Is this going to produce AI as in "I am bender, please insert girder"?
Or as in, "Maybe the blue fairy will make me into a real boy so my mommy will love me".
I eagerly await the former, and I dread the latter, since it will take us two seconds to pervert it into "Im gigolo Joe, Waddaya know?"
Artificial intelligence for menial tasks is great. Artifical humanity will be perverted so fast it will make your head spin.
This is one of those enviro mental patient ideas that will be praised by the raise-vegetables-in-your-own-poop crowd and laughed at as ludicrous by the mainstream. Wanna see grass as a *practical* fuel? Don't pelletize it - ferment it into methanol, and then use it to replace fossil fuels at the gas pump. THEN its starts to make both economic sense AND have at least a feeble chance of happening in the real world...
Yes CRTs put out radiation - in the visible spectrum. It is the voltage of the electrons jumping between cathode and anode that determines the radiation given off at impact. CRT's are tuned to the visible spectrum. Spark plugs, however, operate at 35-40KV, which is right smack dab in the middle of the hard X-ray spectrum. All those cancers people have been blaming on air pollution and hydrocarbons - uh-uh. Chances are it's all due to spark plug radiation.
I wish to coin a phrase, if no one else has done so.
We are now "Janitors of th Microsoft Plumbing"
And why are we viewed with such disdain? Imagine how you would feel about your plumber if you had to call him in two or three times a week to unclog your stopped toilet.
People expect computers to be a consumer appliance that "just works". We get a share of the blame for the appallingly low quality of shrink-wrapped software that is barely beta-test status when shipped to production users. (Test the software?- that's what users are for; Configuration Cotnrol? - that would dip into profits, let the DLLs crash, they can always reboot)
You want respect - install OSS software that doesn't crash, and get paid for adding value in the design process, instead of billing hours for reaming the t3rds out of the M$ toilet.
It is always amusing to me to read how M$ "invented" technologies that were in common use by other operating systems while Bill Gates was still wearing diapers. Both paging and swapping were used on IBM mainframes dating back to the mid 1960's. What windoze (and linux for that matter) could REALLY use is the ability to deterministically dedicate portions of system resources to particular processes. Back when a 1 MIP, 1MB machine cost $1M, operators became highly skilled at managing workloads. Today everyone just throws oodles of RAM and disk at servers and lets the chips fall where they may , so to speak. It wouldn't be a bad idea to actually put a little thought into matching workloads with machine resources, and pro-actively matching them up by deliberate choice(For example - our company is running a prime-time ad at 9pm that features our URL, maybe that's a good time to shut down the normal file backup that happens then). Chaos theory is not always a good load balancer. But what am I saying, that's as outrageous as asking kids to put their money in the bank instead of buying video games...
While the religious side of me revels in the prospect that evolution may be proved impossible, the scientific side looks to the larger picture. The Darwinian view of evolution through slow mutation was proved wrong long ago by the fossil record. This knowledge has been closely held for fear the press would get ahold of it and have a field day. But based on the fossil record, it appears that evolution only happens when small populations are isolated and run short on resources.
THERFORE - it is easy to theorize that genes have (at least) two maintenance modes programmed into them: ONE- we're thriving in a time of abundance - keep things from changing by repairng mistakes; TWO- We're dying off due to hostil conditions - quick, mutate and try to find a way to cope with this. This is why breeders can cause dogs, cats, birds, plants, to change into such bizarre forms in a few generations by breeding offspring back with parents - it simulates a dying population, and activates the evolve to escape mechanism.
This evolutionary ability must itself have had to develop by the slow route, which is why life developed so little diversity for the first few hundred million years. But then, once the evolutionary mechanism was created - it kicked in and species began springing up all over the place.IMHO anyway
WHile this particular development might not be sophisticated enough to read guilt or innocence of a past crime, it might be useful in pre-emptively avoiding destructive behavior.
You could implant a chip that gives electic shocks to , say , a convicted sex offender if they start to get an 3r3ction. Or an alcoholic if they think about drinking alcohol, or a democrat if they think about taxing the rich... uh, hmmmm, OK this *could* get intrusive.
Crypto-phalluses !?!?!? Is that like a chastity belt with a public key infrastructure?
I am a firm believer in the torture of terrorists, but with a twist. Bind the terrorists hand and foot, hang them upside down from a hook, then...
