You just don't like the point he makes, because it's true.
You really believe that? Were the civil rights protesters during the 60's hypocritical because they wore clothes manufactured by corporations controlled by white people? Were those that fought in the American Revolutionary war hypocritical because they used weapons that were copies of British design?
Perhaps you could get congress to pass a law stating that free speech should be limited to the use of technologies not controlled by corporations, thereby effectively eliminating the "problem" of free speech altogether.
I think you are looking at the problem through the lens of a programmer and missing the larger picture.
Self programming is the context of this discussion does not mean the computer will code up a program in "C", compile it, debug it, etc. That's just silly.
What it means is that the machine will be able to interpret, infer and learn from vast amounts of information made available to it, without having logic coded to answer specific questions.
If I ask you who the previous president of the US was, do you write up a quick program, compile and debug it in your brain and finally run it to give the answer? No, your brain stores millions upon millions of relationships between concepts you've encountered and is able to quickly produce and answer through an associative process. No programming required. That is exactly what the aim of the systems in this discussion is.
Granted, programming will be required to build these systems initially. However, once human level intelligence (AGI) is achieved (even if it's just in a specific domain such as information processing), is it so hard to imagine that no more programming will be required, since by definition AGI implies that it has achieved the same level of ability to understand the problem domain as well as any human?
As a cognitive scientist (if that is indeed true), you really should do a little more research (beyond Hofstadter).
AI (AGI in particular) does not necessarily imply imitating humans. It's a bit of a homophobic slant to think that intelligence equates to the human implementation of intelligence. If a machine can exhibit the main features of intelligence (inference, learning, goal seeking, planning, etc, and other factors depending on your definition of intelligence) then it is by definition, intelligent.
Your "Who was the cowboy in Washington?" argument is a straw-man, as you can see from the posts here, most humans didn't even get the subtle references. Watson actually did pretty well in putting together vague references as this is an integral part of the Jeopardy Q/A scheme, even to the point that it was able to best the two top humans at doing this.
To imply that AI has not made advances over the years is pure hogwash. Were capabilities such as Deep Blue, Watson, Siri, et al available 50 years ago? I think not. AI has been steadily advancing over the years, despite not living up to the hype and despite not yet achieving true "human level intelligence" (note, this is vastly different than imitating humans which by some measures fall far short of intelligence). In case you've been living in a cave, advances in AI have been accelerating over the last decade and the nexus between computing power and the various disciplines of cognitive science (neuroscience, psychology, biology, etc as well as their computational counterparts) is producing advances at a much more accelerated pace.
You go right ahead and continue reading Hofstadter and his ilk, while the rest of us continue pushing the envelope of machine IQ and one day maybe (probably within the next 10-20 years), you can continue this debate with your cell phone (or whatever personal device will have replaced it by then).
I suppose it would be more "pure" to eschew anything produced by a corporation while protesting their influence, but then the protesters would need to carry around stone tablets and chisels to communicate, all while wearing animal skins (or protesting in the nude). However, I see no hypocrisy in using all available technologies at their disposal to make their point. After all, the protests are not against technology, but rather corporate greed, government corruption and the undue influence of power and money on the political system.
Perhaps (as your post seems to infer) everyone should just STFU and accept the wonderful economic condition the US is in, due in no small part by the factors mentioned above, eh? I'm sure "Corporate America" thanks you for your support.
Eclipse's memory usage has to do with it's OSGi underpinnings.
I'm not sure it does; Eclipse was still a bloated pig before it was switched to OSGi. The problem really seems to be if you have a lot of plugin modules loaded (like I have...)
Sure it does. The reason loading a lot of plugins tends to increase memory utilization so much has a lot to do with the overhead of the bundling architecture of OSGi. The plugin logic itself may not eat up that much memory, but all the API calls, artifacts and compontents needed to load or activate an OSGi bundle introduce a lot of overhead. Mind you the overhead is justified (IMO) because of the flexibility it provides, but it's definitely not insignificant. Having said that, I don't think it's as bad as some would make it seem since the amount of time it takes to launch Visual Studio and opening a project of any significant size is comparable and VS provides no where near the plugin flexibility that OSGi does.
Regarding pre-OSGi Eclipse (pre - version 3.0), I agree it was a pig. However it was a completely different animal and it's internal complexity had gotten out of hand (hence the switch to OSGi) which was one of the main reasons for its poor performance (along with a much less performant JVM, slower machines, less memory, etc - we're talking around 8 years ago).
Eclipse's memory usage has to do with it's OSGi underpinnings. OSGi is a fantastic, but very complex dynamic module platform. I agree it has performance issues, but it's more a problem with OSGi than with Java. Besides, Eclipse uses SWT, not Swing for it's GUI.
My guess is Oracle will be replacing (or at least modifying) Swing for desktop apps to leverage JavaFX.
The rest of my comment is not directed toward you, but toward all the Java haters here.
For those who wish to bash Java's performance, all I can say is you obviously don't know what you are doing. I've been on a team developing a very extensive customer portal team that supports nearly 5 million customers with hundreds of thousands of hits/day (not just page flips, but real n-tier transactions hitting multiple database backends and web services, all either Weblogic or Tomcat J2EE app servers).
