Given that a lot of these engine tuning parameters are controlled electronically (i.e. timing, etc), and the fact that hardware keeps getting cheaper and faster, wouldn't it be possible to do this genetic modelling "on the fly" (i.e. constantly, during the engine's lifetime)? That way the engine could react to it's own natural wear by "tuning itself".
Variable Valve Technology/Ignition advance/Fuzzy Logic transmissions already exist, but this would be about ten steps beyond...
I think a major problem with the undertaking is that (last time I checked) the fundamentals of how human brains deal with semantic/pragmantic issues (i.e. how we process concepts) was far from nailed down. Half the linguistics community thinks Jerry Fodor is out there, and half of them think he has a point, when he says all concepts are innate.
Now whether or not you believe what he says, the fact that there is so little concensus about something as fundamental as what a concept is and how we process them is a bit worrisome. This is going with the assumption that whatever we build on the software side will mimic *us* on the software side (yet another good question).
You may wonder what all this has to do with machine translation. Well, one of the difficulties mentioned before is known as the "scope problem" -- i.e. if the computer is to use any semantic knowledge (of the world - i.e. concepts) to sort through ambiguity, where does it begin? How do you create an understanding of the world so that there is an understanding of definitions?
I once wrote a PROLOG based Natural Language Parser in college, and thought it was pretty cool until I realized that it was the biggest can of worms I ever opened...
If macs had old CLI programs, I'm sure they would be able to run them too (no interface issues to worry about).
As it stands, they currently run pretty much everything system 7 (1991) savvy and up, as well as possibly system 6 (1987) stuff. For the stuff before that, there are emulators for system 1 and 2 available if you really feel the urge...
Do you come from another planet or smoke crack on a regular basis? Macs have *always* had better backwards compatability than PCs, *especially* on the software side. Hell, when they went PPC from 68k there were a good two or three years where you could run new stuff on a 68040.
OSX might put a dent in that otherwise stellar track record, though.
Go to the Fry's at the corner of Central Expressway and Lawrence Expressway in Sunnyvale. There is one hiding in a plexiglass bubble in the book section, kinda forgotten...
Somewhere at my parents' house I have stashed away some really early Lego idea books from the 70s -- the European ones, because as every true Lego afficianado knows, the really cool stuff didn't start coming to the US until recently.
The *early* 70's lego, if i remember correctly, already had pneumatic systems (for the technic), air filled pneumatic tires, 2x4 wheel bricks with built in spring-suspension, a huge range of gear sizes, and a lot of other cool stuff that never made it to the US.
BTW, are those Idea Books worth something nowadays?
I develop internal content at a large Silicon Valley company. We are stuck using WMP internally, competing for mindshare among project sponsors against vendors who use QT and Real for their demos. Demos that can use SMIL functionality, and are much cleaner looking than anything we can churn out.
Agreed that space exploration should be more of a priority, but earth is not even close to being completely tapped -- in theory. The problem is that the earth is easily capable of FAT32 (netherlands, japan), but we're still running on FAT16 (united states), to use a horrible WinMetaphor.
As i'm sure the slashcrowd can appreciate, we need to adopt a less Microsoftian development model (use huge amounts of resources inelegantly), and more of an OSS model (elegant, "thin" development). This is a far more realistic and reasonable goal than terraforming, however cool terraforming sounds.
VOD is "video on demand" a.k.a. streaming video. Sorry, I sometimes get caught up in the corporate lingo.
I agree that the heavy adverstising from RealPlayer and QT are annoying as a user, but you get better video quality in return. Which player offers the best tradeoff of these two is up to you.
AFAIK, WMP streams only from NT. Real and QT stream from a large number of platforms.
Yeah, favors like non-scriptability and shitty codecs. Just ask someone who *develops* for all three which ones they like -- not to mention which ones offer real power -- and you'll understand why WMP has such a low portion of the streaming market.
If you've looked at MS's latest beta of WMP, they are trying to adopt a lot of the features that make RealPlayer and QT so cool, plus some like lookup from CDDB for titles if you're playing an audio CD. They *do* intend on competing.
They would face another lawsuit (in addition to looking incredibly stupid) by doing this. It is well known that the Mac versions of their products are far more profitable than the windows versions (copy for copy) and that that the mac user base is currently *growing*, and at 10+% of users, quite large already.
This would only be a last-ditch maneuver, and one that would rally pretty much everyone that isn't MS to apple's side.
I think it would be safe to say that MicroSoft's flagship product is Windows 2000, and that, like NT, was (as I understand it) derived from VMS and OS/2.
I think it's a great day to be American, especially when that day is the every once in a while the justice system gets it right. Question is, will Bill become Canadian?:)
are options really not there, or not exercised?
on
The Leased Life?
·
· Score: 2
I recently moved to Silicon Valley. If anywhere exemplifies "the leased life", this place does. Unless you have a large amount of money, you *must* rent. The rest I make do on as cheaply as possible, so that one day my wife and I can take our savings and move somewhere worth spending them.
