"Paul Allen will split the $10 million prize with inventor Burt Rutan, with Rutan making payments to each of his employees who helped design, build, test, and fly SpaceShipOne. thestranger.com
Pretty neat, but
on
Flying By Brain
·
· Score: 3, Informative
"If you think about your brain, and learning and the memory process, I can ask you questions about when you were 5 years old and you can retrieve information. That's a tremendous capacity for memory.
I have to say, I don't remember much from when I was five years old. I remember where I lived and maybe can guesstimate where I spent a specific summer, but most of my knowledge comes from what my parents told me and from little "text" snippets that somehow got stuck in my head (for example, names of cities I visited, etc.)
I can recall some images from the past, but I am not sure whether those are "true" memories or something synthesised by brain to "fill in the blank". This leads me to believe that human memory is rather lossy and large part of what I remember is just a rough approximation of what happened based on a few datapoints that brain actually remembers. Sort of like with people who have a defect in their iris - they still see an image in what's supposed to be a blind spot. This image is synthesised by brain to fill in the gap. Needless to say, occasionaly it turns deadly (especially while driving).
Yes, it is true that great statements require great proof. If I claim that earth is flat than I'd have to produce heaps of proof before anyone would listen. However, Kurzweil is futurologist and you can't prove anything about future because it hasn't happened yet. All you can do is look at the past and extrapolate while taking potential setbacks into account.
Kurzweil says that people tend to overestimate the impact of technology in short run and underestimate it in long run. Perhaps he is guilty of this himself. His mistake is tieing more or less specific timeframe to his predictions. Instead he should be using terms like near, medium, and long term future. Specifying dates erodes his credibility and makes him look silly - no one can predict when certain breakthrough will be achieved (unless it is just a matter of deterministic process like in genome project).
You are saying that Kurzweil's predictions are wrong because of "simple facts like Intel scrapping 4gHz chips and any number of other signs that Moore's Law... is being scrapped as we speak." In fact I'd say that your prediction about death of Moore's law sounds silly to me. It is like saying that lamp based computers aren't good enough to do any decent ray tracing, thus ray tracing is not feasible. Well, current silicon technology is a very recent development and looks rather pale in complexity when compared to human brain. There is no doubt in my mind that this technological hiccup will be resolved either by improving existing silicon technology in some new and innovative way or, if we hit a "silicon dead end", by something completely new.
You state that current computers don't seem to be "intelligent". Does mosquito seem intelligent to you? It seems like a fairly simple automaton to me. Well, modern garden variety computers possess a tiny fraction of mosquito's "computational power", so you can't expect them to act "intelligently", can you?
So Ray's point is that as computational power increases, machines will start acting in more and more "intelligent" ways. Of course, computational power alone doesn't produce intelligence but it will if combined with studying brain structure and mimicking it (or parts of it for starters) in machines. And I don't necessarily mean silicone machines.
Another fundamental point Kurzweil makes is that man and machine will merge at some point. Again, the timeframe he gives for when it will happen is questionable. However, I have little doubt that new ways for interfacing man and machine will be developed. I mean, keyboard and mouse are getting rather dated. As that interface becomes tighter and tighter, man and machine will become completely entangled. And it doesn't have to be anything Borg-like, meaning that it should still allow humans to stay humans. I effect, humans enhance their own wetware with technology thus substituting technological progress for evolution. I don't think many will complain that evolution will destroy human species, so think of it as "expedited evolution". That also makes perfect sense to me - natural evolution evolved humans to live in caves and feed by hunting and gathering. This is just taking evolution one step further - we've been doing it for centuries; stopping at an arbitrary point is not possible, it is like trying to turn time back.
But of course, if it goes down it will go down on Friday evening when sysadm is taking an "out of reach trip" to see the beautiful foliage along with other techies...
On the second thought, they were asking for trouble by making an update on Thrusday. My rule of thumb is to schedule all production updates on Tuesday and in case of slippage beyond Wednesday it should be moved to the next week.
Oh well, I guess they know better (hmm, maybe not)...
In general it works pretty well on linux. Some caveats though: 1. It instructs you to put gmail password in fstab. This is kind of insecure. 2. If your gmail password contains non-alphanumerical chars mount will fail. Instead, put your password in gmailfs.py 3. You'll get a bunch of junk messages in your inbox for each file you store. 4. Deleteing files simply moves them intro Trash, you have to empty it out manually.
Otherwise it is pretty neat, just requires some polishing.
"This works with JavaScript turned off, even in Free Software browsers."
Ok, how about lynx? Can't you just save image to disk? Ok, forget lynx, telnet 80 & GET should do the trick.
