the 7 years since the book was published.) No wonder computers aren't as intelligent as a human brain! And yet despite the huge disadvantage, neural nets are still the best technique for many AI problems, especially if we are worried about coming up with a technique which seems to be generally intelligent.
And finally, while it's interesting to talk about why we haven't created HAL yet, it's important not to confuse this with the idea that "the field of AI is a failure". AI is *not* a failure. While some problems have proven much harder than we initially expected, this is almost entirely because our initial expectations were completely ignorant, rather than because progress has not been made. Most importantly, we need to realize that people who are working in the field of AI are not sitting there day after day trying to create Lt. Commander Data or pass the Turing Test. Rather they're working on solutions to limited domain problems where computers can augment or replace the efforts of humans--and they're succeeding in many, many instances. The only real "problem" with the field of AI is defining what exactly it is.
Haven't all their games flopped miserably despite all the hype?
No. Dominion3 failed utterly and completely, but then again it was just a failed game which ION bought the rights to when the previous developers went bankrupt. Diakatana failed miserably despite all the hype, time, and expense. Deux Ex did quite well and was critically hailed, earning many many "game of the year" honors, despite being not-so-hyped. Anachronox was apparently pretty run-of-the-mill, but it barely got any hype at all.
You, like many people, are unfairly painting all of ION Storm with the brush of Diakatana. Of course, John Romero--project leader for Diakatana (which was actually really called John Romero's Diakatana)--was the founder of ION Storm, and the reason ION got so much hype and publicity and money in the first place. And Diakatana was not just a flop but an apocalyptic fiasco: they plowed something like $50 million and 4 years (after promising it would only take 8 months) into a shockingly mediocre game, all whilst buying the top floors of a lavish skyscraper to serve as their development house, and even once causing their entire programming teams to resign en masse.
But Deus Ex was probably the best game of 2000. One reason for the diparity is that ION Storm actually had three completely seperate teams in seperate cities, so Deux Ex and Diakatana were really developed by the same company in name only.
Everyone and their mom is comparing this to the old PR performance ratings employed by Cyrix et. al. and what a big ripoff they were, and how everyone caught on and Cyrix went out of business and so on. There are two problems with this:
1. PR was a terrible benchmark. It was proprietary, synthetic, had little to do with real-world applications. Moreover, it was integer-only, and thus rather neatly covered up the fact that while the Cyrix CPUs were indeed faster clock-for-clock than a Pentium on integer programs, their floating point seriously sucked. In contrast, the suite of benchmarking suites AMD is using is well chosen, all based on "real-world" application benchmarks, and covers most problem domains pretty well.
The only missing component which might be interesting to have included is SPEC, but the only new data that would really provide is how well cutting-edge, mainly-experimental compilers support each processor. On the one hand, this exclusion does tend to disadvantage the P4, since modern compilation techniques are important to top P4 performance, and eventually these techniques will make their way to mainstream precompiled applications. On the other hand, for the next couple years or so 99% of the programs consumers run will still be compiled with not-so-modern compilers (i.e. MSVC++), and as Intel now owns every single important compiler research team in the world, they may have a slightly unfair advantage here.
In any case, this doesn't really matter because the AthlonXP rating system is comparing AthlonXPs to Athlon Thunderbirds, not P4s.
2. PR meant "Pentium Rating", even while Intel was selling "Pentium-II"s. This is the big thing people tend to forget about the whole PR thing: it was more or less accurate (integer only, of course), but the problem was that Cyrix was trying to position a "PR250" chip against, say, a PII-266. Great, except that the PII was significantly faster clock-for-clock than the Pentium was, especially running 32-bit apps (eg. the then-newly-standard Win95). The PR thing *was* a scam, not because performance ratings are innately a scam, but because the "P" in PR confused the fact that the comparison was to an obsolete processor and not to the current competition.
In any case, this doesn't really matter because the AthlonXP rating system is comparing AthlonXPs to Athlon Thunderbirds, not P4s.
(As measured by some suite of benchmarks AMD has put together, although it's not exactly clear what because they keep fouling it up and talking about the P4 in their so-called whitepaper).
Thus, while this may be a misguided marketing ploy destined to backfire, it is nonetheless a fundamentally fair one, strictly meant to compare Athlons to Athlons, not Athlon's to P4s!
"Model numbers are designed to communicate the relative application performance among the various AMD Athlon XP processors, as well as communicate the architectural superiority over existing AMD Athlon processors." (From the FAQ.)
Thus an AthlonXP 1800+ is (supposed to be) just as much better than a 1.8 GHz P4 as a 1.4 GHz Athlon Thunderbird was better than a 1.4 GHz P4.
(In reality this is not always so much the case, the main reason being that at higher processor speeds the chipset comes into play more, and the dual-channel RDRAM i850 for the P4 delivers more bandwidth than a single-channel PC266 chipset for the AthlonXP (eg. VIA KT266A). This advantage will be all-but-gone once PC333 chipsets hit in a few months...)
Relative to the months of creative work and irreplacable personal data that can be lost, getting the local geek to spend a few hours reinstalling software is indeed trivial.
Absolutely correct.
However, one simple modification could bring the user's personal data under the protection of the admin account while still leaving it accessible to the user account: have a program running with root privileges which automatically backs up a copy of all the user's documents to a file only root has rights to. Then if the docs get hosed eg. by a virus running as user, one simply needs to login as root to get at a backed-up copy.
Of course the idea of backing up to another spot on one's own hard drive seems a little strange, but as most *really* important data files tend to be relatively small (unless the user is doing eg. video editing for a living), it seems like a very sensible solution, especially for OS' like Win2k Professional and OSX--which have strong multi-user security, but are generally run as single-user workstations.
