except that "foo" would return an error message ("foo: command not found"), while the colon wouldn't. Well, it's more like a noop in assembler, but it's still a valid shell command. If you relly want a shell synonim to ":", then use "true". "true" does nothing more but return a zero as exit value, which is the same as what ":" does.
I am an old-school electronic engineer, I loved to play with electronics already in primary school. The truth is, the bar has been raised considerably nowadays. The entry into electronics has been made way too fucking high with SMD devices. They are totally unsuitable for home/hobby experiments and prototyping, they are way too small for most people to solder (without a microscope) and the PCBs are just impossible for a home enthusiast to construct.
Moreover, interfacing computers has become much more complex: previously you vould connect to a 8 or 16 bit address and data bus, you could still manage that. You could manage with RS232 and printer ports with not too complex microcontroller codes. Nowadays you have to deal with PCI, USB etc.
Yes, it all can be done, but it definitely is out of the possibility of us mortals.
Re:Mind shaped by evolution
on
AI in Sci-Fi
·
· Score: 1
I can't agree. To me, self-preservation is the first sign of intelligence (the "I" in "AI"). If a being is not willing to preserve it's existence, then, in my mind, it's not sentient, because it's not able to attach a value to it's existence, i.e. it's not aware of it.
If one is able to evaluate it's existence, which is the realm in which selfconsciousness manifests itself (this notion would be another fundamental pre-requisite for sentience), then it means that it's not aware of it.
Hardly a genius idea: the guy doesn't even consider using the digital output of the CD player. Sure, you can record the analog signal, but the whole point is to create an identical copy of the sound signal.
Let me put it this way: I always managed to install and configure FreeBSD, each single time I did it. I was also rather succesful with Slackware. On the other hand, I am having some realy stupid problems with RedHat Advanced Server installation and configuration, and what's worse, their support (standard license) isn't very helpful. [grudging rant]You'd think that for US$1000+ they would band over backwards to fix this issue.[/grudging rant]
I dunno.. first the NT vulnerability and the fact that it's too broken by design to be fixed, and now this. From a company with such a brilliant track record in OS and patch quality, I am truly surprised.
Imagine if one of the BSD's had Linux's hype behind it, but with *BSD's existing code-review and QA systems
And the BSD documentation! Anyone who used FreeBSD can vouch for the incredible job these guys did in documenting everything clearly and with examples! Sorry but Linux is so much behind in this respect (you wouldn't know it if all you ever used is in fact Linux).
It seemed a bit more consistent than the RedHat of the same version. They had a table showing the differences between RedHat x.x (sorry, I forgot what version was) and Sun Linux 1.0. (again, I am not 100% sure it was 1.0). What I mean is that all the libraries, the compiler and the apps seemed to work together OK. This was no doubt due to having had the time and go through the problems the RH version had. Basically, they added a round of bugfixing, but that's about it. There were a few system-level apps available only in Sun's distro, but I forgot what they were. Obviously nothing earth-shattering...
Well, there's at least one thing you can leave the marketoids to worry about. I honestly often wonder what the f*ck are they paid for, expecially in my company (large mobile phone company).
All this would do is move the potential for damage from the media to the shell.
That's not entirely correct. The way CDs/DVDs work is that they actually focus the laser ray with a little but powerful lens, a few millimeters above the CD/DVD. Small optical obstacles that are somewhat removed (distanced) from the focal point, which is the surface of the media will interfere much less with the signal than it would do if on the surface itself.
That's exactly why dual layer DVDs can work! You focus the laser about half a millimeter lower in order to read the lower layer, while the middle layer doesn't interfere at all.
I am very well aware of the rendundant coding used to provide for a certain amount of resliance of the data, both on CDs and DVDs, but at a certain point when the data density becomes this high, I would imagine that the media would lose data when you just touch it.
One thing that would put me at ease is a kind of media that is completely hermetically protected by a transparent plastic shell. Perhaps a stationary disk while the reader is the one to rotate. That way you wouldn't even need the hole for the rotating spindle.
