Yes, it is cool. And you don't have to wait 7 years. Cassini already completed a trans-ring intersection on it's breaking maneuver when it arrived at Saturn. You can probably find videos on the Net. There are some awesome high-res shots available. Go and find them.
The fear then was that a mis-calculation might be the cause of the worst man-made environmental impact in the solar system -- crashing into the rings and disrupting their delicate balance, causing them to collapse into the planet. Of course with it's tiny mass the most likely outcome would have been just losing the probe as some chunk of ice smashed into it, even with the high velocity it had on it's way from Jupiter. Now presumably the probe's velocity is even lower, so it should be okay.
Forget Microsoft or Apple trying to get get a full OS to work. The Big Company that really could make a killing on these would be Paramount. Get Mike Okuda to design a touch interface similar to the Star Trek PADD -- pannel based, not multiple overlapping windows, customisable layout with generic controls. Voice would be a bonus but shouldn't be necessary. Audio Icons (a la Emacspeak / LCARS) would be a bonus for visually impared (or fully visual enabled but distracted people). Then make it support Apple / Java app store applications and I'd buy one. Oh, and all that the iPad really misses at the moment is a built-in SD card reader -(yes I know the doc has one, but it's not portable, is it?) - that alone would make it much more useful.
I find 17,200mph (27,680km/h) rather difficult to imagine though (I'm not disputing the figure, I just can't imagine how fast that is). So I converted it to every-day units I can think in (metres per second). This figure I can sort-of imagine: 17,200 miles per hour = about 7,739m/s (or about 4 3/4 miles per second for Americans), relative to the launch pad.
Yes, relative speed between Hubble and Atlantis during grappling was probably under one metre/sec. But it was still very impressive to match those two objects up on the orbitals at ground control!
Indeed. After all, the Big Bang itself was originally a wisecrack term, coined by an opponent of the theory....
I'm not sure if the name's stuck simply because no-one's thought of a better term, or because proponents enjoy the irony;-)
Um, "software as a service" is hardly revolutionary. Also hardly worth the bother.
The open-source community has had the infrastructure for "software as a service" since about 1993. It's called X11 and there are lots of applications for it. Since about 2003 No Machine's NX protocol has made it feasible and secure to deploy X11 applications over the Internet (even on a dial-up modem -- put that in your web browser's AJAX pipe and smoke it).
The only part that is "missing" is a "service" which you can log into that hosts and runs X11 applications. I'm pretty sure everybody knows why this is "missing" -- who would want to give up control of their data to use such a service? Not I.
However, if OP can identify a market that is willing to pay to access the services of open source software on your server infrastructure, and can pay for a server farm to host the services on, then no-one here will stop you. Good luck.
And if PP is still not satisfied by your answer, the open-source community could also work "through a browser" (if anyone ever wanted to??) by making a FreeNX plug-in for the browser. Then running this sort of stuff is no more "hassle" to the user than running a flash ad (off topic: oh, sorry, does Flash have a purpose other than ads?): go and get the plug-in, then come back.
I love FreeNX, and I regularly connect to my home Linux box from a Windows laptop to run my Linux software "as a service" over my WLAN. The only problem I have is that the dvorak key mapping doesn't work, and I'm stuck on qwerty (ick!). But then that could be because of my config, and besides, the user base for dvorak is hardly something people are going to worry about either...;-)
Okay, I've tested: should be good to use. Try this code out (sorry about the indenting, I can't figure out how to get slashdot to do
style HTML... also, the string should be "\tXXX" in both cases, I don't know why slashdot has put that space in it in the call to escapeJava()...):
import org.apache.commons.lang.*;
public class EscapeTest{ public static void main(String [] a){ System.out.println(StringEscapeUtils.escapeJava("\ tXXX")); System.out.println("\tXXX"); } } </blockquote>
yes, and that's great. But it'll be Linux/Cell, not Linux/PC, and how likely is it that the development platform will allow you to write games that could be ported away from Cell/PS3? Also, will the Sony tools be free to inspect and re-engineer so that they could be used to write cross-platform games? I don't think that's likely, any more that it's likely Apple will release Aqua and other key parts of Mac OS X, even though the Darwin kernel is OSS. But if they did, it'd be great for Linux/PC, and not for Sony.