My development time is split just about evenly between Java, C# and C++ and I think each has it's strengths and weaknesses and each is a good tool to have in your toolbox. Bashing any of these languages is more a reflection of the ignorance of the commentor than a reflection of the language itself.
Just because Java doesn't require you to free the memory you allocate through object instantiations, doesn't mean you don't have to ever think about memory at all. You still have to be judicious in allocating objects. Techniques like reusing already allocated objects rather than creating new ones can make a huge difference in performance.
Most likely Samsung was trying to figure out what the corner configuration should be, he referred to his 18-year old TI-30 Stat calculator and told the designers to use it as an example.
Narrative I want to push? What the hell is that supposed to mean? Because I pose what I believe is a reasonable question about potential renewable energy sources never making it to market I'm pushing a narrative? I guess I should just STFU and not ask questions, eh?
The statement , “It is still unclear if it could be used for efficient energy generation. It’s too early to tell.” FTFA tells me it has potential for this purpose.
Talk to your right-wingers and libertarians about that before griping about science.
Where in my post did I gripe about science? My (rhetorical) question was intended to point out that there are many, many ways (indeed, which science has shown us) to deal with our energy issues, yet somehow we still can't get them past the laboratories. As you can see for the replies, there are many reasons why this is the case, very few of which have anything to do with science.
are you asking why people might find it difficult to put big oil/coal companies out of business?
I don't think going out of business is in the cards for them. They'll just switch to whatever technology is most profitable. BP didn't change their slogan to "Beyond Petroleum" for no reason.
Every other day there is a story on/. about some new technique or material that can solve the energy crisis. This has been going on for years. Why do these never, ever come to fruition?
Android on (or instead of) the desktop is soon to come. The desktop will soon be touch enabled running some follow on to ice-cream sandwich that works well on phones, tablets and the desktop.
Don't think so? Take a look at Windows 8 if you don't think the desktop and touch screen technologies are quickly merging.
While Oracles' legal team is trying to slow down Andriod, its getting it's Java ME inline with SE and JavaFX to make a run for the mobile/tablet/desktop itself.
Thank you. I couldn't agree more. The anti-java rhetoric is always so thick here I've (almost) gotten to the point I skip reading/. comments on java related articles because of the same old FUD.
Slashdot Mirror
You just don't like the point he makes, because it's true.
You really believe that? Were the civil rights protesters during the 60's hypocritical because they wore clothes manufactured by corporations controlled by white people? Were those that fought in the American Revolutionary war hypocritical because they used weapons that were copies of British design?
Perhaps you could get congress to pass a law stating that free speech should be limited to the use of technologies not controlled by corporations, thereby effectively eliminating the "problem" of free speech altogether.
I see. You are OK with the country going down the tubes as long as it doesn't impact your retirement. Gotcha. Thanks for playing.
Self programming is the context of this discussion does not mean the computer will code up a program in "C", compile it, debug it, etc. That's just silly.
What it means is that the machine will be able to interpret, infer and learn from vast amounts of information made available to it, without having logic coded to answer specific questions.
If I ask you who the previous president of the US was, do you write up a quick program, compile and debug it in your brain and finally run it to give the answer? No, your brain stores millions upon millions of relationships between concepts you've encountered and is able to quickly produce and answer through an associative process. No programming required. That is exactly what the aim of the systems in this discussion is.
Granted, programming will be required to build these systems initially. However, once human level intelligence (AGI) is achieved (even if it's just in a specific domain such as information processing), is it so hard to imagine that no more programming will be required, since by definition AGI implies that it has achieved the same level of ability to understand the problem domain as well as any human?
AI (AGI in particular) does not necessarily imply imitating humans. It's a bit of a homophobic slant to think that intelligence equates to the human implementation of intelligence. If a machine can exhibit the main features of intelligence (inference, learning, goal seeking, planning, etc, and other factors depending on your definition of intelligence) then it is by definition, intelligent.
Your "Who was the cowboy in Washington?" argument is a straw-man, as you can see from the posts here, most humans didn't even get the subtle references. Watson actually did pretty well in putting together vague references as this is an integral part of the Jeopardy Q/A scheme, even to the point that it was able to best the two top humans at doing this.
To imply that AI has not made advances over the years is pure hogwash. Were capabilities such as Deep Blue, Watson, Siri, et al available 50 years ago? I think not. AI has been steadily advancing over the years, despite not living up to the hype and despite not yet achieving true "human level intelligence" (note, this is vastly different than imitating humans which by some measures fall far short of intelligence). In case you've been living in a cave, advances in AI have been accelerating over the last decade and the nexus between computing power and the various disciplines of cognitive science (neuroscience, psychology, biology, etc as well as their computational counterparts) is producing advances at a much more accelerated pace.
You go right ahead and continue reading Hofstadter and his ilk, while the rest of us continue pushing the envelope of machine IQ and one day maybe (probably within the next 10-20 years), you can continue this debate with your cell phone (or whatever personal device will have replaced it by then).
I just got a Microsoft phone for free and didn't even pay for it.
