The part where Neo gets power in "the real world" is pretty weird, but who is to say this could not happen? Buddist monks can make them selves lighter and run faster just by thinking of it.
I keep hearing the movie sucked, but I think many expectations were just too high. The first movie was a syncretism of various sci-fi and fantasy genres, with some philosophy thrown in from a comic book series by Grant Morrison, The Invisibles. Unfortunately, a whole bunch of cult-people took the movie as the source of some great revelation or something. There was nothing particularly deep about The Matrix. Yet, it was a very entertaining film. Good special effects, if nothing really special in terms of storyline.
The Matrix Reloaded is another good popcorn flick. I definitely enjoyed it. It's not there to make a statement or anything. It's there to entertain. And is it ever fun! Unlike most movies, it kept me guessing for the most part. I only figured out a chunk here and there ahead of time. The dialogue is incredibly pretentious, but Laurence Fishburne is so damn good at his lines that I give it a passing grade anyway. Wasn't there a Star Trek villain they figured out was not a human once because he couldn't use consonants? Same with Morpheus. The fighting scenes were designed so that you could actually figure out what was going on. Sure, Chinese ballet is not exactly the most effective fighting style, but it looked pretty graceful and everything. Exciting, death-defying stuff. My favorite character was the key master, that plucky bastard. One big positive was the humor. It had me laughing out loud several times. There were innumerable great touches, like Councillor West!!! Brilliant. And that Monica Belluci chick. Smoking hot. I want..... 'Nuff said.
There were some negatives, and not just the total lack of vocal inflection. The porn scene was not particularly good, even though it had some better than average porn music. It was weird looking at all the people dancing in slow motion while the music was going full speed. In fact, I'd estimate that 35% of the entire film was shown in slow motion, which would indicate that we only got about 83% of the film we thought we were going to get. Way too much slow motion. The music was generally terrific. No, it wasn't John Williams, but it was terribly exciting at times.
The most serious strike against the movie is its lack of a really good villain. Agent Smith is persistent like the Terminator, but you don't really fear him. When he shows up, you get more of a feeling like "Oh great. Here we go again." The Merovingian is a better villain, but again he isn't threatening enough. The ghost dudes are not particularly terrifying, just annoying. Colonel Sanders is not menacing. He's distant and boring. The best villains are those nasty octopi things. Ugly, evil, and perhaps unstoppable. Kenau is Kenau, a downer overall. Carrie Ann-Moss is now 48 years old or so. She almost looks like his mom, so it's fairly sick watching them do the nasty.
One quick point about Freddy vs. Jason, a trailer at the beginning. It's quite sad when you've never heard of a movie, but then figure out what the title is halfway through the trailer, though they only announce the title at the end.
Several of us stayed to watch the trailer for the third movie at the end of the credits. Word of that is getting out.
This resembles a food fight. You've got people with a high school mentality on both sides, and in fact some actual high schoolers driving it.
This whole nightmare could have been avoided if at least one of two groups of nominally intelligent people--the database group and the browser group--had the small amount of creativity necessary to think of a name that is not utterly juvenile. "Firebird" sounds like a Transformer or a He-Man villain. This is a joke, right?
I would like to ask my fellow Mozilla Project members, what the hell are we fighting this battle for? Let them have that dippy name. Plenty of good names were suggested to replace Phoenix. How about picking one?
Finally, a note to Mozilla's legal counsel. Please do some good research and give some good advice next time, so sh&7storms like this can be avoided.
First and most obviously, get him to document his code fully and properly before he leaves. It's the honorable thing to do. In addition to writing up documentation, the code should be fully commented. He should walk people in your company how to compile the code. Maybe there's a trick to it.
Then, once he's gone, audit the code. Maybe you'll need to hire an outside consultant to do it. Anyway, once the source code is audited, you still aren't in the clear. It could be that he put a backdoor in the binaries, leaving the backdoor out of the copy of the source code he pointed you toward. Thus, once you are done auditing the code, compile it. Do a file compare of the current binaries and the newly compiled binaries.
In Windows, the command line is fc/b filename1 filename2.