It may be helpful, I haven't tried it. Would be particularly interesting to see if it'll correctly convert, say "\t" into "\\t" instead of a TAB. If it does, then you could use it to wrap the strings for the regexp pattern methods.
heh, that sounds like something Hofstadter's tortoise might say...;-)
Re:think about this from the other side
on
Cedega and Linux Games
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I agree with you, but I think the big difference between OpenGL/OpenAL/SDL and DirectX, is that DirectX is the XBox platform. So writing for Windows DirectX is not a lot different to writing for XBox.
So it's not a technical problem, it's a matter of market forces and games developers only having a finite budget for porting.
When/if Sony release a development suit for Playstation 3 that can be made to run on Linux/PC, then we'll start to see titles made available for it. I don't think that's likely though, or if it is, it won't be Free Software.
True. I'm not a Hofstadter appologist (he hardly needs one, and I'm certainly unqualified!) but I think this prediction should also be placed in it's context. Hofstadter was talking about the application of artificial reasoning in beating human chess players. The current chess champion systems aren't really reasoning, more like cheating: they spend endless cycles projecting moves forward in the problem space and then apply some huristics in selecting the next move. This is quite different to the lateral thinking and high-level pattern analysis that a human chess master applies, and makes best use of the computer's strength: high-speed drudgery work.
In that light, then I would say that so far the prediction holds true, no chess master has been beaten by a computer program that applies reasoning instead of dumb search and huristics. Also, no machine has matched the three names composing the titel of the book and likely can't for a while.
However, I'm not sure that this single prediction about chess accurately reflects the thrust of GEB anyway. Hofstadter appears to me to spend a great deal of GEB in explaining what in fact reasoning actually is, how it should be possible to mechanise. The prediction about chess doesn't jibe with the rest of the book as I remember. Perhaps I should look up the quote and then I'll understand?
In a nutshell: because Japan are building prototype Protocol Droids.
The point of having a bipedal robot or android (with presumably also two limbs protruding from the upper torso and also hands, digits and opposable thumbs) is so that the robot can fill the role of a nineteenth century house matron, or act as a host and guide in a corporate building. These are roles that Japaneese robotic companies see being fulfilled by robots rather than low-paid workers or not at all, I think.
Seriously though, I think it has something to do with providing a "common ground" for the robot's masters more than anything. What would your mother rather have in her house (that is, if she wanted a robot at all!): a walking talking droid like C3P0 and Twiki, or a liveathan on caterpillar tracks like B9 or a dalek? Granted there are cute non-biped designs (astromech droids, say) just as there can be intimidating bipeds (T-800, Cylon, or Maximillian. — and I'm not entirely sure about Metal Mickey).
But I think a a bipedal, humanoid robot would facilitate user acceptance more than anything, as well as fitting in with the surrounds more easily from a technical and ergonomics standpoint.
If you want to see the real potential of 3D in desktop / internet interface applications, I suggest you head over to the Croquet lab. Brought to us by the same people who invented the 2D desktop, I reckon it shows the most promise of actually applying 3D in a useful way.
Keep in mind that even the genius of Alan Kay is still experimenting with ways to make 3D a useful, intuitive medium of expression. My personal feeling is that, so long as we are stuck using a 2D display, 3D applications are only going to be useful for displaying data that are 3D or 4D. However, that doesn't mean we should wait until we can "jack-in" to the Net before we explore how best to build and navigate a 3D colaborative world... So what if it may not be ready for main-stream use (you could argue that 2D desktops aren't ready for main-stream yet, in fact...) That doesn't mean we should lock it away until then. We're the geeks, people! Lets explore the frontier.
I find myself commenting all over this thread... must be close to my heart:-)
I think you're right, but I wonder if there is something else that drives me to hack, that is "missing" from what you've covered?
