Neah, offshoring is terrible obviously. And in even worse will be when computers do all of our menial and boring tasks using simple AI.
Imagine that; all those jobs will be done for free, and thus we'll lose even more jobs! I can't imagine how bad a world would be where every unwanted job is left to robots and computers!
Whatever I think of The Times Or Murdoch himself, I'm glad that it's a success. Why? Because in the future, it gives not just big publishers, but small websites a chance in the future to earn through another channel (through nano/micro payments) rather than rely on advertising all the time.
And yes, it's stuff like that can help get rid of adverts. I suppose very few of the people who hate the idea of a low-cost paywall actually own a website which they at least update from time to time.
Are you sure we can't solve the problem eventually of having the best of both worlds - flexibility, and performance/reliability?
Never is a long time...
As far as I know, electric vehicles are on the order of not one, but 2 orders of magnitude cheaper to run than a gasoline car. Very few people would want to pay up to 100x as much cash for petrol when they can have cheap electricity.
Battery tech is improving all the time, so we may as well bite the bullet and all switch to at least hybrids (just like using a 60 GB SSD as an OS/boot drive; sorry can't resist saying how amazing SSDs are).
We have so many programming languages for the same reason that a woodworker has so many different tools: they are each useful for different things.
I'm sure there are many new tools that combine the functions of older tools. Also imagine a futuristic universal glue which fused together two items more securely than any amount of superglue or nails could ever do, yet which unfastened cleanly at the flick of a switch. You can see how that would immediately deprecate hammers, nails, hooks, and the millions of glues available on the market.
Java for big bloated enterprise apps
You said it. Maybe you didn't quite mean this, but Java is indeed far more bloated than it should be. Wouldn't it be nice to get the speed of C/C++ but the syntactic simplicity of say Python or Ruby? The science behind achieving that is incredibly hard, but by no means impossible.
At the most, yes, maybe we should split an entirely new paradigm like declarative programming off from the mainstream imperative styles, but even that itself would cut down 99% of all the invented programming languages.
And yes, maybe, we should even combine logic, functional, and procedural into one melting pot. Of course, it would have to be incredibly well designed, without ambiguity, with a minimal syntax, and BASIC-like simplicity, yet as powerful and flexible as C++ or Haskell.
I still think that's possible, but would require a massive worldwide coordinated effort some decades down the line, when we know a lot more about the science behind it all, when CPU architectures have settled down more, and where competition in the programming language arena isn't as needed as much as it is now.
Surely though, one could do something like square (or even cube, or higher, perhaps using exponentiation) the results so that bigger differences are penalized even more so.
It reminds me of the problem determining the volume of a sound. If you take a minute long sample which is basically silent apart from a single loud spike lasting 1 millisecond, do you average the whole minute (very quiet), or take the maximum of the whole minute (very loud).
One day, I think we'll have a universal language that everyone uses (yeah English would suit me, but I don't care as long as whatever language it is, everyone uses it). Efficiency would rocket through the roof, and hence we'll save billions or trillions of pounds.
In the same way, we'll all be using a single programming language too (even if that language combines more than one paradigm). Yes competition is good in the mean time, but I mean ultimately. It'll be as fast as C or machine code, but as readable as a much higher level language. It won't have baggage such as headers or be unnecessarily verbose either.
Until that point, we need to do a lot more to improve languages, and it won't just be deckchair arranging.
How about the total of each difference between the R, G and B values of every pixel to the source. It's not 100%, but I bet that would get pretty close.
Before we can give 'fitness' scores to the algorithm, it's really important that we define properly what 'fitness' actually means.
It's a great idea, but why put these things in such easily accessible locations where they could be open to anyone with less than noble intentions? I did the same thing as this guy a couple of years back, but was a little more selective in location, some of which are as follows:
* Mount Etna (near the mouth)
* North pole (well 40 ft underground at that point)
* 3 miles underground at an unknown location. There is a cave entrance though I think (well there was last time I went).
* In my house
* Inside the fossilized remains of a dead bird found somewhere in the Sahara Desert.
* Five are in the ocean too (I'll keep the exact locations secret, but you may have some luck checking out the Atlan... (hint hint) ).
Whenever it comes to this kind of thing, it's always left ambiguous. I find that generally when people (even professionals) speak of 'half the size', they could mean in length, area, or volume (where applicable). Each of those of course gives entirely different results.
