Who needs virtual desktops when you can have multiple monitors?
I usually use 12 virtual desktops on Linux. Not only would the cost be prohibitive, as would the power and space requirements, but there's no way to connect them all to a single PC.
Too bad linux does not support them out of box (i.e., without tricking with command prompt)
But it does support virtual desktops. Guess which one is more useful for the majority of users?
I bought Fallout 3 for PS3 on sale since the PC version I bought on Steam consistently froze after a scant few minutes of play. Should I as an end consumer really need to dig into minutiae of Windows settings to try and tweak it enough for a game to run properly?
This has nothing to do with Windows and is a Fallout 3 bug. And no, a mere consumer couldn't figure it out, so he'll end up buying the same thing twice.
I thought we had left the bad old days behind us.
"Bad old days" return whenever there's some new development in hardware. The use of protected mode - first through DOS extenders and later through pmode OS freed us from messing around with DOS's memory types, but then 3D accelerator cards arrived, with their proprietary APIs of course. Now everyone uses Direct3D or OpenGL, but multi-core has arrived, forcing games to switch to parallel execution, and bugs result during transition. Compute shaders - using the 3D accelerator as a math co-processor - is the newest fad; we'll see what new problems arise from there.
Repeat after me: PCs for surfing and work, consoles for games.
For desktop usage, Win7 is most definitely just as stable as Linux. I say this from experience too, and not out of my ass.
Maybe. It's hard to say for sure, since most Linux distros it easy to run lots of programs at once, while Windows doesn't - no virtual desktops, taskbar can only take a few running programs before spilling into multi-line, etc.
Or did you mean they're both stable when used as glorified typewriters? Of course they are, and so is Win95.
If in one part of my talk I concentrate on linear systems, people will generally remember that if I announce it clearly, and will not need a giant slide projected onto the screen to remind them. It's *what* I am saying about linear system, their properties, relations to non-linear system, linearization etc. that's important. NOT the fact that I am talking about these things in some particular order, but WHAT I am saying about them.
So what are you saying about them? If it can't be effectively summarized in a single slide of bullet points, I assure you that most of it is going to melt into a buzz in your audience's ears. There is a limit to how much information human brain can absorb at once before you have to stop and think about it, which requires tuning out the lecturer.
There's a reason why PowerPoint is so popular, and that reason is that it allows you to memorize the main points of the representation despite not catching most of the details. Of course, this rises the question of whether it really makes any sense to do the representation at all, rather than just emailing the bullet point list, but oh well.
Escape velocity wasn't impossible. It was a puzzle to be solved. I prefer to look at Relativity and faster than light travel the same way.
Faster than light travel would also be time travel, which would lead to causal loops, which is likely be logically impossible. This is very different from mere engineering problems of reaching escape velocity.
However, there is a solution: simply make yourself immortal. Upload your mind to a machine, or fortify your human body to take the decades of travel between stars even with nuclear propulsion, and the problem goes away. After all, Marco Polo didn't need a jumbo jet to reach China:).
With current tech nearest solar system is 120.000 years away (250 K round trip).
With current tech the nearest solar system is about half a century away. Well, actually that's 40 years old tech, but you get the idea.
Yes, folks, we could build and send a starship to Alpha Centauri right now if we wanted to, and have it arrive within our lifetimes. We just don't want to, but would rather spend our resources to bomb the living shit out of some miserable desert state and pay bonuses to failed bankers. O how the mighty have fallen.
I guess I'll have to root for China, since it doesn't seem that anyone else has the will to reach for glory anymore. Shame on you, West, shame on you.
Like the meta-director in left for dead? May not control much more than zombies and item placement, but it is there.
Yeah, only far more so. For example, you decide to go exploring the countryside in an RPG, and the director AI generates a small town for you to find. To continue the zombie theme, the town has a problem with them; you refuse to help them, and return later to find the town overrun and full of zombies. There's a single family left, and guiltily you help them escape to a nearby city, only you're pursued by the zombie army, and the city is besieged. Will it fall? Will it prevail? Will it defend against zombies but fail to eradicate them, resulting in stagnation in trade and all that that implies? How will the Kingdom react?
