http://www.greenplug.us/
Green Plug has been mentioned before on/. and has been adopted by Westinghouse (http://mobile.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/15/0136223)
If it is adopted widely, the problem of multiple chargers will largely disappear.
Microsoft probably feel like they're losing all of their mindshare to Google.
So, they come out with this identification technology to win back the hearts and minds of the anti-Google brigade.
I'm so confused now....
It seems that isohunt is a resource that is either before its time, or just reflecting the current state of the bittorrent ecosystem. The way I see it, the vast majority of torrents out there are for copyrighted works not distributed by the original creators/owners.
I don't believe there are enough "legit" torrents out there for isohunt et al to index to give them a better reputation though.
Maybe this is one area where Microsoft can use their Labs software that created 3D models/pictures from flat photos.
Augment the current prototype some more, detect the appropriate control points, and (mostly) eliminate all those other bits which change too much. Granted, this wouldn't work with all those of you who like just standing around outside talking...
Forums, IRC, email, etc. are all widely used as you've noted.
However, I'll hazard a guess that Google has the infrastructure and will to allow all your project members to have all project-related communications logged (I don't mean this in a paranoia-crazed world sense either).
When this new Google product becomes more mature I could easily see a time when a new project will allow you to create/add new members by gmail account or create a new project member account for the purposes of the project.
> AI's are human-designed/manufactured. Since we're prone to errors, it follows they are/will be as well. Does that mean AIs would make similar or different mistakes, and how would they handle them? The same, differently, or not at all? Will we see a regression, in that AIs will result to brute-force discovery much like early scientists? Will they evolve?
Brute-force is generally used by those who have no other recourse to action. It's entirely reasonable to expect that post-human strong-AI would be tackling problems and questions which are considered intractable by humans, but for the AI would still be a very difficult problem. Thus, it resorts to its own level of brute-forcing an answer.
> Another question area: Anyone who has built a compiler knows the three-tap rule. Build it, build it using itself, build it a third time, compare. Will AIs produce AIs, and if so, will they be better, or equally flawed? Will a 'perfect' AI still be capable of scientific invention/discovery? Will the mistakes of its human operators/supervisors/managers make up for its lack thereof?
This second question area overlaps with my first reply, in that the deficiencies that we see in ourselves can be improved or removed in a strong AI, and similarly different types of issues will be resolved by said AI for the next generation. This is a natural progression, and applies to all of human history.
> What about drive? Will the drive of a human manager/supervisor/etc be sufficient substitute for an AI which can't posess them?
Strong AI is a hypothetical form of artificial intelligence that can truly reason and solve problems; a strong AI is said to be sentient, or self-aware, but may or may not exhibit human-like thought processes.
Given that the AI may not appear to rationalise/reason things in a human-like fashion doesn't imply that it won't have drive. We may simply be too simple to see it.
... it's just a matter of how quickly the competition latches onto it, and does something about it.
I certainly ain't a fanboy, or MS lackey, but I can give credit where credit is due.
Anyway, some things to remember about Microsoft's current strategy and direction:
as parent poster says, they're sitting on a cash warchest, which is NOT going to be wasted, but rather invested
the home user desktop is still largely their domain. This means a lot of game/app developers
DirectX is a very mature and stable platform to develop on
DirectX for Xbox (whatever MS decides to call it today or in the future, it's still the same to me) and PC will very quickly converge to a common base, thereby making cross-development costs drop
their purchases of existing gamehouses to add to their own entertainment division continues unabated
all the metrics they learn from running their own different online services (Live, MSN, ad services, Xbox Live!, etc.) will continue to give them better hints on where the consumer entertainment market is heading
they're pushing their own formats for video/audio, APIs of all sorts, etc. like crazy (it's basically trying to get the hardware to support their formats, which makes them defacto standards a la DirectX on current video cards)
they keep rapidly developing and maturing the.NET platform, and they're quite happy to let Mono keep trundling along (in the end, it doesn't cost them anything to magically support all the *nix platforms then)
Quite frankly, as far as their direction is concerned, it's about going for a high-visibility, high-click-rate market segment.
It should go without saying that they want to hold all the keys, and keep the content creators in check. Xbox Live is just the start of the next generation. I've got little doubt that a.NET will eventually make it to Xbox. Maybe not the this or the next generation, but it's getting there.
Like it or not, but Microsoft is using a hardware agnostic approach for the future. They definitely won't be tied to x86 forever, and that's pretty obvious with the current hardware they had developed for the Xbox 360.
