I don't think the question is whether what Tridge did was ethical or not. Sure, what he did was ethical. I really don't care. The real question is whether Bitkeeper is acting ethically.
Honestly, they don't have to give anything to us, and they can decide for any reason or lack of reason to stop giving us anything. Which they did. Now we can complain about it, but I don't see where they owe us a d@mned thing.
Linus. Linus says is that he can't argue "against that". Unfortunately, the "that" makes his statement ambiguous. Hot-heads are assuming that he is referring to an anti-reverse engineering position. Re-read the actual statement. There are three interpretations that are quite possible:
It can mean that Linus condemns reverse-engineering. Unlikely. Linus isn't stupid and probably realizes (daily) how important reversing is.
It can mean that he can't argue with the fact that they can define their own license to contain whatever they want. This is perfectly sensible.
It can mean that he can't argue with the fact that the terms of the license are being broken. As long as there is a reasonable arguement that this is happening, and there does seem to be one whether you agree with it or not, then this also seems to be sensible.
In short, Bitkeeper's acting within it's rights. Linus' statement is likely being misread. Tridge did something that's ok, but set off a shit-storm. Get over it.
Indeed? Seriously timothy, shame on you. Science is important as a basic part of our culture. Not for us to accomplish goals, but to make a life with rigorous and joyous curiosity more worth living. Steps like this simply devalue our culture and quality of life. Whether this event is cause or effect in the devaluation doesn't really matter, it's part of a cycle that bodes poorly for all of us.
Yup, they're mock-ups and not very good ones at that. Since they're being touted as screenshots, it brings into question the validity of anything else in the article.
When I was growing up I made a 17" Dobsonian telescope. At the time it was considered quite the light bucket. We would take it out just before dusk so that it would cool down properly for a midnight viewing. One of my buddies did the classic, "Oh let's point it at the moon," thing thinking that because it was still light out, it would be safe to look at without stopping down the aperture. Notta good idea: a few feet away his *hand* lit up like a halogen bulb and that was the end of that "bright" idea. Lucky it was only his hand.
But this makes me wonder, the brightness of the light at the focal point would be: L[f] = L[a]*r*A[a]/A[f]
where A[a] is the area of the aperture, A[f] is the area of the focal point, and L[a] is the brightness at the aperature, and r is the percentage of light that gets reflected.
Now, in the article he says that the solar death ray uses 112 normal mirrors, and they're all flat, so r*A[a]/A[f] is likely to be.85*112 ~= 95, which gets him a temperature of 500 degrees C. Now, my telescope can bring the light cone down to an area of, say 1/4" diameter, and the reflective coating I use on my mirror can get 90% transmission no problem. So, r*A[a]/A[f] for my 17 inch aperture is likely to be.90*4900 ~= 4410. Ok, the moon's average albedo (measure of reflectivity) is 0.12, and the moon and the sun have the same apparent size in the sky (ie solar eclipse is close match in size). So, does that mean I should be getting 0.12*4410/95 ~= 4.5 the light intensity from my lunar death ray as he does from his solar one?
Hey I could fry ants with the moon! Or on second thought, maybe not.
Because if it is, the implication is that you cannot run a non-GPL'ed program on the Hurd. This is the same reasoning that led Linus to put precisely this exception in the GPL that Linux uses. I would *love* the Hurd to prosper, but if the maintainers want 1) people to take software licensing seriously AND 2) actually use the Hurd, then their license must not restrict user space to GPL only programs. This is especially important since Hurd is microkernel and things like, oh, the file system and the process server sit in user space.
As things stand now, even if Hurd were magically ready to go today, I would not write software for it because I would be restricted to the GPL. I don't mind the GPL, but I do mind the restriction.
You know, perhaps spam's not the problem. Remember this is a very inventive man. If spam were the problem, he would either employ a solution or likely tackle it because it is a large hard problem.
I'm inclined to disagree with you because the point of this approach is to look at existing correct translations and learn a pattern matching off of them. So there is going to have to be some kind trade off between accuracy and generality in the patterns. And certainly, this implementation may fall flat. But the overall approach sounds good to me at first because we can have arbitrary or variable generality to pattern matches. Even better, we can have high level pattern matching determining lower level pattern matching.
For example, if there is a sentence which has a specific metaphoric meaning in one context, but has a generic literal meaning in another, presumably a high level pattern match on the context could direct a low level pattern matcher as to be very accurate or very general. Perhaps a multi-pass converging pluralog between various levels would be necessary. But could this not take care of context and nuance?
That said, I am quite willing to be persuaded that the problem really is beyond A.I. Would you care to give some kind of, in your opinion, really hard examles that might fool A.I. forever?
