On the one hand Google employees would be more likely to do the right thing technically for such a huge undertaking, but on the other hand try to actually read something on Google Print.
At least at the gallica site you can search, browse and read what has already been digitized, for Free (as in speech). They have sunk millions and made mistakes, fine. Perhaps they'll make fewer mistakes in the future.
Learning a foreign language is a great way to expand one's horizons.
Think of the poor French or German unable to appreciate Monty Python or Shakespeare in the text. What are they missing ! Now the converse is also true. Reading Kant in the text is quite an experience, so is Rousseau or Voltaire. The same is true of Cervantes or Garcia Marques in Spanish, and of all other languages, past or present.
I recommend trying to read even small passages of The Illiad in ancient Greek. There are resources on the Web that can help you do that relatively easily. With a good translation at hand the experience is amazing.
Now think of all the lost languages of the world. All the legends, all the cultures that have already disappeared.
Today we can and we must preserve all this. Both the Google and the European initiative go in the right direction.
I ususally don't mind what RMS says, often he will say things simply and concisely.
However in this case he doesn't add anything to the debate, except perhaps come to the aid of the developer who reverse-engineered some of the BK protocol.
He could have remained silent. The debacle speaks for itself loud and clear.
DjVU only has an open-source decoder, not an encoder. DjVu is not patent free, it uses wavelet encoding (which is a patent minefield, one of the reasons JPEG2000 is not getting off the grounds).
In general the Slashdot developer forum is made of much more reasonable people.
Re:Not that bold, ask a creationist!
on
Mapping the Mind
·
· Score: 1
It sounds stupid because it is. This is a method that works exactly 0% of the time every time.
Your inversion solution is not practical. You will not find the inverse of any MD5 sum that way before the heat death of the Universe, not to mention that of your computer.
This BK story was always controversial. BK itself was always going to go away sooner or later due to its conflictual nature.
Linus might suffer for a while (and I'm truly sorry for him) but hopefully we'll have a workable replacement soon, which will presumably be completely Free and usable by all. We now have a complete set of requirements for a BK replacement, and this in itself is quite precious.
In the long run the productivity loss due to the Linux kernel hackers having to pioneer an as-yet undecided new tool will be offset by the whole FOSS community getting to benefit from it.
So thannks to BK for the ride and good luck to LMcV with his new approach and his software.
You are correct but if you do control both the client and the server they are easier to write and maintain.
It looks as if BK was making a bit of a buck but not enough to be the next Microsoft. They had to compromise on development costs, and so the easiest was to do what they did.
Now this stunt is a tough call. It will in fact obviously make BK irrelevant in the medium term with Linux. On the other hand they say that no publicity is bad publicity, so this might give BK some exposure. More people might want to use it in the proprietary world as an alternative to Perforce (say).
You mean Microsoft have to remain compatible with Microsoft's own old bugs and undocumented features ?
It comes down to a choice. The NT original team made a series of excellent technical choices that had to be undone for marketing reasons, not all of which having to do with backward compatibility (graphics within kernel, tight integration of browser, etc).
If it were that simple. The buyout will not happen, it would be seen as anticompetive.
Even if it were to go ahead Microsoft would still not deliver anything that "just works". It is not in their business model.
They can have the best O/S designers money can buy. They should be shipping the best O/S from any measure on the face of the Earth, and for a while (with the original NT team) it looked as if they would pull it off but it didn't happen.
Buying and porting OS/X would simply kill it off. The world would be a great O/S poorer, not richer.
Not only that but there used to be a commonly held position that implementing a patented software invention for the purpose of research and study was a non-infringing use, and that even distributing this software was OK, as long as it wasn't actually _used_ later on in any product by anybody without a license. VTK (the visual toolkit) for example implements some patented methods such as the marching cubes, etc, but you are not allowed to use these without a license.
Same with freetype. The hinting methods patented by Adobe/Microsoft (IIRC) are in there but disabled by default. If you want to use them you are supposed to hold a license from the patent holders.
However even this is point is being debated now in the US. Non-infringing use are being increasingly questionned. This is very scary.
I think software inventions should only be patented if a reference implementation is given and maintained by the patentee. The patent would lapse by lack of support. It would get rid of many frivolous patents and actually make the industry progress, not the other way around.
Also that way it would be clear what was patented.
After all patents on real inventions require blueprints and prototypes, not mere handwaving and interpretation.
> If RMS had his way, [...] nobody would > be able to make a living writing software (bad).
RMS has himself never said that, in fact he says exactly the opposite. You should read the GNU philosophy pages before spouting such nonsense, in particular this particular aspect.
The FSF says that you should charge as much as you possibly can for Free software. Redhad in particular is demonstrating this point very well.