If there are any differences, that doesn't necessarily mean anything significant. Move the current binaries to a temp directory or someplace out of the way. Don't delete them, as they could be important later. Copy the newly compiled binaries in. Test the whole system to make sure it works.
As for ensuring your intellectual property is protected, I don't know how you can truly do that from a technical standpoint. You should notify your corporate legal counsel of your concern. If you don't know who that is, bring it to your CEO's attention.
All right, I capitulate. I'll let you AI guys into the secret.
First, you may want to read Antonio Damsio's book, "Descartes' Error." The basic reason is that you don't want to make the same error that Descartes made. It's the same error that Minsky has made and always will make. That error is the strong mind/body distinction.
Obviously, the mind, being the same as the brain, is physically part of the body. What Descartes and subsequent philosophers, including AI researchers have falsely believed, is that the operation of the mind can be totally separated from the operation of the body. It can be somewhat separated, but not totally. As Damasio observes, the brain is deeply tied into the physical body and especially to the sensory organs.
What AI has not yet accomplished can be simplified to one task: learning. You can't get a legal AI to learn--on its own--enough about medicine to be a good medical AI. The knowledge that current "AI" gets is programmed into it.
The solution is to get an AI to learn. To get an AI to learn, you have to get the AI hooked up to exterior sensory devices, like a camera, a stand-in for an eye. A full array of sensors to mimic human senses would be nice, but for now, let's start with the eye. Once you've got the thing to see, you have to get it to recognize objects. If you can teach an AI to read, for example, that is huge. Don't give the AI OCR software. Instead, give it software that enables it to figure out how to do its own optical character recognition.
How quickly does technology change. One year a technology is dominant, the next it is dust. One year a company is innovative, the next it decides to play it safe and put politics and profits above innovation. It's all about the Benjamins, people.
Let's assume that the Register is actually correct, and that blogs are reducing the usefulness of Google's famous PageRank algorithm for indexing web pages. How should Google respond?
First, they could update the PageRank algorithm so it works better for the WorldWide Web of today, in 2003, and not just for the WorldWide Web of several years ago. This would recognize that the WorldWide Web is everchanging and that the same search engine algorithm is not going to work well year after year without continuous tweaks and updates.
Second, they could take "troublemaker" sites--all the sites that are different from standard issue sites as they were designed in 1999, meaning blogs--and move them out of Google's index for the WorldWide Web and into their own, "junk" category. Over time, this would chop more and more of the valuable content out of Google's index, and would cut Google off from blogs, where most innovation on the web is occurring today. Google may not think blogs are important to its search engine business, but as each day passes the blog revolution marches on, with Google or sans Google. They will cut themselves out of the new revolution at their own peril.
Blog techniques are taking over the web. It may look like a fraction of a percent on paper, but blogs are where the action is today. Web publishing is going to be more and more decentralized. Blogging is fun, even if you don't get a lot of hits. Blogging is informative. Whenever I do a search on Google, I specifically look for blogs, because I know they are current and up to date, and talking about the same thing that I'm interested in.
Google apparently is motivated by two concerns: (1) Google is unwilling or unable to fix PageRank to cut out some of the so-called "blog noise." The only way they can deal with the everchanging web is to cut it into pieces. Alternatively, (2) blogs don't pay Google money, and thus they want sites that either pay them money now or will in the future to appear in front of blogs. The more money that's in it for Google, the higher Google will rank them. Unfortunately, people will see this as the corrupt practice that it is over time, and Google's credibility will suffer.
If Google really decides to move blogs into their own category, it will be a significant departure. It will be segregation. Separate and unequal. If so, it would be the writing on the wall for Google. At that point, I would be forced to recommend that people cash out of their Google stock.
As for Google's competitors, like Alta Vista and Teoma, they must be licking their chops now. Google is talking about blogs as if they were a chink in its armor. I'd exploit that to the utmost.
I was just using Teoma the other day. It's improving a lot. Google ought to be worried. Google should fix its technology to stay ahead. Instead, as the Register is reporting, they are contemplating segregation as a political strategy to maintain market dominance. That's quite disappointing. Iit's a strategy that will certainly not work in the long run.