That can't be right? I've got 10.3.8 with the Java 1.4.2 update, and this auto-update isn't detected for me either. Strange. If you can find out, what version of Java are/were you running? I currently have:
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.4.2_05-141.3)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.4.2-38, mixed mode)
HURD is a beautiful idea. However, I think one of the major problems with it isn't even the glacial development cycle. If you read the license on Linux you will see that Linus put in the following:
NOTE! This copyright does *not* cover user programs that use kernel services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use of the kernel, and does *not* fall under the heading of "derived work". Also note that the GPL below is copyrighted by the Free Software Foundation, but the instance of code that it refers to (the Linux kernel) is copyrighted by me and others who actually wrote it.
As far as I know, the HURD license has no such preamble, which means that you cannot run any non-GPL'ed programs on HURD. None, zero, zip. Why? Because clause 2b of the GPL states:
b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.
The reason Linus put the preamble in is that this clause means that if you put two programs in memory at the same time, and they interact in any way, you have created a third derivative program. This is so that, I as an commercial software developer can't simply do some type of unothodox dynamic linking to get around the intent of the 2b. But since every user program must talk to the OS, under this interpretation, every user program must be GPL'ed. Hence Linus' preamble.
So while nobody cares today (and rightly so), somebody will make this an issue at some point, because it has already been made an issue with Linux. If/when it gets made an issue, I cannot foresee RMS putting in a preamble like Linus did.
In this case HURD will only run GPL software, and is therefore useless to general public. It even would be useless to me, and I've used *BSD and GNU/Linux since 1994.
Well, at this point, no one really knows anything except for what IBM, Apple, and Freescale have published. There are no benchmarks, reviews, etc. that I know of. So everything I've said is a guess; I meant it as such and said "supposedly outperforms". On the same note, however, you're also guessing that the new dual G4 is going to be hotter than what we've got now. Pretty easy to agree with, (and I generally do agree with you) but like me, you haven't pointed out any benchmarks, reviews, etc. Note that the dual core chip takes a little less than 15W while an iBook G4 draws about the same. So, it looks to me like the dual will probably be hotter than than the current G4s, but not nearly as hot as the G5 at 40W, or thereabout.
As far as the practicality of dual core vs. single core machines goes... Without concurrency there's no boost; with concurrency usually there is some boost and it is possible, in fact, to have a dual core system be faster than single core at twice the speed. It's not common but it all depends on what you're doing.
Yes, I already read the concurrent programming article a while back, but I'm afraid I don't share your enthusiasm for it. I think the author blurs program performance and performance programming. The first is about raw speed, the second is about making your program run X percent faster than your competitors' do. As such the "free lunch" he describes never really existed for people who actually do performance programming. Concurrency is already used whenever possible since you never know when you might be runnning on an SMP machine. Abstract machines can be massively parallel regardless of the hardware underneath. For everybody who doesn't do performance programming, the problem usually comes down to decoupling the performance bottleneck from the rest of the application, then handing it off to a performance person. (They still have to make sure their code is reasonably fast and lean, but parallelism isn't a big issue)
Anyway, I'm getting OT. I think the bottom line is that for the types of tasks I do, the performance benefit of SMP in a laptop sounds a lot better than the benefit of a G5.
Yes and no. I agree that the speed bump isn't that much. Since the dual core freescale supposedly outperforms a G5 at same clock speed, I really would have liked to see the freescale in the new specs.
<wild speculation>
However, moving to freescale poses a bit of a problem because it's 32 bit. Since eventually all their machines will be 64 bit, the problem is that when making the move to G5, Apple would need to solve both the heat problem, and provide an increase in performance at some spec upgrade. It would be much easier to just solve the heat problem while moving from a slower CPU. If this is the case, it makes sense to keep the PB line as slow as possible, while still throwing the marketing dept some performance boost to work with. Hence, upgrade early, but not by much.
</wild speculation>
Of course, the imperitive to go 64 bit on a laptop is not really there yet. I would still like to see the dual core chip in the PB.
My absolute favorite, however, is checking to see if I locked the door to my apartment. Lots of times, I'm preoccupied and in a rush when I'm leaving the apartment, and only remember to check whether I locked the door by the time I reach the bottom of the stairs. So back up I go, check the door, go back down. And what do you know? By the time I get back downstairs again, I can't remember whether I actually did the check when I was up. Argh, I might have forgotten! So back up I go again. Actually this rarely happens, but when it does, I can go for several cycles. It's maddening.
The issue is not whether the BBC article is wrapped in pop-science or not. The issue is global climate change. Historically, segments of the human population have gotten into entrapment scenarios with relative ease and horrific consequences. Some people have noticed this trend and speculated that global climate change could be a deciding factor in the biggest of these scenarios ever.
The parent's claim that the "pop-scientist" just jumped to a conclusion does absolutely nothing to refute said conclusion. Yes, the idea that the two effects cancel each other out is overly simplistic, but until I see some kind of refutation, the theory seems plausible. Why should it not be plausible?
The comment that the BBC is being irresponsible is inflamatory. How is the idea no-change being caused by man any different than the idea of change being caused? The claim is: to want something to "back it up" (the theory), but if you read the article, they do make an attempt. Why isn't this attempt sufficient for a BBC article, and if it isn't, what higher standard for evidence is?