Presumably you know that RHEL is more expensive than Windows yet is distributed under the terms of the GPL, and therefore the freeest form of Free Software according to Stallman.
so-called theorem-proving systems are able to *check* human proofs for logic mistakes or sometimes to generate proofs for small known problem.
However AFAIK no new interesting proof of an open problem has been given entirely by computer yet. I.e, input the statement of the problem in some formal language, let the computer run and produce a proof of the statement.
The 4-colour theorem is not a counter-example. All the computer did was run through a givent list of configurations and check that some given properties were true for them. The checking was hard to do for humans because is was arduous and repetitive, but in this instance the computer program was not asked to show any creativity.
If what you describe were true we would be able right now to simulate thought, only very very slowly, and not so slowly using a large enough cluster.
The fact is we have no idea how to program a computer that will emulate or simulate thought, and that point hasn't evolved nearly as much as hardware has in the last 30 years. Mostly we have tried many ways which have essentially not worked.
Nothing is telling me that we will discover that way in the next century or so. Possibly computers are the wrong paradigm.
Stars that are between 1.4 and 3 solar masses do not collapse to a black hole, but to a neutron star instead. These are extremely dense and tiny stars that are made from essentially the same material atom nuclei are made of.
Stars below 1.4 solar mass collapse to a white dwarf (very dense but normal matter, initially very hot but eventually cooling down to a dark star since no further fusion reaction occur).
Stars above 3 solar masses do collapse to black holes, to the best of our knowledge.
Black holes are called that way because originally they were thought not to emit anything (hence black), but absorb all matter and radiation without possibility of return (hence hole). We think we know now that black hole do emit radiation (thermal radiation or Hawking's radiation) and that a black hole in perfect isolated vacuum would eventually emit all its mass as radiation and vanish, although that would take many aeons.
Black holes are therefore not truly black or really holes at all, but the name stuck.
More cores don't necessarily mean more performance after a while.
There are improvements going from one to two cores, but going from 8 to 16 does not improve things very much except on massively parallel tasks (or systems with lots of users). Managing to distribute all these tasks can be quite a chore for the kernel too.
The technologies you talk about are not as far off as they were earlier.
Today OCR of printed text is a solved problem. It comes bundled with your $100 scanner, and it's damn useful.
By solved I mean that if you gave a few pages to type up to a person they would make more errors than OCR software make now.
Handwritten OCR will come, it is harder, but not impossibly harder.
Speech recognition is progressing. It comes bundled with MacOS/X, and you've certainly heard of spoken text entry in word processors. It's not accurate enough to replace typing in able-bodied people, but for many diabled people it's a godsend.
We've come to a much greater understanding of what neural nets do, and to duplicate or better their success rate with non-black-box classification systems such as regression trees, support vector machines, kNN and the like.
Progress are slow but constant, the most obvious (and upsetting) progress I know of is in the security area. It has become feasible to trust automated security systems to some extent. You are certainly aware that you can be booked for speeding or running a red light via an automated system (which will read your number plate and send you a fine without much supervision).
Myself I'm not a believer in strong AI, but I witness (in my work as a reseacher in automated image analysis) constant and relentless progress in useable weak AI.
The human brain is hardwired for complex languages. We're not sure about cetaceans. They definitely communicate, but we don't know at what level of complexity.
We know this because people who have had their speech centre knocked out by a stroke don't recover any form of speech. Other bits of the brain don't take over to compensate.
Now language is pretty important to overall intelligence. Without it no I/O processing, and it's pretty hard to learn.
It will show them. Go to the pub, learn to play some music, invite some neighbours over for tea, whatever.
I read that on average in the western world people watch anywhere between 2h and 4h of TV a day. These days it means 1h or so of commercials. Isn't there anything else to do?
I don't know the difference between WBEL/CentOS, they are very much alike. CentOS seems to have a larger community behind it, perhaps.
Redhat will EOL FC3 in about 9 months. After that you'll get some sort of community support for a while. The community will have to fix everything by hand. Since a new version of FC happens every 6 months or so and each version will require a new team to look after it I wouldn't assume this would go on for too long
RH will EOL RHEL4 in about 5 years. WBEL/CentOS are just recompiled version of RHEL with the trademarked stuff removed. Support will consist of recompiling the RH official fixes, which is much more likely to happen.
If you are running some kind of server where desktop prettiness is not that important, where stability is paramount but can't afford RHEL because it's in your basement, go for WBEL/CentOS. If you want to keep getting the newest stuff on your desktop and don't mind upgrading fairly frequently (every 6 months to a year) then go for FC.
Slashdot Mirror
On the one hand Google employees would be more likely to do the right thing technically for such a huge undertaking, but on the other hand try to actually read something on Google Print.
At least at the gallica site you can search, browse and read what has already been digitized, for Free (as in speech). They have sunk millions and made mistakes, fine. Perhaps they'll make fewer mistakes in the future.