Yes, Linux has not been revolutionized. As you may have noticed the industry is being fettered by a monopolist, thus starving innovators of venture capital.
Windows 95 was a "aignificant improvement." Since then MS has made the desktop OS more stable and more plastic looking. Other than that, no big changes in the way it's used. Overall, no significant improvements since Windows 95. This is all at a time when a lot of cool stuff could be done to improve usability of the desktop OS.
Well, guess what, the IT industry is stalled. I guess Microsoft's argument in the antitrust suit is now shown to be the sham it was. "Oh, the industry is constantly innovating. Even 95% market share is not likely to last long." It's lasting long, and it's putting a chokehold on the entire industry.
When was the last time Microsoft released a new version of Internet Explorer? I believe it was back before they had 90% or more market share. Hmm. What a coinicidence.
When was the last time that Microsoft significantly improved their desktop OS? That would be Windows 95. Back when Microsoft was facing competition from OS/2 for that business.
When was the last time that Microsoft significantly improved their server OS? Well, you can debate that one, but it's obvious that Microsoft even today faces stiff competition from Linux, BSD, and other Unix variants.
And speaking of lack of competition, we all know the real reason why fiber to the home (the last mile) is taking so long: local telephone monopolies. This is true in the USA and in other countries. Once people can get fiber to the home, the so-called "bandwidth glut" will disappear in a hurry.
There is a lot more innovation that can take place. The biggest area IMO is wireless. The small, handheld wireless device market is certainly not mature. One of the things to look for is cell phone/PDA convergence, which hasn't been done sufficiently well yet. It's not just all-in-one devices, however. We should also look for new functionality in devices.
Content distribution is still the toughest business. Unless you have a world-class product like the Wall Street Journal, it's difficult to charge money for information. The best solution is to sell not just information, but add on something else. This something else could be a service like ad-blocking or a set number of minutes of professional advice or consulting, or a tangible product like a poster or a toy. Don't just sell Harry Potter on the web. Sell a bundle of a Harry Potter book together with a unique poster or action figure. That sort of thing.
In short, the future is very bright. Microsoft's monopoly will not last forever, even if the US government refuses to do anything about it.
Well said. The crux is whether the file system should be designed to meet the tasks of the user, or should the file system remain the province of the expert. I feel it should be accessible to the user, as it helps a user create the hierachical structure for his data that he finds most useful. A find utility is critical, too, but its functionality is different from the grouping and subgrouping of data. I would not want to rely exclusively on a find utility. Why would anyone else? How could you ever test a find utility to make sure it wasn't missing something if you could not access the data itself? In the end, you never could. At some point, the user has to get at the data itself. Accessing the data itself is of critical importance in personal computing. Therefore, a file system and incumbent layout scheme are needed that has a high enough level of abstraction to be useful to users with minimal training. GoboLinux is superior in this regard to a typical Linux system. Ideally, GoboLinux would supplement their improved file system layout with an improved search utility in the sense that you are talking about. The two together would be a strong combination.
What we have here is a tug of war between skilled technicians of the present who want to continue the knowledge gap they enjoy over users of systems, especially Linux systems, and ordinary users who want to have complete control over their machines. It's a contest of wills. The trend of computing has been to further and further decentralize power by putting tools in the hands of users at the expense of administrators, and designing those tools for ease of use for those with less and less training. GoboLinux seems to get that.
Re:Tivo sucks
on
TiVo Basic
·
· Score: -1, Flamebait
Oh, good job. Mark me down to -1, flame bait. That's intelligent. Let's not let anyone express any dissident opinion here. Let's ignore the fact that many Tivo owners quoted by the media say they are in fact now watching more television, not merely the "television they want to watch."
Score one for Slashdot's intellectual conformism.
Hey, guess what? Now I am rejected even by my fellow geeks. I wear your scorn like a badge of honor. I may be alone, but nevertheless I am right.
I hate the Tivo. I've never used one or seen one, nor do I ever want to. Why the hell would I want to watch more television? Come on, people, go outside and enjoy the weather. I'm going for a jog tomorrow morning. I'll be thinking about how enjoyable my non-television watching experience is.
a subtle philosphical theme about how we percieve reality.
