The French government is there to serve the Republic. The Republic in France is almost like a Church amongst their politicians.
When you are a foreigner (and you happen to live under a monarchy), you feel like the Republic is the people for most French politicians. Sometimes it looks like they can't even understand that the interest of the state (la republique) isn't always the interest of the people.
This is quite surprising. French people usually claim to be very rationnal, but their politicians are mostly "ideologue" rather than being pragmatic.
Generally French have difficulties with foreign languages just like Brits or Americans.
What you take as arrogance is usually a difficulty to answer you in English or in your native tongue IMHO.
Most don't know foreign languages. They have difficulties to handle their ignorance (they are proud people usually) and thus they look arrogant.
Their answer is short (they use the only few words they know like yes,no,this way or whatever)and they look annoyed (they are in fact embarassed).
Try to speak French/German in the middle of Great Britain or the USA and you will soon find yourself in a similar position.
I'm not French, I'm Belgian and my native tongue is French. French people are usually polite and well educated... But in French.
When you use English as a lingua franca in Europe, it is usually better to know "Excuse me" in the local language at least, smile, and ask this question to a young fellow (more chances that he/she knows English).
Not really...The issue here is whether or not the EU as an administration should order products/licenses from Microsoft.
The issue isn't whether or not Microsoft can do business in the EU.
The European union bureaucracy is huge, but not that huge.
As an European and an user of open source products I don't support this proposition.
Microsoft has been punished already. Time to move on. Microsoft is already facing serious competitions and its dominant position looks less invicible than it used to be. Technically/Financially Open Source is the way forward for public services. But if Microsoft can prove that their products are objectively better for an administration, then I see no reason why it shouldn't be used.
Leftists such as this green party are taking it as an easy ideological shot against big companies (they hate them). I don't support that.
Reducing your workforce when your problems are based on Sales and Technical issues is a stupid move. Because those are some of the major areas which need people to get the product back on par.
Let's play the CEO...A post somewhere below mentionned that they are building new fabs in India.Their jobs cut will probably happen in the USA and Europe.
It looks to me that AMD lost its technology advantage over Intel, they have to compete on the low end until new products arrive from the R&D department. Low end means that you have to cut cost everywhere and most certainly in your production.
So basically they are probably moving a part of their industry to India (or China or whatever) to drastically reduce workforce cost.
Low end means also that you compete on price only. Your marketing needs are far less important. So they reduce the marketing department budget and payrolls.
I don't think their move is as stupid as you claim. There are certainly better options (as always...The problem is to find them) but it looks like logical steps to me.
What would be stupid IMHO...Is to bet that soon the killer CPU will come out of the R&D. You take a big debt to finance structural costs until it arrives on the market. If it doesn't work then you are in big trouble. Because your production costs are always high, your new product doesn't sell well and your low end existing products are overpriced and thus don't sell well too. Basically You sell nothing, you cannot take another debt, you have no revenues and even slashing 50% of your employees won't help.
Because as a business owner, you recognize that Google is investing in your business by seeding your startup costs?
I'm a business owner and a wel developer
I watched the whole presentation. I failed to notice where they would help me to reduce any costs. I can already have (for free) everything I saw in this presentation (hosting excluded...And I don't pay this part...My clients do). It looks like a well balanced API, I won't certainly bash the work of those developers but there are already dozens of comparable solutions.
The same feeling I've got each time I see a new CMS...Ok great...Well done...Just like the one I'm currently using. So tell me if it is the same...What should I change?
I would have been far more interested by something similar to Flex. I don't know something truly new.
The risk here is that the EU is going to look at this from a protectionist point of view. They have an opportunity to establish some non-tarrif trade barriers here and there is little opportunity for the US to complain.
European anti-competitive laws are mainly aimed at European countries/companies.
There are still strong protectionnist tendencies amongst european countries against each other.
For example, last week, the Italian state can't refund the nearly bankrupted Air Italia because of these laws. They are almost "forced" to sell it to Air France/KLM (privately held)
Anti-trust laws are also mainly aimed at European companies.
So basically the European union is the only body in Europe promoting/reinforcing free/fair trades. Its main mission is to guarantee fair play amongst its members. American companies having European acitivites experience it from time to time. Here on slashdot microsoft makes headlines.