No one can deny the project is important.
Learning a foreign language is a great way to expand one's horizons.
Think of the poor French or German unable to appreciate Monty Python or Shakespeare in the text. What are they missing ! Now the converse is also true. Reading Kant in the text is quite an experience, so is Rousseau or Voltaire. The same is true of Cervantes or Garcia Marques in Spanish, and of all other languages, past or present.
I recommend trying to read even small passages of The Illiad in ancient Greek. There are resources on the Web that can help you do that relatively easily. With a good translation at hand the experience is amazing.
Now think of all the lost languages of the world. All the legends, all the cultures that have already disappeared.
Today we can and we must preserve all this. Both the Google and the European initiative go in the right direction.
Apparently they are trying to resist.
I ususally don't mind what RMS says, often he will say things simply and concisely.
However in this case he doesn't add anything to the debate, except perhaps come to the aid of the developer who reverse-engineered some of the BK protocol.
He could have remained silent. The debacle speaks for itself loud and clear.
DjVU only has an open-source decoder, not an encoder. DjVu is not patent free, it uses wavelet encoding (which is a patent minefield, one of the reasons JPEG2000 is not getting off the grounds).
In general the Slashdot developer forum is made of much more reasonable people.
It sounds stupid because it is. This is a method that works exactly 0% of the time every time.
Your inversion solution is not practical. You will not find the inverse of any MD5 sum that way before the heat death of the Universe, not to mention that of your computer.
Spoken like someone who presumably has never felt the pain of terminal cancer or even a good strong migraine.
Your attitude is very strange. Taken to the extreme, since life is just a long prelude to death, why bother having a nice pleasant life at all ?
This BK story was always controversial. BK itself was always going to go away sooner or later due to its conflictual nature.
Linus might suffer for a while (and I'm truly sorry for him) but hopefully we'll have a workable replacement soon, which will presumably be completely Free and usable by all. We now have a complete set of requirements for a BK replacement, and this in itself is quite precious.
In the long run the productivity loss due to the Linux kernel hackers having to pioneer an as-yet undecided new tool will be offset by the whole FOSS community getting to benefit from it.
So thannks to BK for the ride and good luck to LMcV with his new approach and his software.
You are correct but if you do control both the client and the server they are easier to write and maintain.
It looks as if BK was making a bit of a buck but not enough to be the next Microsoft. They had to compromise on development costs, and so the easiest was to do what they did.
Now this stunt is a tough call. It will in fact obviously make BK irrelevant in the medium term with Linux. On the other hand they say that no publicity is bad publicity, so this might give BK some exposure. More people might want to use it in the proprietary world as an alternative to Perforce (say).
> oh and honorable mention means you didn't solve ;)
> any. Take that Tech!
That doesn't seem to be true.
this scoreboard shows "honorable mention" universities with score > 0.
You mean Microsoft have to remain compatible with Microsoft's own old bugs and undocumented features ?
It comes down to a choice. The NT original team made a series of excellent technical choices that had to be undone for marketing reasons, not all of which having to do with backward compatibility (graphics within kernel, tight integration of browser, etc).
If it were that simple. The buyout will not happen, it would be seen as anticompetive.
Even if it were to go ahead Microsoft would still not deliver anything that "just works". It is not in their business model.
They can have the best O/S designers money can buy. They should be shipping the best O/S from any measure on the face of the Earth, and for a while (with the original NT team) it looked as if they would pull it off but it didn't happen.
Buying and porting OS/X would simply kill it off. The world would be a great O/S poorer, not richer.
Precisely, and there are example of games that ship for multiple architectures on the one medium : the recent myst series for example.
Not only that but there used to be a commonly held position that implementing a patented software invention for the purpose of research and study was a non-infringing use, and that even distributing this software was OK, as long as it wasn't actually _used_ later on in any product by anybody without a license. VTK (the visual toolkit) for example implements some patented methods such as the marching cubes, etc, but you are not allowed to use these without a license.
Same with freetype. The hinting methods patented by Adobe/Microsoft (IIRC) are in there but disabled by default. If you want to use them you are supposed to hold a license from the patent holders.
However even this is point is being debated now in the US. Non-infringing use are being increasingly questionned. This is very scary.
I think software inventions should only be patented if a reference implementation is given and maintained by the patentee. The patent would lapse by lack of support. It would get rid of many frivolous patents and actually make the industry progress, not the other way around.
Also that way it would be clear what was patented.
After all patents on real inventions require blueprints and prototypes, not mere handwaving and interpretation.
> If RMS had his way, [...] nobody would
> be able to make a living writing software (bad).
RMS has himself never said that, in fact he says exactly the opposite. You should read the GNU philosophy pages before spouting such nonsense, in particular this particular aspect.