ROTFLMAO.
Oh yes, The Matrix, a movie, was so very, very subtle. And philosophic. It practically put Plato to shame. Oh, we are so sophisticated here. Hmmm. Could we build on this deep, deep insight and discuss how Biodome compares with Kierkegaard? "No! I will not be limited by your limited metaphysical world!"
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, yes, bukkake: the new threshold for deviancy.
BTW, of course Morphus is a bot. He doesn't speak in contractions. That's the oldest one in the book!
ROTFL.
The Matrix Reloaded is another good popcorn flick. I definitely enjoyed it. It's not there to make a statement or anything. It's there to entertain. And is it ever fun! Unlike most movies, it kept me guessing for the most part. I only figured out a chunk here and there ahead of time. The dialogue is incredibly pretentious, but Laurence Fishburne is so damn good at his lines that I give it a passing grade anyway. Wasn't there a Star Trek villain they figured out was not a human once because he couldn't use consonants? Same with Morpheus. The fighting scenes were designed so that you could actually figure out what was going on. Sure, Chinese ballet is not exactly the most effective fighting style, but it looked pretty graceful and everything. Exciting, death-defying stuff. My favorite character was the key master, that plucky bastard. One big positive was the humor. It had me laughing out loud several times. There were innumerable great touches, like Councillor West!!! Brilliant. And that Monica Belluci chick. Smoking hot. I want..... 'Nuff said.
There were some negatives, and not just the total lack of vocal inflection. The porn scene was not particularly good, even though it had some better than average porn music. It was weird looking at all the people dancing in slow motion while the music was going full speed. In fact, I'd estimate that 35% of the entire film was shown in slow motion, which would indicate that we only got about 83% of the film we thought we were going to get. Way too much slow motion. The music was generally terrific. No, it wasn't John Williams, but it was terribly exciting at times.
The most serious strike against the movie is its lack of a really good villain. Agent Smith is persistent like the Terminator, but you don't really fear him. When he shows up, you get more of a feeling like "Oh great. Here we go again." The Merovingian is a better villain, but again he isn't threatening enough. The ghost dudes are not particularly terrifying, just annoying. Colonel Sanders is not menacing. He's distant and boring. The best villains are those nasty octopi things. Ugly, evil, and perhaps unstoppable. Kenau is Kenau, a downer overall. Carrie Ann-Moss is now 48 years old or so. She almost looks like his mom, so it's fairly sick watching them do the nasty.
One quick point about Freddy vs. Jason, a trailer at the beginning. It's quite sad when you've never heard of a movie, but then figure out what the title is halfway through the trailer, though they only announce the title at the end.
Several of us stayed to watch the trailer for the third movie at the end of the credits. Word of that is getting out.
4/5 stars.
This whole nightmare could have been avoided if at least one of two groups of nominally intelligent people--the database group and the browser group--had the small amount of creativity necessary to think of a name that is not utterly juvenile. "Firebird" sounds like a Transformer or a He-Man villain. This is a joke, right?
I would like to ask my fellow Mozilla Project members, what the hell are we fighting this battle for? Let them have that dippy name. Plenty of good names were suggested to replace Phoenix. How about picking one?
Finally, a note to Mozilla's legal counsel. Please do some good research and give some good advice next time, so sh&7storms like this can be avoided.
Then, once he's gone, audit the code. Maybe you'll need to hire an outside consultant to do it. Anyway, once the source code is audited, you still aren't in the clear. It could be that he put a backdoor in the binaries, leaving the backdoor out of the copy of the source code he pointed you toward. Thus, once you are done auditing the code, compile it. Do a file compare of the current binaries and the newly compiled binaries.
In Windows, the command line is fc /b filename1 filename2.
If there are any differences, that doesn't necessarily mean anything significant. Move the current binaries to a temp directory or someplace out of the way. Don't delete them, as they could be important later. Copy the newly compiled binaries in. Test the whole system to make sure it works.