(Seriously, I do agree with you and besides this venerable exception and the oft-mentioned difficulty of getting good clean musical fun after typing "Britney Spears" into a search engine (although lately even the official Britney material is becoming delightfully unclean), there really is no real possibility of confusing porn and non-porn sites. IMO while a.sex domain might theoretically bring some benefits, the potential for censorship of every other tld and the blocking of.sex would be too great if it existed.)
Mostly because the KT266A will be cheaper for the same performance and advantages. The major advantage of the dual DDR-SDRAM channels is to make the onboard video bite slightly less. If you are going to stuff it with an AGP video card, etc. you might as well just get the KT266A.
Or, it makes sense to use the nForce 220 (single DDR channel) with a seperate video card, to get the benefit of the awesome integrated sound for (potentially) significantly less than the cost of a KT266A + SB Live.
You are right that the 440 makes no sense as a high-end chipset, only as a good mid-end OEM chipset (integrated video means lower assembly cost).
Seriously-- why _shouldn't_ computer crime be crime?
Computer crime should be a crime.
But it already *is* a crime. The question is what is a just response to computer crimes. Some things which are *not* just:
Sentencing someone to lifetime imprisonment without possibility of parole for a simple computer crime. Remember, if the crime really warranted such a sentence--for example, cracking air traffic control and causing planes to crash into each other; cracking a CIA computer and stealing national secrets--then the criminal would already be liable for serious punishment under existing laws--murder and espionage, in these cases.
Retroactively eliminating the statute of limitations, allowing people to now be charged with computer "crimes" they committed decades ago.
What's even worse is the provision that giving advice or information which may be used to facilitate computer crimes is not only criminalized but subject to the same penalties.
To put it another way, if this law passes then someone could be given life in prison without parole for documenting vulnerabilities which allow systems to be compromised by a cracker or a worm. Indeed, it isn't clear that, with the removal of the statute of limitations, they couldn't charge the people documented the vulnerabilities responsible for eg. Code Red or Nimda under this law.
This provision is like the anti-circumvention provision of the DMCA writ large. Whereas at least the DMCA only applies to access-control restrictions on copyrighted material, this law could potentially make all discussion of any vulnerabilities which allow systems or information to be compromised illegal.
These provisions are so utterly preposterous and out of proportion to the crimes (or so-called crimes) discussed as to boggle the mind.
These executables are automatically executed if the receipient who opens (or previews) the email is running Internet Explorer 5 or 6. Note that the worm may spoof the source address on the emails...
...The wav file is called readme.eml. Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 and higher will automatically execute the malicious file...
Nowhere on the link you provided does it specify which versions of IE are affected. Indeed, I'm fairly certain that IE6 is *not* affected (or at least requires the user to respond to a dialog box before it will run.eml or.exe files). Moreover, I'm fairly sure that MS has patches for these vulnerabilities in IE5.
On the other hand, I believe that IE4 *is* vulnerable to at least the.eml bug.
Does anyone have more information about the IE5 part of this? How does it spread? What exactly spreads? How do you find out if you are infected and does this also work for IE5.5 and IE6 or is it only IE5.0x?
It spreads according to a hole in IE 5 which automatically opens and executes.eml files. More information here.
I tried the demonstration exploit on the above page using IE6, and it gave me a dialog box confirming that I wanted to open the file. (Except it was already a.tmp file in my temp directory at that point, not a.eml file.) So presumably IE6 at least asks your permission first. Also, when I decided to "open" the file it opened the file in Word, instead of running it. (apparently)
So IE6 appears to be safe, at least from the demo exploit coded by Guninski. Dunno about IE 5.5.
The problem with Asbestos is that the only safe level of exposure is zero.
Actually, that's a myth. The reason so many thousands got sick from asbestos is because so many thousands breathed in lots and lots of it, over and over and over for years. Mainly people who worked in construction and installed it almost every day for years. Also shipyards (asbestos was widely used in ship construction, as you *really* don't want those catching fire) and the factories where the asbestos was made.
Check out the graph on this page. It shows the asbestos-related death rates for workers who were exposed to various levels of airborne asbestos every day of their working careers. Even then, the death rate varies widely (and almost linearly) with the asbestos levels experienced. At low levels (eg..1 fiber/cc of air), the increased death rate is barely significant (3.2 deaths/1000).
Furthermore, asbestos exposure is a cumulative risk, very similar to the risks from smoking. Just as smoking 3 packs every day for a week won't kill you if you don't smoke again, even a relatively high asbestos exposure over a few days or weeks will not cause a significant occurance of disease. Or, as that link puts it, "Risk of asbestos related illness is Dose-Response related. That is, the greater the amount of exposure and the longer the time of exposure, the greater the risk of asbestos related cancers."
Assuming that Giuliani is telling the truth about the levels measured, there would appear to be little to worry about from asbestos here.
According to Giuliani, at least, they've been repeatedly testing air quality and "as you get beyond the epicenter of the recovery site, the asbestos levels in the air are either safe or nonexistent."
Yeah, that Jonas Salk sure was one corporate whore. And awful folks like Tishler, Conover and Sheehan, damn those antibiotics. Who needed them? I'm sure they would have made it to all those poor people eventually.
The question is whether Salk et. al. would only have made their discoveries if their research was funded by a private company, as opposed to if they worked eg. at a research university and their research was funded by the university and government grants. I can't conceive of a reason why there would be any difference. I'm certainly not aware of any suggestion that Salk was motivated by the promise of monopoly patents rather than a desire to save millions of children's lives.
Now, the question you have to answer is this: what if Salk et. al. had their own companies, and prevented anyone else in the world from developing killed virus vaccines, or antibiotics, for the 17 year patent period? Back in the 50's, only the vaccines or antibiotics themselves were patentable. If invented today, the entire fields of killed virus vaccines and synthetic antibiotics would likely be signed off on by the USPTO.