The FSF says that you should charge as much as you possibly can for Free software. Redhad in particular is demonstrating this point very well.
Presumably you know that RHEL is more expensive than Windows yet is distributed under the terms of the GPL, and therefore the freeest form of Free Software according to Stallman.
Yes, but not new ones !
so-called theorem-proving systems are able to *check* human proofs for logic mistakes or sometimes to generate proofs for small known problem.
However AFAIK no new interesting proof of an open problem has been given entirely by computer yet. I.e, input the statement of the problem in some formal language, let the computer run and produce a proof of the statement.
The 4-colour theorem is not a counter-example. All the computer did was run through a givent list of configurations and check that some given properties were true for them. The checking was hard to do for humans because is was arduous and repetitive, but in this instance the computer program was not asked to show any creativity.
If what you describe were true we would be able right now to simulate thought, only very very slowly, and not so slowly using a large enough cluster.
The fact is we have no idea how to program a computer that will emulate or simulate thought, and that point hasn't evolved nearly as much as hardware has in the last 30 years. Mostly we have tried many ways which have essentially not worked.
Nothing is telling me that we will discover that way in the next century or so. Possibly computers are the wrong paradigm.
Stars that are between 1.4 and 3 solar masses do not collapse to a black hole, but to a neutron star instead. These are extremely dense and tiny stars that are made from essentially the same material atom nuclei are made of.
Stars below 1.4 solar mass collapse to a white dwarf (very dense but normal matter, initially very hot but eventually cooling down to a dark star since no further fusion reaction occur).
Stars above 3 solar masses do collapse to black holes, to the best of our knowledge.
Black holes are called that way because originally they were thought not to emit anything (hence black), but absorb all matter and radiation without possibility of return (hence hole).
We think we know now that black hole do emit radiation (thermal radiation or Hawking's radiation) and that a black hole in perfect isolated vacuum would eventually emit all its mass as radiation and vanish, although that would take many aeons.
Black holes are therefore not truly black or really holes at all, but the name stuck.
More cores don't necessarily mean more performance after a while.
There are improvements going from one to two cores, but going from 8 to 16 does not improve things very much except on massively parallel tasks (or systems with lots of users). Managing to distribute all these tasks can be quite a chore for the kernel too.
XP Home does not support SMP. You'll only see one of the two cores with it, unless Microsoft change their policy.
The technologies you talk about are not as far off as they were earlier.
Today OCR of printed text is a solved problem. It comes bundled with your $100 scanner, and it's damn useful.
By solved I mean that if you gave a few pages to type up to a person they would make more errors than OCR software make now.
Handwritten OCR will come, it is harder, but not impossibly harder.
Speech recognition is progressing. It comes bundled with MacOS/X, and you've certainly heard of spoken text entry in word processors. It's not accurate enough to replace typing in able-bodied people, but for many diabled people it's a godsend.
We've come to a much greater understanding of what neural nets do, and to duplicate or better their success rate with non-black-box classification systems such as regression trees, support vector machines, kNN and the like.
Progress are slow but constant, the most obvious (and upsetting) progress I know of is in the security area. It has become feasible to trust automated security systems to some extent. You are certainly aware that you can be booked for speeding or running a red light via an automated system (which will read your number plate and send you a fine without much supervision).
Myself I'm not a believer in strong AI, but I witness (in my work as a reseacher in automated image analysis) constant and relentless progress in useable weak AI.
The human brain is hardwired for complex languages. We're not sure about cetaceans. They definitely communicate, but we don't know at what level of complexity.
We know this because people who have had their speech centre knocked out by a stroke don't recover any form of speech. Other bits of the brain don't take over to compensate.
Now language is pretty important to overall intelligence. Without it no I/O processing, and it's pretty hard to learn.
It will show them. Go to the pub, learn to play some music, invite some neighbours over for tea, whatever.
I read that on average in the western world people watch anywhere between 2h and 4h of TV a day. These days it means 1h or so of commercials. Isn't there anything else to do?
To answer your queries:
I don't know the difference between WBEL/CentOS, they are very much alike. CentOS seems to have a larger community behind it, perhaps.
Redhat will EOL FC3 in about 9 months. After that you'll get some sort of community support for a while. The community will have to fix everything by hand. Since a new version of FC happens every 6 months or so and each version will require a new team to look after it I wouldn't assume this would go on for too long
RH will EOL RHEL4 in about 5 years. WBEL/CentOS are just recompiled version of RHEL with the trademarked stuff removed. Support will consist of recompiling the RH official fixes, which is much more likely to happen.
If you are running some kind of server where desktop prettiness is not that important, where stability is paramount but can't afford RHEL because it's in your basement, go for WBEL/CentOS. If you want to keep getting the newest stuff on your desktop and don't mind upgrading fairly frequently (every 6 months to a year) then go for FC.