You have been referred to the redundant redundancy department.
Perhaps (as your post seems to infer) everyone should just STFU and accept the wonderful economic condition the US is in, due in no small part by the factors mentioned above, eh? I'm sure "Corporate America" thanks you for your support.
Pistol missed your moon Otis 200 bouncer 20,010 and mistress rotor would like a responsibility.
Used to be we at least pretended to be respectful of the dead for a little while....
I believe three days is the accepted convention. Sorry, we're a little past that now. The truth can now be spoken.
Eclipse's memory usage has to do with it's OSGi underpinnings.
I'm not sure it does; Eclipse was still a bloated pig before it was switched to OSGi. The problem really seems to be if you have a lot of plugin modules loaded (like I have...)
Sure it does. The reason loading a lot of plugins tends to increase memory utilization so much has a lot to do with the overhead of the bundling architecture of OSGi. The plugin logic itself may not eat up that much memory, but all the API calls, artifacts and compontents needed to load or activate an OSGi bundle introduce a lot of overhead. Mind you the overhead is justified (IMO) because of the flexibility it provides, but it's definitely not insignificant. Having said that, I don't think it's as bad as some would make it seem since the amount of time it takes to launch Visual Studio and opening a project of any significant size is comparable and VS provides no where near the plugin flexibility that OSGi does.
Regarding pre-OSGi Eclipse (pre - version 3.0), I agree it was a pig. However it was a completely different animal and it's internal complexity had gotten out of hand (hence the switch to OSGi) which was one of the main reasons for its poor performance (along with a much less performant JVM, slower machines, less memory, etc - we're talking around 8 years ago).
Now I can just create objects willy nilly and not know the consequences in the JVM.
I think I've found your problem.
My guess is Oracle will be replacing (or at least modifying) Swing for desktop apps to leverage JavaFX.
The rest of my comment is not directed toward you, but toward all the Java haters here.
For those who wish to bash Java's performance, all I can say is you obviously don't know what you are doing. I've been on a team developing a very extensive customer portal team that supports nearly 5 million customers with hundreds of thousands of hits/day (not just page flips, but real n-tier transactions hitting multiple database backends and web services, all either Weblogic or Tomcat J2EE app servers).
My development time is split just about evenly between Java, C# and C++ and I think each has it's strengths and weaknesses and each is a good tool to have in your toolbox. Bashing any of these languages is more a reflection of the ignorance of the commentor than a reflection of the language itself. Just because Java doesn't require you to free the memory you allocate through object instantiations, doesn't mean you don't have to ever think about memory at all. You still have to be judicious in allocating objects. Techniques like reusing already allocated objects rather than creating new ones can make a huge difference in performance.
Someone call my name?
Most likely Samsung was trying to figure out what the corner configuration should be, he referred to his 18-year old TI-30 Stat calculator and told the designers to use it as an example.
There FTFY...
Agreed. Random coincidences like rounded corners. Oh wait...
Narrative I want to push? What the hell is that supposed to mean? Because I pose what I believe is a reasonable question about potential renewable energy sources never making it to market I'm pushing a narrative? I guess I should just STFU and not ask questions, eh? The statement , “It is still unclear if it could be used for efficient energy generation. It’s too early to tell.” FTFA tells me it has potential for this purpose.
Talk to your right-wingers and libertarians about that before griping about science.
Where in my post did I gripe about science? My (rhetorical) question was intended to point out that there are many, many ways (indeed, which science has shown us) to deal with our energy issues, yet somehow we still can't get them past the laboratories. As you can see for the replies, there are many reasons why this is the case, very few of which have anything to do with science.
I may be a moron, but I did get first post!!!
are you asking why people might find it difficult to put big oil/coal companies out of business?
I don't think going out of business is in the cards for them. They'll just switch to whatever technology is most profitable. BP didn't change their slogan to "Beyond Petroleum" for no reason.
We're talking graphene, not graphite pencil-dick!
Every other day there is a story on /. about some new technique or material that can solve the energy crisis. This has been going on for years. Why do these never, ever come to fruition?
So how soon till we have a fully functional pre-crime police department where they arrest and try people before crimes are even commited?
Will never happen. The lawyers and politicians would be the first to get arrested so you know they will never allow this...
Don't want to dissapoing anyone, but I haven't rebooted Win7 on my Lenovo notebook for about 2 years. When I power it off it hibernates.
Guess that makes you about two years behind in Win7 security patches then.
Android on (or instead of) the desktop is soon to come. The desktop will soon be touch enabled running some follow on to ice-cream sandwich that works well on phones, tablets and the desktop.
Don't think so? Take a look at Windows 8 if you don't think the desktop and touch screen technologies are quickly merging.
While Oracles' legal team is trying to slow down Andriod, its getting it's Java ME inline with SE and JavaFX to make a run for the mobile/tablet/desktop itself.
Java dead on the desktop? - I don't think so.
Thank you. I couldn't agree more. The anti-java rhetoric is always so thick here I've (almost) gotten to the point I skip reading /. comments on java related articles because of the same old FUD.
At long last...Jobs is in the iCloud.
FTFY