That said, I still have four more years until my stock fully vests. Yes, Silicon Valley is "strangely hostile to you doing anything other than working, sleeping, or spending", but why is that? I predict it has a lot more to do with the motives of the people who now occupy it (like me, here to gain money) than anything else.
Options for combatting this exist:
1) Get out on the weekend. Drive to Yosemite, go on an 8 hour hike, sea kayak, mountain bike. Better yet, organize an event involving one of these.
2) Minimize your billing commitments. I have rent, phone, heat, and cellphone bills. That's about it.
3) Explore your community. I know there is a park near my house -- i run by it every morning. I have also been to the library. Go find a hole in the wall restaurant.
Not to get too offtopic -- the nature of online life dictates that anything can and will change at any time, anywhere. Reality (currently) is a bit more constant. We're all trying to make sense of an existence somewhere in between.
Again, I agree with you that Apple has done little *recently* to advance OS software (depending on where you consider the OS boundaries to lie). Most of the problem has been, as you said, their inability, until recently, to come up with a consistent forward migration plan.
I see little difference between the fact that MS managed to move from DOS to Win2k and the current switch Apple is making from the original MacOS to MacOSX, just that MS did it first (not necessarily better). If anything, apple deserves kudos for attempting to make BSD accessible to the mere mortal.
This is not to defend Apple's fuckups, and not to say that they're a fountain of mana -- they're not. If you argue that apple dropped the ball in the realm of OS software, I'm sure most people (with the possible exception of David Every) would agree with you. Just don't lump lack of OS software innovation onto the whole picture -- Apple is doing a lot of innovation in other places (including software - can we say iMovie? (yes - bought and dumbed down from MacroMedia - but innovative in the sense that it makes DV accessible to everyone).
BTW, Apple was probalby the first company to *market* its innovativeness, and that's why so many people think it is.
Slashdot Mirror
Given that a lot of these engine tuning parameters are controlled electronically (i.e. timing, etc), and the fact that hardware keeps getting cheaper and faster, wouldn't it be possible to do this genetic modelling "on the fly" (i.e. constantly, during the engine's lifetime)? That way the engine could react to it's own natural wear by "tuning itself".
Variable Valve Technology/Ignition advance/Fuzzy Logic transmissions already exist, but this would be about ten steps beyond...
I think a major problem with the undertaking is that (last time I checked) the fundamentals of how human brains deal with semantic/pragmantic issues (i.e. how we process concepts) was far from nailed down. Half the linguistics community thinks Jerry Fodor is out there, and half of them think he has a point, when he says all concepts are innate.
Now whether or not you believe what he says, the fact that there is so little concensus about something as fundamental as what a concept is and how we process them is a bit worrisome. This is going with the assumption that whatever we build on the software side will mimic *us* on the software side (yet another good question).
You may wonder what all this has to do with machine translation. Well, one of the difficulties mentioned before is known as the "scope problem" -- i.e. if the computer is to use any semantic knowledge (of the world - i.e. concepts) to sort through ambiguity, where does it begin? How do you create an understanding of the world so that there is an understanding of definitions?
I once wrote a PROLOG based Natural Language Parser in college, and thought it was pretty cool until I realized that it was the biggest can of worms I ever opened...
it's called an Apex 600A :) (too bad they've been neutered).
It may not be now, but it invetitibly will become part of the English language at some point or another, like "nite" has.
Language is a fluid entity. Many non-linguists have a hard time with that. (So do many linguists -- it gives us headaches).
By the way, language is about a lot more than simply communicating, but that is a story for another day...
If macs had old CLI programs, I'm sure they would be able to run them too (no interface issues to worry about).
As it stands, they currently run pretty much everything system 7 (1991) savvy and up, as well as possibly system 6 (1987) stuff. For the stuff before that, there are emulators for system 1 and 2 available if you really feel the urge...
...at least Microsoft isn't sponsoring the mission...
"Gentleman, we have.... a fatal error! Abort! Abort"
..or worse yet, Fry's Electronics.
.
Do you come from another planet or smoke crack on a regular basis? Macs have *always* had better backwards compatability than PCs, *especially* on the software side. Hell, when they went PPC from 68k there were a good two or three years where you could run new stuff on a 68040.
OSX might put a dent in that otherwise stellar track record, though.
Go to the Fry's at the corner of Central Expressway and Lawrence Expressway in Sunnyvale. There is one hiding in a plexiglass bubble in the book section, kinda forgotten...
>>Will we see Jeff Bezos and Amazon inducted into the hall in 2060 for patents which changed the way the web worked? ;-)
Even in the hyperspeed economy of today, it takes a little while for it to become clear exactly who is *worthy* of an award, and who was just a sham.
Somewhere at my parents' house I have stashed away some really early Lego idea books from the 70s -- the European ones, because as every true Lego afficianado knows, the really cool stuff didn't start coming to the US until recently.
