The current software situation is just the logical consequence of the actual monopolized industry state.
Without real competence there's no way to create new profit areas. If a small firm finds a niche it will be desplaced as his size reaches a critical magnitude. Big corporations doesn't need to innovate, in fact 'innovation' is only a marketing buzzword.
Now, the point is: Software industry is being frozen by big money corporations, but software is still a hand made creation.
There's no way to stop people writing software, the only real possibility to limit people willingness to write software is to try to convert the process in a very difficult and technical one (ie: raising the entry level). The process is a well know one, and has been done in every mass production industry (electronics, mechanics, etc). That's why we see so much complex and difficult 'standards' (ie: SOAP, CLR) being actively pushed by big corporations.
But no matter how hard they try, software is different from others fields, the complexity factor of software is far greater, that's why small teams and even individuals are able to create great software pieces (very much like music), that's something corporations cannot fight, and that's why things keeps changing in this field.
Some corporations see OSS as a threat, but that's only the logical effect of the nature of software creation in a connected world, the real threat is simpler than that, the real threat is that software is writing.
Water on mars, what a surprise!.. And for ages!... Oh!....
Summerians already called Mars the 'watery station', they even said that Mars was destroyed on a violent episode.. Maybe some years from now we will find evidence of a massive impact..
I would have to drive over 1000 miles to reach a non-English speaking area (Mexico). No wonder most people don't pick up a second/third language.
How true!
But remember that's an 'anormal' situation. As species, humans show a high degree of language variation, even small placement changes (ie: differenet valleys) affects language. That's happenning all over the world on hundreds of languages.
English or maybe future Mandarin 'standarization' or aglomeration, is not the norm, is the exception. We are already losing an invaluable source of knowledge with the actual rate of language destruction. Let's not pretend that's a 'natural' state!.
Yes, and I replied saying that the percentage of non-english speakers deals done in english is nothing compared to the number of deals done in non-english.
There are a lot of second languages in the world, in vast areas of the world english means nothing to common people, so the total number of deals done at a given moment in the world between people of different native language english is just a small part.
English can be the most used languahe between big bussines true, but do you believe that these are the most common ones in the world?.
All air traffic is controlled in english, true. but all bussiness are dealed in english?... Common, not even remotely, world is far bigger than you suppouse.
Even if english is the largest second language, the truth is that:
1) there are very broadly used second languages in the world ie: spanish.
2) the distribution of these second languages is very sensible to geografic location.
So if you are speaking to an international audience, you better select the most used second language in the place you are, because in a lot of places english is not a sensible option.
1 - Mono is designed to be a second player (to play catch-up with MS is a 20 years old game).
2 - Any effort put in mono is an effort taken from java (do you like to favour MS?, me no.).
3 - Instead of playing MS games why not to build an OSS cross platform environment (or force Sun to fully open java)?
4 - The three previous items contains the 'MS' letters, that's the problem, that's why I don't like mono.
I refused to mention that aspect, Turing's life has been already broadly commented!... but yes, there's a strong correlation between his ideas, and his education. What strikes me most is that the man was lucid enough to realize-it and work from there!
Re:The arcane art of programming
on
Biomorphic Software
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The idea is not new, read the Turing's paper Intelligent Machinery about Pain & Pleasure machines. In short, machines behaves freely but are conditioned by two simple stimulus: 'pain' that forces behaviour to change, and 'pleasure' that stabilizes current behaviour.
Dan is right, there's a real need for societal software, and somehow it will exist in some form in the near future.
The problem I see is simple: in other engineering areas standards are used everywhere, ie: electrical normatives regulates every aspect of an industrial device. Software (at least in his current form) cannot be 'normalized' to that level, and that's the problem.
We can agree on 'simple' or 'closed' things such as data formats, or even on classical algorithms but how we stablish the other details of source code making (ie: variable names, allocation strategies, etc,etc)? And even more important, if we try to normalize those aspects how long will or those norms lasts?
What about trying to learn from games, and for example; stop using menus? Those small labels on the upper part of the windows, there are a lot, but we seldom use a few of them.
Ergonomic interfaces don't present more than a few options at a time, if my memory es corerct there were studies about using more than 7 options as being confusing. If few options are presented, you don't need menus.