As for ensuring your intellectual property is protected, I don't know how you can truly do that from a technical standpoint. You should notify your corporate legal counsel of your concern. If you don't know who that is, bring it to your CEO's attention.
Good luck.
If Gyllenhaal changed his name and then became famous, his name would not be a household name. His stage name would be a household name.
Besides, he doesn't look like Peter Parker.
Ah.... I see you are in search of intelligent life on the Internet. Too bad there isn't any here. Good luck.
First, you may want to read Antonio Damsio's book, "Descartes' Error." The basic reason is that you don't want to make the same error that Descartes made. It's the same error that Minsky has made and always will make. That error is the strong mind/body distinction.
Obviously, the mind, being the same as the brain, is physically part of the body. What Descartes and subsequent philosophers, including AI researchers have falsely believed, is that the operation of the mind can be totally separated from the operation of the body. It can be somewhat separated, but not totally. As Damasio observes, the brain is deeply tied into the physical body and especially to the sensory organs.
What AI has not yet accomplished can be simplified to one task: learning. You can't get a legal AI to learn--on its own--enough about medicine to be a good medical AI. The knowledge that current "AI" gets is programmed into it.
The solution is to get an AI to learn. To get an AI to learn, you have to get the AI hooked up to exterior sensory devices, like a camera, a stand-in for an eye. A full array of sensors to mimic human senses would be nice, but for now, let's start with the eye. Once you've got the thing to see, you have to get it to recognize objects. If you can teach an AI to read, for example, that is huge. Don't give the AI OCR software. Instead, give it software that enables it to figure out how to do its own optical character recognition.
Yes, it is.
That's GreyMatter.
Let's assume that the Register is actually correct, and that blogs are reducing the usefulness of Google's famous PageRank algorithm for indexing web pages. How should Google respond?
First, they could update the PageRank algorithm so it works better for the WorldWide Web of today, in 2003, and not just for the WorldWide Web of several years ago. This would recognize that the WorldWide Web is everchanging and that the same search engine algorithm is not going to work well year after year without continuous tweaks and updates.
Second, they could take "troublemaker" sites--all the sites that are different from standard issue sites as they were designed in 1999, meaning blogs--and move them out of Google's index for the WorldWide Web and into their own, "junk" category. Over time, this would chop more and more of the valuable content out of Google's index, and would cut Google off from blogs, where most innovation on the web is occurring today. Google may not think blogs are important to its search engine business, but as each day passes the blog revolution marches on, with Google or sans Google. They will cut themselves out of the new revolution at their own peril.
Blog techniques are taking over the web. It may look like a fraction of a percent on paper, but blogs are where the action is today. Web publishing is going to be more and more decentralized. Blogging is fun, even if you don't get a lot of hits. Blogging is informative. Whenever I do a search on Google, I specifically look for blogs, because I know they are current and up to date, and talking about the same thing that I'm interested in.
Google apparently is motivated by two concerns: (1) Google is unwilling or unable to fix PageRank to cut out some of the so-called "blog noise." The only way they can deal with the everchanging web is to cut it into pieces. Alternatively, (2) blogs don't pay Google money, and thus they want sites that either pay them money now or will in the future to appear in front of blogs. The more money that's in it for Google, the higher Google will rank them. Unfortunately, people will see this as the corrupt practice that it is over time, and Google's credibility will suffer.
If Google really decides to move blogs into their own category, it will be a significant departure. It will be segregation. Separate and unequal. If so, it would be the writing on the wall for Google. At that point, I would be forced to recommend that people cash out of their Google stock.
As for Google's competitors, like Alta Vista and Teoma, they must be licking their chops now. Google is talking about blogs as if they were a chink in its armor. I'd exploit that to the utmost.
I was just using Teoma the other day. It's improving a lot. Google ought to be worried. Google should fix its technology to stay ahead. Instead, as the Register is reporting, they are contemplating segregation as a political strategy to maintain market dominance. That's quite disappointing. Iit's a strategy that will certainly not work in the long run.
Windows 95 was a "aignificant improvement." Since then MS has made the desktop OS more stable and more plastic looking. Other than that, no big changes in the way it's used. Overall, no significant improvements since Windows 95. This is all at a time when a lot of cool stuff could be done to improve usability of the desktop OS.