Let the families of their victims into the room with blow-torches. Film it, and then put it on El-Jizz-ear-ache TV. With a narrator voicing over the screams - "If you kill someone for Bin Laden, you're not going to heaven, you're going to personally supply the weiner for the roast at 'camp toasty', where your victims families will be invited to burn your b@lls off"
Hmm, the responses I've received pretty much prove my point. You guys ARE members of the cult of UNIX. A cult that wishes that intelligence MATTERED in our society, that desperately wants to find a way to create a meritocracy where high intelligence will make them the elite instead of socially maladjusted misfits.
Maybe we could have a truce. Let those who want to see Linux succeed in the mainstream create a code thread that is easy to use, called maybe Linux-S for soft. And then have a variant with all the useful GUI tools removed, called Linux-H for hard.
Then the inside joke for hard-core Linerds could be to ask whether your distro was soft or hard...
Ah, the plot is working then. You see, right-wing fundamentalists aren't really Christians. They are brain-dead stooges, whose policies are the opposite of the teachings of Jesus. (Jesus said He had no kingdom in this world, so how can we be a 'christian' nation? Jesus said that when you pray you should pray in secret instead of showing off in front of men - so how would that justify public prayer in schools? Jesus said to give to all who ask from you - so how does this condone cutting aid to needy families? Jesus said to forgive those who persecute you - so how does this justify bombing them? Jesus looked at a taxed coin and said render unto ceasar the things that are ceasar's - so how does this justify tax cuts for the rich?) The fundamentalists are being used like an army of satanic zombies to lull the Church into quiescence while the mechanisms of totalitarian domination and control are being assembled (for use against terrorists, of course). Won't they be surprised when those systems are turned against them!
Wow, that was a long way to go to make a dig at Christianity. But you have made a logical fallacy. If Bill is evil, and he is the antichrist, then the antichrist is evil. Therefore, the opposite of the antichrist - Christ, would be good by implication. However, Christianity, the religion that claims to follow Christ, has been unfaithful to his teachings, and has committed murder, robbery, and genocide. This may imply that many followers of Christ are evil, but the followers of many other faiths have committed similar acts (you know- somehting about the two towers), therefore this more likely only implies that humans are inherently hypocritical, not that Christ was evil. The point about Bill being the "antichrist", though, wasn't to call him the opposite of Jesus, but to imply that he is buidling the infrastructure to enable a totalitarian and oppressive world state. And non-Christians probably won't enjoy geting flocked by it any more than the flock does.
You missed an important point in your rant. It isn't just that Linux/free BSD adherents are squabbling children. NO, NO, NO. They are squabbling adherents of a religious cult. In particular, the cult of UNIX. These people are cut from the same cloth as the old mainframe system operators. They believe that it is MORALLY WRONG for a computr system to be easy to use. Why write a GUI that lets a user choose from a scrollable list of options, when you can make them use a command line interface where they have to memorize the syntax of 25 option flags. If you make it easy to use, the commercial value of memorizing command options evaporates, and they might have to get REAL jobs. And if helpful souls corrupt your favorite open source package by creating GUI tools to configure and run it - rewrite the applicaiton to break all the GUI tools! The only reason for having a GUI on Linux at all is to seduce Windows users into trying Linux, knowing full well that to get anywhere they will HAVE to learn the CLI -bwahahahahahaha! I have been a faithful Linux devotee for 8 years, and with about every second release, my window manager changes, requiring me to relearn all the configuration settings, or the multimedia viewer I had been using gets dropped, and I have to reinstall it by hand from tarballs, or the CD burner software disappears and I have to find an alternate. I will never stop loving or using Linux, BUT, for heavens sake guys, GET RID OF THE CLI, and STOP REINVENTING THE WHEEL! Repeat after me - "Ease of use is all that matters", "Ease of use is all that matters", "Ease of use is all that matters","Ease of use is all that matters",...
Personnaly, I view the development of an AI Teddy Bear as further evidence that Bill Gates is destined to be the antichrist. IMHO, he is one of the few succesful people I have seen who is so pathetically brain-damaged that he really really thinks that people want to do away with all human contact and replace it with digital interaction. Just think, AI teddy will of course have to incorporate digital rights management. Which will prevent parents from providing custom input into the raising of their children. Only State-approved, licensed parenting algorithms will be allowed. And of course, *endangering* a child by failure to provide them with a state-approved AI-teddy will be classified as child abuse. Making AI-teddy the perfect tool for the coming totalitarian State to indoctrinate children in atheist PC behavior from the cradle. As a parent this scares me so bad that my hair stands on end. I am sometimes tempted to pray for Mr. Bill to have a disabling stroke before he can damage our society any further.