OTOH, with 30 GB, I can imagine I could put my whole collection of classical CD music on 5 UDOs, uncompressed. Or they will think about some abherration such as AudioDVD, so that the whole 30 GB will be just enough for some 60 minutes of music....
"You know that times are stange when the best rapper in the world is white, the best golfer in the world is black, the Americas cup is held by landlocked Sweden, the French are accusing the Americans of arrogance and Germany is steadfstly refusing to go to war."
That would be Switzerland: they won the cup this year.
Excellent points! I agree, of course. In fact, in support of your point on Japan, it's well known that Japan as a country has been a rether barren and poor in natural resources. Japan hasn't had a lot of steel, ever, so it seems to be natural that they spent a lot of time to prepare the blade of their katana swords by hammering the blade and then folding it and more hammering and folding, until the crystal structure in the steel would become regular and confer to the blade incredible toughness and maintain the sharpness better than any contemporary weapon. Conclusion: to make the best or the little steel they had, they had to develop technology.
Anyway, thank you for compleneting my thoughts with your excellent thoughts. Good stuff on Slashdot, from time to time.
Will they? Problem is, there is not scientific research in the field of how much relaxed your protection is vs. how much this helps adoption of your product. Let me clarify: the relatively easy mod-chip-ability of the Playstation 1 and 2 seem to have contributed to the popularity of these consoles. Sure, a modded Playstation can accept copied game CDs, but in the overall picture it might have paid off for Sony. Another example: Microsoft products such as the Windows-es and Office. It appears that a relatively easy copy-ability of these products has certainly increased their ubiquitousness, and perhaps as a result of this, generated more profit for Microsoft than it would have otherwise.
Actually, I can imagine that Microsoft perhaps has done some research in this regard, and that they would never publish the results if they did confirm the supposition outlined above.
I would tend to disagree with you, in the sense that I think there is a viable market for these "gadgets" outside of Japan, too.
The reason why the Japanese have built them is that they had the vision, and vision transforms into action directed towards a goal. Those anime cartoons were just a manifestation of this technological vision, but not the only one. If you just visit Japan, you understand how high-tech-centric that society actually is.
There are other technological visions, too: in Finland, for example, we are very much directed towards a connected future (Finland has the greatest number of permanently-connected Internet nodes/websites in the world per capita, and the highest penetration of mobile phones in the market). Here you can even pay in some shops using your mobile phone, all the banking, investing etc. is done via the Internet etc.
The United States has a different technological vision yet: research of new materials, propulsion, space exploration, semiconductor technology. I think it's the most balanced, but this is really just in the eye of the beholder.
I don't see why you would get flamed. It's a much less controversial issue than, for example, Iraq.
Back to "Spirited"; while I would agree that there have been better Miyazaki movies, still, I think it's better than "Shrek". Then again, I also think that "Monsters" was better than "Shrek" and in some ways better than some of Miyazaki movies, too ("Porco" being somewhat of a low point in his career). So you see, it's all in the eye of the beholder.
Damn all this Miyazaki talk, I'm going to pop "Totoro" in the VCR, I really got an appetite for a good flick:o)
I agree, "Tonari no Totoro" is a real treat! And it's really OK for the whole family (including a 34-year old engineer). It's one of those movies that really makes you feel good, and you're not ashamed about it. Well, I'm not.
"Mononoke Hime" is a bit gory, as you say, and yet, there is so much beauty there. Just think of the majestic elegance of the wolf gods, for example. I still have to find a cartoon that would match the glorious, powerful and elegant animation in "Mononoke".
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you, regardless of the motivation (karmawhore).
Now, I see that among those original Mac icons there's this four-leaf thingy. What was that symbolizing, anyone?
except that "foo" would return an error message ("foo: command not found"), while the colon wouldn't. Well, it's more like a noop in assembler, but it's still a valid shell command. If you relly want a shell synonim to ":", then use "true". "true" does nothing more but return a zero as exit value, which is the same as what ":" does.