As usual, this DRM attempt will make it a pain for legit users to use but won't stop any determined abusers. On the other hand, I imagine that Google is under immense pressure from the industry to put sime kind of DRM so this could provide sufficient cover for them.
The only way this stuff is going to work is if they make text image all warped and wavy to defeat automatic OCR but that would greatly impact the usability of this service.
we will be closer to a decent PDA/Cell Phone/MP3 Player in one device. Multiple gadgets are a pain (and make you look like a Christmas tree). I am pretty certain it would have to be solid state player though. HD won't work well in a combo.
I imagine official NASA response would be:
on
Antarctic Telescope?
·
· Score: -1, Troll
"The big difference between stationary telescope on Earth and Hubble is that stationary telescope rotates with Earth and it is difficult to stay locked on a specific area for a prolonged period of time. Hubble, on the other hand, could just hang in one spot in space and thus be fixed on a single point indefinitely; and that makes all the difference!"
9% on average on "Business Apps" is to vague too draw any conclusions. Was the slowdown in disk, network, memory, network performance? All of the above?
The slowdown could mean that MS cut some corners and traded speed for security in XPs' pre SP2 version. While fixing security problems they had to perform some extra checks and that dragged performance down. Or, they could've discovered some serious architectural issues with fixing new holes, so they had to do it in a slow and inefficient way due to the fact that their architecture wasn't designed with those checks in mind.
On a side note, I experienced a significant slowdown when running Norton AV that supposedly does a bunch of extra security checks. File and network performance became unbearable at times. It got so bad that I had to ditch NAV so now I am reverting my Windows system every day (I run it under VMWare, Linux is a host system). I found this setup + Zone Alarm to be a better answer to endless Windows security issues.
This should be about algorithms, not architecture. Anything they can do in silicon can and should be implemented and perfected in PC software first. I don't care if it takes PC 10 minutes to recognize 10 second sentence as long as it does it accurately. As soon as that happens, then by all means cut its power consumption and speed it up x1000 by doing it in silicone. If all they are doing is speeding up existing, relatively low accuracy algorithms, then their effort is of limited use.
Too be honest, I doubt that putting a few clever algorithms together will ever achieve any respectable accuracy no matter how fast those algorithms are. Sure, it might accurately recognize words from limited vocabulary when spoken clearly and/or in simple sentences. If this is their goal, then it is quite achievable. It sounds to me though that they are aiming much higher as in "dictating a detailed email". I think that so many things have to happen from effective noise filtering to proper phonetic model representation to parsing to content-based correction. Latter step is especially problematic since it requires a huge knowledge database which takes humans years to accumulate. I am not saying that these difficulties are insurmountable, but simply that their goals are too ambitious for the current state of our technology and knowledge. I'd love to be proven wrong on that account though.
For me, the battery should last long enogh so I can unplug my laptop and carry it to a different location (as in kitchen to living room). My laptop is 12 pounds though (Inspiron 9100) and portability was limited to "get it from home to work and back" . Of course, YMMV depending on what you do.
Sometimes it is just not possible to obtain any decent performance without stored procedures. For example, suppose you have to do some complex calculations on a large data set and then crunch it down to a much smaller result.
Without stored procedures:
Application server - run a large select on DB, transfer a huge amount of data, crunch it. Very inefficient since large data transfer (usually done over network) is very costly.
With stored procedures:
Application server - simply run stored procedure on DB and get small results data set back. Much more efficient since no large data transfer is required.
Currently, if I start typing URL in the address bar, it matches URLs alphabetically. This gets very annoying at times, especially if you accidentally type giigle.com instead of google.com and then it keeps on matching giggle.com for weeks when I type "g".
This problem can be fixed by using frequency count with some time decay. For example, if I went to google.com 100 times within last week and once to giggle.com, then match to google.com on "g". If, however, I went to giigle.com 5 times recently, then match to giigle.com
While one might argue that this makes the algorithm unpredictable from user's standpoint, in my experience people keep on typing until they see the correct match. So, this way they'll see the right match sooner on average.
Slashdot Mirror
There are fundamental things missing, ... no single 'sign-on system' giving reference to Microsoft's foundering .Net passport program.
Please, someone, tell him about kerberos...
Netflix got some cometition now!
Just replace players with tanks and the cup is yours!
you could just have the optical drive shielded in lead
:)
Yeah, right, this makes a perfect match for an ultra light laptop!!!
"Paul Allen will split the $10 million prize with inventor Burt Rutan, with Rutan making payments to each of his employees who helped design, build, test, and fly SpaceShipOne.
thestranger.com
This is nothing that a little sting operation won't fix. Seriously, how do they plan on getting the payment without being traced?