By contrast, Lloyd Conover wasted 27 years of his life defending his tetracyclene patent in court. For his efforts, he got inducted into the USPTO Hall of Fame. (As were Tishler and Sheehan. Salk, as mentioned above, did not merit an invite.)
Incidentally, I had never heard of Lloyd Conover before in my life.
Slashdot Mirror
I find the bit-twiddling abilities of Common Lisp to be pretty advanced compared to C.
Granted, this depends on what you mean by "bit-twiddling"--smashing memory based on a pointer given to you by the OS is going to be implementation-dependent.
However, for actually pulling bits out of data and re-arranging them, I find the Common Lisp routines to be great. You can assign/extract integer values to/from any consecutive block of bits, without having to compute the masks and shifts yourself. I've found this quite nice in creating code that converts to/from native IEEE floats from/to other floating-point formats.
Interesting comment. I should have said that it was my *impression* that LISP wasn't particularly suited for bit-twiddling; I haven't had much experience with that aspect of it myself. Glad (and not terribly surprised) to hear that it's better than I reported.
How bout this recession we are in because any idiot with a half-baked idea could get millions in venture capital and then blew it when the dotbomb mess happened? People lost a LOT of jobs then. When your money is tight, your entertainment expenses tend to drop lower as well. Rather than go buy a new computer, people are making do with what they have. Not to mention the fact that this is a finite market as well. Once everyone has a computer, you can't expect sales and marketing to help much, people won't buy a new pc without a good reason. Napster may have been that reason for some, but I don't buy it. My $0.4
Obviously you're right that some of the dotcom crash was quite necessary and had nothing to do with the Napster ruling. But the point you're forgetting is that the dotcoms started to crash in the spring of 2000, and for a while it was pretty well contained: the dotcoms themselves (mostly just the bad ones) with some collateral damage to Sun and Cisco once they actually started going under in late 2000.
But the huge drop in consumer PC sales and consumer broadband didn't happen until spring 2001--until the Napster decision, almost precisely.
And it makes sense: you take a service that went from 0 people in fall 1999 to IIRC 80 million in spring 2001, many of them buying new computers, new CD burners, and/or broadband connections to use Napster, and then you suddenly take that impetus away, you're going to get a big problem on your hands. Indeed everybody had been saying for years that new computers weren't needed because there was no new killer app...but there *was* a killer app, Napster. Napster is the reason that every computer comes with a CD burner now, and DVD-ROMs are just optional. When I bought my last computer 3.5 years ago, I bought it with a DVD-ROM, because everyone thought they were going to replace CD-ROMs very quickly. But they didn't, and the reasons why were, in 1999, the introduction of the sub-$1000 computer, which kept CD-ROMs standard, and in 2000, Napster, which made CD burners standard.
So, again, the broadband and PC markets dropped in the wake of the Napster decision, like a rock. And of course the most ironic thing is that the music industry's sales did exactly the same thing--they were rising, at a record pace no less, throughout 2000 and Q101...but then, directly after the Napster decision, they turned negative and have plummetted ever since.
Of course everyone attributes this to the lack of good music (except the labels, who somehow attribute it to "piracy" even though it happened just as they killed off most music-sharing). But that just begs the question whether the existence of a free open venue for sharing music didn't help more people learn about more bands, and help more bands get more buzz and make it big. It's surely a better explanation than "all creative people with musical talent died or retired or got writer's block in mid-2001."
The saddest part is that the so-called free-market system does nothing to correct this tremendous self-induced mistake on the part of the record labels. Sure they're getting punished for it, but the end result of that is just that some will sell themselves to others and instead of the big 5, all our music will be controlled by the big 3 or the big 2. An even more concentrated monopoly will only mean increased lobbying power, an even more desperate insistence on rewriting the law to protect their obsolete business model, and even less chance of innovation or competition.
The point is not that the free market cannot coexist with government regulations; I agree with Lessig that some form of copyright is necessary, although I would revert to the pre-1990 style which essentially exempted non-commercial copying from infringement charges. The point is that the free market does not work when the current business leaders are able to buy laws to protect them from future conditions. Perhaps the whole Enron mess will lead some people to question that...but somehow I doubt it.
I'd like to see somone post a couple of brief examples of things that were well-suited to Lisp (and would be much more difficult in C) - anyone have anything handy?
If you're interested is LISP, you should take a look at Paul Graham's excellent ANSI Common LISP, a wonderfully written introduction to LISP which is nonetheless a decent resource which can almost replace the much heftier Steele. If you're not sure you want to spend the cash, the first couple chapters are online.
In this very small, very chatty book for beginners with not too much code, Graham nonetheless manages to include examples such as a ray tracer (90 lines of code); a program to dynamically generate HTML pages (119 lines of code; this program (very much expanded, but without a single rewrite) now powers Yahoo! Stores); and a complete, seperate object-oriented language with multiple inheritence (89 lines; but a much more powerful OO language, CLOS, is already included with Common LISP). The last two in particular would be impossible to do as quickly or easily in C.
A much bigger LISP book I happen to have at the moment is Peter Norvig's Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming : Case Studies in Common Lisp, which includes a whole lot of impressive and/or historically interesting examples, including ELIZA, STUDENT (solves algebraic word problems) MACSYMA (symbolic integration ala Mathematica), a Prolog interpreter and compiler, a Scheme interpreter, an optimizing LISP compiler, a natural language grammar parser, and a couple other things. I just finished (well, turned in...) a project which extended Norvig's code to play the game Othello, also from this book, to use trained neural nets (which unfortunately didn't train all that well). The coding part of this was made darn easy by the fact that Norvig's Othello function takes as inputs two functions which provide the move-selection strategies for black and white respectively--something that can't be done in a language without functional closures.