It's really now a matter of how well they manage in the execution.
The USA is a capitalist and consumerist society, it logically follows that companies will screw everyone by providing the toys they don't need, much like you implied with your comment.
Possibly the fastest way to show how out-of-date the copyright laws are in a country like Australia or New Zealand (where it is technically illegal to format-shift or record shows or whatever) is to sue someone on behalf of the Music Industry as a "friend".
Make a public warning ahead of the actual action, publically stating that some unnamed poor sod will be legally sued into oblivion, and then follow through with the threat (and any subsequent appeals.
Of course, finding a person to do this and take all the flak for this type of action would be near impossible.
The mind boggles at how the music industry would react to having a "friend" sue all the normal users of their music...
Given the limited number of possible moves in any given Chess position, and the amount of knowledge of the game amassed over the years, it becomes a relatively simple game for computers to play.
Conversely (and any strong Go player can flame me for this) Go hasn't been nearly as well analysed as Chess, and proportionally doesn't have that same depth for computers to fall back on.
Expand that to Civ, with Sid's descriptions of units, city placement (almost anywhere on solid ground), resources, multiple win/lose scenarios, diplomacy, a map larger than a Go board, etc., and you've got a branching complexity far in excess of either Chess or Go. AI in games just isn't about to catch up to the necessary requirements.
And your comment on him having no interest in software freedom; I pose these questions back to you: Do you just want free software made by professionals? Would it even exist if he never got paid to do it in the first place? And doesn't he have a right to financially benefit from all the effort put into the creation of the software?
I'm all for free software and open source, but for the right reasons.
They realise that to expand the market in which to make money, they have to have the people that can take advantage of their software. It's a pity that governments don't take the same approach, given how stagnant the large western economies have been in recent years. Simply put, we improve the lot of the poorer nations, and they'll learn to see what we have to offer, and in turn what they have to offer to us. In the long term, it's a win-win situation.
If we use wikis as a front-end to the cvs, and by default mark all modules with a simple security level (no disk access, etc), and wrap each thing with unit tests for basic error capturing, and had incremental compilation, then we might have an easier and more collaborative way of coding.
To further the idea a little more, the wiki also helps in documenting the structure of the project, and like other tools would be able to show any/all references to given code.
Certainly, if you're a hardcore coder, you'll have a preference for direct access to the cvs. For more casual coders, or those who just want to wander around looking for interesting things to help on, the wiki frontend could help.
That being said, I have no idea how well this idea could work, but for smaller prototyping projects it might just work.
Let's just play the Devil's advocate here, and suggest that Microsoft makes a lot more smaller incremental updates and upgrades, but uses a shareware-type model where they give away the minor upgrades to ensure their audience stays watching and waiting for more.
That way they can keep people interested, move quicker, and can spend plenty of other time improving their underlying architecture to support even more stuff later.
They could even use the incremental upgrades as trojans for installing the base libraries for other applications they're developing.
For all the comments made by everyone about the good, the bad, and the ugly about this proposed law (and the way more States seem to want to pass similar laws), the fact remains that the average person DOES NOT know about the slashdot protestations.
Furthermore, the average person has little to no idea about what the video game industry is actually like, and will get all their information from the politicians and the mass media.
Laws WILL be passed to further restrict what can and will be consumed by everyone because there is no large groundswell of slashdot visitors to offset the current loud groups of politicians/mothers/etc.
If we don't want these types of laws to be passed, the only viable answer is to make our voices heard by writing to newspapers, calling into radio stations, writing to the politicians, and so on.
Protesting in online forums, voting in online polls, and so on will do nothing significant because the vast majority of people are not connected, or are so ill-equipped to know about places such as slashdot, or whatever your favourite site is.
Don't just sit at home posting, and agreeing with everyone else online. Get out and make a difference by getting into the media channels which the average person consumes.
Fight the fight on their own territory, because they certainly aren't coming into ours.
I'll name my bias: I'm a Mozilla Firefox user by default.
However, overall I think the options that have been put into IE7 will work for most "mom 'n' pop" households.
With regards the actual UI:
the combination refresh/stop button makes a lot of sense to me.
the History button doesn't make sense. Which way is forwards? which way is back? granted, this isn't particularly clear in Firefox either, but still...
The new tab tab (what the heck?) might get a bit mashed up with a lot of tabs in the same window
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.greenplug.us/ Green Plug has been mentioned before on /. and has been adopted by Westinghouse (http://mobile.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/15/0136223)
If it is adopted widely, the problem of multiple chargers will largely disappear.