Overall, the BBC article does predict dire consequences with little solid evidence. However, we have the same issue at stake with the World Health Organization trying to make predictions for epidemics. But, I live in what was one of the SARS hot-spots, and even if they don't have strong evidence, I don't mind WHO predictions being used to guide public health policy.
I don't see this BBC article as any different, other than by the fact that it wasn't issued as a statement of an official body, so it won't be used in public policy. However, it doesn't mean that one might as well bang your head against a wall, instead of considering that the current lack of global climate change may be itself a serious problem.
It's nice that IBM is doing this, but have you looked at the list of patent titles? I admit I only took a quick look but to me the list looks... old and rather bound to IBM products. I'm guessing that IBM has found that, historically, some patents don't make them much money (maybe because nobody does same thing), so to squeeze value from them (in this case, good will) they are giving royalty free licenses to OSS. In that case, they are generating tremendous good will and giving away little or nothing to non-competitors. I hope I'm wrong, but I can't see why new and/or widely useful patents would be given away. This list doesn't reassure me, and I will wait and see the usefulness of these patents before singing the praises of IBM.
Your comment about being "initiated" into the religion of the job market is interesting. I am currently doing a job search, have a masters in CS and have worked for a while as a compiler designer at a big name technical company. But...
But honestly, because I don't stretch the truth on my resume and then cram for interviews, I don't seem to come off as very competitive. My greatest strengths are that I am a fast learner and am very creative. Ah, but everyone says this in their cover letter, so when you actually are, it's doesn't help much to put it down or list funky ideas. Sure, my GPA was 3.8, my thesis is some of the most advanced work in its area, I minored philosphy, enjoyed economics and archaeology, I've been an amateur astronomer, musician, and have run a semi-successful two man consulting company. Think recruiters and hiring managers want to talk to me? Hah, not on your life! I just don't have shopping list of experience with the exact tools that they've asked for. Well, I don't.
So why don't I stretch the truth? I have several acquaintences who do and when they get an interview they just cram like hell. Of course they don't really learn anything, they only get enough to fool the interviewers who don't know what they are talking about. Consequently, they end up in jobs surrounded by people who pretty much weaselled their way in, in the same manner. And I do not want to be with people like that because these people will drive you insane with their incompetence and need for support. This is no joke.
What about the folks I know who are good? Well, most of them have either burned out or stayed in academia. Thinking back, the places they went to work at were usually closely tied to their universities. However, those were the glory days and all those companies have pretty much been bought out and "transformed". (hence the burn outs)
The only thing I can think of is to stay honest, and hope I'll find some employer who is not in the religion of the job market. Is there a hope? I like to think so.
No. Although I currently use a no-feature cellphone, and am not interested in a camera-java-game phone, I still strongly disagree with you. Just because a current set of add-ons to the basic cell phone are stupid doesn't mean some add-ons wouldn't be useful.
For example, I could see real use for things like PIM functionality backed by a remote server (PIM functionality alone is bad if the phone can die/break/be misplaced/stolen etc.), a couple gig of onboard flash data storage, speech to text to speech processing, good 1 or 2 button emergency calling with automatic location, and so on. It's actually not too hard to blue-sky dream up things that you might really want in a portable computing device, besides being able to phone people on it.
I think that cell phone manufacturers have had a real lack of vision as to what they could build so far. Forget the whole remote services area, which for some bizarre reason just hasn't gone anywhere, cell phones could be a great starting point for the next generation computing device. If I could have a portable cell phone/computer that I could plug into a terminal and have it co-operate with servers on the net, you bet I would buy it in a heartbeat. Yes, security would be a major issue, but that is a design/implementation problem, not an issue of vision.
The fact that this article is serious and not a piece of fiction indicates that we as a society believe our stories a little too easily. Perhaps it is not so very different from fundamentalists; religous, economic, technophobic (I think this is an article of technophobia, btw), political, patriotic or otherwise.
One might respond to this article by talking about real A.I. research, not some potential of "strong" A.I. We could talk about what the real problems are, the goals, what kind of progress we're making, what to expect and so forth. A.I. is really a wonderful field and I am all for discussing it. One could try to get a semi-serious technical discussion going, rather than fastastic one.
Or we could go down the philosophic route, and address the issue of personal identity directly. "Who are we, what are we?" type questions have been around forever. Applying the issue to an automoton adds little or nothing over Aristotle's discussions of virtue and archetypes, it just dresses things up differently. Or pick your favorite period in western history's philosophy and you'll unearth these questions pretty quickly.
But I am pessimistic that the author of this article would be much interested. Although he makes allusions to them, he never really discusses the foundations of A.I. or philosphy to pin his arguments on. All he says at the end is that maybe we can learn something about humanity from thinking about this hypothetical trial as a mental exercise.