I noticed few months ago that Novell (I think, anyway It was an American company with open source based services) won a mid sized European Commission contract against european companies.
Adobe is well established in the European commissions and it is making a lot (really a lot) of money.
If you play fair, you are welcome. If you don't you get fines.That's quite simple really.
How much do you want to bet that the Olympic village and international hotels will have open unrestricted access for all visitors
That's already the case IMHO...At least the last time I was in Shanghai (2005) I don't remember having anykind of problem to surf on my favorite web sites (news.bbc.co.uk, nytimes.com, slashdot.org, lemonde.fr, lefigaro.fr to name a few). I heard (two days ago: I watched a very nice interview on BBC World of a leading chinese diplomat) that they've got two policies, one for the private/local connection and another one for places where foreign people can be (like my hotel). Too bad that I didn't try http://www.tibet.com/ (the official web site of the Tibetan government in exile).
You are right. Official web site. They state that salasaga is a "Integrated Development Environment for producing eLearning". SWF is just an output media.
For those interested in Open source Flash tool. I'm currently testing FlashDevelop (IDE for Actionscript). Looks quite nice and useful the web site (well an "official forum") (Windows compatible only AFAIK) More info on here
Maybe we should just call them "The Internet SS". Short, to the point, and descriptive of what they do (spy for the government).
If they can tracked down those responsible for the last wave of paedophilia spams I received the last week (I did my part of the job and I send an email to the appropriate web hosting company), I won't consider them as SS. There are a lot of crimes florishing because of the current state of international laws . It all depends of the mission they will receive from their respective governments. If they fight against filesharers only...What a waste of time and energy...If they track the monsters described above, they are more than welcome.
"Back then your teacher was often a maths teacher who didn't really understand the computers so they did all they could"
How true...I still remember that I lost points because i used something similar to (translate it into ZX spectrum basic): Boolean test=false; . . . if(test) { } else { }
instead of:
if(test) { } if(!test) { }
I still remember that my way was totally fine. The math teacher knew nothing about computer. I was 12 years or something, The first time that I had any interest for a class.
I agree...If you consider a human body as a "tool" rather than a romantic figure. 1. The human body is totally inadapted to space (it needs constant temperature, athmosphere, water, food, etc.). 2. The human body is extremely fragile (radiation in space). It requires additionnal security measures and protections. 3. Most of the current scientifics space researches can be monitored remotely. 4. It costs less to send a bunch of robots than a human being for the same result.
The british position makes sense. Personnally I always thought that space exploration will require a dedicated "body" whatever it means. Sooner or later we will be able to send "intelligent" being to space and it won't be in an organic body.
I agree. I use Firefox 2 on both windows vista and Linux (OpenSuse KDE). The memory issue isn't on windows as far I can see. The real issue is Firefox on Linux.
It looks like they bash it because it is a threat to their current state of knowledge, IMHO. When things become too simple, you loose your "guru" status. I've experienced that (at another level) when WYSIWYG web editors such as dreamweave allowed non-technical guy to code a "relatively" clean code . Suddently those folks (i was part of them) lost their HTML king status and they were forced to migrate to a higher level (perl and then java/c# web developer in my case). Sure things are still better when you code by hand...But if a guy can make a layout in one hour and you still need two hours to carefully adjust your code and they both pass the Internet Explorer and Firefox (netscape in those days) tests...And if you still ask higher fees: you are screwed.
RoR not as fast as (whatever)? Who cares, I've got plenty of web services with less than 100 visitors per day.
I've played with ruby in my spare-time. Technically it looks clean, well balanced and easy to maintain. Pragmatically there are plenty of "new" languages (Python and others) with good potential. Financially I will consider it as an opportunity once I will see my competitors using it or it will be part of a project's requirements. I don't see Ruby becoming really mainstream (like PHP) in the following years.
Precisly...For example US mortgages debt. I guess the "real" businesses behind could be easily tracked but US police officers. All you have to do is respond to the SPAM and wait until you get a phone number, a bank account or whatever. Or those VIAGRA pills...If they are "officals", then you can track their production numbers to the last "official" resellers.