I am not pretending to defend Kay, I don't know him, but frankly to say for example that a spreadsheet plug-in is realy nifty illustrates the point: the problem is not the plug-in or how good it is, the problem is that visicalc is 25 years old!. If you find it ok, that's allright, but try to understand that after 25 years some people can get a little bored.
After more than 20 years programming my opinion is that Alan Kay is right. Those who are older enough know that there were expectatives (ie: computers will understand human languaje), now there are refinements (oh, look at that, spell-check on any text entry, wow!),
Even the most succesful idea on those years, the web, was already (and probably better) designed in the Xanadu project.
Hardware is still worse, one single schema, a single processing units, lots of memory, and a hard disk, that's all. Were are those prolog machines? I remember a small english company that build a nice small blue box able to outperform some CRAYs on graphic processing. That was creativity.
Computing has fallen by his own success, there was bussines and money to get, now big corporations are unable to do a thing but continue with the same old crap. Of course innovation is lost, the only thing that gives software an edge is that is a personal activity, that's why open source still remains. But the big picture is depressing, sofware is under MS control, and harware is under Intel directions, that's falling short friends, very very short.l
Sure, but biological systems are complex, they are not made of individual, isolated systems. In the case at hand, even if cochlea is unable to directly transmit those rates, I think we cannot say that a physical wave way above audible range has no effect on neural processing.
ie: Even if the hairs are unable to resonate at a given frecuency, his biologic structure is under the load of the wave, and that can affect his response, maybe not the rate, but say the decay slope, or any other internal funcion of the structure. As you already said, on higer frecuencies neurons keeps firing, not on ordered secuence, but they keeps doing his work.
Anyway, it seems we are in full 'hair splitting' no?:)
to whether a 50 ns phase shift in a speaker cable, at 25 kHz, is audible.
Maybe is not audible, but we cannot say is not detected on the neuronal level.:)
The main point for me is that we can hardly accept 'firing' or 'spike trains' as a symptom of information transmission, synchronization, amplitude, or simply delay can be information carriers.
The part of the work of Liaw and Berger i know is about neural network simulations, they build a synapse model more closely resembling 'natural' systems. The main point of his simualtions, was that every synapse has his own set of similar functions, information is coded in the temporal dimension, with feedback from the post synaptic level.
That kind of setup shows an exponential processing power, very small differences in temporal spike distribution have a large impact on subsequent behaviour. The firing rate is not critical, timming between signals is.
That was maybe two years ago... look on US patents for Liaw and Berger work, they build some very small systems (11 'neurons') able to detect the speaker (single word, many speakers), or the word (single speaker, many words) variying the setups.
Again, I am not pretending phase information transmission, just that small phase shifts can produce large effects on posterior signal processing. Others works also indicates that the temporal dimension plays a crucial role on biological neuronal processing. Never read about firing rate as a limiting factor for information transmission on neural systems.
Well, maybe is not a fully know process, but as you seems to know, there's a of lot work done in that area, and my expressed opinion is quite common in the field, so I don't understand why you try to emphasize firing rate as a limiting factor.
Of course higher frequencies are being detected and passed on to the brain; but absolute phase information, as far as anyone can tell, is not preserved beyond that few kHz limit."
I've never pretended that phase information is preserved, just that is not irrelevant, quite the contrary.
Again, your evidence to the contrary is welcome. Try to be specific and cite research wherever possible.
Easy, take a look at the work of Liaw and Berger on adaptative synapse simulation.
Now, could you please indicate some research work that provides some facts about the limits of neuron firing phase shifts effects?, Note that the work I've cited specifically adresses that point, and strongly (succesful and patented simulations) suggest the contrary,specifically read the work on computational capabities of pre and post adaptative synapse behaviour.
Neurons encode information by interfrencing timed pulses on pre and pos sinapses conditions, if the firing rate of the neurons of auditori system is a few KHz, that doesn't mean that nervous systems cannot process faster rates, quite the contrary.
Not only harmonics, but noise is also important.
Bad digital processing tries to eliminate any trace of natural noises that are inherent to instrument playing, the efect is unnatural and strange, but hey, is 'sharp'.
Musicians play with noise, just hear great classic players.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, a major milestone is sci-fi movies, mainly due to:
1- The history is just old plain good sci-fi, and
2- The making is simply fantastic.
And of course, of course... Anne Francis.
Gotta love this movie!.
And that's something new ?...
he joke about 'if it works is not AI!' is years old my friend.