The term "learning curve" was invented by the aerospace industry in the 1930s as a way to quantify improved efficiency from mass production
Aren't you confusing "learning curve" with "economy of scales" here?
... is not fiction after all!!! :)
"If you think about your brain, and learning and the memory process, I can ask you questions about when you were 5 years old and you can retrieve information. That's a tremendous capacity for memory.
I have to say, I don't remember much from when I was five years old. I remember where I lived and maybe can guesstimate where I spent a specific summer, but most of my knowledge comes from what my parents told me and from little "text" snippets that somehow got stuck in my head (for example, names of cities I visited, etc.)
I can recall some images from the past, but I am not sure whether those are "true" memories or something synthesised by brain to "fill in the blank". This leads me to believe that human memory is rather lossy and large part of what I remember is just a rough approximation of what happened based on a few datapoints that brain actually remembers. Sort of like with people who have a defect in their iris - they still see an image in what's supposed to be a blind spot. This image is synthesised by brain to fill in the gap. Needless to say, occasionaly it turns deadly (especially while driving).
Yes, it is true that great statements require great proof. If I claim that earth is flat than I'd have to produce heaps of proof before anyone would listen. However, Kurzweil is futurologist and you can't prove anything about future because it hasn't happened yet. All you can do is look at the past and extrapolate while taking potential setbacks into account.
... is being scrapped as we speak." In fact I'd say that your prediction about death of Moore's law sounds silly to me. It is like saying that lamp based computers aren't good enough to do any decent ray tracing, thus ray tracing is not feasible. Well, current silicon technology is a very recent development and looks rather pale in complexity when compared to human brain. There is no doubt in my mind that this technological hiccup will be resolved either by improving existing silicon technology in some new and innovative way or, if we hit a "silicon dead end", by something completely new.
Kurzweil says that people tend to overestimate the impact of technology in short run and underestimate it in long run. Perhaps he is guilty of this himself. His mistake is tieing more or less specific timeframe to his predictions. Instead he should be using terms like near, medium, and long term future. Specifying dates erodes his credibility and makes him look silly - no one can predict when certain breakthrough will be achieved (unless it is just a matter of deterministic process like in genome project).
You are saying that Kurzweil's predictions are wrong because of "simple facts like Intel scrapping 4gHz chips and any number of other signs that Moore's Law
You state that current computers don't seem to be "intelligent". Does mosquito seem intelligent to you? It seems like a fairly simple automaton to me. Well, modern garden variety computers possess a tiny fraction of mosquito's "computational power", so you can't expect them to act "intelligently", can you?
So Ray's point is that as computational power increases, machines will start acting in more and more "intelligent" ways. Of course, computational power alone doesn't produce intelligence but it will if combined with studying brain structure and mimicking it (or parts of it for starters) in machines. And I don't necessarily mean silicone machines.
Another fundamental point Kurzweil makes is that man and machine will merge at some point. Again, the timeframe he gives for when it will happen is
questionable. However, I have little doubt that new ways for interfacing man and machine will be developed. I mean, keyboard and mouse are getting rather dated. As that interface becomes tighter and tighter, man and machine will become completely entangled. And it doesn't have to be anything Borg-like, meaning that it should still allow humans to stay humans. I effect, humans enhance their own wetware with technology thus substituting technological progress for evolution. I don't think many will complain that evolution will destroy human species, so think of it as "expedited evolution". That also makes perfect sense to me - natural evolution evolved humans to live in caves and feed by hunting and gathering. This is just taking evolution one step further - we've been doing it for centuries; stopping at an arbitrary point is not possible, it is like trying to turn time back.
But of course, if it goes down it will go down on Friday evening when sysadm is taking an "out of reach trip" to see the beautiful foliage along with other techies...
On the second thought, they were asking for trouble by making an update on Thrusday. My rule of thumb is to schedule all production updates on Tuesday and in case of slippage beyond Wednesday it should be moved to the next week.
Oh well, I guess they know better (hmm, maybe not)...
In general it works pretty well on linux.
Some caveats though:
1. It instructs you to put gmail password in fstab. This is kind of insecure.
2. If your gmail password contains non-alphanumerical chars mount will fail. Instead, put your password in gmailfs.py
3. You'll get a bunch of junk messages in your inbox for each file you store.
4. Deleteing files simply moves them intro Trash, you have to empty it out manually.
Otherwise it is pretty neat, just requires some polishing.
"This works with JavaScript turned off, even in Free Software browsers."