I certainly wouldn't want to do any of these in C; although all of them could be so done, it would only be at the cost of a good deal of length, functionality and elegence.
In general, LISP is great for anything involving GOFAI (good old fasioned AI, i.e. non-stochastic), anything that needs to generate hierarchically nested text (e.g. HTML, XML, or LISP programs), anything that needs to be written quickly (or LISP can be used as a rapid-prototyping language), any sort of interpreter, or for any time you wished you could modify the available programming languages to build one that really suits your problem. LISP is also great for extending existing programs, which is why almost every user-extensible application uses a dialect of LISP to do the job. (e.g. emacs, AutoCAD, etc. No, VB macros for Word don't count, although it is noteworthy that LISP is useful over such a wide range of programming tasks as to be a replacement for VB and C.)
What is LISP bad at? Well, its libraries can be rather weak and nonstandard (although ANSI Common LISP itself comes with a large array of useful functions); GUI stuff, multithreading, and networking all fit in this category and are often implementation specific. (Of course, this is nothing to do with the language itself but just with what tools are available.) Its use for really low level bit-twiddling stuff is somewhat awkward. Iteration in LISP suffers somewhat from being only a little bit more powerful than iteration in C; the upside is you can still combine it with all the other great stuff in LISP, but the downside is that the parenthisis-style syntax, which is so much better for writing macros and functional code, only clutters up iterative code.
And, certain of the most powerful features of LISP, like macros and closures-as-first-level-objects, take a bit of experience to wrap your mind around, as does the functional programming paradigm. (LISP does not in any way require functional programming; it's just that while there are other languages as good as LISP at iterative code and arguably as good as LISP at OO code, there is nothing as good for functional code.) This is usually taken to mean that LISP is only suitable for CS students and AI researchers, because ordinary programmers are too dumb to get this stuff. I'm just a CS student, and I haven't had much experience with how dumb ordinary programmers are or aren't, but intuitively I think this argument is bunk.
Personally I think these techniques are just new things to learn; subtle and powerful, sure, but so is simple recursion the first time you learn it and every programmer knows how to use that. Indeed, once you understand recursion well, functional programming and function closures are not very large conceptual leaps at all. Sometimes the mechanics of lambda closures can be slightly tricky, but no more so than referencing and dereferencing pointers in C, and with a lot greater payoff. Hell, the most complicated uses of functions as objects in LISP are a lot easier to get right IMO than even simple uses of templates in C++, and "templates" (i.e. generic funcions) come for free in LISP, due to runtime type checking. (Of course, this is why no one uses C++ templates, but whatever.)
Macros are difficult to write. But then again, they are incredibly powerful, and not "necessary" very often. And it's usually *extremely* easy to understand someone else's macro code, which is all a novice would have to do anyways.
Plus there are lots of features of LISP which make it incredibly easy for beginners. Debugging in LISP is ridiculously easy, at least for programs which don't use too many functional closures or complex objects. Instead of the C paradigm where you only have one big executable main(), LISP programs are made up of lots of little functions, all of which are callable (and thus extraordinarily easily debuggable) from the top-level evaluator. There's no write-save-compile-test-debug loop; it's all together, and all very fast. Immediate feedback means more willingness to take chances, try out things, and make mistakes.
Plus, because there's no main(), your programs are always extensible. If you want to, once you're done with a function it's trivial to make a larger function which calls the other function, takes it as an input, etc.
There is no need to manage memory, no need to futz around with pointers, and no way to cause a segfault until you start optimizing. Buffer overflows are impossible. You can start with a skeleton of a program, gradually add functionality, and only add optimizations at the end when you have tested your code; and you can test every new function or optimization, so you know exactly what goes wrong when something does.
And it's fast: once you put in proper optimizations, compiled LISP is nearly as fast as C. Of course this wasn't always the case, and it's not the case for LISP before you put in type declarations. And a compiled LISP file will probably be bigger than compiled C code, especially when you add the LISP top-level eval to it. On the other hand, C is usually not as fast or small as well optimized assembly code, but there is a good reason very few people program in that anymore: because programming in C makes your code less buggy and much faster to develop. Similarly, programming LISP will almost always make your code less buggy and much faster to develop than using C. Now that compiler technology and computer hardware have made those differences almost moot, it probably makes much more sense to use LISP than C.
Of course, the result of this change has not been to drive more people to LISP, but instead to drive LISP's features into other languages. Thus we have C++ with attempts at generic functions; Java with decent OO and automatic garbage collection; Python showing the usefullness of an interactive top-level. Nowadays Perl and Python are getting functional closures and the list datastructure, although their functions are not quite first-level objects and so not quite as powerful. Plus it will probably take another prefix-syntax language for macros to be copied properly.
Whether the world will realize that LISP already exists (and indeed has since the late 50's) or continue to reinvent it, I dunno. Probably the latter so long as LISP remains short of libraries that tie it down to modern computers. (Again, GUIs, multithreading, networking.) Still, it's probably worth learning LISP just so that when the same ideas come out in more "mainstream" languages years from now you'll already know and understand them.
I think this was meant as a joke. I've just started reading Lessig's latest book where he talks about how the Internet having an e2e architecture makes it an innovation commons. Microsoft and especially Disney would like to put restrictions on that e2e design by limiting what an attached device could do.
.NET from this standpoint, as it most certainly involves a way to increase the power terminals get from communicating over the Internet without changing the rules of the network itself (even to the point of exploiting the few restrictions already part of those rules, but I digress). Yes, you might need to sell your credit cards, pets, soul, mortgage, etc. to MS in order to access any Passport-enabled websites, but at least in order for .NET to work it will require leaving the Internet intact for non-.NET websites to talk to non-MS computers quite happily.