In an intellectually impovrished world, sure. But this guy references Kant and Jefferson, so presumably this is not an intellectually impovrished world. In which case, picking "strong" A.I. means that he thinks it's a good vehicle for whatever issue he really is talking about (and I have no way of guessing what that is). Not that he thinks that "strong" A.I. is around the corner, but that he thinks that it will capture people's imaginations. Or it captures his imagination.
Ok, problem: while us geeks can talk you blue about morality in ST:TNG because it's fun for us, the normal and legal worlds do not. It's fine if there's a geek law student out there who writes this kind of paper for geekery, but this a *law* magazine for general readership.
The fact that this article gets published shows that there is a general feeling that the strong A.I. story is provocative. But it's only more provocative than other fictions if this particular story could actually be true. Yes, and a great many very dangerous ideas could be true too. Are we swallowing this one, and what else can we believe?
Has anyone else noticed a colour shift after an awake from screensaver? I'm finding that sometimes there's a shift to a bluer hue. Turning the screensaver on and off sometimes resets it back to the normal colour balance. If this were on a CRT I would say that there's something wrong with the blue gun, but this is on the LCD of an iBook G4.
Strange. Could it be something with the video drivers?
It seems everyone misses this because the 3D world is the familiar and they feel that 3D GUIs should somehow be easy to use because of that familiarity. It's a mistake. The 2D GUI sits in 3D (real) space and the brain understands this easily. But if you have a 3D GUI sitting in 3D space, now you have two 3D spaces and this is hard for the brain to work with.
Now this isn't a new problem, painters right back to the renaissance have dealt with this (although lots of wannbes these days haven't a clue about it), and they developed a whole host of techniques about when to use perspective and, just as importantly, when not to use perspective and to use foreshortening instead. Plus they always draw attention to the picture plane, the "invisible" surface of the canvas, in some compositional way to allow the viewer to visually reconcile the fact that they can see at least two 3D spaces when viewing the painting.
The combination of primarily these and other techniques allowed them to create 3D representations that actually are simple to see, and therefore extremely convincing. But they are *not* pure 3D.
As far as the immersive GUIs go, the problem is that each of us views the 3D world from our unique points of view. Unless you have out-of-body experiences, the 3D space you see includes some cue of yourself *in that space*. Playing a FPS doesn't really put you in a space, so much as gives you a 3D space you can get accustomed to navigating through. Try as you might, turn the lights off, get head-mounted monitors, use huge wall projectors, you're still stuck in a place where one's personal space just doesn't match the visual space and the brain goes into overdrive to figure out what's going on. You have to adapt to it.
Perhaps someday, it might be possible to formalize the old master's handling of 3D representation to a sufficient degree to apply it to GUI development, but I'm doubtful. The best bet for 3D GUIs, I think, is with the Princess Leia/R2D2 type display. All else is just clutter.
Oh please, you don't need to falsify data. There's two other much easier ways to get good looking results.
1) Do an incomplete job. Research reviewers rarely have the time for a real analysis of what you've done. Present a theory that's easily plausible and ignore what you don't like. Answer the standard types of objections, which if you're half-way competent, are dead simple to anticipate. Acknowledge that there are future directions for research in those areas and walk away. It happens all the time, and my experience has been that it's the folks with the highest reputations who do this the best. It's a social art form.
2) Optimize around a single case, and build interest in that case beyond what has done before. Reviewers will reserve judgement about what is important and what is not, but if you make enough noise, they generally get sucked in. State clearly that your optimization does not generalize, but give some nice graphs of empirical results. This is actually less of a social art form than (1) but is a lot easier.
So I would agree that most scientists are reputable. After all, their success depends on their reputation, and without success it's impossible to make a life as a scientist. That doesn't mean that they are necessarily honorable, moral, interested in truth, or in the least concerned with advancing their fields rather than their careers. Some are, but many have good reputations that let them churn out mediocre papers for ever and a day.
Wow. This is a quite a piece of flamebait for the/. crowd:-) Recognizing this, I'ld like to make a claim against computers use with kids. Well, let's say kids under the age of 15, as example.
The wealth of knowledge accessible through computers won't make children have better grades. For example, they can't write better papers, or make nicer projects today than they could back in the 1960's. You think they can? How many papers of students from the 1960's have you read? You might be surprised at the quality! Sure, today's kids can include more facts and they can copy and cheat a whole lot easier. But that doesn't mean they put those facts together in any meaningful way. Actually, they might do so in less meaningful ways simply because there is too much to put together.
Now what computers *can* do is mesmorize a kid the same way the TV does. And thinking that kids left with a computer without games, IM, or the ability to surf, will try to figure out how the thing works is just plain naive. Yes some kids will, and I'm sure most/.ers were that type of kid, but the vast majority will be just be bored. Kids are usually not rational. They don't look at something and say, "Hm, lets see if we can figure this out." They react, and they crave things to react to.