The *early* 70's lego, if i remember correctly, already had pneumatic systems (for the technic), air filled pneumatic tires, 2x4 wheel bricks with built in spring-suspension, a huge range of gear sizes, and a lot of other cool stuff that never made it to the US.
BTW, are those Idea Books worth something nowadays?
Where is here?
I develop internal content at a large Silicon Valley company. We are stuck using WMP internally, competing for mindshare among project sponsors against vendors who use QT and Real for their demos. Demos that can use SMIL functionality, and are much cleaner looking than anything we can churn out.
Agreed that space exploration should be more of a priority, but earth is not even close to being completely tapped -- in theory. The problem is that the earth is easily capable of FAT32 (netherlands, japan), but we're still running on FAT16 (united states), to use a horrible WinMetaphor.
As i'm sure the slashcrowd can appreciate, we need to adopt a less Microsoftian development model (use huge amounts of resources inelegantly), and more of an OSS model (elegant, "thin" development). This is a far more realistic and reasonable goal than terraforming, however cool terraforming sounds.
VOD is "video on demand" a.k.a. streaming video. Sorry, I sometimes get caught up in the corporate lingo.
I agree that the heavy adverstising from RealPlayer and QT are annoying as a user, but you get better video quality in return. Which player offers the best tradeoff of these two is up to you.
AFAIK, WMP streams only from NT. Real and QT stream from a large number of platforms.
I can just see the look on my sysadmin's face when I tell him he's just a glorified janitor!
Yeah, favors like non-scriptability and shitty codecs. Just ask someone who *develops* for all three which ones they like -- not to mention which ones offer real power -- and you'll understand why WMP has such a low portion of the streaming market.
If you've looked at MS's latest beta of WMP, they are trying to adopt a lot of the features that make RealPlayer and QT so cool, plus some like lookup from CDDB for titles if you're playing an audio CD. They *do* intend on competing.
Given that quicktime for BSD based OSX is currently heavily under development, QT for Linux should be a lot more viable.
It does do something if you have quicktime pro.
They are godsends compared to Windows MediaPlayer (the other alternative), especially from a VOD programmer's perspective.
They would face another lawsuit (in addition to looking incredibly stupid) by doing this. It is well known that the Mac versions of their products are far more profitable than the windows versions (copy for copy) and that that the mac user base is currently *growing*, and at 10+% of users, quite large already.
This would only be a last-ditch maneuver, and one that would rally pretty much everyone that isn't MS to apple's side.
I think it would be safe to say that MicroSoft's flagship product is Windows 2000, and that, like NT, was (as I understand it) derived from VMS and OS/2.
:)
I think it's a great day to be American, especially when that day is the every once in a while the justice system gets it right. Question is, will Bill become Canadian?
Now all those MSFT investors will own shares of both MS and FT! Damn, looks like I missed out again...
How about "Micro" and "Soft" :)
I recently moved to Silicon Valley. If anywhere exemplifies "the leased life", this place does. Unless you have a large amount of money, you *must* rent. The rest I make do on as cheaply as possible, so that one day my wife and I can take our savings and move somewhere worth spending them.
That said, I still have four more years until my stock fully vests. Yes, Silicon Valley is "strangely hostile to you doing anything other than working, sleeping, or spending", but why is that? I predict it has a lot more to do with the motives of the people who now occupy it (like me, here to gain money) than anything else.
Options for combatting this exist:
1) Get out on the weekend. Drive to Yosemite, go on an 8 hour hike, sea kayak, mountain bike. Better yet, organize an event involving one of these.
2) Minimize your billing commitments. I have rent, phone, heat, and cellphone bills. That's about it.
3) Explore your community. I know there is a park near my house -- i run by it every morning. I have also been to the library. Go find a hole in the wall restaurant.
Not to get too offtopic -- the nature of online life dictates that anything can and will change at any time, anywhere. Reality (currently) is a bit more constant. We're all trying to make sense of an existence somewhere in between.
Again, I agree with you that Apple has done little *recently* to advance OS software (depending on where you consider the OS boundaries to lie). Most of the problem has been, as you said, their inability, until recently, to come up with a consistent forward migration plan.
I see little difference between the fact that MS managed to move from DOS to Win2k and the current switch Apple is making from the original MacOS to MacOSX, just that MS did it first (not necessarily better). If anything, apple deserves kudos for attempting to make BSD accessible to the mere mortal.
This is not to defend Apple's fuckups, and not to say that they're a fountain of mana -- they're not. If you argue that apple dropped the ball in the realm of OS software, I'm sure most people (with the possible exception of David Every) would agree with you. Just don't lump lack of OS software innovation onto the whole picture -- Apple is doing a lot of innovation in other places (including software - can we say iMovie? (yes - bought and dumbed down from MacroMedia - but innovative in the sense that it makes DV accessible to everyone).
BTW, Apple was probalby the first company to *market* its innovativeness, and that's why so many people think it is.