It's not a joke. If you pay attention to Lessig's recent pronouncements on the subject, he's decided that the biggest threat to the Internet comes from those who would change it from its current topology--i.e. a dumb network with smart terminals--into a smart network with dumb terminals. The companies Lessig figures are trying to do this are, not surprisingly, the ones that own the network (or parts thereof): AOLTW and the rest of the cable co.'s. Since most of these companies are either connected with the copyright cartels or in the business of making distribution deals with them, they would like nothing more than to be able to control what content passes over their section of "the Internet".
MS and Disney, on the other hand, and for all the horrible things which can rightfully be said about them, do *not* want a switch to a smart network with dumb terminals...because they don't control the network, and would thus be at the mercy of those who do. Indeed, Lessig is apparently quite optimistic about
Microsoft and especially Disney would like to put restrictions on that e2e design by limiting what an attached device could do.
Perhaps they would, but they don't control the network, so they can't. Instead, they need to push for the network to stay open in order to allow their attached devices to do whatever they want them to do. The cable companies, on the other hand, do control the network, and have been itching for years and years to limit what an attached device can do in order to eliminate competition for their own attached devices, or in order to extort content providers for the privilige of getting their stuff on the "approved list".
Lessig argues that these sorts of issues of telecommunications law are in fact the most dire threat posed to the Internet in the near future, and that most politechies misplace their energies by not realizing this fact. Dunno if he's at all right about this, but he's certainly proved insightful in the past.
I have to say, this thing looks a lot prettier when you have good photos of it. It's definitely growing on me...
but no pictures >:(
The pics weren't in the original story anyways, just on the home page. Here's the cover pic--on another site, so no worry that it will be taken down--and here's a nice pic which is still accessible on timecanada.com.
Man, that and the printer-friendly version of the article? If timecanada doesn't fire their webmaster for posting too early, they sure as hell should fire him for being unable to even take the story and picture down successfully!
Deep link still works...
Pic
Cover photo
And several billion dollars says Napster shouldn't exist
Several more billion dollars says Napster should exist. However, the PC and broadband industries--both of which collapsed in the wake of the Napster decision--do not spend their billions buying Congressmen. (Well, the surviving portion of the broadband industry does, but only because it has been consolidated into the hands of content owners, who of course contributed their billions against Napster.)
The sad thing is that there was another industry which collapsed, though not quite as precipitously, at exactly the time of the Napster decision. I'm speaking, of course, about the recording industry. All throughout 2000, when Napster grew from almost-zero to 80 million users, IIRC, record sales increased to record levels (yay, a pun!). Sure the economy was good, but 2000 had IIRC the largest rate of increase in something like a decade. (And the economy was good for most of that decade.) Now 2001 is a terrible year for the record industry--which they blame on "piracy", of course, completely disregarding the fact that the decline started almost precisely when Napster got shut down.
Of course there are other interpretations for why record sales sucked this year, e.g. "the music available sucked." But this is precisely the point--the music you heard about sucked. Maybe the fact that it was suddenly much more difficult (not just Napster, but even more the demise of independent online radio, also due to RIAA lawsuits) to hear about new bands and sample their music had something to do with this??
The Napster case was just like the Sony Betamax case...the only difference was which side won. We know what the long-term consequences of losing the Betamax case were for the MPAA--roughly half of their income. The comparison with the RIAA's "victory" over Napster should prove enlightening...
But the freaking name is obviously a rip-off of Windows. There is no question that it would create market confusion. For him to claim otherwise is just nonsense. After all, why call it Lindows if you're not trying to piggyback on Windows?
It is obvious that the name makes a reference to Microsoft Windows. But that's not a violation of trademark; nor is being "a rip-off" enough to violate a trademark. It's only a violation if the name is likely to confuse anybody, which, clearly, it is not.
The name is meant to convey that the product is a combination of LINux and wINDOWS, which, indeed, it is (functionality-wise). Just like copyright does not prevent someone from copying a CD, trademark does not prevent someone from basing a name or a logo on another company's name or logo. Instead, copyright prevents someone from *distributing* that copied CD, and trademark prevents someone from choosing a name or logo so similar as to invite *confusion*.
The fact that people confuse such issues is a result of the fact that people think the rights due to the "owner" of Intellectual "Property" are at all akin to the rights due to the owner of real property, which they are not. In fact, it's too bad that the term "property" isn't trademarked, because it could sue "Intellectual Property" for definition-infringement and win!
EV7 will come out, but so far its performance doesn't look so competitive.
Huh????? EV7 will almost certainly be the fastest MPU available at the time of its launch (by this I mean highest scores in SPEC2k int and fp), even ahead of the extremely expensive POWER4 (which sort of "cheats" on the single-threaded SPEC2k because then the one active core on the device gets the entire 128MB of shared L3 cache to itself).
Of course Compaq's support is questionable, the upgrade path is zero, and there's no telling how quickly they'll get out the high-end 32 and 64-way boxes out, but in terms of plain old CPU performance the EV7 is going to be the chip to beat. (BTW, sounds like you didn't read the article if you didn't get this point.)
And I bet it will cost more then 10%. AMD will still have the better ratio of performance/price.
Certainly Northwood will (rightly) carry a bit of a price premium over Willamette, but mainly because Willy prices will drop by a lot. Northwood will almost certainly improve Intel's price/performance relative to AMD, for the simple reason that in addition to being able to clock faster and getting better performance at equivalent clock speeds, Northwoods are cheaper to make than Willamettes, because they're a lot smaller. (~130mm^2 vs. 217mm^2)
AMD will still offer better performance/price, of course, but mainly because they will cut prices in response. (And they had an awfully large lead to start with.)