There are plenty of spams requiring real businesses behind. Most of these businesses are located in western countries. Why can't they track them?
I have played and even worked with a previous winner of the Loebner price: Alice http://www.alicebot.org/
This isn't an Artificial intelligence (at least in my definition). This is a chatterbot. It is purely based on pattern-matching mechanism. It doesn't "learn" by itself. Most of the time the chatterbot owner dig into the log files, track the illogical chatterbot answers and change them in its database. Basically chatterbot have no "real" memory. They can't associate ideas to make their own. Don't get me wrong, this is really a nice concept...It may even work on a very limited subject but that's all.
Something else...The thing about the baby: A baby has instincts. He/she cries to get attention. He/she has various instinctive behaviors. Mothers and fathers are also extremely receptive to those signals (Seeing a baby in danger is unbearable for most people).
There are also gestures that are totally instinctive, like smiling, etc so even if the baby is just few months old, he/she can already have a basic communication with his/her social peers.
The real issue is that we are social sexual being. We are "all" programmed in some way to procreate. You try to get the best position in the society in order to reassure/seduce potential partner (That's a caricature...But well), you take care of your body to look healthy (thus reliable).
So you can say that we have a purpose. Our intelligence is developped around that purpose: We first have to survive and then we have to procreate. The real intelligence is all the complexity we have built around it.
Now...What should be the purpose of an artificial intelligence? What should it accomplish in its lifetime? Why should it be curious? What are the fundamental set of communication tools it needs at the beginning. How could it learn things in order to accomplish its destiny? That's the real problem IMHO. If something has no purpose you can't make it intelligent...There is nothing to do.
Also if they were able to receive funding, say from the/a government then there could be a lot of speculation again about impartiality (is that even a word) and a whole different set of issues. I would like to see them reach the status though where they *could* receive funding as a library though...
Well Wikipedia is quite international these days...You've got the French version, the English version, the German version and so on. I'm not a US taxpayer, but I wouldn't appreciate to see my hard earned money spent on services for foreigners. (but as European you are more than welcome:-) )
Expecting several nations to join the club and pay their share (like Canada paying its share for French and English, Switzerland for Italian/German/French and so on) is a bit difficult to imagine.
If you can pay all these services without any taxpayer money...Why not?
I'm no sysadmin, I'm a programmer. I hate configuring things:-).
I was truly surprised how easy it was to set up a samba server for the OpenSuse desktops...The only thing I had to do manually was the password file (if I remember well). I'm not expert in LAN technologies but I didn't find it more difficult than the Microsoft server I had to configure years ago for the same task.
My company is quite small but we've got 4 desktop pc running OpenSuse (development mainly. Build by a local shop and one dual boot to try our web based application on windows XP and to support Flash development), a network laser B/W printer (brother) and a low end server (tyan with RAID + a remote backup solution). It works fine.
I don't think Linux is ready yet for very small companies with no technical backgrounds (because...in the end I still had to configure something in a "config" file and I had to find the information over the web) and you still have to choose your hardware carefully (like SATA issues).
I won't use Linux on my laptop (it works fine and I don't want to spend hours/days/weeks to configure/debug my WIFI card, debugging the unsupported cheap video card inside, how to sync my smartphone, etc...Why should I waste so many hours, exactly?)
But in the end, it is quite close IMHO, I have seen a significant evolution at my little level anyway. You can run a company almost exclusively on Linux.
Financially this is really interesting. I have saved at least $1000 in license costs in this operation only. I don't include Open Office we were already using nor all these countless "free" tools like monodevelop, eclipse, apache, project manager and all...Or things that I shouldn't buy like an anti-virus. You could say that I save at least $12.000 per year...$12.000 per year that's already half of the salary of a junior that I just hired two months ago.
I'm not a Microsoft basher. For example we use c#.net (on linux) and I truly like it. I've got Vista on my laptop and I like it too (no kidding). There are a lot things they did well. I don't care about the politic vision of RMS. I run a company and so I cut cost, period. If somebody claims to have a better solution than Linux, I will study it. But the last time I have studies their "TCO" hwatever it means, the extra hours I had to spend were really worth the effort.