The problem with computers is that it is too easy, as it is with TV, to deliver experiences that really just engage reaction with thought. Forget games, just look at all they eye candy in modern GUIs. We react to it, and that's OK, but it is also contrary to the purpose of education. Education is about thinking, not reacting. Educational software is at best a noble effort, but if it is to compete with the other experiences that kids have with computers, it must always compete on a reactive level, and therefore its effect is highly limited.
But what about play? Well, in normal play, kids do make-believe all the time. But a key difference between this and the computer environment is that they control and understand their make-believe worlds to whatever extent they want. Because of that control they get to play out and understand the rest of their experiences. The computer environment just doesn't let them do that. Neither is it reality. So a young mind might not benefit from *playing* in the computer environment that much.
So if it's not for education and it's not for play, it's not surprising that there might be a correlation between their use and poorer performance at school.
Slashdot Mirror
***:~/***/$ java -version
java version "1.4.2_05"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.4.2_05-141.4)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.4.2-38, mixed mode)
There was an update to java 1.4.2 Update 2 that perhaps you missed?
Honestly, they don't have to give anything to us, and they can decide for any reason or lack of reason to stop giving us anything. Which they did. Now we can complain about it, but I don't see where they owe us a d@mned thing.
Linus. Linus says is that he can't argue "against that". Unfortunately, the "that" makes his statement ambiguous. Hot-heads are assuming that he is referring to an anti-reverse engineering position. Re-read the actual statement. There are three interpretations that are quite possible:
- It can mean that Linus condemns reverse-engineering. Unlikely. Linus isn't stupid and probably realizes (daily) how important reversing is.
- It can mean that he can't argue with the fact that they can define their own license to contain whatever they want. This is perfectly sensible.
- It can mean that he can't argue with the fact that the terms of the license are being broken. As long as there is a reasonable arguement that this is happening, and there does seem to be one whether you agree with it or not, then this also seems to be sensible.
In short, Bitkeeper's acting within it's rights. Linus' statement is likely being misread. Tridge did something that's ok, but set off a shit-storm. Get over it.<mumble> Right, it's the Pigeonhole Principle! Now we just need enough, erm, "Pigeons". See, computer science degrees are useful. </mumble>
Indeed? Seriously timothy, shame on you. Science is important as a basic part of our culture. Not for us to accomplish goals, but to make a life with rigorous and joyous curiosity more worth living. Steps like this simply devalue our culture and quality of life. Whether this event is cause or effect in the devaluation doesn't really matter, it's part of a cycle that bodes poorly for all of us.
Yup, they're mock-ups and not very good ones at that. Since they're being touted as screenshots, it brings into question the validity of anything else in the article.
When I was growing up I made a 17" Dobsonian telescope. At the time it was considered quite the light bucket. We would take it out just before dusk so that it would cool down properly for a midnight viewing. One of my buddies did the classic, "Oh let's point it at the moon," thing thinking that because it was still light out, it would be safe to look at without stopping down the aperture. Notta good idea: a few feet away his *hand* lit up like a halogen bulb and that was the end of that "bright" idea. Lucky it was only his hand.
But this makes me wonder, the brightness of the light at the focal point would be: L[f] = L[a]*r*A[a]/A[f]
where A[a] is the area of the aperture, A[f] is the area of the focal point, and L[a] is the brightness at the aperature, and r is the percentage of light that gets reflected.
Now, in the article he says that the solar death ray uses 112 normal mirrors, and they're all flat, so r*A[a]/A[f] is likely to be .85*112 ~= 95, which gets him a temperature of 500 degrees C. Now, my telescope can bring the light cone down to an area of, say 1/4" diameter, and the reflective coating I use on my mirror can get 90% transmission no problem. So, r*A[a]/A[f] for my 17 inch aperture is likely to be .90*4900 ~= 4410. Ok, the moon's average albedo (measure of reflectivity) is 0.12, and the moon and the sun have the same apparent size in the sky (ie solar eclipse is close match in size). So, does that mean I should be getting 0.12*4410/95 ~= 4.5 the light intensity from my lunar death ray as he does from his solar one?
Hey I could fry ants with the moon! Or on second thought, maybe not.
As things stand now, even if Hurd were magically ready to go today, I would not write software for it because I would be restricted to the GPL. I don't mind the GPL, but I do mind the restriction.
You know, perhaps spam's not the problem. Remember this is a very inventive man. If spam were the problem, he would either employ a solution or likely tackle it because it is a large hard problem.
For example, if there is a sentence which has a specific metaphoric meaning in one context, but has a generic literal meaning in another, presumably a high level pattern match on the context could direct a low level pattern matcher as to be very accurate or very general. Perhaps a multi-pass converging pluralog between various levels would be necessary. But could this not take care of context and nuance?
That said, I am quite willing to be persuaded that the problem really is beyond A.I. Would you care to give some kind of, in your opinion, really hard examles that might fool A.I. forever?