Maybe this will put to rest the conspiracy theory that the moon shots were faked. Although I have always like the second half of that theory, namely that even though we never went to the moon, *when we got there* we found alien bases, and that's why we didn't go back. So I assume those bases are air-brushed out of the NASA photos???
Shouldn't autocoder be in the lineage of COBOL, and shouldn't anaconda descend from Python a couple years ago? Where is CPM's compiled basic? And COBOL, I know a lot of people making money today developing in a language that disappeared back in 2002.
There's an amazing amount of detail in the chart, but there is no mention of vendor proprietary languages, like IBMs transaction control language that TSO was written in, or the DEC Forms Control Language for transaction processing.
I think this task is impossibly complex and the knowledge has often disappeared with the death of a company here and there.
This kind of waste is made incredibly easy by a new republican type of government procurement called "performance based contracting". In the good old days, when the US did things like sending rockets to the moon, the government payed competitive salaries, and hired highly competent people. These competent people wrote highly competent specifications, then hired contractors to build things to those specs. The problem was that the contractors ability to rob the government blind was limited by the good judgement of the gov't employees. Now, under the republicans, gov't salaries and staff levels have been slashed. The only people left are old slobs waiting to retire. These people are hopelessly out of touch, and couldn't write a technical spec to save their lives. SO they have redfined procurement. NOW you just write a one-page request that says "Build us a computer system", then you open up your wallet, and let the contractor take whatever they want. In order to keep the cotnractor "honest" you offer them a 10% bonus on top of whatever rapacious profits they have already made if the system they build actually WORKS. And what has this gotten us - mind boggling incompetence and waste on a scale unprecedented in the history of mankind! Of course this is exactly what the republicans want. It gives them an excuse to "punish" government workers with further pay and staff cuts, and this in turn means even less interference in the shovelling of large buckets of tax dollars into the wallets of large corporations. The innocent get blamed and the guilty get rich.
For example - what about an Lshell. In the L shell, there would be a config file with mu;tiple synonyms in the users own language for all shell commands, and a set of full-word option flags that get aliased to the correct single-letter option flags for each command.
When a user types in a command, the Lshell does a best-guess fit to the list of synonyms, and only bothers the user if there is substantial ambiguity. It then resolves the command option to their correct flags, again best-guess fit, and then runs the appropriate binary.
Now that disks are huge, the filesystem should allow contiguous files for things like streaming video, it should have a metadata directory(supplied by both the user and a file scan) for each file that can be interactively searched to find files, and files should have an extensive Access Control List that goes way beyond the owner-group-world granularity.
All, and I mean ALL the system configuration files should be concatenated into a single file, with the sections labeled with their old file names and purposes, and there should be a single GUI tool to manage all of it.
The kernel should allow server processes to have fixed allocations of CPU, memory, and disk to guarantee deterministic response from server apps.
And there should be a UNIVERSAL package management system for software installation that works like debian apt-get with the red-carpet GUI.
UNIX was obviously originally written as a practical joke - a parody of an operating system, designed with the antithesis of a practical user interface. Instead of setting a goal of being intuitively obvious with command names, consistent in syntax, and using a generous set of defaults, UNIX instead uses a set of counter-intuitive command names, unique syntax for each command, destructive defaults, and no attempt to assist or complete commands for the user.
The kernel is equally disfunctional. Nothing is deterministic, there were originally no facilities for giving fixed quotas of CPU, memory or disk to processes. Only general levels of priority. THere were no interrupt handling, no ability to guarantee I/O rates by creating contiguous files. It was like a little childs kindergarten OS.
Some of these things have been partially compensated for in proprietary extensions by companies like SGI.
BTW- if Linux is ever going to come out of the geek closet and graduate to a widely used OS, it is going to have to divorce its cult-of-UNIX followers and drop the CLI...
And how have Nvidia (which was founded by refugee SGI engineers - and uses proprietray SGI technology that they got sued and had to pay for) and ATI advanced our culture??? Are people using them to model molecules to find analogs of antibiotics for resistant bacteria?? Are they studying the bonds of Helium nuclei to advance the development of fusion reactors?? NOOO - They're using the technology to blow up Police Cars with RPGs in Grand Theft Auto XIII or watch the bouncing boobies of the beach bimbos in Beach Volleyball VII. Rewards that come to the masses too easily only encourage sloth and decadence...