That article sure uses a a lot of words to say 'the web should be communist'.
Any system where a small group of people get to make the decisions will skew towards making the world more to the liking of those people. Further, new additions to this ruling class will be those deemed acceptable by the current encumbants. This is a bad thing.
What you describe is an autocratic government because there is a self appointed "ruling class". There is no ruling class (theorically)in a communist society. A communist society is a "dictature of the mass": your rights as an individual, especially private property are non-existant.
That's why for example an old school communist like Trotsky was able to critize harshly the Stallinist way of governing...And why he has been assassinated in Mexico.
Most communism we know are degenerated forms of communism. Marx wrote that only a world revolution could establish communism (like a critical mass). So practically speaking it means that communism is impossible to apply. Sooner or later a nation (like Poland did while blocking the early communist invasion led by Trostky), or individuals (the heroes) will stand up to protect their own rights and properties.
Leave communist where it belongs: the XIX-XXth dark history.
I'm involved in e-marketing campaigns and public web sites and rarely for intranet project.
first: I'm not a mac fanboy nevertheless I can't see myself selling a web site totally incompatible with Mac....What can justify that you may lose +/- 5% of your audience (and potential sells) because of this technical choice? On the marketing/communication side there is no justification.
Another example: I work for communication agencies as a technical subcontractor...They almost all have Macs instead of windows. So practically...If I send them a link to check the web site under construction....How could they approve it?
If Microsoft shows support for the mono port...And If downloading silverlight is as simple as flash (on Mac and why not on Linux); if the support looks like a long term strategy: Then silverlight looks quite promising (technically speaking) in two years or so. If they don't, I won't "learn/sell" it. It will be useless for my job.
I also think that a succesful silverlight may help Adobe/Macromedia to get more decent prices for their products (some prices are simply insane), I'm more than open to help a true free market.
Personnally because I'm so used to brackets. I mean all languages I know (c++,java,c#,perl,php and even Javascript) use them. I did try to experiment python but this feature was a no-go for me. Okay that's silly I know:-), but that's true.
Weeks ago, I was searching the web for (very) rough estimations over a trip to Mars. No landing, just a journey around mars and back to earth. Just one astronaut. As you guess it was for the fun, nothing serious.
This station is already a proven design, You can say everything you want about Russians, but they have build really reliable space stuffs so far and they have quite competitive prices these days.
The only real work would be its propulsion and protection against radiation outside the earth magnetic field as far as I understand. And of course food, oxygen, water...But you don't need to get everything in your spaceship, you can send a modified soyuz to Mars before your journey. On your way back home you can also arrange a rendez-vous with a modifed soyuz. I really don't know anyway.
Now...How to finance it? I don't have $5bn (or a lot more) anytime soon... Well i suspect that you can finance a large parts through private funding. Imagine...A 2 or 3 years event. A thing probably as popular as an olympic game and more than all reality-show combined.
People are desesperate to see a true historical events in their lifetime. (for the little story I was the hero of my dream, don't dare to take my place:-)).
Something else...Everybody would die to be part of such andventure. A lot of things could be outsourced to companies with the rights to publicize it (like 3M and their famous moon shoes).Even the open source world would be extremely proud to code various things for the first mission to Mars. Imagine open source software onboard of the first spaceship to mars! Personnally I would give my soul to code anything that would be used in space and I would double/triple recheck everything to be sure that I won't be the responsible of the lethal bug:-).
Now...How could you live 2 years without seeing nobody...Big question, but well I rarely feel lonely, I always preferred to live on my own, I suspect that I could handle it. Just give me a computer, an interesting project to code, few divx through an internet space "tube":-) and I will be the happiest man in the galaxy...And if I die so be it...We will all die in few decades anyway, life is so short.
And then I went to bed with a very nice dream in mind:-).
Slashdot Mirror
Well I had a friend of mine a German working in Brussels. He was responsible for orders dispatching.
A Dutch subsidiary called to ask him about a specific order and how much time it would take.
He replied, "three hours by tank" with the heaviest German accent he could find.
Feeling an innocent smile appearing on my face I understood that WWII is definitely history now.
The French government is there to serve the Republic. The Republic in France is almost like a Church amongst their politicians.