That's not 'human' that's only 'social'.
Old old old marketing boy.
The current software situation is just the logical consequence of the actual monopolized industry state.
Without real competence there's no way to create new profit areas. If a small firm finds a niche it will be desplaced as his size reaches a critical magnitude. Big corporations doesn't need to innovate, in fact 'innovation' is only a marketing buzzword.
Now, the point is: Software industry is being frozen by big money corporations, but software is still a hand made creation.
There's no way to stop people writing software, the only real possibility to limit people willingness to write software is to try to convert the process in a very difficult and technical one (ie: raising the entry level). The process is a well know one, and has been done in every mass production industry (electronics, mechanics, etc). That's why we see so much complex and difficult 'standards' (ie: SOAP, CLR) being actively pushed by big corporations.
But no matter how hard they try, software is different from others fields, the complexity factor of software is far greater, that's why small teams and even individuals are able to create great software pieces (very much like music), that's something corporations cannot fight, and that's why things keeps changing in this field.
Some corporations see OSS as a threat, but that's only the logical effect of the nature of software creation in a connected world, the real threat is simpler than that, the real threat is that software is writing.
Doubt?
Water on mars, what a surprise!.. And for ages!... Oh!....
Summerians already called Mars the 'watery station', they even said that Mars was destroyed on a violent episode.. Maybe some years from now we will find evidence of a massive impact..
Hey that's 5.5k years old news!
I would have to drive over 1000 miles to reach a non-English speaking area (Mexico). No wonder most people don't pick up a second/third language.
How true!
But remember that's an 'anormal' situation. As species, humans show a high degree of language variation, even small placement changes (ie: differenet valleys) affects language. That's happenning all over the world on hundreds of languages.
English or maybe future Mandarin 'standarization' or aglomeration, is not the norm, is the exception. We are already losing an invaluable source of knowledge with the actual rate of language destruction. Let's not pretend that's a 'natural' state!.
Yes, and I replied saying that the percentage of non-english speakers deals done in english is nothing compared to the number of deals done in non-english.
There are a lot of second languages in the world, in vast areas of the world english means nothing to common people, so the total number of deals done at a given moment in the world between people of different native language english is just a small part.
English can be the most used languahe between big bussines true, but do you believe that these are the most common ones in the world?.
if you find-it strange, get ready (in 10 years) for the chinese wave! :)
Amazing how people call other languages strange!!!
Half truths.
All air traffic is controlled in english, true. but all bussiness are dealed in english?... Common, not even remotely, world is far bigger than you suppouse.
Even if english is the largest second language, the truth is that:
1) there are very broadly used second languages in the world ie: spanish.
2) the distribution of these second languages is very sensible to geografic location.
So if you are speaking to an international audience, you better select the most used second language in the place you are, because in a lot of places english is not a sensible option.
1 - Mono is designed to be a second player (to play catch-up with MS is a 20 years old game).
2 - Any effort put in mono is an effort taken from java (do you like to favour MS?, me no.).
3 - Instead of playing MS games why not to build an OSS cross platform environment (or force Sun to fully open java)?
4 - The three previous items contains the 'MS' letters, that's the problem, that's why I don't like mono.
:)
I refused to mention that aspect, Turing's life has been already broadly commented!... but yes, there's a strong correlation between his ideas, and his education. What strikes me most is that the man was lucid enough to realize-it and work from there!
The idea is not new, read the Turing's paper Intelligent Machinery about Pain & Pleasure machines. In short, machines behaves freely but are conditioned by two simple stimulus: 'pain' that forces behaviour to change, and 'pleasure' that stabilizes current behaviour.
Dan is right, there's a real need for societal software, and somehow it will exist in some form in the near future.
The problem I see is simple: in other engineering areas standards are used everywhere, ie: electrical normatives regulates every aspect of an industrial device. Software (at least in his current form) cannot be 'normalized' to that level, and that's the problem.
We can agree on 'simple' or 'closed' things such as data formats, or even on classical algorithms but how we stablish the other details of source code making (ie: variable names, allocation strategies, etc,etc)? And even more important, if we try to normalize those aspects how long will or those norms lasts?
What about trying to learn from games, and for example; stop using menus? Those small labels on the upper part of the windows, there are a lot, but we seldom use a few of them.