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.4.2_05-141.3)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.4.2-38, mixed mode)
thx
NOTE! This copyright does *not* cover user programs that use kernel services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use of the kernel, and does *not* fall under the heading of "derived work". Also note that the GPL below is copyrighted by the Free Software Foundation, but the instance of code that it refers to (the Linux kernel) is copyrighted by me and others who actually wrote it.
As far as I know, the HURD license has no such preamble, which means that you cannot run any non-GPL'ed programs on HURD. None, zero, zip. Why? Because clause 2b of the GPL states:
b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.
The reason Linus put the preamble in is that this clause means that if you put two programs in memory at the same time, and they interact in any way, you have created a third derivative program. This is so that, I as an commercial software developer can't simply do some type of unothodox dynamic linking to get around the intent of the 2b. But since every user program must talk to the OS, under this interpretation, every user program must be GPL'ed. Hence Linus' preamble.
So while nobody cares today (and rightly so), somebody will make this an issue at some point, because it has already been made an issue with Linux. If/when it gets made an issue, I cannot foresee RMS putting in a preamble like Linus did.
In this case HURD will only run GPL software, and is therefore useless to general public. It even would be useless to me, and I've used *BSD and GNU/Linux since 1994.
Huh. Interesting to reread ESR's Take My Job, Please! essay, now that he is stepping aside.
As far as the practicality of dual core vs. single core machines goes ... Without concurrency there's no boost; with concurrency usually there is some boost and it is possible, in fact, to have a dual core system be faster than single core at twice the speed. It's not common but it all depends on what you're doing.
Yes, I already read the concurrent programming article a while back, but I'm afraid I don't share your enthusiasm for it. I think the author blurs program performance and performance programming. The first is about raw speed, the second is about making your program run X percent faster than your competitors' do. As such the "free lunch" he describes never really existed for people who actually do performance programming. Concurrency is already used whenever possible since you never know when you might be runnning on an SMP machine. Abstract machines can be massively parallel regardless of the hardware underneath. For everybody who doesn't do performance programming, the problem usually comes down to decoupling the performance bottleneck from the rest of the application, then handing it off to a performance person. (They still have to make sure their code is reasonably fast and lean, but parallelism isn't a big issue)
Anyway, I'm getting OT. I think the bottom line is that for the types of tasks I do, the performance benefit of SMP in a laptop sounds a lot better than the benefit of a G5.
<wild speculation>
However, moving to freescale poses a bit of a problem because it's 32 bit. Since eventually all their machines will be 64 bit, the problem is that when making the move to G5, Apple would need to solve both the heat problem, and provide an increase in performance at some spec upgrade. It would be much easier to just solve the heat problem while moving from a slower CPU. If this is the case, it makes sense to keep the PB line as slow as possible, while still throwing the marketing dept some performance boost to work with. Hence, upgrade early, but not by much.
</wild speculation>
Of course, the imperitive to go 64 bit on a laptop is not really there yet. I would still like to see the dual core chip in the PB.
Hah! Been there, done that (more than once).
My absolute favorite, however, is checking to see if I locked the door to my apartment. Lots of times, I'm preoccupied and in a rush when I'm leaving the apartment, and only remember to check whether I locked the door by the time I reach the bottom of the stairs. So back up I go, check the door, go back down. And what do you know? By the time I get back downstairs again, I can't remember whether I actually did the check when I was up. Argh, I might have forgotten! So back up I go again. Actually this rarely happens, but when it does, I can go for several cycles. It's maddening.
... when it's simply a diatribe.
The issue is not whether the BBC article is wrapped in pop-science or not. The issue is global climate change. Historically, segments of the human population have gotten into entrapment scenarios with relative ease and horrific consequences. Some people have noticed this trend and speculated that global climate change could be a deciding factor in the biggest of these scenarios ever.
The parent's claim that the "pop-scientist" just jumped to a conclusion does absolutely nothing to refute said conclusion. Yes, the idea that the two effects cancel each other out is overly simplistic, but until I see some kind of refutation, the theory seems plausible. Why should it not be plausible?
The comment that the BBC is being irresponsible is inflamatory. How is the idea no-change being caused by man any different than the idea of change being caused? The claim is: to want something to "back it up" (the theory), but if you read the article, they do make an attempt. Why isn't this attempt sufficient for a BBC article, and if it isn't, what higher standard for evidence is?
Overall, the BBC article does predict dire consequences with little solid evidence. However, we have the same issue at stake with the World Health Organization trying to make predictions for epidemics. But, I live in what was one of the SARS hot-spots, and even if they don't have strong evidence, I don't mind WHO predictions being used to guide public health policy.
I don't see this BBC article as any different, other than by the fact that it wasn't issued as a statement of an official body, so it won't be used in public policy. However, it doesn't mean that one might as well bang your head against a wall, instead of considering that the current lack of global climate change may be itself a serious problem.