For instance, when all that my computer could do when I turned it on was blink a cursor and answer "Syntax error" to everything I typed, why was I still motivated to program, instead of go read a good book, watch TV, or go outside and play?
I think that the answer is: I was facinated by the puzzle. I was also keenly interested in figuring out how things work. I used to pull clocks appart, re-wire stereos, that sort of thing: computer = just another gadget to tweak, though very expensive (!) so I'd better tweak it by "programming", whatever that is, because it has a book that says "you can't break it by programming"...
If computers present a puzzle that is interesting, has a low entry barrier, and rewards exploration, then kids will program it. Other posts in this thread show that: the puzzle isn't interesting if the computer does nearly everything you want anyway, the entry barrier is very high (hidden or non-existent programming tools) and the reward for exploration is quite low (results gained through programming lower than what you get from an internet search, most of the time).
It's sad. I have a very young son who (if he's interested later -- he's only 6 months old now:-D) I'd love to share my love of programming with. I'm having a hard time comming up with interesting puzzles that are easy to get started in and reward exploration though. Squeak has a low barrier, maybe using it to write a simple game, with the hope that the reward of "I did it myself" is good enough is about the best I can come up with.
Why do I think it's important? Why not just let kids be illiterate? I don't know. I think it's out of a sense of preserving culture and skills, probably the same sence that a carpenter laments the passing of his craft.
Re:Kids have moved beyond the computer as a tool.
on
Do Kids Still Program?
·
· Score: 1
Oh sheesh! "kids today are so lazy/selfish" was the cry of the baby-boomers when I was a kid. Note: the baby-boomers are the first generation ever to leave the world worse for their kids than when they found it.
The problem is not the kids: kids are kids. The problem is that they aren't given motivating examples, are not shown how to think critically about infromation that has been handed to them, and they are not shown how this is a problem for them: what happens if (or when) you can no longer get your solutions handed to you on a plate? What if the software you purchased this year can no longer read and edit the document you wrote last year? Why does this stupid computer behave they way it does, instead of the way you expect?
It's the same with general education and a "lack of interest" in science, or in good nutrition. "kids these days don't eat vegitables". Again, it's not the kids, it's their parents/carers/teachers (following the example of their baby-boomer parents in turn) not being responsible and taking away/limiting choice in food to direct the kids to healthy eating. It's why you cannot vote until you are 18/21 (on the assumption that you aren't a kid by then: you've learnt to consider facts and make decisions, rather than to act like a lemming).
Kids need to be directed. If they aren't heading in the "right" direction, it's because they haven't been pointed that way, or at least shown that there is another way.
All very true and valid points. What this kid needs is his dad, or some friends who've already "figured it out"...
Sadly, it is just as Alan Kay has observed (paraphrasing): Kids are shown how to do too many stupid things on computers and they think this is all that they are for. They think that driving a word-processor makes you computer literate.
People have been bemoning this issue for a long time though. Witness the complaints when HyperCard became popular on the Mac: all the "real programmers" worried that it would lead to spaghetti-stacks. It might have, but at least the stack writers were learning something about programming, and becomming more computer literate than their game-playing friends.
Since now-days the computer has been hidden beneath a "user-friendly" interface, kids need someone to show them how to open the hood. Assuming that the hood can in fact be opened, which in Windows, it's been welded shut and you must purchase your own blow-torch first.
With the wide deployment of "mind-reading" hardware into every-day PCs, ATM terminals and electronic entry gates, there will suddenly be a massive market for tin-foil hats (and of course, a D-I-Y sub-culture making Open Source instructions to build your own hat).
Speaking of hats: will we have to wear one of those shower-cap things to unlock doors or our computer terminals? Can you imagine lining up to use an ATM that has a device that descends from the ceiling to "read" your head, before giving you cash? Make's it easy for the mugger to rob you after the cash is dispensed and your head is still caught in the reader...