This kind of game would basically combine Civilization, Master of Magic, Sims, SimCity and L4D director AI into a single gamemaster AI, resulting in a fully open-ended gameplay, as opposed to the scripted worlds of Fallout 3 or Oblivion. Speaking of which, I suspect that Bethesda will be the first company to try this; after all, they've been trying ever since The Elder Scrolls: Arena for precisely this. Hey Bethesda, any of you reading this? Care to try the challenge ?-)
First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price?
And sometimes that's exactly the right approach, except you should really build three or four or ten. One might argue that that's the very purpose of the government: to force inefficiency where short-term self-interest would result in long-term disaster - in other words, to avoid the tragedy of the commons.
B-b-but you're saying that the bloated corrupt government that takes money from people at gunpoint and has no incentives for efficiency might have done a better job than a private contractor that works on the God-given free enterprise system that rewards efficiency and punishes waste!
On the contrary, the free market did exactly as it was supposed to: it eliminated the inefficiency of redundant systems and a safety margin. Efficiency or the safety of redundancy, you can have one or the other but not both. That's why any important system should be managed by the government, and free enterprise should be limited to the role of logistical optimization it's actually good at.
Unfortunately some people nowadays consider free market their religion, so we got deregulation and resulting financial crisis. Oh well...
Because even after multiple demonstrations otherwise, upper and executive management cling tightly to the fantasy that experienced mid-level+ IT (and other) staff are generic and can be disposed of and replaced at will, with essentially no loss to productivity.
Upper and executive management cling thightly to the fantasy that everyone below them is serfs and they, the Chosen Ones, have been divinely appointed as nobility. They cling to this fantasy because how would they justify laying off half the low-level employees to rise their bonuses otherwise?
This is the basic problem of all organizations: at some point those who are at the top will start thinking they deserve to be at the top, at which point they start throwing their weight around, then inventing more or less idiotic justifications for that. It typically ends with catastrophic failure of the organization.
This is still an extremely unprofessional thing to do.
Professionalism goes both ways. If you keep your employees guessing whether they'll still have a job tomorrow, they'll keep you guessing whether you still have a system tomorrow. Why would you expect to get more than you give?
I imagine with the next generation of consoles that costs will start increasing again, though.
Assuming there'll be a next generation, of course, which is a pretty huge assumption for this very reason and a number of others.
I predict that the next revolution in gaming will come from AI-directed procedural generation of content on the fly; not only does it lower development costs a lot, but it'll also allow truly open-ended gameworlds.
I like big budget games because they can have cool visuals, full spoken dialogue and so on.
This rises an interesting question: is voice synthesis nowadays good enough to handle most of the dialogue? Most voice actors are pretty bad, sometimes hilariously so, so I'd imagine that a computer reading a script - perhaps with some markup cues for emotional state and such - would do just as well, if not better.
This would cut development costs for dialogy-heavy games a lot, and as a bonus also make modding a lot easier.
However once you've hit that point, you have pretty much peaked. There isn't a point in spending money on other things.
You may be able to simulate thought with electronics, but you can simulate an atomic explosion, and no radiation will be produced.
The difference being, of course, that simulated thinking will have the same outwardly observable effects as actual thinking, and is thus indistinguishable from it, while a simulated nuclear explosion doesn't have the same effects as a real one. Why do people come up with such obviously stupid analogies?
Which is a non-issue if we're sending people up for other reasons than to get astronaut training. If we're sending a geologist up to study a comet, then it doesn't matter that he's a novice at astronauting.
Except that we don't need to send a geologist, we need to send at least 4 of them to have decent chances of one of them surviving:(. And of course experience at astronauting matters, just like experience at piloting a helicopter would matter for a geologist using one to get to an interesting rock formation here on Earth.
That may be your reasoning, but there are other lines of reasoning too, that don't require increased safety. For example, sending people up to do construction work on comets. That doesn't require increasing safety to massively redundant levels.
Yes, it does. Do you have any idea how much training that kind of work would take? And how much that training would cost?