I was an SGI employee during the "glory days', and got to watch the company go downhill until I got laid off in the umpteenth wave of "rightsizing".
But in spite of the layoff, I love SGI. The only problem with SGI was that they were just too d@mn good at everything. They treated their employees like kings. Their pay was 10-20% above their competitors. They had free sodas and gourmet coffee for employees *before* the dot.com boom. Their machines were always the best-of-the-best. Most powerful CPUs, best graphics, most user friendly OS. Their suppot staff were highly trained degreed EEs who actually knew how the comuters worked down to the circuit level, not fresh-out-of-highschool dweebs with a 3-month certificate in micros@ftology.
What happended to SGI is an allegory for what has happened to America in general. Cheap mass-produced commodity junk has taken the profit out of the market, and forced everyone to lower their standards. Veyr much like the SouthPark episode "Something Wallmart this way comes."
Ultimately we will all end up buying $100 dollar commodity computers, not because they are good or powerful, but because they will be all we can afford on our $10/hr jobs as janitors of the Microsoft plumbing.
Go to your congresspersons (http://www.senate.gov/general/co ntact_information/senators_cfm.cfm) (http://www.house.gov/writerep /)
and say-
I propose a counter-bill, which would: 1) Cut the copyright protection for electronic media to 3 years - the copyright was only intended to allow the author to recoup fair and reasonable compensation, not to give them a monopoly in perpetuity. 2) Put the burden of copy protection on manufacturers, and prohibit the filing of lawsuits or prosecutions against any individual, unless that individual is selling pirate copies for a profit. 3) Ban the regulation or restriction of the sharing of digital content over the internet.
Oh, my, Gosh, this is incredible*** "Setting stupidity as a goal is counterproductive. I think it would be better if the goal were that computer operators learn the skills necessary to use something like Linux or BSD. The basics are something you only need to learn once - they are more like concepts - so if the computer operators learn how to use the computers properly, we will have a more realistic computing environment - because no matter how dumb you make something or how dumb you make a job description,... They ought to make theoretical physics easier... it's too hard!, or They ought to make Partial Differential Equations easier... they're too hard!. C'mon, people... get with it already."
It's no wonder linux is going nowhere. You UNIX nuts are incorrigible. You really do WANT computers to be hard to use.
Hey, why not replace those "lazy" electric starters on cars with hand cranks, that'll sell big. And food processors - lets go back to hand cranked meat grinders, the way it oughta be.
Give me a friggin break. Computers are a consumer appliance. They CAN be made easy to use, and only the ones that ARE easy to use will sell.
Layoffs in the IT industry went up 60% last year - because of rigid control-freak basket cases who won't update their technical skills.
UNIX is DEAD, and if linux doesn't unhook from the corpse of UNIX and become more user-friendly, it's going to end up in the junkheap of history with IBM OS/360 and UNIVAC EXEC-8.
Uhhh, have we ever seen a little tool called "Search" under Windows - you can search based on substring names, date of modification, and preselect the directories to search in,
WHne the results come up, you can highlight some or all of the files, then cut and paste them into an arbitrary directory.
This stuf has been around for almost 10 years (since Win 95).
You need to get out more...
The thing holding linux back is the cult of UNIX, the propeller-head weenies who think that a Command-line interface is the way God wanted computers to be used, and that it is immoral to make computers easy to use, since people need to earn the right to compute by memorizing arcane command syntax. Linux won't succeed in the mainstream until we learn a whole new paradigm. Repeat after me - "Ease of use is all that matters"; "GUI good, CLI bad"; For techies-"Any effort required by the user to learn the interface is two orders of magnitude more important than the effort expended by the developer in making it easy to use."
I suggest a whole new goal, not just GUI, but DWIM (Do What I Meant). Instead of making the user interface into a video game where the user plays against the machine in order to see if he/she can get what he/she wants out of it, make the user interface an AI Avatar whose mission in life is to do what the user WANTS, even if the user interface has to go to great lengths to overcome the user's ignorance of the technology....