No, just weapons-grade spent uranium. That's all...
Not unless you reprocess it. Good luck making a bomb using an old fuel rod.
Dirty bombs don't need to have weapons-grade materials.
Microsoft probably feel like they're losing all of their mindshare to Google. So, they come out with this identification technology to win back the hearts and minds of the anti-Google brigade. I'm so confused now....
GP REALLY needs to turn off their webcam..
It seems that isohunt is a resource that is either before its time, or just reflecting the current state of the bittorrent ecosystem. The way I see it, the vast majority of torrents out there are for copyrighted works not distributed by the original creators/owners.
I don't believe there are enough "legit" torrents out there for isohunt et al to index to give them a better reputation though.
It's something you use to wash yourself with...
oops... sorry.. wrong forum...
Maybe this is one area where Microsoft can use their Labs software that created 3D models/pictures from flat photos.
Augment the current prototype some more, detect the appropriate control points, and (mostly) eliminate all those other bits which change too much. Granted, this wouldn't work with all those of you who like just standing around outside talking...Maybe it's more to do with having your head put inside what is roughly equivalent to a small microwave?
The only thing he doesn't mention is the copyright issue, which I agree is a big issue the "analysts" on Wall Street don't seem to be worrying about.
Dvorak's angle on YouTube is the ease of use versus its competitors, and he as clearly says "no matter what happens to YouTube".
I wonder if you even read the attached link, or just read the submitted summary...
Forums, IRC, email, etc. are all widely used as you've noted.
However, I'll hazard a guess that Google has the infrastructure and will to allow all your project members to have all project-related communications logged (I don't mean this in a paranoia-crazed world sense either).
When this new Google product becomes more mature I could easily see a time when a new project will allow you to create/add new members by gmail account or create a new project member account for the purposes of the project.
> AI's are human-designed/manufactured. Since we're prone to errors, it follows they are/will be as well. Does that mean AIs would make similar or different mistakes, and how would they handle them? The same, differently, or not at all? Will we see a regression, in that AIs will result to brute-force discovery much like early scientists? Will they evolve?
Brute-force is generally used by those who have no other recourse to action. It's entirely reasonable to expect that post-human strong-AI would be tackling problems and questions which are considered intractable by humans, but for the AI would still be a very difficult problem. Thus, it resorts to its own level of brute-forcing an answer.
> Another question area: Anyone who has built a compiler knows the three-tap rule. Build it, build it using itself, build it a third time, compare. Will AIs produce AIs, and if so, will they be better, or equally flawed? Will a 'perfect' AI still be capable of scientific invention/discovery? Will the mistakes of its human operators/supervisors/managers make up for its lack thereof?
This second question area overlaps with my first reply, in that the deficiencies that we see in ourselves can be improved or removed in a strong AI, and similarly different types of issues will be resolved by said AI for the next generation. This is a natural progression, and applies to all of human history.
> What about drive? Will the drive of a human manager/supervisor/etc be sufficient substitute for an AI which can't posess them?
From wikipedia:
Given that the AI may not appear to rationalise/reason things in a human-like fashion doesn't imply that it won't have drive. We may simply be too simple to see it.
I can't believe I wasted time looking at this. At least give us something to justify this...
I certainly ain't a fanboy, or MS lackey, but I can give credit where credit is due.
Anyway, some things to remember about Microsoft's current strategy and direction:
- as parent poster says, they're sitting on a cash warchest, which is NOT going to be wasted, but rather invested
- the home user desktop is still largely their domain. This means a lot of game/app developers
- DirectX is a very mature and stable platform to develop on
- DirectX for Xbox (whatever MS decides to call it today or in the future, it's still the same to me) and PC will very quickly converge to a common base, thereby making cross-development costs drop
- their purchases of existing gamehouses to add to their own entertainment division continues unabated
- all the metrics they learn from running their own different online services (Live, MSN, ad services, Xbox Live!, etc.) will continue to give them better hints on where the consumer entertainment market is heading
- they're pushing their own formats for video/audio, APIs of all sorts, etc. like crazy (it's basically trying to get the hardware to support their formats, which makes them defacto standards a la DirectX on current video cards)
- they keep rapidly developing and maturing the
.NET platform, and they're quite happy to let Mono keep trundling along (in the end, it doesn't cost them anything to magically support all the *nix platforms then)
Quite frankly, as far as their direction is concerned, it's about going for a high-visibility, high-click-rate market segment.It should go without saying that they want to hold all the keys, and keep the content creators in check. Xbox Live is just the start of the next generation. I've got little doubt that a .NET will eventually make it to Xbox. Maybe not the this or the next generation, but it's getting there.