At a 25% level (or pick any other number, really, that you can agree with -- the point is reduced safety from current, not the exact 25% number) if you need 10 geologists up there, you send up 40.
And for this to feasible, the costs per launch would need to drop to much less than 1/4th as a result of relaxed safety. They won't.
With a different safety percentage the numbers will be different, but the point is we don't need to be absolutely sure that if we send n people, then n people reach the destination. That's just an added excessive cost, and we can do it for cheaper if we accept some losses.
The people we send up to do anything interesting in space will require a lot of training, and there's nowhere near infinite pool of people willing to sign up for a certain death on the off chance that they get to space, and training also costs money. Your idea is simply unworkable, and will likely remain unworkable no matter how you massage the numbers. Even in the best imaginable case it would lower the cost per succesful launch at most a few percents.
Ironically you do need quantum physics to explain the modern transistor. Just because its quantum doesn't mean its "unspeakable quantum phenomenon" or anything.
The key word here is "explain". The people going on about brains working through quantum gravity or other nonsense like that are trying to use it as modern-day magic to move brains - and thus minds - to the realm of unexplainable.
And lets not forget the inherent question of free will in all this.
There is no such inherent question. "Free will" is a concept in law and philosophy, while determinism is a concept in fundamental physics. Treating the two as opposites leads to nonsensical results. Adding the assertion that you do indeed have free will in this already-nonsensical scale as an axiom and drawing conclusions about how the brain must work from this basis then leads to truly comical ones.
I nowadays assume that anyone who speaks of quantum mechanics in any context other than fundamental physics is simply using them as a more sciency sounding term for magic.
Theoretically, our bodies/brains could work just fine without anyone inside looking out, so to speak. We could still run around, build houses, go to soccer practice, whatever, but not actually be sentient. We drones would/could still be very intelligent, and appear to be sentient in every currently measurable way, but nobody is actually home.
This is the so-called Philosophical Zombie argument. It has a number of flaws, the most obvious likely being the underlaying assumption that consciousness really is redundant. Basically, the zombie argument not only asserts that you have a soul of the little-man-inside-you variety, which the zombie presumably lacks, but it also asserts that said soul is just a passive passenger, since the zombie functions just fine without it.
The whole problem arised because certain philosophers feel threatened by the idea of thinking machines, feeling it makes them less special, so they have started using every argument from zombies to quantum mysticism to argue against them being possible and, if someone actually builds one, that it's not really intelligent, where real intelligence differs from mere pretend intelligence in some vague, ill-defined way. It's basically the evolution vs. creationism fight all over again, and for largely the same reasons. It's best to simply ignore this rubbish; it's pointless to argue with someone who's decided the conclusion beforehand and twists all facts and arguments to support it.
Everyone thinks a sentient machine will be built, and I'll agree that sentience can be easily faked; I've written fake AI that seems real. There is no artificial sentience on earth, why is it supposed that machines can be made sentient?
Because, as far as we can tell, human brain is nothing but a machine of finite complexity. If so, then a machine can be sentient, so why couldn't we build one too?
Basically, all arguments against humans building sentient machines ultimately boil down to: "Sentient creatures require supernatural souls (of little-man-inside-you variety), which only God(s) can create, and since we're not God(s) we can't create souls and thus can't create sentient machines."
Maybe a better question would be why would an AI want to stay awake for a thousand year journey to another star?
Why wouldn't it? Why would being in interstellar space hinder an AI's ability to engage in the AI equivalent of living its life?
It has communications with other AIs, even if they have years of lag; it has materials and machines to conduct experiments en-route and incorporate any new technological breakthroughs; it can create virtual worlds for itself; it can monitor the target system for, for example, radiation indicative of emerging technological civilizations, etc. The only reason it might want to sleep is some kind of physiological or psychological weakness, but such problems could be solved at design phase.
Failing all else, it could be revising its plans for exactly what it'll do once it reaches the target. New reports would presumably come from other AIs, and of course the system could be surveyed at ever-greater accuracy as the distance to it grows shorter. An AI that stays awake is simply more likely to be succesful than one who sleeps.
Souls do not exist. There is no evidence for them. What we call a "soul" is just the maintained state of an electro-chemical chain reaction we harbour in our bodies.