If you haven't done so already, try to install Mozilla to a clean directory. Sorry for the ambiguousness.
I can get to Cnet.com without crashing. Try installing 1.3.1 or 1.4 beta to a clean directory, then try it. You're not using Phoenix/Firebird are you?
When was the last time Microsoft released a new version of Internet Explorer? I believe it was back before they had 90% or more market share. Hmm. What a coinicidence.
When was the last time that Microsoft significantly improved their desktop OS? That would be Windows 95. Back when Microsoft was facing competition from OS/2 for that business.
When was the last time that Microsoft significantly improved their server OS? Well, you can debate that one, but it's obvious that Microsoft even today faces stiff competition from Linux, BSD, and other Unix variants.
And speaking of lack of competition, we all know the real reason why fiber to the home (the last mile) is taking so long: local telephone monopolies. This is true in the USA and in other countries. Once people can get fiber to the home, the so-called "bandwidth glut" will disappear in a hurry.
There is a lot more innovation that can take place. The biggest area IMO is wireless. The small, handheld wireless device market is certainly not mature. One of the things to look for is cell phone/PDA convergence, which hasn't been done sufficiently well yet. It's not just all-in-one devices, however. We should also look for new functionality in devices.
Content distribution is still the toughest business. Unless you have a world-class product like the Wall Street Journal, it's difficult to charge money for information. The best solution is to sell not just information, but add on something else. This something else could be a service like ad-blocking or a set number of minutes of professional advice or consulting, or a tangible product like a poster or a toy. Don't just sell Harry Potter on the web. Sell a bundle of a Harry Potter book together with a unique poster or action figure. That sort of thing.
In short, the future is very bright. Microsoft's monopoly will not last forever, even if the US government refuses to do anything about it.
If you're crashing, it's probably Java. Reinstall it. Get the latest. Also, make sure you have the latest Flash plugin.
Well said. The crux is whether the file system should be designed to meet the tasks of the user, or should the file system remain the province of the expert. I feel it should be accessible to the user, as it helps a user create the hierachical structure for his data that he finds most useful. A find utility is critical, too, but its functionality is different from the grouping and subgrouping of data. I would not want to rely exclusively on a find utility. Why would anyone else? How could you ever test a find utility to make sure it wasn't missing something if you could not access the data itself? In the end, you never could. At some point, the user has to get at the data itself. Accessing the data itself is of critical importance in personal computing. Therefore, a file system and incumbent layout scheme are needed that has a high enough level of abstraction to be useful to users with minimal training. GoboLinux is superior in this regard to a typical Linux system. Ideally, GoboLinux would supplement their improved file system layout with an improved search utility in the sense that you are talking about. The two together would be a strong combination.
What we have here is a tug of war between skilled technicians of the present who want to continue the knowledge gap they enjoy over users of systems, especially Linux systems, and ordinary users who want to have complete control over their machines. It's a contest of wills. The trend of computing has been to further and further decentralize power by putting tools in the hands of users at the expense of administrators, and designing those tools for ease of use for those with less and less training. GoboLinux seems to get that.
Convenient user id. I've been around longer, son.
Score one for Slashdot's intellectual conformism.
Hey, guess what? Now I am rejected even by my fellow geeks. I wear your scorn like a badge of honor. I may be alone, but nevertheless I am right.
I hate the Tivo. I've never used one or seen one, nor do I ever want to. Why the hell would I want to watch more television? Come on, people, go outside and enjoy the weather. I'm going for a jog tomorrow morning. I'll be thinking about how enjoyable my non-television watching experience is.
ROTFLMAO.
Oh yes, The Matrix, a movie, was so very, very subtle. And philosophic. It practically put Plato to shame. Oh, we are so sophisticated here. Hmmm. Could we build on this deep, deep insight and discuss how Biodome compares with Kierkegaard? "No! I will not be limited by your limited metaphysical world!"
When you accept your Nobel Prize, be sure to mention /.
As of today, I am refusing to purchase any more recorded music. The radio and my CD collection are enough until this blows over.
WFM.