When you are a foreigner (and you happen to live under a monarchy), you feel like the Republic is the people for most French politicians. Sometimes it looks like they can't even understand that the interest of the state (la republique) isn't always the interest of the people.
This is quite surprising. French people usually claim to be very rationnal, but their politicians are mostly "ideologue" rather than being pragmatic.
Generally French have difficulties with foreign languages just like Brits or Americans.
What you take as arrogance is usually a difficulty to answer you in English or in your native tongue IMHO.
Most don't know foreign languages. They have difficulties to handle their ignorance (they are proud people usually) and thus they look arrogant.
Their answer is short (they use the only few words they know like yes,no,this way or whatever)and they look annoyed (they are in fact embarassed).
Try to speak French/German in the middle of Great Britain or the USA and you will soon find yourself in a similar position.
I'm not French, I'm Belgian and my native tongue is French. French people are usually polite and well educated... But in French.
When you use English as a lingua franca in Europe, it is usually better to know "Excuse me" in the local language at least, smile, and ask this question to a young fellow (more chances that he/she knows English).
Not really...The issue here is whether or not the EU as an administration should order products/licenses from Microsoft.
The issue isn't whether or not Microsoft can do business in the EU. The European union bureaucracy is huge, but not that huge.
As an European and an user of open source products I don't support this proposition.
Microsoft has been punished already. Time to move on. Microsoft is already facing serious competitions and its dominant position looks less invicible than it used to be.
Leftists such as this green party are taking it as an easy ideological shot against big companies (they hate them). I don't support that.Technically/Financially Open Source is the way forward for public services. But if Microsoft can prove that their products are objectively better for an administration, then I see no reason why it shouldn't be used.
Let's play the CEO...A post somewhere below mentionned that they are building new fabs in India.Their jobs cut will probably happen in the USA and Europe.
It looks to me that AMD lost its technology advantage over Intel, they have to compete on the low end until new products arrive from the R&D department. Low end means that you have to cut cost everywhere and most certainly in your production.
So basically they are probably moving a part of their industry to India (or China or whatever) to drastically reduce workforce cost.
Low end means also that you compete on price only. Your marketing needs are far less important. So they reduce the marketing department budget and payrolls.
I don't think their move is as stupid as you claim. There are certainly better options (as always...The problem is to find them) but it looks like logical steps to me.
What would be stupid IMHO...Is to bet that soon the killer CPU will come out of the R&D. You take a big debt to finance structural costs until it arrives on the market. If it doesn't work then you are in big trouble. Because your production costs are always high, your new product doesn't sell well and your low end existing products are overpriced and thus don't sell well too. Basically You sell nothing, you cannot take another debt, you have no revenues and even slashing 50% of your employees won't help.
I'm a business owner and a wel developer
I watched the whole presentation. I failed to notice where they would help me to reduce any costs. I can already have (for free) everything I saw in this presentation (hosting excluded...And I don't pay this part...My clients do). It looks like a well balanced API, I won't certainly bash the work of those developers but there are already dozens of comparable solutions.
The same feeling I've got each time I see a new CMS...Ok great...Well done...Just like the one I'm currently using. So tell me if it is the same...What should I change?
I would have been far more interested by something similar to Flex. I don't know something truly new.
The risk here is that the EU is going to look at this from a protectionist point of view. They have an opportunity to establish some non-tarrif trade barriers here and there is little opportunity for the US to complain.
European anti-competitive laws are mainly aimed at European countries/companies.
There are still strong protectionnist tendencies amongst european countries against each other.
For example, last week, the Italian state can't refund the nearly bankrupted Air Italia because of these laws. They are almost "forced" to sell it to Air France/KLM (privately held)
Anti-trust laws are also mainly aimed at European companies.
So basically the European union is the only body in Europe promoting/reinforcing free/fair trades. Its main mission is to guarantee fair play amongst its members. American companies having European acitivites experience it from time to time. Here on slashdot microsoft makes headlines.
I noticed few months ago that Novell (I think, anyway It was an American company with open source based services) won a mid sized European Commission contract against european companies. Adobe is well established in the European commissions and it is making a lot (really a lot) of money.