I am an old-school electronic engineer, I loved to play with electronics already in primary school. The truth is, the bar has been raised considerably nowadays. The entry into electronics has been made way too fucking high with SMD devices. They are totally unsuitable for home/hobby experiments and prototyping, they are way too small for most people to solder (without a microscope) and the PCBs are just impossible for a home enthusiast to construct.
Moreover, interfacing computers has become much more complex: previously you vould connect to a 8 or 16 bit address and data bus, you could still manage that. You could manage with RS232 and printer ports with not too complex microcontroller codes. Nowadays you have to deal with PCI, USB etc.
Yes, it all can be done, but it definitely is out of the possibility of us mortals.
I can't agree. To me, self-preservation is the first sign of intelligence (the "I" in "AI"). If a being is not willing to preserve it's existence, then, in my mind, it's not sentient, because it's not able to attach a value to it's existence, i.e. it's not aware of it.
If one is able to evaluate it's existence, which is the realm in which selfconsciousness manifests itself (this notion would be another fundamental pre-requisite for sentience), then it means that it's not aware of it.
Talk about "just asking for jokes"...
Hardly a genius idea: the guy doesn't even consider using the digital output of the CD player. Sure, you can record the analog signal, but the whole point is to create an identical copy of the sound signal.
I plan on using the (copper) digital-out on my CD player to connect to the digital-in of my audigy soundcard.
Such a simple solution!
What is strange about that? You just got lucky, and with a product that is not actually directly related to RHAS.
Let me put it this way: I always managed to install and configure FreeBSD, each single time I did it. I was also rather succesful with Slackware. On the other hand, I am having some realy stupid problems with RedHat Advanced Server installation and configuration, and what's worse, their support (standard license) isn't very helpful. [grudging rant]You'd think that for US$1000+ they would band over backwards to fix this issue.[/grudging rant]
I dunno.. first the NT vulnerability and the fact that it's too broken by design to be fixed, and now this.
From a company with such a brilliant track record in OS and patch quality, I am truly surprised.
Imagine if one of the BSD's had Linux's hype behind it, but with *BSD's existing code-review and QA systems
And the BSD documentation! Anyone who used FreeBSD can vouch for the incredible job these guys did in documenting everything clearly and with examples! Sorry but Linux is so much behind in this respect (you wouldn't know it if all you ever used is in fact Linux).
It seemed a bit more consistent than the RedHat of the same version. They had a table showing the differences between RedHat x.x (sorry, I forgot what version was) and Sun Linux 1.0. (again, I am not 100% sure it was 1.0). What I mean is that all the libraries, the compiler and the apps seemed to work together OK. This was no doubt due to having had the time and go through the problems the RH version had. Basically, they added a round of bugfixing, but that's about it.
There were a few system-level apps available only in Sun's distro, but I forgot what they were. Obviously nothing earth-shattering...
Well, there's at least one thing you can leave the marketoids to worry about. I honestly often wonder what the f*ck are they paid for, expecially in my company (large mobile phone company).
All this would do is move the potential for damage from the media to the shell.
That's not entirely correct. The way CDs/DVDs work is that they actually focus the laser ray with a little but powerful lens, a few millimeters above the CD/DVD. Small optical obstacles that are somewhat removed (distanced) from the focal point, which is the surface of the media will interfere much less with the signal than it would do if on the surface itself.
That's exactly why dual layer DVDs can work! You focus the laser about half a millimeter lower in order to read the lower layer, while the middle layer doesn't interfere at all.
I am aware of those, but I have noticed the first (very fine) grains of dust inside some of the minidisks I have. I guess it's inevitable.
I am very well aware of the rendundant coding used to provide for a certain amount of resliance of the data, both on CDs and DVDs, but at a certain point when the data density becomes this high, I would imagine that the media would lose data when you just touch it.
One thing that would put me at ease is a kind of media that is completely hermetically protected by a transparent plastic shell. Perhaps a stationary disk while the reader is the one to rotate. That way you wouldn't even need the hole for the rotating spindle.