Ok, how about lynx? Can't you just save image to disk? Ok, forget lynx, telnet 80 & GET should do the trick.
As usual, this DRM attempt will make it a pain for legit users to use but won't stop any determined abusers. On the other hand, I imagine that Google is under immense pressure from the industry to put sime kind of DRM so this could provide sufficient cover for them.
The only way this stuff is going to work is if they make text image all warped and wavy to defeat automatic OCR but that would greatly impact the usability of this service.
we will be closer to a decent PDA/Cell Phone/MP3 Player in one device. Multiple gadgets are a pain (and make you look like a Christmas tree). I am pretty certain it would have to be solid state player though. HD won't work well in a combo.
Number of milliseconds in 49.7 days:
60*60*24*49.7 * 1000 = 4,294,080,000
which just about overflows uint32.
"The big difference between stationary telescope on Earth and Hubble is that stationary telescope rotates with Earth and it is difficult to stay locked on a specific area for a prolonged period of time. Hubble, on the other hand, could just hang in one spot in space and thus be fixed on a single point indefinitely; and that makes all the difference!"
9% on average on "Business Apps" is to vague too draw any conclusions. Was the slowdown in disk, network, memory, network performance? All of the above?
The slowdown could mean that MS cut some corners and traded speed for security in XPs' pre SP2 version. While fixing security problems they had to perform some extra checks and that dragged performance down. Or, they could've discovered some serious architectural issues with fixing new holes, so they had to do it in a slow and inefficient way due to the fact that their architecture wasn't designed with those checks in mind.
On a side note, I experienced a significant slowdown when running Norton AV that supposedly does a bunch of extra security checks. File and network performance became unbearable at times. It got so bad that I had to ditch NAV so now I am reverting my Windows system every day (I run it under VMWare, Linux is a host system). I found this setup + Zone Alarm to be a better answer to endless Windows security issues.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/start.htm l?pg=6
Pretty cool, actually:
h tm l?pg=6
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/start.
This should be about algorithms, not architecture. Anything they can do in silicon can and should be implemented and perfected in PC software first. I don't care if it takes PC 10 minutes to recognize 10 second sentence as long as it does it accurately. As soon as that happens, then by all means cut its power consumption and speed it up x1000 by doing it in silicone. If all they are doing is speeding up existing, relatively low accuracy algorithms, then their effort is of limited use.
Too be honest, I doubt that putting a few clever algorithms together will ever achieve any respectable accuracy no matter how fast those algorithms are. Sure, it might accurately recognize words from limited vocabulary when spoken clearly and/or in simple sentences. If this is their goal, then it is quite achievable. It sounds to me though that they are aiming much higher as in "dictating a detailed email". I think that so many things have to happen from effective noise filtering to proper phonetic model representation to parsing to content-based correction. Latter step is especially problematic since it requires a huge knowledge database which takes humans years to accumulate. I am not saying that these difficulties are insurmountable, but simply that their goals are too ambitious for the current state of our technology and knowledge. I'd love to be proven wrong on that account though.
For me, the battery should last long enogh so I can unplug my laptop and carry it to a different location (as in kitchen to living room). My laptop is 12 pounds though (Inspiron 9100) and portability was limited to "get it from home to work and back" . Of course, YMMV depending on what you do.
Sometimes it is just not possible to obtain any decent performance without stored procedures. For example, suppose you have to do some complex calculations on a large data set and then crunch it down to a much smaller result.
Without stored procedures:
Application server - run a large select on DB, transfer a huge amount of data, crunch it. Very inefficient since large data transfer (usually done over network) is very costly.
With stored procedures:
Application server - simply run stored procedure on DB and get small results data set back. Much more efficient since no large data transfer is required.
While the speech itself is from the early 70's, the paper takes on new importance with the recent trend in louder is better music.
I think when loudness becomes music's most important quality, the word "music" should be placed in quotes.
Really, why care about perfect reproduction when your ears are bleeding?
Currently, if I start typing URL in the address bar, it matches URLs alphabetically. This gets very annoying at times, especially if you accidentally type giigle.com instead of google.com and then it keeps on matching giggle.com for weeks when I type "g".
This problem can be fixed by using frequency count with some time decay. For example, if I went to google.com 100 times within last week and once to giggle.com, then match to google.com on "g". If, however, I went to giigle.com 5 times recently, then match to giigle.com
While one might argue that this makes the algorithm unpredictable from user's standpoint, in my experience people keep on typing until they see the correct match. So, this way they'll see the right match sooner on average.
this thing beats Asimo hands down - more flexibility in a much smaller package.
Check out the video - gotta love the head stand!