If you play fair, you are welcome. If you don't you get fines.That's quite simple really.
How much do you want to bet that the Olympic village and international hotels will have open unrestricted access for all visitors
That's already the case IMHO...At least the last time I was in Shanghai (2005) I don't remember having anykind of problem to surf on my favorite web sites (news.bbc.co.uk, nytimes.com, slashdot.org, lemonde.fr, lefigaro.fr to name a few). I heard (two days ago: I watched a very nice interview on BBC World of a leading chinese diplomat) that they've got two policies, one for the private/local connection and another one for places where foreign people can be (like my hotel). Too bad that I didn't try http://www.tibet.com/ (the official web site of the Tibetan government in exile).
So basically it's nothing like Flash at all then?
You are right.
Official web site.
They state that salasaga is a "Integrated Development Environment for producing eLearning". SWF is just an output media.
For those interested in Open source Flash tool. I'm currently testing FlashDevelop (IDE for Actionscript). Looks quite nice and useful
the web site (well an "official forum") (Windows compatible only AFAIK)
More info on here
Maybe we should just call them "The Internet SS". Short, to the point, and descriptive of what they do (spy for the government).
If they can tracked down those responsible for the last wave of paedophilia spams I received the last week (I did my part of the job and I send an email to the appropriate web hosting company), I won't consider them as SS. There are a lot of crimes florishing because of the current state of international laws . It all depends of the mission they will receive from their respective governments. If they fight against filesharers only...What a waste of time and energy...If they track the monsters described above, they are more than welcome.
"Back then your teacher was often a maths teacher who didn't really understand the computers so they did all they could"
How true...I still remember that I lost points because i used something similar to (translate it into ZX spectrum basic):
Boolean test=false;
.
.
.
if(test)
{
}
else
{
}
instead of:
if(test)
{
}
if(!test)
{
}
I still remember that my way was totally fine. The math teacher knew nothing about computer.
I was 12 years or something, The first time that I had any interest for a class.
I agree...If you consider a human body as a "tool" rather than a romantic figure.
1. The human body is totally inadapted to space (it needs constant temperature, athmosphere, water, food, etc.).
2. The human body is extremely fragile (radiation in space). It requires additionnal security measures and protections.
3. Most of the current scientifics space researches can be monitored remotely.
4. It costs less to send a bunch of robots than a human being for the same result.
The british position makes sense.
Personnally I always thought that space exploration will require a dedicated "body" whatever it means. Sooner or later we will be able to send "intelligent" being to space and it won't be in an organic body.
I agree. I use Firefox 2 on both windows vista and Linux (OpenSuse KDE). The memory issue isn't on windows as far I can see. The real issue is Firefox on Linux.
So I ask: Why the bashing?
It looks like they bash it because it is a threat to their current state of knowledge, IMHO. When things become too simple, you loose your "guru" status. I've experienced that (at another level) when WYSIWYG web editors such as dreamweave allowed non-technical guy to code a "relatively" clean code . Suddently those folks (i was part of them) lost their HTML king status and they were forced to migrate to a higher level (perl and then java/c# web developer in my case). Sure things are still better when you code by hand...But if a guy can make a layout in one hour and you still need two hours to carefully adjust your code and they both pass the Internet Explorer and Firefox (netscape in those days) tests...And if you still ask higher fees: you are screwed.
RoR not as fast as (whatever)? Who cares, I've got plenty of web services with less than 100 visitors per day.
I've played with ruby in my spare-time. Technically it looks clean, well balanced and easy to maintain. Pragmatically there are plenty of "new" languages (Python and others) with good potential. Financially I will consider it as an opportunity once I will see my competitors using it or it will be part of a project's requirements. I don't see Ruby becoming really mainstream (like PHP) in the following years.
Precisly...For example US mortgages debt. I guess the "real" businesses behind could be easily tracked but US police officers. All you have to do is respond to the SPAM and wait until you get a phone number, a bank account or whatever. Or those VIAGRA pills...If they are "officals", then you can track their production numbers to the last "official" resellers.
There are plenty of spams requiring real businesses behind. Most of these businesses are located in western countries. Why can't they track them?
I agree.