I am thinking of other remarkably successful attempts for computers to "read your thoughts" through your actions: witness Clippy the paper-clip electronic smart agent: "I see you are writing a letter. Would you like me to bollicks it up for you?"
We don't even have OCR software that can defeat the anti-robot measures on Slashdot's anonymous post system. I don't have much confidence in a nuron-reading system's accuracy, regardless of my present mental condition.
Like Trusted Computing (oxymoron of the 21st Century, that one!), if it ever does fly, it'll be avoided in droves unless some government makes it compulsory...
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it is cool. And you don't have to wait 7 years. Cassini already completed a trans-ring intersection on it's breaking maneuver when it arrived at Saturn. You can probably find videos on the Net. There are some awesome high-res shots available. Go and find them.
The fear then was that a mis-calculation might be the cause of the worst man-made environmental impact in the solar system -- crashing into the rings and disrupting their delicate balance, causing them to collapse into the planet. Of course with it's tiny mass the most likely outcome would have been just losing the probe as some chunk of ice smashed into it, even with the high velocity it had on it's way from Jupiter. Now presumably the probe's velocity is even lower, so it should be okay.
Forget Microsoft or Apple trying to get get a full OS to work. The Big Company that really could make a killing on these would be Paramount. Get Mike Okuda to design a touch interface similar to the Star Trek PADD -- pannel based, not multiple overlapping windows, customisable layout with generic controls. Voice would be a bonus but shouldn't be necessary. Audio Icons (a la Emacspeak / LCARS) would be a bonus for visually impared (or fully visual enabled but distracted people). Then make it support Apple / Java app store applications and I'd buy one. Oh, and all that the iPad really misses at the moment is a built-in SD card reader -(yes I know the doc has one, but it's not portable, is it?) - that alone would make it much more useful.
I agree, it is actually impressive.
I find 17,200mph (27,680km/h) rather difficult to imagine though (I'm not disputing the figure, I just can't imagine how fast that is). So I converted it to every-day units I can think in (metres per second). This figure I can sort-of imagine: 17,200 miles per hour = about 7,739m/s (or about 4 3/4 miles per second for Americans), relative to the launch pad.
Yes, relative speed between Hubble and Atlantis during grappling was probably under one metre/sec. But it was still very impressive to match those two objects up on the orbitals at ground control!
Epigrams of programming:
120 Adapting old programs to fit new machines usually means adapting new machines to behave like old ones.
( http://www.pam1.bcs.uwa.edu.au/~michaelw/Perlis_Epigrams.html )
I think the high-point in Microsoft during Gates' carerr definately has to be when they decided to remove the paperclip from Microsoft Office.
Indeed. After all, the Big Bang itself was originally a wisecrack term, coined by an opponent of the theory.... I'm not sure if the name's stuck simply because no-one's thought of a better term, or because proponents enjoy the irony ;-)
or, if not to the employer, then to the IRS as a work expense. At least, that would fly with the ATO in Australia, I'm not too clued up on US tax law.
So THAT's what Beazely was on about. "Up hill and down dale" indeed. A valed reference, eh?
An author filter. Zonk still posts fud drivel it appears...
Um, "software as a service" is hardly revolutionary. Also hardly worth the bother.
The open-source community has had the infrastructure for "software as a service" since about 1993. It's called X11 and there are lots of applications for it. Since about 2003 No Machine's NX protocol has made it feasible and secure to deploy X11 applications over the Internet (even on a dial-up modem -- put that in your web browser's AJAX pipe and smoke it).
The only part that is "missing" is a "service" which you can log into that hosts and runs X11 applications. I'm pretty sure everybody knows why this is "missing" -- who would want to give up control of their data to use such a service? Not I.
However, if OP can identify a market that is willing to pay to access the services of open source software on your server infrastructure, and can pay for a server farm to host the services on, then no-one here will stop you. Good luck.
Indeed!
;-)
And if PP is still not satisfied by your answer, the open-source community could also work "through a browser" (if anyone ever wanted to??) by making a FreeNX plug-in for the browser. Then running this sort of stuff is no more "hassle" to the user than running a flash ad (off topic: oh, sorry, does Flash have a purpose other than ads?): go and get the plug-in, then come back.