Slashdot Mirror
Is this going to produce AI as in "I am bender, please insert girder"? Or as in, "Maybe the blue fairy will make me into a real boy so my mommy will love me". I eagerly await the former, and I dread the latter, since it will take us two seconds to pervert it into "Im gigolo Joe, Waddaya know?" Artificial intelligence for menial tasks is great. Artifical humanity will be perverted so fast it will make your head spin.
This is one of those enviro mental patient ideas that will be praised by the raise-vegetables-in-your-own-poop crowd and laughed at as ludicrous by the mainstream.
Wanna see grass as a *practical* fuel? Don't pelletize it - ferment it into methanol, and then use it to replace fossil fuels at the gas pump.
THEN its starts to make both economic sense AND have at least a feeble chance of happening in the real world...
Yes CRTs put out radiation - in the visible spectrum. It is the voltage of the electrons jumping between cathode and anode that determines the radiation given off at impact. CRT's are tuned to the visible spectrum. Spark plugs, however, operate at 35-40KV, which is right smack dab in the middle of the hard X-ray spectrum. All those cancers people have been blaming on air pollution and hydrocarbons - uh-uh. Chances are it's all due to spark plug radiation.
I'm switching to diesel.
I wish to coin a phrase, if no one else has done so.
We are now "Janitors of th Microsoft Plumbing"
And why are we viewed with such disdain? Imagine how you would feel about your plumber if you had to call him in two or three times a week to unclog your stopped toilet.
People expect computers to be a consumer appliance that "just works". We get a share of the blame for the appallingly low quality of shrink-wrapped software that is barely beta-test status when shipped to production users. (Test the software?- that's what users are for; Configuration Cotnrol? - that would dip into profits, let the DLLs crash, they can always reboot)
You want respect - install OSS software that doesn't crash, and get paid for adding value in the design process, instead of billing hours for reaming the t3rds out of the M$ toilet.
It is always amusing to me to read how M$ "invented" technologies that were in common use by other operating systems while Bill Gates was still wearing diapers. Both paging and swapping were used on IBM mainframes dating back to the mid 1960's. What windoze (and linux for that matter) could REALLY use is the ability to deterministically dedicate portions of system resources to particular processes.
Back when a 1 MIP, 1MB machine cost $1M, operators became highly skilled at managing workloads. Today everyone just throws oodles of RAM and disk at servers and lets the chips fall where they may , so to speak. It wouldn't be a bad idea to actually put a little thought into matching workloads with machine resources, and pro-actively matching them up by deliberate choice(For example - our company is running a prime-time ad at 9pm that features our URL, maybe that's a good time to shut down the normal file backup that happens then). Chaos theory is not always a good load balancer. But what am I saying, that's as outrageous as asking kids to put their money in the bank instead of buying video games...
While the religious side of me revels in the prospect that evolution may be proved impossible, the scientific side looks to the larger picture.
The Darwinian view of evolution through slow mutation was proved wrong long ago by the fossil record. This knowledge has been closely held for fear the press would get ahold of it and have a field day. But based on the fossil record, it appears that evolution only happens when small populations are isolated and run short on resources.
THERFORE - it is easy to theorize that genes have (at least) two maintenance modes programmed into them: ONE- we're thriving in a time of abundance - keep things from changing by repairng mistakes; TWO- We're dying off due to hostil conditions - quick, mutate and try to find a way to cope with this. This is why breeders can cause dogs, cats, birds, plants, to change into such bizarre forms in a few generations by breeding offspring back with parents - it simulates a dying population, and activates the evolve to escape mechanism.
This evolutionary ability must itself have had to develop by the slow route, which is why life developed so little diversity for the first few hundred million years. But then, once the evolutionary mechanism was created - it kicked in and species began springing up all over the place.IMHO anyway
WHile this particular development might not be sophisticated enough to read guilt or innocence of a past crime, it might be useful in pre-emptively avoiding destructive behavior.
You could implant a chip that gives electic shocks to , say , a convicted sex offender if they start to get an 3r3ction. Or an alcoholic if they think about drinking alcohol, or a democrat if they think about taxing the rich... uh, hmmmm, OK this *could* get intrusive.
Crypto-phalluses !?!?!?
Is that like a chastity belt with a public key infrastructure?
I am a firm believer in the torture of terrorists, but with a twist.
Bind the terrorists hand and foot, hang them upside down from a hook, then...