I have played and even worked with a previous winner of the Loebner price: Alice
http://www.alicebot.org/
This isn't an Artificial intelligence (at least in my definition). This is a chatterbot. It is purely based on pattern-matching mechanism. It doesn't "learn" by itself. Most of the time the chatterbot owner dig into the log files, track the illogical chatterbot answers and change them in its database. Basically chatterbot have no "real" memory. They can't associate ideas to make their own. Don't get me wrong, this is really a nice concept...It may even work on a very limited subject but that's all.
Something else...The thing about the baby: A baby has instincts. He/she cries to get attention. He/she has various instinctive behaviors. Mothers and fathers are also extremely receptive to those signals (Seeing a baby in danger is unbearable for most people).
There are also gestures that are totally instinctive, like smiling, etc so even if the baby is just few months old, he/she can already have a basic communication with his/her social peers.
The real issue is that we are social sexual being. We are "all" programmed in some way to procreate. You try to get the best position in the society in order to reassure/seduce potential partner (That's a caricature...But well), you take care of your body to look healthy (thus reliable).
So you can say that we have a purpose. Our intelligence is developped around that purpose: We first have to survive and then we have to procreate.
The real intelligence is all the complexity we have built around it.
Now...What should be the purpose of an artificial intelligence? What should it accomplish in its lifetime? Why should it be curious? What are the fundamental set of communication tools it needs at the beginning. How could it learn things in order to accomplish its destiny? That's the real problem IMHO. If something has no purpose you can't make it intelligent...There is nothing to do.
Google is currently building a big Data Center here in Belgium($340 million).
for more info
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2007/Apr/27/google_data_center_project_in_belgium.html
And it looks like it is just the beginning of their European investment.
Also if they were able to receive funding, say from the/a government then there could be a lot of speculation again about impartiality (is that even a word) and a whole different set of issues. I would like to see them reach the status though where they *could* receive funding as a library though...
:-) )
Well Wikipedia is quite international these days...You've got the French version, the English version, the German version and so on.
I'm not a US taxpayer, but I wouldn't appreciate to see my hard earned money spent on services for foreigners. (but as European you are more than welcome
Expecting several nations to join the club and pay their share (like Canada paying its share for French and English, Switzerland for Italian/German/French and so on) is a bit difficult to imagine.
If you can pay all these services without any taxpayer money...Why not?
I'm no sysadmin, I'm a programmer. I hate configuring things :-).
.net (on linux) and I truly like it. I've got Vista on my laptop and I like it too (no kidding). There are a lot things they did well. I don't care about the politic vision of RMS. I run a company and so I cut cost, period. If somebody claims to have a better solution than Linux, I will study it. But the last time I have studies their "TCO" hwatever it means, the extra hours I had to spend were really worth the effort.
I was truly surprised how easy it was to set up a samba server for the OpenSuse desktops...The only thing I had to do manually was the password file (if I remember well). I'm not expert in LAN technologies but I didn't find it more difficult than the Microsoft server I had to configure years ago for the same task.
My company is quite small but we've got 4 desktop pc running OpenSuse (development mainly. Build by a local shop and one dual boot to try our web based application on windows XP and to support Flash development), a network laser B/W printer (brother) and a low end server (tyan with RAID + a remote backup solution). It works fine.
I don't think Linux is ready yet for very small companies with no technical backgrounds (because...in the end I still had to configure something in a "config" file and I had to find the information over the web) and you still have to choose your hardware carefully (like SATA issues).
I won't use Linux on my laptop (it works fine and I don't want to spend hours/days/weeks to configure/debug my WIFI card, debugging the unsupported cheap video card inside, how to sync my smartphone, etc...Why should I waste so many hours, exactly?)
But in the end, it is quite close IMHO, I have seen a significant evolution at my little level anyway. You can run a company almost exclusively on Linux.
Financially this is really interesting. I have saved at least $1000 in license costs in this operation only. I don't include Open Office we were already using nor all these countless "free" tools like monodevelop, eclipse, apache, project manager and all...Or things that I shouldn't buy like an anti-virus. You could say that I save at least $12.000 per year...$12.000 per year that's already half of the salary of a junior that I just hired two months ago.