I love FreeNX, and I regularly connect to my home Linux box from a Windows laptop to run my Linux software "as a service" over my WLAN. The only problem I have is that the dvorak key mapping doesn't work, and I'm stuck on qwerty (ick!). But then that could be because of my config, and besides, the user base for dvorak is hardly something people are going to worry about either...
yes, and that's great. But it'll be Linux/Cell, not Linux/PC, and how likely is it that the development platform will allow you to write games that could be ported away from Cell/PS3? Also, will the Sony tools be free to inspect and re-engineer so that they could be used to write cross-platform games? I don't think that's likely, any more that it's likely Apple will release Aqua and other key parts of Mac OS X, even though the Darwin kernel is OSS. But if they did, it'd be great for Linux/PC, and not for Sony.
It may be helpful, I haven't tried it. Would be particularly interesting to see if it'll correctly convert, say "\t" into "\\t" instead of a TAB. If it does, then you could use it to wrap the strings for the regexp pattern methods.
heh, that sounds like something Hofstadter's tortoise might say... ;-)
I agree with you, but I think the big difference between OpenGL/OpenAL/SDL and DirectX, is that DirectX is the XBox platform. So writing for Windows DirectX is not a lot different to writing for XBox.
So it's not a technical problem, it's a matter of market forces and games developers only having a finite budget for porting.
When/if Sony release a development suit for Playstation 3 that can be made to run on Linux/PC, then we'll start to see titles made available for it. I don't think that's likely though, or if it is, it won't be Free Software.
True. I'm not a Hofstadter appologist (he hardly needs one, and I'm certainly unqualified!) but I think this prediction should also be placed in it's context. Hofstadter was talking about the application of artificial reasoning in beating human chess players. The current chess champion systems aren't really reasoning, more like cheating: they spend endless cycles projecting moves forward in the problem space and then apply some huristics in selecting the next move. This is quite different to the lateral thinking and high-level pattern analysis that a human chess master applies, and makes best use of the computer's strength: high-speed drudgery work.
In that light, then I would say that so far the prediction holds true, no chess master has been beaten by a computer program that applies reasoning instead of dumb search and huristics. Also, no machine has matched the three names composing the titel of the book and likely can't for a while.
However, I'm not sure that this single prediction about chess accurately reflects the thrust of GEB anyway. Hofstadter appears to me to spend a great deal of GEB in explaining what in fact reasoning actually is, how it should be possible to mechanise. The prediction about chess doesn't jibe with the rest of the book as I remember. Perhaps I should look up the quote and then I'll understand?
The point of having a bipedal robot or android (with presumably also two limbs protruding from the upper torso and also hands, digits and opposable thumbs) is so that the robot can fill the role of a nineteenth century house matron, or act as a host and guide in a corporate building. These are roles that Japaneese robotic companies see being fulfilled by robots rather than low-paid workers or not at all, I think.
Seriously though, I think it has something to do with providing a "common ground" for the robot's masters more than anything. What would your mother rather have in her house (that is, if she wanted a robot at all!): a walking talking droid like C3P0 and Twiki, or a liveathan on caterpillar tracks like B9 or a dalek? Granted there are cute non-biped designs (astromech droids, say) just as there can be intimidating bipeds (T-800, Cylon, or Maximillian. — and I'm not entirely sure about Metal Mickey).
But I think a a bipedal, humanoid robot would facilitate user acceptance more than anything, as well as fitting in with the surrounds more easily from a technical and ergonomics standpoint.
Agreed. I believe in Star Wars, the floating training device is referred to by Luke as a "remote":
;-)
"You know, I could almost see the remote..."
Sad that I can quote Star Wars scripts without having to fish out the DVD...