Let the families of their victims into the room with blow-torches. Film it, and then put it on
El-Jizz-ear-ache TV. With a narrator voicing over the screams - "If you kill someone for Bin Laden, you're not going to heaven, you're going to personally supply the weiner for the roast at 'camp toasty', where your victims families will be invited to burn your b@lls off"
Then see how many recruits *that* gets them...
Hmm, the responses I've received pretty much prove my point. You guys ARE members of the cult of UNIX. A cult that wishes that intelligence MATTERED in our society, that desperately wants to find a way to create a meritocracy where high intelligence will make them the elite instead of socially maladjusted misfits. Maybe we could have a truce. Let those who want to see Linux succeed in the mainstream create a code thread that is easy to use, called maybe Linux-S for soft. And then have a variant with all the useful GUI tools removed, called Linux-H for hard. Then the inside joke for hard-core Linerds could be to ask whether your distro was soft or hard...
Ah, the plot is working then. You see, right-wing fundamentalists aren't really Christians. They are brain-dead stooges, whose policies are the opposite of the teachings of Jesus. (Jesus said He had no kingdom in this world, so how can we be a 'christian' nation? Jesus said that when you pray you should pray in secret instead of showing off in front of men - so how would that justify public prayer in schools? Jesus said to give to all who ask from you - so how does this condone cutting aid to needy families? Jesus said to forgive those who persecute you - so how does this justify bombing them? Jesus looked at a taxed coin and said render unto ceasar the things that are ceasar's - so how does this justify tax cuts for the rich?) The fundamentalists are being used like an army of satanic zombies to lull the Church into quiescence while the mechanisms of totalitarian domination and control are being assembled (for use against terrorists, of course). Won't they be surprised when those systems are turned against them!
Wow, that was a long way to go to make a dig at Christianity. But you have made a logical fallacy. If Bill is evil, and he is the antichrist, then the antichrist is evil. Therefore, the opposite of the antichrist - Christ, would be good by implication. However, Christianity, the religion that claims to follow Christ, has been unfaithful to his teachings, and has committed murder, robbery, and genocide. This may imply that many followers of Christ are evil, but the followers of many other faiths have committed similar acts (you know- somehting about the two towers), therefore this more likely only implies that humans are inherently hypocritical, not that Christ was evil. The point about Bill being the "antichrist", though, wasn't to call him the opposite of Jesus, but to imply that he is buidling the infrastructure to enable a totalitarian and oppressive world state. And non-Christians probably won't enjoy geting flocked by it any more than the flock does.
You missed an important point in your rant. ...
It isn't just that Linux/free BSD adherents are squabbling children. NO, NO, NO. They are squabbling adherents of a religious cult. In particular, the cult of UNIX. These people are cut from the same cloth as the old mainframe system operators. They believe that it is MORALLY WRONG for a computr system to be easy to use. Why write a GUI that lets a user choose from a scrollable list of options, when you can make them use a command line interface where they have to memorize the syntax of 25 option flags. If you make it easy to use, the commercial value of memorizing command options evaporates, and they might have to get REAL jobs. And if helpful souls corrupt your favorite open source package by creating GUI tools to configure and run it - rewrite the applicaiton to break all the GUI tools! The only reason for having a GUI on Linux at all is to seduce Windows users into trying Linux, knowing full well that to get anywhere they will HAVE to learn the CLI -bwahahahahahaha! I have been a faithful Linux devotee for 8 years, and with about every second release, my window manager changes, requiring me to relearn all the configuration settings, or the multimedia viewer I had been using gets dropped, and I have to reinstall it by hand from tarballs, or the CD burner software disappears and I have to find an alternate.
I will never stop loving or using Linux, BUT, for heavens sake guys, GET RID OF THE CLI, and STOP REINVENTING THE WHEEL!
Repeat after me - "Ease of use is all that matters", "Ease of use is all that matters", "Ease of use is all that matters","Ease of use is all that matters",
Personnaly, I view the development of an AI Teddy Bear as further evidence that Bill Gates is destined to be the antichrist. IMHO, he is one of the few succesful people I have seen who is so pathetically brain-damaged that he really really thinks that people want to do away with all human contact and replace it with digital interaction. Just think, AI teddy will of course have to incorporate digital rights management. Which will prevent parents from providing custom input into the raising of their children. Only State-approved, licensed parenting algorithms will be allowed. And of course, *endangering* a child by failure to provide them with a state-approved AI-teddy will be classified as child abuse. Making AI-teddy the perfect tool for the coming totalitarian State to indoctrinate children in atheist PC behavior from the cradle. As a parent this scares me so bad that my hair stands on end. I am sometimes tempted to pray for Mr. Bill to have a disabling stroke before he can damage our society any further.