I'm not a Microsoft basher. For example we use c#
That article sure uses a a lot of words to say 'the web should be communist'.
Any system where a small group of people get to make the decisions will skew towards making the world more to the liking of those people. Further, new additions to this ruling class will be those deemed acceptable by the current encumbants. This is a bad thing.
What you describe is an autocratic government because there is a self appointed "ruling class". There is no ruling class (theorically)in a communist society. A communist society is a "dictature of the mass": your rights as an individual, especially private property are non-existant.
That's why for example an old school communist like Trotsky was able to critize harshly the Stallinist way of governing...And why he has been assassinated in Mexico.
Most communism we know are degenerated forms of communism. Marx wrote that only a world revolution could establish communism (like a critical mass). So practically speaking it means that communism is impossible to apply. Sooner or later a nation (like Poland did while blocking the early communist invasion led by Trostky), or individuals (the heroes) will stand up to protect their own rights and properties.
Leave communist where it belongs: the XIX-XXth dark history.
Assembly? We had to write out the 1's and 0's on the wire directly!
Writing? I sing the bytes stream just like my good old zx81 tape drive.
Thanks.
;-)
Concerning stupid things, occasionnally I say intelligent things too
SO I guess i should give a try now.
I'm involved in e-marketing campaigns and public web sites and rarely for intranet project.
first: I'm not a mac fanboy nevertheless I can't see myself selling a web site totally incompatible with Mac....What can justify that you may lose +/- 5% of your audience (and potential sells) because of this technical choice? On the marketing/communication side there is no justification.
Another example: I work for communication agencies as a technical subcontractor...They almost all have Macs instead of windows. So practically...If I send them a link to check the web site under construction....How could they approve it?
If Microsoft shows support for the mono port...And If downloading silverlight is as simple as flash (on Mac and why not on Linux); if the support looks like a long term strategy: Then silverlight looks quite promising (technically speaking) in two years or so. If they don't, I won't "learn/sell" it. It will be useless for my job.
I also think that a succesful silverlight may help Adobe/Macromedia to get more decent prices for their products (some prices are simply insane), I'm more than open to help a true free market.
I'm curious -- why?
:-), but that's true.
Personnally because I'm so used to brackets. I mean all languages I know (c++,java,c#,perl,php and even Javascript) use them.
I did try to experiment python but this feature was a no-go for me. Okay that's silly I know
Weeks ago, I was searching the web for (very) rough estimations over a trip to Mars. No landing, just a journey around mars and back to earth. Just one astronaut. As you guess it was for the fun, nothing serious.
:-)).
:-).
:-) and I will be the happiest man in the galaxy...And if I die so be it...We will all die in few decades anyway, life is so short.
:-).
But let imagine that you buy the plan of a station like Russian Salyut_7
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salyut_7
This station is already a proven design, You can say everything you want about Russians, but they have build really reliable space stuffs so far and they have quite competitive prices these days.
The only real work would be its propulsion and protection against radiation outside the earth magnetic field as far as I understand. And of course food, oxygen, water...But you don't need to get everything in your spaceship, you can send a modified soyuz to Mars before your journey. On your way back home you can also arrange a rendez-vous with a modifed soyuz. I really don't know anyway.
Now...How to finance it? I don't have $5bn (or a lot more) anytime soon... Well i suspect that you can finance a large parts through private funding. Imagine...A 2 or 3 years event. A thing probably as popular as an olympic game and more than all reality-show combined.
People are desesperate to see a true historical events in their lifetime. (for the little story I was the hero of my dream, don't dare to take my place
Something else...Everybody would die to be part of such andventure. A lot of things could be outsourced to companies with the rights to publicize it (like 3M and their famous moon shoes).Even the open source world would be extremely proud to code various things for the first mission to Mars. Imagine open source software onboard of the first spaceship to mars! Personnally I would give my soul to code anything that would be used in space and I would double/triple recheck everything to be sure that I won't be the responsible of the lethal bug
Now...How could you live 2 years without seeing nobody...Big question, but well I rarely feel lonely, I always preferred to live on my own, I suspect that I could handle it. Just give me a computer, an interesting project to code, few divx through an internet space "tube"
And then I went to bed with a very nice dream in mind