Like it or not, but Microsoft is using a hardware agnostic approach for the future. They definitely won't be tied to x86 forever, and that's pretty obvious with the current hardware they had developed for the Xbox 360.
It's really now a matter of how well they manage in the execution.
I, for one, am not in the slightest surprised.
They claimed they purchased the company mostly for the Sales people, as opposed to the products.
Possibly the fastest way to show how out-of-date the copyright laws are in a country like Australia or New Zealand (where it is technically illegal to format-shift or record shows or whatever) is to sue someone on behalf of the Music Industry as a "friend".
Make a public warning ahead of the actual action, publically stating that some unnamed poor sod will be legally sued into oblivion, and then follow through with the threat (and any subsequent appeals.
Of course, finding a person to do this and take all the flak for this type of action would be near impossible.
The mind boggles at how the music industry would react to having a "friend" sue all the normal users of their music...
Given the limited number of possible moves in any given Chess position, and the amount of knowledge of the game amassed over the years, it becomes a relatively simple game for computers to play.
Conversely (and any strong Go player can flame me for this) Go hasn't been nearly as well analysed as Chess, and proportionally doesn't have that same depth for computers to fall back on.
Expand that to Civ, with Sid's descriptions of units, city placement (almost anywhere on solid ground), resources, multiple win/lose scenarios, diplomacy, a map larger than a Go board, etc., and you've got a branching complexity far in excess of either Chess or Go. AI in games just isn't about to catch up to the necessary requirements.
And your comment on him having no interest in software freedom; I pose these questions back to you: Do you just want free software made by professionals? Would it even exist if he never got paid to do it in the first place? And doesn't he have a right to financially benefit from all the effort put into the creation of the software?
I'm all for free software and open source, but for the right reasons.
They realise that to expand the market in which to make money, they have to have the people that can take advantage of their software. It's a pity that governments don't take the same approach, given how stagnant the large western economies have been in recent years. Simply put, we improve the lot of the poorer nations, and they'll learn to see what we have to offer, and in turn what they have to offer to us. In the long term, it's a win-win situation.
To further the idea a little more, the wiki also helps in documenting the structure of the project, and like other tools would be able to show any/all references to given code.
Certainly, if you're a hardcore coder, you'll have a preference for direct access to the cvs. For more casual coders, or those who just want to wander around looking for interesting things to help on, the wiki frontend could help.
That being said, I have no idea how well this idea could work, but for smaller prototyping projects it might just work.
That way they can keep people interested, move quicker, and can spend plenty of other time improving their underlying architecture to support even more stuff later.
They could even use the incremental upgrades as trojans for installing the base libraries for other applications they're developing.
Possibilities are endless here...
and the proposed changes of "first submitter" instead of "original inventor" were accepted, then Brown would probably lose.
Furthermore, the average person has little to no idea about what the video game industry is actually like, and will get all their information from the politicians and the mass media.
Laws WILL be passed to further restrict what can and will be consumed by everyone because there is no large groundswell of slashdot visitors to offset the current loud groups of politicians/mothers/etc.
If we don't want these types of laws to be passed, the only viable answer is to make our voices heard by writing to newspapers, calling into radio stations, writing to the politicians, and so on.
Protesting in online forums, voting in online polls, and so on will do nothing significant because the vast majority of people are not connected, or are so ill-equipped to know about places such as slashdot, or whatever your favourite site is.
Don't just sit at home posting, and agreeing with everyone else online. Get out and make a difference by getting into the media channels which the average person consumes.
Fight the fight on their own territory, because they certainly aren't coming into ours.
However, overall I think the options that have been put into IE7 will work for most "mom 'n' pop" households.
With regards the actual UI:
- the combination refresh/stop button makes a lot of sense to me.
- the History button doesn't make sense. Which way is forwards? which way is back? granted, this isn't particularly clear in Firefox either, but still...
- The new tab tab (what the heck?) might get a bit mashed up with a lot of tabs in the same window
Otherwise, not too bad an upgrade to IE6.Don't you mean great security by obscurity?
How can you forget that you can have file extensions larger than 3 characters in FAT32 and NTFS?