If nothing else, Apollo gave us "Tang" and "Space Food Sticks" (am I the only person on earth that liked them?)
Maybe this will put to rest the conspiracy theory that the moon shots were faked. Although I have always like the second half of that theory, namely that even though we never went to the moon, *when we got there* we found alien bases, and that's why we didn't go back. So I assume those bases are air-brushed out of the NASA photos???
Shouldn't autocoder be in the lineage of COBOL, and shouldn't anaconda descend from Python a couple years ago? Where is CPM's compiled basic? And COBOL, I know a lot of people making money today developing in a language that disappeared back in 2002.
There's an amazing amount of detail in the chart, but there is no mention of vendor proprietary languages, like IBMs transaction control language that TSO was written in, or the DEC Forms Control Language for transaction processing.
I think this task is impossibly complex and the knowledge has often disappeared with the death of a company here and there.
This kind of waste is made incredibly easy by a new republican type of government procurement called "performance based contracting". In the good old days, when the US did things like sending rockets to the moon, the government payed competitive salaries, and hired highly competent people. These competent people wrote highly competent specifications, then hired contractors to build things to those specs. The problem was that the contractors ability to rob the government blind was limited by the good judgement of the gov't employees. Now, under the republicans, gov't salaries and staff levels have been slashed. The only people left are old slobs waiting to retire. These people are hopelessly out of touch, and couldn't write a technical spec to save their lives. SO they have redfined procurement. NOW you just write a one-page request that says "Build us a computer system", then you open up your wallet, and let the contractor take whatever they want. In order to keep the cotnractor "honest" you offer them a 10% bonus on top of whatever rapacious profits they have already made if the system they build actually WORKS. And what has this gotten us - mind boggling incompetence and waste on a scale unprecedented in the history of mankind! Of course this is exactly what the republicans want. It gives them an excuse to "punish" government workers with further pay and staff cuts, and this in turn means even less interference in the shovelling of large buckets of tax dollars into the wallets of large corporations. The innocent get blamed and the guilty get rich.
For example - what about an Lshell. In the L shell, there would be a config file with mu;tiple synonyms in the users own language for all shell commands, and a set of full-word option flags that get aliased to the correct single-letter option flags for each command. When a user types in a command, the Lshell does a best-guess fit to the list of synonyms, and only bothers the user if there is substantial ambiguity. It then resolves the command option to their correct flags, again best-guess fit, and then runs the appropriate binary. Now that disks are huge, the filesystem should allow contiguous files for things like streaming video, it should have a metadata directory(supplied by both the user and a file scan) for each file that can be interactively searched to find files, and files should have an extensive Access Control List that goes way beyond the owner-group-world granularity. All, and I mean ALL the system configuration files should be concatenated into a single file, with the sections labeled with their old file names and purposes, and there should be a single GUI tool to manage all of it. The kernel should allow server processes to have fixed allocations of CPU, memory, and disk to guarantee deterministic response from server apps. And there should be a UNIVERSAL package management system for software installation that works like debian apt-get with the red-carpet GUI.
UNIX was obviously originally written as a practical joke - a parody of an operating system, designed with the antithesis of a practical user interface. Instead of setting a goal of being intuitively obvious with command names, consistent in syntax, and using a generous set of defaults, UNIX instead uses a set of counter-intuitive command names, unique syntax for each command, destructive defaults, and no attempt to assist or complete commands for the user. The kernel is equally disfunctional. Nothing is deterministic, there were originally no facilities for giving fixed quotas of CPU, memory or disk to processes. Only general levels of priority. THere were no interrupt handling, no ability to guarantee I/O rates by creating contiguous files. It was like a little childs kindergarten OS. Some of these things have been partially compensated for in proprietary extensions by companies like SGI. BTW- if Linux is ever going to come out of the geek closet and graduate to a widely used OS, it is going to have to divorce its cult-of-UNIX followers and drop the CLI...