Our problem is that we think like the humans we are.. That includes a pretty large amount of overestimation of our own abilities. The human kind of intelligence is probably *not* the only one that can exist....Let's not be too arrogant and conclude that because our first attempts of creating intelligence failed we'll never achieve it.. Maybe just rethink what intelligence actually is.
But that's precisely the problem with trying to "achieve AI"--defining what the hell "intelligence" is. For better or worse, people have traditionally defined "intelligence" roughly as "the things people can do but animals can't," or, "the things people can do but it makes our noggins hurt after a while." When put this way, the deficiencies in this definition become pretty apparent, but no one has come up with an obviously better version. Instead we usually approach the question of whether a thing is "intelligent" using the standards of the old Supreme Court decision defining obscenity--we think we know it when we see it.
Or more often, we think we know what it isn't when we see that. The history of "the quest for AI" (I put that in quotes very advisedly) is full of problems that, if solved, would surely be proof of AI...until they are solved, in which case it's still a dumb computer. Computers are now the world champions or competitive with world champions in chess, checkers, backgammon, othello, poker, bridge, and almost any game of mental skill with the significant exception of go. Computers have both proven several important and previously unproved mathematical theorems (e.g. the 4 color map coloring conjecture) and have come up with elegant and/or novel proofs for existing theorems (e.g. a computer proof of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem which "invented" Cantor's diagonalization technique on its own).
On the other hand, we have yet to make a computer which can navigate and react to its environment as well as, say, a pet dog can (sorry AIBO), nor one which can understand human language in any but the most limited domains. (Of course "understand" is a similarly difficult to define term. As an example of what I mean, look at CYC, a company which gets its name from its initial mission when it was founded IIRC back in 1984--to program a computer which understood enough concepts to understand language well enough that it could read an enCYClopedia (or any other descriptions in natural language) and learn what it didn't already know. While CYC has developed a useful system, it's still a ways from passing the encyclopedia test.)
Even though we're used to thinking of playing championship-level chess or doing advanced mathematics as hallmarks of particularly intelligent humans, while navigating an environment or understanding language is something that even the dumbest people can do, we find that computers are good at different things. (Or rather, we know how to program computers to be good at some things but not other things.)
The "problem" has been that in the early days of computers and on into the "golden age" of AI, we didn't know squat about how the human brain worked, nor even about what sorts of steps were needed in order to e.g. understand natural language. Back then, most AI researchers--brilliant people, mind you--figured all that would be necessary for a computer to understand language would be a link to a dictionary and maybe some rudimentary ability to parse grammar. Indeed, in many ways the field of linguistics arose as a result of the attempts and failures of computer scientists to get computers to understand language. Similarly, the successes and failures of AI have been instrumental in guiding or even creating the field of computational neuroscience.
What we are coming to understand is that the things that only "more intelligent" people can do are not really the hallmarks of "intelligence" but rather are examples of people fitting their brains to tasks they were not really designed for. For AI to truly "be achieved", we will have to get much better at making computers succeed at the tasks which a monkey can do just as well as a human, rather than those which humans can do but monkeys can't.
Also, we're learning that our instinctive idea of "intelligence" demands that techniques be general rather than specific. In other words, we don't consider exhaustive depth-limited minimax search with static evaluation to be a truly intelligent game playing technique--even though it can allow a computer to become the world chess champion--because it really sucks at go. The fact that go has a branching factor (i.e. avg. # of legal moves) of over 300 while chess has one of around 30 doesn't mean that similar thinking techniques (so far as we can tell) can't be used for a human to play both, but it does mean that exhaustive search is a feasible technique for a chess-playing computer but not a go-playing computer; we tend to interpret this (rightly or wrongly) as saying that exhaustive search is not an "intelligent" technique.
Next, it's time to stop tossing around that crap about how computers are so much faster or more powerful than human brains. That's complete hogwash. A modern CPU has roughly 10^6 gates, compared to ~10^11 neurons in a human brain. A computer might have 10^9 bits of memory (or even 10^10 if we go really high-end), and 10^11 bits of storage space, but a human brain has ~10^14 synapses, which can be viewed as encoding part of what the brain knows. A human brain has a remarkable 10^14 bits/sec of data bandwidth, compared to ~10^10 bps for a PC and 10^11 bps for e.g. the upcoming Alpha EV7. The only category computers lead in is cycle time, roughly 10^-9 for computers compared to ~10^-3 for the human brain. The upshot of all this is that, when it comes to computers programed as neural networks, a computer can only perform about 10^6 neuron updates/sec compared with 10^14 for a human brain, and the largest computer networks (limited by feasibility not by space) are maybe 10^5 neurons compared to 10^11 in the brain. So, roughly 100,000,000 times slower and 1,000,000,000 times smaller than a brain. (Figures based upon those in _Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach_, updated for the 7 years since the book was published.) No wonder computers aren't as intelligent as a human brain! And yet despite the huge disadvantage, neural nets are still the best technique for many AI problems, especially if we are worried about coming up with a technique which seems to be generally intelligent.
And finally, while it's interesting to talk about why we haven't created HAL yet, it's important not to confuse this with the idea that "the field of AI is a failure". AI is *not* a failure. While some problems have proven much harder than we initially expected, this is almost entirely because our initial expectations were completely ignorant, rather than because progress has not been made. Most importantly, we need to realize that people who are working in the field of AI are not sitting there day after day trying to create Lt. Commander Data or pass the Turing Test. Rather they're working on solutions to limited domain problems where computers can augment or replace the efforts of humans--and they're succeeding in many, many instances. The only real "problem" with the field of AI is defining what exactly it is.
Haven't all their games flopped miserably despite all the hype?