It's nice that IBM is doing this, but have you looked at the list of patent titles? I admit I only took a quick look but to me the list looks ... old and rather bound to IBM products. I'm guessing that IBM has found that, historically, some patents don't make them much money (maybe because nobody does same thing), so to squeeze value from them (in this case, good will) they are giving royalty free licenses to OSS. In that case, they are generating tremendous good will and giving away little or nothing to non-competitors. I hope I'm wrong, but I can't see why new and/or widely useful patents would be given away. This list doesn't reassure me, and I will wait and see the usefulness of these patents before singing the praises of IBM.
Your comment about being "initiated" into the religion of the job market is interesting. I am currently doing a job search, have a masters in CS and have worked for a while as a compiler designer at a big name technical company. But ...
But honestly, because I don't stretch the truth on my resume and then cram for interviews, I don't seem to come off as very competitive. My greatest strengths are that I am a fast learner and am very creative. Ah, but everyone says this in their cover letter, so when you actually are, it's doesn't help much to put it down or list funky ideas. Sure, my GPA was 3.8, my thesis is some of the most advanced work in its area, I minored philosphy, enjoyed economics and archaeology, I've been an amateur astronomer, musician, and have run a semi-successful two man consulting company. Think recruiters and hiring managers want to talk to me? Hah, not on your life! I just don't have shopping list of experience with the exact tools that they've asked for. Well, I don't.
So why don't I stretch the truth? I have several acquaintences who do and when they get an interview they just cram like hell. Of course they don't really learn anything, they only get enough to fool the interviewers who don't know what they are talking about. Consequently, they end up in jobs surrounded by people who pretty much weaselled their way in, in the same manner. And I do not want to be with people like that because these people will drive you insane with their incompetence and need for support. This is no joke.
What about the folks I know who are good? Well, most of them have either burned out or stayed in academia. Thinking back, the places they went to work at were usually closely tied to their universities. However, those were the glory days and all those companies have pretty much been bought out and "transformed". (hence the burn outs)
The only thing I can think of is to stay honest, and hope I'll find some employer who is not in the religion of the job market. Is there a hope? I like to think so.
No. Although I currently use a no-feature cellphone, and am not interested in a camera-java-game phone, I still strongly disagree with you. Just because a current set of add-ons to the basic cell phone are stupid doesn't mean some add-ons wouldn't be useful.
For example, I could see real use for things like PIM functionality backed by a remote server (PIM functionality alone is bad if the phone can die/break/be misplaced/stolen etc.), a couple gig of onboard flash data storage, speech to text to speech processing, good 1 or 2 button emergency calling with automatic location, and so on. It's actually not too hard to blue-sky dream up things that you might really want in a portable computing device, besides being able to phone people on it.
I think that cell phone manufacturers have had a real lack of vision as to what they could build so far. Forget the whole remote services area, which for some bizarre reason just hasn't gone anywhere, cell phones could be a great starting point for the next generation computing device. If I could have a portable cell phone/computer that I could plug into a terminal and have it co-operate with servers on the net, you bet I would buy it in a heartbeat. Yes, security would be a major issue, but that is a design/implementation problem, not an issue of vision.
The fact that this article is serious and not a piece of fiction indicates that we as a society believe our stories a little too easily. Perhaps it is not so very different from fundamentalists; religous, economic, technophobic (I think this is an article of technophobia, btw), political, patriotic or otherwise.
One might respond to this article by talking about real A.I. research, not some potential of "strong" A.I. We could talk about what the real problems are, the goals, what kind of progress we're making, what to expect and so forth. A.I. is really a wonderful field and I am all for discussing it. One could try to get a semi-serious technical discussion going, rather than fastastic one.
Or we could go down the philosophic route, and address the issue of personal identity directly. "Who are we, what are we?" type questions have been around forever. Applying the issue to an automoton adds little or nothing over Aristotle's discussions of virtue and archetypes, it just dresses things up differently. Or pick your favorite period in western history's philosophy and you'll unearth these questions pretty quickly.
But I am pessimistic that the author of this article would be much interested. Although he makes allusions to them, he never really discusses the foundations of A.I. or philosphy to pin his arguments on. All he says at the end is that maybe we can learn something about humanity from thinking about this hypothetical trial as a mental exercise.
In an intellectually impovrished world, sure. But this guy references Kant and Jefferson, so presumably this is not an intellectually impovrished world. In which case, picking "strong" A.I. means that he thinks it's a good vehicle for whatever issue he really is talking about (and I have no way of guessing what that is). Not that he thinks that "strong" A.I. is around the corner, but that he thinks that it will capture people's imaginations. Or it captures his imagination.
Ok, problem: while us geeks can talk you blue about morality in ST:TNG because it's fun for us, the normal and legal worlds do not. It's fine if there's a geek law student out there who writes this kind of paper for geekery, but this a *law* magazine for general readership.
The fact that this article gets published shows that there is a general feeling that the strong A.I. story is provocative. But it's only more provocative than other fictions if this particular story could actually be true. Yes, and a great many very dangerous ideas could be true too. Are we swallowing this one, and what else can we believe?