And how have Nvidia (which was founded by refugee SGI engineers - and uses proprietray SGI technology that they got sued and had to pay for) and ATI advanced our culture??? Are people using them to model molecules to find analogs of antibiotics for resistant bacteria?? Are they studying the bonds of Helium nuclei to advance the development of fusion reactors?? NOOO - They're using the technology to blow up Police Cars with RPGs in Grand Theft Auto XIII or watch the bouncing boobies of the beach bimbos in Beach Volleyball VII. Rewards that come to the masses too easily only encourage sloth and decadence...
I was an SGI employee during the "glory days', and got to watch the company go downhill until I got laid off in the umpteenth wave of "rightsizing". But in spite of the layoff, I love SGI. The only problem with SGI was that they were just too d@mn good at everything. They treated their employees like kings. Their pay was 10-20% above their competitors. They had free sodas and gourmet coffee for employees *before* the dot.com boom. Their machines were always the best-of-the-best. Most powerful CPUs, best graphics, most user friendly OS. Their suppot staff were highly trained degreed EEs who actually knew how the comuters worked down to the circuit level, not fresh-out-of-highschool dweebs with a 3-month certificate in micros@ftology. What happended to SGI is an allegory for what has happened to America in general. Cheap mass-produced commodity junk has taken the profit out of the market, and forced everyone to lower their standards. Veyr much like the SouthPark episode "Something Wallmart this way comes." Ultimately we will all end up buying $100 dollar commodity computers, not because they are good or powerful, but because they will be all we can afford on our $10/hr jobs as janitors of the Microsoft plumbing.
Go to your congresspersonso ntact_information /senators_cfm.cfm)p /)
(http://www.senate.gov/general/c
(http://www.house.gov/writere
and say-
I propose a counter-bill, which would:
1) Cut the copyright protection for electronic media to 3 years - the copyright was only intended to allow the author to recoup fair and reasonable compensation, not to give them a monopoly in perpetuity.
2) Put the burden of copy protection on manufacturers, and prohibit the filing of lawsuits or prosecutions against any individual, unless that individual is selling pirate copies for a profit.
3) Ban the regulation or restriction of the sharing of digital content over the internet.
Let's put the Free back in Freedom!
Oh, my, Gosh, this is incredible*** "Setting stupidity as a goal is counterproductive. I think it would be better if the goal were that computer operators learn the skills necessary to use something like Linux or BSD. The basics are something you only need to learn once - they are more like concepts - so if the computer operators learn how to use the computers properly, we will have a more realistic computing environment - because no matter how dumb you make something or how dumb you make a job description, ... They ought to make theoretical physics easier... it's too hard!, or They ought to make Partial Differential Equations easier... they're too hard!. C'mon, people... get with it already."
It's no wonder linux is going nowhere. You UNIX nuts are incorrigible. You really do WANT computers to be hard to use.
Hey, why not replace those "lazy" electric starters on cars with hand cranks, that'll sell big. And food processors - lets go back to hand cranked meat grinders, the way it oughta be.
Give me a friggin break. Computers are a consumer appliance. They CAN be made easy to use, and only the ones that ARE easy to use will sell.
Layoffs in the IT industry went up 60% last year - because of rigid control-freak basket cases who won't update their technical skills.
UNIX is DEAD, and if linux doesn't unhook from the corpse of UNIX and become more user-friendly, it's going to end up in the junkheap of history with IBM OS/360 and UNIVAC EXEC-8.
Uhhh, have we ever seen a little tool called "Search" under Windows - you can search based on substring names, date of modification, and preselect the directories to search in, WHne the results come up, you can highlight some or all of the files, then cut and paste them into an arbitrary directory. This stuf has been around for almost 10 years (since Win 95). You need to get out more...
The thing holding linux back is the cult of UNIX, the propeller-head weenies who think that a Command-line interface is the way God wanted computers to be used, and that it is immoral to make computers easy to use, since people need to earn the right to compute by memorizing arcane command syntax. Linux won't succeed in the mainstream until we learn a whole new paradigm. Repeat after me - "Ease of use is all that matters"; "GUI good, CLI bad"; For techies-"Any effort required by the user to learn the interface is two orders of magnitude more important than the effort expended by the developer in making it easy to use." I suggest a whole new goal, not just GUI, but DWIM (Do What I Meant). Instead of making the user interface into a video game where the user plays against the machine in order to see if he/she can get what he/she wants out of it, make the user interface an AI Avatar whose mission in life is to do what the user WANTS, even if the user interface has to go to great lengths to overcome the user's ignorance of the technology....