No. Dominion3 failed utterly and completely, but then again it was just a failed game which ION bought the rights to when the previous developers went bankrupt. Diakatana failed miserably despite all the hype, time, and expense. Deux Ex did quite well and was critically hailed, earning many many "game of the year" honors, despite being not-so-hyped. Anachronox was apparently pretty run-of-the-mill, but it barely got any hype at all.
You, like many people, are unfairly painting all of ION Storm with the brush of Diakatana. Of course, John Romero--project leader for Diakatana (which was actually really called John Romero's Diakatana)--was the founder of ION Storm, and the reason ION got so much hype and publicity and money in the first place. And Diakatana was not just a flop but an apocalyptic fiasco: they plowed something like $50 million and 4 years (after promising it would only take 8 months) into a shockingly mediocre game, all whilst buying the top floors of a lavish skyscraper to serve as their development house, and even once causing their entire programming teams to resign en masse.
But Deus Ex was probably the best game of 2000. One reason for the diparity is that ION Storm actually had three completely seperate teams in seperate cities, so Deux Ex and Diakatana were really developed by the same company in name only.
Everyone and their mom is comparing this to the old PR performance ratings employed by Cyrix et. al. and what a big ripoff they were, and how everyone caught on and Cyrix went out of business and so on. There are two problems with this:
1. PR was a terrible benchmark. It was proprietary, synthetic, had little to do with real-world applications. Moreover, it was integer-only, and thus rather neatly covered up the fact that while the Cyrix CPUs were indeed faster clock-for-clock than a Pentium on integer programs, their floating point seriously sucked. In contrast, the suite of benchmarking suites AMD is using is well chosen, all based on "real-world" application benchmarks, and covers most problem domains pretty well.
The only missing component which might be interesting to have included is SPEC, but the only new data that would really provide is how well cutting-edge, mainly-experimental compilers support each processor. On the one hand, this exclusion does tend to disadvantage the P4, since modern compilation techniques are important to top P4 performance, and eventually these techniques will make their way to mainstream precompiled applications. On the other hand, for the next couple years or so 99% of the programs consumers run will still be compiled with not-so-modern compilers (i.e. MSVC++), and as Intel now owns every single important compiler research team in the world, they may have a slightly unfair advantage here.
In any case, this doesn't really matter because the AthlonXP rating system is comparing AthlonXPs to Athlon Thunderbirds, not P4s.
2. PR meant "Pentium Rating", even while Intel was selling "Pentium-II"s. This is the big thing people tend to forget about the whole PR thing: it was more or less accurate (integer only, of course), but the problem was that Cyrix was trying to position a "PR250" chip against, say, a PII-266. Great, except that the PII was significantly faster clock-for-clock than the Pentium was, especially running 32-bit apps (eg. the then-newly-standard Win95). The PR thing *was* a scam, not because performance ratings are innately a scam, but because the "P" in PR confused the fact that the comparison was to an obsolete processor and not to the current competition.
In any case, this doesn't really matter because the AthlonXP rating system is comparing AthlonXPs to Athlon Thunderbirds, not P4s.
(sorry to reply to self, etc.)
Instead, AthlonXP1800+ == theoretical 1.8 GHz Athlon Thunderbird
(As measured by some suite of benchmarks AMD has put together, although it's not exactly clear what because they keep fouling it up and talking about the P4 in their so-called whitepaper).
Thus, while this may be a misguided marketing ploy destined to backfire, it is nonetheless a fundamentally fair one, strictly meant to compare Athlons to Athlons, not Athlon's to P4s!
"Model numbers are designed to communicate the relative application performance among the various AMD Athlon XP processors, as well as communicate the architectural superiority over existing AMD Athlon processors." (From the FAQ.)
Thus an AthlonXP 1800+ is (supposed to be) just as much better than a 1.8 GHz P4 as a 1.4 GHz Athlon Thunderbird was better than a 1.4 GHz P4.
(In reality this is not always so much the case, the main reason being that at higher processor speeds the chipset comes into play more, and the dual-channel RDRAM i850 for the P4 delivers more bandwidth than a single-channel PC266 chipset for the AthlonXP (eg. VIA KT266A). This advantage will be all-but-gone once PC333 chipsets hit in a few months...)
Please get it right!
Relative to the months of creative work and irreplacable personal data that can be lost, getting the local geek to spend a few hours reinstalling software is indeed trivial.
Absolutely correct.
However, one simple modification could bring the user's personal data under the protection of the admin account while still leaving it accessible to the user account: have a program running with root privileges which automatically backs up a copy of all the user's documents to a file only root has rights to. Then if the docs get hosed eg. by a virus running as user, one simply needs to login as root to get at a backed-up copy.
Of course the idea of backing up to another spot on one's own hard drive seems a little strange, but as most *really* important data files tend to be relatively small (unless the user is doing eg. video editing for a living), it seems like a very sensible solution, especially for OS' like Win2k Professional and OSX--which have strong multi-user security, but are generally run as single-user workstations.
Thoughts?
Do sex sites have domain names like microsoft.com? As amusing as that would be, the answer is also no.
.sex domain might theoretically bring some benefits, the potential for censorship of every other tld and the blocking of .sex would be too great if it existed.)
Good point!
(Seriously, I do agree with you and besides this venerable exception and the oft-mentioned difficulty of getting good clean musical fun after typing "Britney Spears" into a search engine (although lately even the official Britney material is becoming delightfully unclean), there really is no real possibility of confusing porn and non-porn sites. IMO while a
Mostly because the KT266A will be cheaper for the same performance and advantages. The major advantage of the dual DDR-SDRAM channels is to make the onboard video bite slightly less. If you are going to stuff it with an AGP video card, etc. you might as well just get the KT266A.