You do realize that your third sentence directly contradicts the first two, right?
Perhaps you meant that souls as supernatural entities that survive the death of body don't exist, which may or may not be true but is not provable either way. However, what should be pretty obvious is that people who think that they do are not going to be impressed or convinced by your assertion that they don't, especially when you deliver it in such an inaccurate form.
Keep souls out of science, for fuck's sake. Or I guess we should ask Bigfoot what he thinks about manned space exploration and do what he thinks is right?
We are talking about ethics here. Metaphysical questions - such as do souls exist - are unavoidable in such a context, since what is right and wrong often depend on the underlaying assumptions about the nature of reality.
Yeah, leap seconds suck, but the proposed solution (to let UTC drift farther and farther away from reality) sucks even harder.
No, it doesn't. Simply use UTC as an abstract "seconds after a certain point" and use time zone data to adjust for local Solar time. It's simpler, less likely to result in weird bugs, and allows anyone who wants adjust their local time every day if they so wish.
If the Advertisers would just cut out that middleman and deal directly with the hosting company there wouldn't be this problem.
How could they? She is the one putting stuff up. She is the one designing the Web pages and producing their content. What are the advertisers supposed to do - inject advertising on her web pages without her approval?
Of course this all assumes we're talking about a generic hosting company and not a Livejournal or whatever.
But helium isn't burned or consumed or changed into something else, so we still have it when we are done using it. It's not like the helium is going to vanish into thin air.
No, it's going to vanish to outer space. Temperature of a gas is a measure of the average kinetic energy of a single molecule; since helium atoms don't form molecules and are very light, they tend to have very high velocities in a given temperature. So high, in fact, that they exceed Earth's escape velocity; while molecules at lower atmosphere will likely collide with other molecules before escaping, those in in the upper atmosphere will simply go up and never come down again.
Slashdot Mirror
I usually use 12 virtual desktops on Linux. Not only would the cost be prohibitive, as would the power and space requirements, but there's no way to connect them all to a single PC.
But it does support virtual desktops. Guess which one is more useful for the majority of users?
This has nothing to do with Windows and is a Fallout 3 bug. And no, a mere consumer couldn't figure it out, so he'll end up buying the same thing twice.
"Bad old days" return whenever there's some new development in hardware. The use of protected mode - first through DOS extenders and later through pmode OS freed us from messing around with DOS's memory types, but then 3D accelerator cards arrived, with their proprietary APIs of course. Now everyone uses Direct3D or OpenGL, but multi-core has arrived, forcing games to switch to parallel execution, and bugs result during transition. Compute shaders - using the 3D accelerator as a math co-processor - is the newest fad; we'll see what new problems arise from there.
Consoles are for people who's Google-Fu is weak.
Maybe. It's hard to say for sure, since most Linux distros it easy to run lots of programs at once, while Windows doesn't - no virtual desktops, taskbar can only take a few running programs before spilling into multi-line, etc.
Or did you mean they're both stable when used as glorified typewriters? Of course they are, and so is Win95.
So what are you saying about them? If it can't be effectively summarized in a single slide of bullet points, I assure you that most of it is going to melt into a buzz in your audience's ears. There is a limit to how much information human brain can absorb at once before you have to stop and think about it, which requires tuning out the lecturer.
There's a reason why PowerPoint is so popular, and that reason is that it allows you to memorize the main points of the representation despite not catching most of the details. Of course, this rises the question of whether it really makes any sense to do the representation at all, rather than just emailing the bullet point list, but oh well.
Faster than light travel would also be time travel, which would lead to causal loops, which is likely be logically impossible. This is very different from mere engineering problems of reaching escape velocity.
However, there is a solution: simply make yourself immortal. Upload your mind to a machine, or fortify your human body to take the decades of travel between stars even with nuclear propulsion, and the problem goes away. After all, Marco Polo didn't need a jumbo jet to reach China :).
With current tech the nearest solar system is about half a century away. Well, actually that's 40 years old tech, but you get the idea.