Ergonomic interfaces don't present more than a few options at a time, if my memory es corerct there were studies about using more than 7 options as being confusing. If few options are presented, you don't need menus.
Whatever happened to the 60's notion that technology would have us working less?
Don't be cruel. :)
I am not pretending to defend Kay, I don't know him, but frankly to say for example that a spreadsheet plug-in is realy nifty illustrates the point: the problem is not the plug-in or how good it is, the problem is that visicalc is 25 years old!. If you find it ok, that's allright, but try to understand that after 25 years some people can get a little bored.
After more than 20 years programming my opinion is that Alan Kay is right. Those who are older enough know that there were expectatives (ie: computers will understand human languaje), now there are refinements (oh, look at that, spell-check on any text entry, wow!),
Even the most succesful idea on those years, the web, was already (and probably better) designed in the Xanadu project.
Hardware is still worse, one single schema, a single processing units, lots of memory, and a hard disk, that's all. Were are those prolog machines? I remember a small english company that build a nice small blue box able to outperform some CRAYs on graphic processing. That was creativity.
Computing has fallen by his own success, there was bussines and money to get, now big corporations are unable to do a thing but continue with the same old crap. Of course innovation is lost, the only thing that gives software an edge is that is a personal activity, that's why open source still remains. But the big picture is depressing, sofware is under MS control, and harware is under Intel directions, that's falling short friends, very very short.l
Sure, but biological systems are complex, they are not made of individual, isolated systems. In the case at hand, even if cochlea is unable to directly transmit those rates, I think we cannot say that a physical wave way above audible range has no effect on neural processing.
ie: Even if the hairs are unable to resonate at a given frecuency, his biologic structure is under the load of the wave, and that can affect his response, maybe not the rate, but say the decay slope, or any other internal funcion of the structure. As you already said, on higer frecuencies neurons keeps firing, not on ordered secuence, but they keeps doing his work.
Anyway, it seems we are in full 'hair splitting' no? :)
to whether a 50 ns phase shift in a speaker cable, at 25 kHz, is audible.
Maybe is not audible, but we cannot say is not detected on the neuronal level. :)
The main point for me is that we can hardly accept 'firing' or 'spike trains' as a symptom of information transmission, synchronization, amplitude, or simply delay can be information carriers.
The part of the work of Liaw and Berger i know is about neural network simulations, they build a synapse model more closely resembling 'natural' systems. The main point of his simualtions, was that every synapse has his own set of similar functions, information is coded in the temporal dimension, with feedback from the post synaptic level.
That kind of setup shows an exponential processing power, very small differences in temporal spike distribution have a large impact on subsequent behaviour. The firing rate is not critical, timming between signals is.
That was maybe two years ago... look on US patents for Liaw and Berger work, they build some very small systems (11 'neurons') able to detect the speaker (single word, many speakers), or the word (single speaker, many words) variying the setups.
Again, I am not pretending phase information transmission, just that small phase shifts can produce large effects on posterior signal processing. Others works also indicates that the temporal dimension plays a crucial role on biological neuronal processing. Never read about firing rate as a limiting factor for information transmission on neural systems.
Well, maybe is not a fully know process, but as you seems to know, there's a of lot work done in that area, and my expressed opinion is quite common in the field, so I don't understand why you try to emphasize firing rate as a limiting factor.
Of course higher frequencies are being detected and passed on to the brain; but absolute phase information, as far as anyone can tell, is not preserved beyond that few kHz limit."
I've never pretended that phase information is preserved, just that is not irrelevant, quite the contrary.
Again, your evidence to the contrary is welcome. Try to be specific and cite research wherever possible.
Easy, take a look at the work of Liaw and Berger on adaptative synapse simulation.
Now, could you please indicate some research work that provides some facts about the limits of neuron firing phase shifts effects?, Note that the work I've cited specifically adresses that point, and strongly (succesful and patented simulations) suggest the contrary,specifically read the work on computational capabities of pre and post adaptative synapse behaviour.
Neurons encode information by interfrencing timed pulses on pre and pos sinapses conditions, if the firing rate of the neurons of auditori system is a few KHz, that doesn't mean that nervous systems cannot process faster rates, quite the contrary.
Not only harmonics, but noise is also important. Bad digital processing tries to eliminate any trace of natural noises that are inherent to instrument playing, the efect is unnatural and strange, but hey, is 'sharp'.
Musicians play with noise, just hear great classic players.