Or, it makes sense to use the nForce 220 (single DDR channel) with a seperate video card, to get the benefit of the awesome integrated sound for (potentially) significantly less than the cost of a KT266A + SB Live.
You are right that the 440 makes no sense as a high-end chipset, only as a good mid-end OEM chipset (integrated video means lower assembly cost).
Computer crime should be a crime.
But it already *is* a crime. The question is what is a just response to computer crimes. Some things which are *not* just:
- Sentencing someone to lifetime imprisonment without possibility of parole for a simple computer crime. Remember, if the crime really warranted such a sentence--for example, cracking air traffic control and causing planes to crash into each other; cracking a CIA computer and stealing national secrets--then the criminal would already be liable for serious punishment under existing laws--murder and espionage, in these cases.
- Retroactively eliminating the statute of limitations, allowing people to now be charged with computer "crimes" they committed decades ago.
What's even worse is the provision that giving advice or information which may be used to facilitate computer crimes is not only criminalized but subject to the same penalties.To put it another way, if this law passes then someone could be given life in prison without parole for documenting vulnerabilities which allow systems to be compromised by a cracker or a worm. Indeed, it isn't clear that, with the removal of the statute of limitations, they couldn't charge the people documented the vulnerabilities responsible for eg. Code Red or Nimda under this law.
This provision is like the anti-circumvention provision of the DMCA writ large. Whereas at least the DMCA only applies to access-control restrictions on copyrighted material, this law could potentially make all discussion of any vulnerabilities which allow systems or information to be compromised illegal.
These provisions are so utterly preposterous and out of proportion to the crimes (or so-called crimes) discussed as to boggle the mind.
These executables are automatically executed if the receipient who opens (or previews) the email is running Internet Explorer 5 or 6. Note that the worm may spoof the source address on the emails...
.eml or .exe files). Moreover, I'm fairly sure that MS has patches for these vulnerabilities in IE5.
.eml bug.
...The wav file is called readme.eml. Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 and higher will automatically execute the malicious file...
Nowhere on the link you provided does it specify which versions of IE are affected. Indeed, I'm fairly certain that IE6 is *not* affected (or at least requires the user to respond to a dialog box before it will run
On the other hand, I believe that IE4 *is* vulnerable to at least the
Does anyone have more information about the IE5 part of this? How does it spread? What exactly spreads? How do you find out if you are infected and does this also work for IE5.5 and IE6 or is it only IE5.0x?
.eml files. More information here.
.tmp file in my temp directory at that point, not a .eml file.) So presumably IE6 at least asks your permission first. Also, when I decided to "open" the file it opened the file in Word, instead of running it. (apparently)
It spreads according to a hole in IE 5 which automatically opens and executes
I tried the demonstration exploit on the above page using IE6, and it gave me a dialog box confirming that I wanted to open the file. (Except it was already a
So IE6 appears to be safe, at least from the demo exploit coded by Guninski. Dunno about IE 5.5.
The problem with Asbestos is that the only safe level of exposure is zero.
.1 fiber/cc of air), the increased death rate is barely significant (3.2 deaths/1000).
Actually, that's a myth. The reason so many thousands got sick from asbestos is because so many thousands breathed in lots and lots of it, over and over and over for years. Mainly people who worked in construction and installed it almost every day for years. Also shipyards (asbestos was widely used in ship construction, as you *really* don't want those catching fire) and the factories where the asbestos was made.
Check out the graph on this page. It shows the asbestos-related death rates for workers who were exposed to various levels of airborne asbestos every day of their working careers. Even then, the death rate varies widely (and almost linearly) with the asbestos levels experienced. At low levels (eg.
Furthermore, asbestos exposure is a cumulative risk, very similar to the risks from smoking. Just as smoking 3 packs every day for a week won't kill you if you don't smoke again, even a relatively high asbestos exposure over a few days or weeks will not cause a significant occurance of disease. Or, as that link puts it, "Risk of asbestos related illness is Dose-Response related. That is, the greater the amount of exposure and the longer the time of exposure, the greater the risk of asbestos related cancers."
Assuming that Giuliani is telling the truth about the levels measured, there would appear to be little to worry about from asbestos here.
According to Giuliani, at least, they've been repeatedly testing air quality and "as you get beyond the epicenter of the recovery site, the asbestos levels in the air are either safe or nonexistent."
Giuliani press conference. (NY Times; registration required.)
Perhaps /. should whip up a generic, catch-all Intellectual Property icon.
How about a picture of a gaping, distended asshole?
Yeah, that Jonas Salk sure was one corporate whore. And awful folks like Tishler, Conover and Sheehan, damn those antibiotics. Who needed them? I'm sure they would have made it to all those poor people eventually.
The question is whether Salk et. al. would only have made their discoveries if their research was funded by a private company, as opposed to if they worked eg. at a research university and their research was funded by the university and government grants. I can't conceive of a reason why there would be any difference. I'm certainly not aware of any suggestion that Salk was motivated by the promise of monopoly patents rather than a desire to save millions of children's lives.
Now, the question you have to answer is this: what if Salk et. al. had their own companies, and prevented anyone else in the world from developing killed virus vaccines, or antibiotics, for the 17 year patent period? Back in the 50's, only the vaccines or antibiotics themselves were patentable. If invented today, the entire fields of killed virus vaccines and synthetic antibiotics would likely be signed off on by the USPTO.
By the by, you might be interested to know that Jonas Salk didn't patent the polio vaccine. Incidentally, he is a national hero.
By contrast, Lloyd Conover wasted 27 years of his life defending his tetracyclene patent in court. For his efforts, he got inducted into the USPTO Hall of Fame. (As were Tishler and Sheehan. Salk, as mentioned above, did not merit an invite.)
Incidentally, I had never heard of Lloyd Conover before in my life.