Yes, folks, we could build and send a starship to Alpha Centauri right now if we wanted to, and have it arrive within our lifetimes. We just don't want to, but would rather spend our resources to bomb the living shit out of some miserable desert state and pay bonuses to failed bankers. O how the mighty have fallen.
I guess I'll have to root for China, since it doesn't seem that anyone else has the will to reach for glory anymore. Shame on you, West, shame on you.
Yeah, only far more so. For example, you decide to go exploring the countryside in an RPG, and the director AI generates a small town for you to find. To continue the zombie theme, the town has a problem with them; you refuse to help them, and return later to find the town overrun and full of zombies. There's a single family left, and guiltily you help them escape to a nearby city, only you're pursued by the zombie army, and the city is besieged. Will it fall? Will it prevail? Will it defend against zombies but fail to eradicate them, resulting in stagnation in trade and all that that implies? How will the Kingdom react?
This kind of game would basically combine Civilization, Master of Magic, Sims, SimCity and L4D director AI into a single gamemaster AI, resulting in a fully open-ended gameplay, as opposed to the scripted worlds of Fallout 3 or Oblivion. Speaking of which, I suspect that Bethesda will be the first company to try this; after all, they've been trying ever since The Elder Scrolls: Arena for precisely this. Hey Bethesda, any of you reading this? Care to try the challenge ?-)
And sometimes that's exactly the right approach, except you should really build three or four or ten. One might argue that that's the very purpose of the government: to force inefficiency where short-term self-interest would result in long-term disaster - in other words, to avoid the tragedy of the commons.
On the contrary, the free market did exactly as it was supposed to: it eliminated the inefficiency of redundant systems and a safety margin. Efficiency or the safety of redundancy, you can have one or the other but not both. That's why any important system should be managed by the government, and free enterprise should be limited to the role of logistical optimization it's actually good at.
Unfortunately some people nowadays consider free market their religion, so we got deregulation and resulting financial crisis. Oh well...
Well, isn't that the whole point of law?
Upper and executive management cling thightly to the fantasy that everyone below them is serfs and they, the Chosen Ones, have been divinely appointed as nobility. They cling to this fantasy because how would they justify laying off half the low-level employees to rise their bonuses otherwise?
This is the basic problem of all organizations: at some point those who are at the top will start thinking they deserve to be at the top, at which point they start throwing their weight around, then inventing more or less idiotic justifications for that. It typically ends with catastrophic failure of the organization.
Professionalism goes both ways. If you keep your employees guessing whether they'll still have a job tomorrow, they'll keep you guessing whether you still have a system tomorrow. Why would you expect to get more than you give?
Assuming there'll be a next generation, of course, which is a pretty huge assumption for this very reason and a number of others.
I predict that the next revolution in gaming will come from AI-directed procedural generation of content on the fly; not only does it lower development costs a lot, but it'll also allow truly open-ended gameworlds.
This rises an interesting question: is voice synthesis nowadays good enough to handle most of the dialogue? Most voice actors are pretty bad, sometimes hilariously so, so I'd imagine that a computer reading a script - perhaps with some markup cues for emotional state and such - would do just as well, if not better.
This would cut development costs for dialogy-heavy games a lot, and as a bonus also make modding a lot easier.
All too true. Turd polishing is popular as ever.
The difference being, of course, that simulated thinking will have the same outwardly observable effects as actual thinking, and is thus indistinguishable from it, while a simulated nuclear explosion doesn't have the same effects as a real one. Why do people come up with such obviously stupid analogies?
Except that we don't need to send a geologist, we need to send at least 4 of them to have decent chances of one of them surviving :(. And of course experience at astronauting matters, just like experience at piloting a helicopter would matter for a geologist using one to get to an interesting rock formation here on Earth.
Yes, it does. Do you have any idea how much training that kind of work would take? And how much that training would cost?
And for this to feasible, the costs per launch would need to drop to much less than 1/4th as a result of relaxed safety. They won't.
The people we send up to do anything interesting in space will require a lot of training, and there's nowhere near infinite pool of people willing to sign up for a certain death on the off chance that they get to space, and training also costs money. Your idea is simply unworkable, and will likely remain unworkable no matter how you massage the numbers. Even in the best imaginable case it would lower the cost per succesful launch at most a few percents.