OTOH, with 30 GB, I can imagine I could put my whole collection of classical CD music on 5 UDOs, uncompressed. Or they will think about some abherration such as AudioDVD, so that the whole 30 GB will be just enough for some 60 minutes of music....
"You know that times are stange when the best rapper in the world is white, the best golfer in the world is black, the Americas cup is held by landlocked Sweden, the French are accusing the Americans of arrogance and Germany is steadfstly refusing to go to war."
That would be Switzerland: they won the cup this year.
Excellent points! I agree, of course.
In fact, in support of your point on Japan, it's well known that Japan as a country has been a rether barren and poor in natural resources. Japan hasn't had a lot of steel, ever, so it seems to be natural that they spent a lot of time to prepare the blade of their katana swords by hammering the blade and then folding it and more hammering and folding, until the crystal structure in the steel would become regular and confer to the blade incredible toughness and maintain the sharpness better than any contemporary weapon. Conclusion: to make the best or the little steel they had, they had to develop technology.
Anyway, thank you for compleneting my thoughts with your excellent thoughts. Good stuff on Slashdot, from time to time.
..if, of course, AMD does not follow suit.
Will they? Problem is, there is not scientific research in the field of how much relaxed your protection is vs. how much this helps adoption of your product. Let me clarify: the relatively easy mod-chip-ability of the Playstation 1 and 2 seem to have contributed to the popularity of these consoles. Sure, a modded Playstation can accept copied game CDs, but in the overall picture it might have paid off for Sony.
Another example: Microsoft products such as the Windows-es and Office. It appears that a relatively easy copy-ability of these products has certainly increased their ubiquitousness, and perhaps as a result of this, generated more profit for Microsoft than it would have otherwise.
Actually, I can imagine that Microsoft perhaps has done some research in this regard, and that they would never publish the results if they did confirm the supposition outlined above.
I would tend to disagree with you, in the sense that I think there is a viable market for these "gadgets" outside of Japan, too.
The reason why the Japanese have built them is that they had the vision, and vision transforms into action directed towards a goal. Those anime cartoons were just a manifestation of this technological vision, but not the only one. If you just visit Japan, you understand how high-tech-centric that society actually is.
There are other technological visions, too: in Finland, for example, we are very much directed towards a connected future (Finland has the greatest number of permanently-connected Internet nodes/websites in the world per capita, and the highest penetration of mobile phones in the market). Here you can even pay in some shops using your mobile phone, all the banking, investing etc. is done via the Internet etc.
The United States has a different technological vision yet: research of new materials, propulsion, space exploration, semiconductor technology. I think it's the most balanced, but this is really just in the eye of the beholder.
I don't think Redhat has EOL'd rh7 or rh8 yet.
You don't think? RedHat Linux 7.0 is EOL in 6 days from today. And RedHat Linux 8.0 will be dead at the end of this year.
No shit, I have recently been promoted to "design engineer 2" which is equivalent (so they tell me) to senior engineer.
Design engineer 2 ? Dunno. It just doesn't sound right.
I don't see why you would get flamed. It's a much less controversial issue than, for example, Iraq.
:o)
Back to "Spirited"; while I would agree that there have been better Miyazaki movies, still, I think it's better than "Shrek".
Then again, I also think that "Monsters" was better than "Shrek" and in some ways better than some of Miyazaki movies, too ("Porco" being somewhat of a low point in his career). So you see, it's all in the eye of the beholder.
Damn all this Miyazaki talk, I'm going to pop "Totoro" in the VCR, I really got an appetite for a good flick
Actually, he was bood off. The music was nowhere as loud as the boos.
Man, did he make an asshole of himself.
I agree, "Tonari no Totoro" is a real treat! And it's really OK for the whole family (including a 34-year old engineer). It's one of those movies that really makes you feel good, and you're not ashamed about it. Well, I'm not.
"Mononoke Hime" is a bit gory, as you say, and yet, there is so much beauty there. Just think of the majestic elegance of the wolf gods, for example. I still have to find a cartoon that would match the glorious, powerful and elegant animation in "Mononoke".