I think personally the best idea is to use the highest dimension for the application. For example, when speaking of a 3D object, half the size would mean half the volume. Unfortunately, things like DPI don't work like that.
What a coincidence that the work most likely to be counted as boring (at least on the computer side of things), is also the most likely to be able to be automated.
I'd do anything for a Plants vs Zombies game, but with real challenge and difficulty. That was a great but far too easy game.
Can't they at least put extra difficult modes on like the old arcade games used to do?
Sigh...
I liked the feel of the Amiga 4000 keyboards back in the day. I wonder what key mechanism that used. I'm pretty sure it was responsive and tactile, but mercifully quiet.
I think the two greatest things you could possible add to Windows 8 would be:
1: Force 64 bit on everyone. Yes, I know it's a stepping stone, but we've got to do it someday - might as well make it ASAP.
2: metadata/database/semantic filesystem. Folders can be used too, but searching for files based on tags is so much simpler and faster. Think Google, but for the OS.
Thanks! Always wanted to make a program out of it with a full GUI - be pretty complex though.
There are other programs out there, but the math you can use on each 'atom' isn't as flexible as far as I know.
I wouldn't call it amazingly good, nor selfless.
Most would trade off a bit of car damage with a life. The decision isn't rocket science.
Yeah, some common sense was used, but I'm sure you would've done the same thing had you had the 'luck' to be in such a cool and strange situation.
A decade or so back, I created something called "Super Magnet", and the whole idea was to create a system of atoms/magnets with completely customizable forces - a bit like an infinitely extendable version of what Nature does.
Yes, I know this is in software, but the results can be pretty cool:
Bear in mind these animations are about 10 years old - modern hardware and algorithms would use many more magnets (though creativity counts for quite a bit too).
Slashdot Mirror
Neah, offshoring is terrible obviously. And in even worse will be when computers do all of our menial and boring tasks using simple AI.
Imagine that; all those jobs will be done for free, and thus we'll lose even more jobs! I can't imagine how bad a world would be where every unwanted job is left to robots and computers!
Do you mean the way you drag the slider on the left and it jumps from 5 'full' comments up to 200 with no inbetween levels?
You're right - it's a pain. Slashdot really messed this one up, and I've got no way to go back to before afaik.
Whatever I think of The Times Or Murdoch himself, I'm glad that it's a success. Why? Because in the future, it gives not just big publishers, but small websites a chance in the future to earn through another channel (through nano/micro payments) rather than rely on advertising all the time.
And yes, it's stuff like that can help get rid of adverts. I suppose very few of the people who hate the idea of a low-cost paywall actually own a website which they at least update from time to time.
Are you sure we can't solve the problem eventually of having the best of both worlds - flexibility, and performance/reliability? Never is a long time...
See my other post which answers some of the other points: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1847736&cid=34090776
Then why would there be so much 'joy' when Java died if those programmers could have used another language to begin with?
As far as I know, electric vehicles are on the order of not one, but 2 orders of magnitude cheaper to run than a gasoline car. Very few people would want to pay up to 100x as much cash for petrol when they can have cheap electricity.
Battery tech is improving all the time, so we may as well bite the bullet and all switch to at least hybrids (just like using a 60 GB SSD as an OS/boot drive; sorry can't resist saying how amazing SSDs are).
We have so many programming languages for the same reason that a woodworker has so many different tools: they are each useful for different things.
I'm sure there are many new tools that combine the functions of older tools. Also imagine a futuristic universal glue which fused together two items more securely than any amount of superglue or nails could ever do, yet which unfastened cleanly at the flick of a switch. You can see how that would immediately deprecate hammers, nails, hooks, and the millions of glues available on the market.
Java for big bloated enterprise apps
You said it. Maybe you didn't quite mean this, but Java is indeed far more bloated than it should be. Wouldn't it be nice to get the speed of C/C++ but the syntactic simplicity of say Python or Ruby? The science behind achieving that is incredibly hard, but by no means impossible.
At the most, yes, maybe we should split an entirely new paradigm like declarative programming off from the mainstream imperative styles, but even that itself would cut down 99% of all the invented programming languages.
And yes, maybe, we should even combine logic, functional, and procedural into one melting pot. Of course, it would have to be incredibly well designed, without ambiguity, with a minimal syntax, and BASIC-like simplicity, yet as powerful and flexible as C++ or Haskell.
I still think that's possible, but would require a massive worldwide coordinated effort some decades down the line, when we know a lot more about the science behind it all, when CPU architectures have settled down more, and where competition in the programming language arena isn't as needed as much as it is now.