The key word here is "explain". The people going on about brains working through quantum gravity or other nonsense like that are trying to use it as modern-day magic to move brains - and thus minds - to the realm of unexplainable.
There is no such inherent question. "Free will" is a concept in law and philosophy, while determinism is a concept in fundamental physics. Treating the two as opposites leads to nonsensical results. Adding the assertion that you do indeed have free will in this already-nonsensical scale as an axiom and drawing conclusions about how the brain must work from this basis then leads to truly comical ones.
I nowadays assume that anyone who speaks of quantum mechanics in any context other than fundamental physics is simply using them as a more sciency sounding term for magic.
This is the so-called Philosophical Zombie argument. It has a number of flaws, the most obvious likely being the underlaying assumption that consciousness really is redundant. Basically, the zombie argument not only asserts that you have a soul of the little-man-inside-you variety, which the zombie presumably lacks, but it also asserts that said soul is just a passive passenger, since the zombie functions just fine without it.
The whole problem arised because certain philosophers feel threatened by the idea of thinking machines, feeling it makes them less special, so they have started using every argument from zombies to quantum mysticism to argue against them being possible and, if someone actually builds one, that it's not really intelligent, where real intelligence differs from mere pretend intelligence in some vague, ill-defined way. It's basically the evolution vs. creationism fight all over again, and for largely the same reasons. It's best to simply ignore this rubbish; it's pointless to argue with someone who's decided the conclusion beforehand and twists all facts and arguments to support it.
Because, as far as we can tell, human brain is nothing but a machine of finite complexity. If so, then a machine can be sentient, so why couldn't we build one too?
Basically, all arguments against humans building sentient machines ultimately boil down to: "Sentient creatures require supernatural souls (of little-man-inside-you variety), which only God(s) can create, and since we're not God(s) we can't create souls and thus can't create sentient machines."
Why wouldn't it? Why would being in interstellar space hinder an AI's ability to engage in the AI equivalent of living its life?
It has communications with other AIs, even if they have years of lag; it has materials and machines to conduct experiments en-route and incorporate any new technological breakthroughs; it can create virtual worlds for itself; it can monitor the target system for, for example, radiation indicative of emerging technological civilizations, etc. The only reason it might want to sleep is some kind of physiological or psychological weakness, but such problems could be solved at design phase.
Failing all else, it could be revising its plans for exactly what it'll do once it reaches the target. New reports would presumably come from other AIs, and of course the system could be surveyed at ever-greater accuracy as the distance to it grows shorter. An AI that stays awake is simply more likely to be succesful than one who sleeps.
You are posting on Slashdot rather than rotting in jail somwhere, literally or figuratively.
You do realize that your third sentence directly contradicts the first two, right?
Perhaps you meant that souls as supernatural entities that survive the death of body don't exist, which may or may not be true but is not provable either way. However, what should be pretty obvious is that people who think that they do are not going to be impressed or convinced by your assertion that they don't, especially when you deliver it in such an inaccurate form.
We are talking about ethics here. Metaphysical questions - such as do souls exist - are unavoidable in such a context, since what is right and wrong often depend on the underlaying assumptions about the nature of reality.
No, it doesn't. Simply use UTC as an abstract "seconds after a certain point" and use time zone data to adjust for local Solar time. It's simpler, less likely to result in weird bugs, and allows anyone who wants adjust their local time every day if they so wish.
How could they? She is the one putting stuff up. She is the one designing the Web pages and producing their content. What are the advertisers supposed to do - inject advertising on her web pages without her approval?
Of course this all assumes we're talking about a generic hosting company and not a Livejournal or whatever.
No, it's going to vanish to outer space. Temperature of a gas is a measure of the average kinetic energy of a single molecule; since helium atoms don't form molecules and are very light, they tend to have very high velocities in a given temperature. So high, in fact, that they exceed Earth's escape velocity; while molecules at lower atmosphere will likely collide with other molecules before escaping, those in in the upper atmosphere will simply go up and never come down again.