Keep in mind that even the genius of Alan Kay is still experimenting with ways to make 3D a useful, intuitive medium of expression. My personal feeling is that, so long as we are stuck using a 2D display, 3D applications are only going to be useful for displaying data that are 3D or 4D. However, that doesn't mean we should wait until we can "jack-in" to the Net before we explore how best to build and navigate a 3D colaborative world... So what if it may not be ready for main-stream use (you could argue that 2D desktops aren't ready for main-stream yet, in fact...) That doesn't mean we should lock it away until then. We're the geeks, people! Lets explore the frontier.
I find myself commenting all over this thread... must be close to my heart :-)
:-D) I'd love to share my love of programming with. I'm having a hard time comming up with interesting puzzles that are easy to get started in and reward exploration though. Squeak has a low barrier, maybe using it to write a simple game, with the hope that the reward of "I did it myself" is good enough is about the best I can come up with.
I think you're right, but I wonder if there is something else that drives me to hack, that is "missing" from what you've covered?
For instance, when all that my computer could do when I turned it on was blink a cursor and answer "Syntax error" to everything I typed, why was I still motivated to program, instead of go read a good book, watch TV, or go outside and play?
I think that the answer is: I was facinated by the puzzle. I was also keenly interested in figuring out how things work. I used to pull clocks appart, re-wire stereos, that sort of thing: computer = just another gadget to tweak, though very expensive (!) so I'd better tweak it by "programming", whatever that is, because it has a book that says "you can't break it by programming"...
If computers present a puzzle that is interesting, has a low entry barrier, and rewards exploration, then kids will program it. Other posts in this thread show that: the puzzle isn't interesting if the computer does nearly everything you want anyway, the entry barrier is very high (hidden or non-existent programming tools) and the reward for exploration is quite low (results gained through programming lower than what you get from an internet search, most of the time).
It's sad. I have a very young son who (if he's interested later -- he's only 6 months old now
Why do I think it's important? Why not just let kids be illiterate? I don't know. I think it's out of a sense of preserving culture and skills, probably the same sence that a carpenter laments the passing of his craft.
Oh sheesh! "kids today are so lazy/selfish" was the cry of the baby-boomers when I was a kid. Note: the baby-boomers are the first generation ever to leave the world worse for their kids than when they found it.
The problem is not the kids: kids are kids. The problem is that they aren't given motivating examples, are not shown how to think critically about infromation that has been handed to them, and they are not shown how this is a problem for them: what happens if (or when) you can no longer get your solutions handed to you on a plate? What if the software you purchased this year can no longer read and edit the document you wrote last year? Why does this stupid computer behave they way it does, instead of the way you expect?
It's the same with general education and a "lack of interest" in science, or in good nutrition. "kids these days don't eat vegitables". Again, it's not the kids, it's their parents/carers/teachers (following the example of their baby-boomer parents in turn) not being responsible and taking away/limiting choice in food to direct the kids to healthy eating. It's why you cannot vote until you are 18/21 (on the assumption that you aren't a kid by then: you've learnt to consider facts and make decisions, rather than to act like a lemming).
Kids need to be directed. If they aren't heading in the "right" direction, it's because they haven't been pointed that way, or at least shown that there is another way.
All very true and valid points. What this kid needs is his dad, or some friends who've already "figured it out"...
Sadly, it is just as Alan Kay has observed (paraphrasing): Kids are shown how to do too many stupid things on computers and they think this is all that they are for. They think that driving a word-processor makes you computer literate.
People have been bemoning this issue for a long time though. Witness the complaints when HyperCard became popular on the Mac: all the "real programmers" worried that it would lead to spaghetti-stacks. It might have, but at least the stack writers were learning something about programming, and becomming more computer literate than their game-playing friends.
Since now-days the computer has been hidden beneath a "user-friendly" interface, kids need someone to show them how to open the hood. Assuming that the hood can in fact be opened, which in Windows, it's been welded shut and you must purchase your own blow-torch first.
Like Trusted Computing (oxymoron of the 21st Century, that one!), if it ever does fly, it'll be avoided in droves unless some government makes it compulsory...
Seriously, I'm hanging out for 4.0...