Right, got it. Thanks!
Has anyone else noticed a colour shift after an awake from screensaver? I'm finding that sometimes there's a shift to a bluer hue. Turning the screensaver on and off sometimes resets it back to the normal colour balance. If this were on a CRT I would say that there's something wrong with the blue gun, but this is on the LCD of an iBook G4.
Strange. Could it be something with the video drivers?
Absolutely right.
It seems everyone misses this because the 3D world is the familiar and they feel that 3D GUIs should somehow be easy to use because of that familiarity. It's a mistake. The 2D GUI sits in 3D (real) space and the brain understands this easily. But if you have a 3D GUI sitting in 3D space, now you have two 3D spaces and this is hard for the brain to work with.
Now this isn't a new problem, painters right back to the renaissance have dealt with this (although lots of wannbes these days haven't a clue about it), and they developed a whole host of techniques about when to use perspective and, just as importantly, when not to use perspective and to use foreshortening instead. Plus they always draw attention to the picture plane, the "invisible" surface of the canvas, in some compositional way to allow the viewer to visually reconcile the fact that they can see at least two 3D spaces when viewing the painting.
The combination of primarily these and other techniques allowed them to create 3D representations that actually are simple to see, and therefore extremely convincing. But they are *not* pure 3D.
As far as the immersive GUIs go, the problem is that each of us views the 3D world from our unique points of view. Unless you have out-of-body experiences, the 3D space you see includes some cue of yourself *in that space*. Playing a FPS doesn't really put you in a space, so much as gives you a 3D space you can get accustomed to navigating through. Try as you might, turn the lights off, get head-mounted monitors, use huge wall projectors, you're still stuck in a place where one's personal space just doesn't match the visual space and the brain goes into overdrive to figure out what's going on. You have to adapt to it.
Perhaps someday, it might be possible to formalize the old master's handling of 3D representation to a sufficient degree to apply it to GUI development, but I'm doubtful. The best bet for 3D GUIs, I think, is with the Princess Leia/R2D2 type display. All else is just clutter.
Oh please, you don't need to falsify data. There's two other much easier ways to get good looking results.
1) Do an incomplete job. Research reviewers rarely have the time for a real analysis of what you've done. Present a theory that's easily plausible and ignore what you don't like. Answer the standard types of objections, which if you're half-way competent, are dead simple to anticipate. Acknowledge that there are future directions for research in those areas and walk away. It happens all the time, and my experience has been that it's the folks with the highest reputations who do this the best. It's a social art form.
2) Optimize around a single case, and build interest in that case beyond what has done before. Reviewers will reserve judgement about what is important and what is not, but if you make enough noise, they generally get sucked in. State clearly that your optimization does not generalize, but give some nice graphs of empirical results. This is actually less of a social art form than (1) but is a lot easier.
So I would agree that most scientists are reputable. After all, their success depends on their reputation, and without success it's impossible to make a life as a scientist. That doesn't mean that they are necessarily honorable, moral, interested in truth, or in the least concerned with advancing their fields rather than their careers. Some are, but many have good reputations that let them churn out mediocre papers for ever and a day.
Wow. This is a quite a piece of flamebait for the /. crowd :-) Recognizing this, I'ld like to make a claim against computers use with kids. Well, let's say kids under the age of 15, as example.
/.ers were that type of kid, but the vast majority will be just be bored. Kids are usually not rational. They don't look at something and say, "Hm, lets see if we can figure this out." They react, and they crave things to react to.
The wealth of knowledge accessible through computers won't make children have better grades. For example, they can't write better papers, or make nicer projects today than they could back in the 1960's. You think they can? How many papers of students from the 1960's have you read? You might be surprised at the quality! Sure, today's kids can include more facts and they can copy and cheat a whole lot easier. But that doesn't mean they put those facts together in any meaningful way. Actually, they might do so in less meaningful ways simply because there is too much to put together.
Now what computers *can* do is mesmorize a kid the same way the TV does. And thinking that kids left with a computer without games, IM, or the ability to surf, will try to figure out how the thing works is just plain naive. Yes some kids will, and I'm sure most
The problem with computers is that it is too easy, as it is with TV, to deliver experiences that really just engage reaction with thought. Forget games, just look at all they eye candy in modern GUIs. We react to it, and that's OK, but it is also contrary to the purpose of education. Education is about thinking, not reacting. Educational software is at best a noble effort, but if it is to compete with the other experiences that kids have with computers, it must always compete on a reactive level, and therefore its effect is highly limited.
But what about play? Well, in normal play, kids do make-believe all the time. But a key difference between this and the computer environment is that they control and understand their make-believe worlds to whatever extent they want. Because of that control they get to play out and understand the rest of their experiences. The computer environment just doesn't let them do that. Neither is it reality. So a young mind might not benefit from *playing* in the computer environment that much.
So if it's not for education and it's not for play, it's not surprising that there might be a correlation between their use and poorer performance at school.