Hmm, I think I see what you mean.
Surely though, one could do something like square (or even cube, or higher, perhaps using exponentiation) the results so that bigger differences are penalized even more so.
It reminds me of the problem determining the volume of a sound. If you take a minute long sample which is basically silent apart from a single loud spike lasting 1 millisecond, do you average the whole minute (very quiet), or take the maximum of the whole minute (very loud).
One day, I think we'll have a universal language that everyone uses (yeah English would suit me, but I don't care as long as whatever language it is, everyone uses it). Efficiency would rocket through the roof, and hence we'll save billions or trillions of pounds.
In the same way, we'll all be using a single programming language too (even if that language combines more than one paradigm). Yes competition is good in the mean time, but I mean ultimately. It'll be as fast as C or machine code, but as readable as a much higher level language. It won't have baggage such as headers or be unnecessarily verbose either.
Until that point, we need to do a lot more to improve languages, and it won't just be deckchair arranging.
How about the total of each difference between the R, G and B values of every pixel to the source. It's not 100%, but I bet that would get pretty close.
Before we can give 'fitness' scores to the algorithm, it's really important that we define properly what 'fitness' actually means.
It's a great idea, but why put these things in such easily accessible locations where they could be open to anyone with less than noble intentions? I did the same thing as this guy a couple of years back, but was a little more selective in location, some of which are as follows:
* Mount Etna (near the mouth)
* North pole (well 40 ft underground at that point)
* 3 miles underground at an unknown location. There is a cave entrance though I think (well there was last time I went).
* In my house
* Inside the fossilized remains of a dead bird found somewhere in the Sahara Desert.
* Five are in the ocean too (I'll keep the exact locations secret, but you may have some luck checking out the Atlan... (hint hint) ).
Whenever it comes to this kind of thing, it's always left ambiguous. I find that generally when people (even professionals) speak of 'half the size', they could mean in length, area, or volume (where applicable). Each of those of course gives entirely different results.
I think personally the best idea is to use the highest dimension for the application. For example, when speaking of a 3D object, half the size would mean half the volume. Unfortunately, things like DPI don't work like that.
What a coincidence that the work most likely to be counted as boring (at least on the computer side of things), is also the most likely to be able to be automated.
I'd do anything for a Plants vs Zombies game, but with real challenge and difficulty. That was a great but far too easy game. Can't they at least put extra difficult modes on like the old arcade games used to do? Sigh...
I liked the feel of the Amiga 4000 keyboards back in the day. I wonder what key mechanism that used. I'm pretty sure it was responsive and tactile, but mercifully quiet.
I'm sure you can get a PC utility which will play a 120 dB jet-engine-level 'click' if you should so wish :P
Let's leave things as silent if possible and have the option for it to make a clicking if we *want*.
I think the two greatest things you could possible add to Windows 8 would be:
1: Force 64 bit on everyone. Yes, I know it's a stepping stone, but we've got to do it someday - might as well make it ASAP.
2: metadata/database/semantic filesystem. Folders can be used too, but searching for files based on tags is so much simpler and faster. Think Google, but for the OS.
Thanks! Always wanted to make a program out of it with a full GUI - be pretty complex though. There are other programs out there, but the math you can use on each 'atom' isn't as flexible as far as I know.
Their relative speeds were only about 5mph. No harm can really be done that way.
I wouldn't call it amazingly good, nor selfless. Most would trade off a bit of car damage with a life. The decision isn't rocket science. Yeah, some common sense was used, but I'm sure you would've done the same thing had you had the 'luck' to be in such a cool and strange situation.
Yes, the life insurance guys would save a bit of cash there. Good thinking.
A decade or so back, I created something called "Super Magnet", and the whole idea was to create a system of atoms/magnets with completely customizable forces - a bit like an infinitely extendable version of what Nature does.
Yes, I know this is in software, but the results can be pretty cool:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTW09McfCjA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdfSWsTBtyE
http://www.skytopia.com/project/magnet/magnet.html
Bear in mind these animations are about 10 years old - modern hardware and algorithms would use many more magnets (though creativity counts for quite a bit too).
That feature will be available in version 738. No worries, at that pace they're updating, you should get that by next month!
It was supposed to be a kind of joke, because I made the same 'error' you did ;)
I'm glad you put the "[NB - sarcasm]" bin in there. I was just about to hopelessly embarrass myself by taking that seriously [NB - sarcasm].