French police is composed of the Police Nationale (ordinary police, civilian, mainly in cities and urban areas) and the Gendarmerie (military police, mainly in the country or in little towns).
You can bet that the real army wouldn't care about little flashy notebooks if they had to set up a strong communication system in a hostile country; but here we're not talking about soldiers and fighters, we're talking about policemen. Therefore the constraints are less drastic, and the systems may be less noise-tolerant. Furthermore, when the communication devices in use were created, nobody thought that UHF communication might ever be integrated into a mass-market product.
They (the gendarmerie) have thousands of offices all over the country, most of time in isolated areas (countryside, very small towns, mountains - they are the guys who will save your life if you ever get lost in a hole in the Alps). They want to have a working communication system and they don't want to dump all their communication devices jus because of a few notebooks.
I don't think there will be a real problem, though : 50-meters range is not significant in regard to the distances covered by their networks. But if there is a clash, and the choice is between iBooks and the Gendarmes, by money is on the latter.
I want to compare current status of Gnome and KDE. So I open two Netscape windows, one on www.kde.org, the other on www.gnome.org, and I read what's going on in Desktopland.
KDE : "Well, we've just finished reimplementing Visual Studio from scratch (the last beta is shipped with Mandrake 6.1), and we're almost done with Office, but you'll have to wait a little because KWord still flicks every now and then"...
Gnome : "Well, we've got a woooonderful spreadsheet and a nifty little editor, and we're currently working on getting together every piece of productivity software we find to set up some kind of office suite (boy, they call it a 'meta-project' !) and as for develoment tools, well, Emacs is fine after all, isnt'it ?"
Admittedly, the last sentence is forged. But the rest is painfully true. So far, in massive projects as well as in little funny tools, KDE has the lead and doesn't seem anything like close to lose it.
This is even becoming a point in the Oh-So-Holy-War of knowing whether Linux should be called "Gnu/Linux" : The day KDE 2.0 ships (and that seems to be very soon), talking about "KDE/Linux" systems will make much more sense for a significant proportion of Linux users who will spend almost all of their time using KDE tools.
So the question is:
When are you going to remember that you're actually making a desktop environment - not an academic project - and that this time, unlike older GNU success-stories, you have a tough competitor that stands exactly in the same niche as you ?
Emacs took almost ten years to become more or less usable by novice users without spending days and nights trying to figure out how to configure X or Y parameters. I'm afraid Gnome won't have as much time as its glorious predecessor to break through. In ten years, people will already have chosen their side. So far, Gnome quite doesn't look like the winner.
Oh dear, I can't believe it. The timing just seems so incredibly perfect !
Wherever this (rather muddy) story ends up, I can't help noticing the fact that it is brought to public attention just after Disney's acquired Infoseek and decided to set up its new "kids-safe" portal GoGuardian.
Even more flabbergasting [tm] is the fact that this scandal rises just as Disney launches its "SafeSurfing week" in Europe. This campaign is aimed at "giving children and parents basic tips of safety on the internet". Paedophilia is among its primary subjects...
This is no conspiracy stuff. I simply find it extremely amusing to see those oh-so-virtuous people discovering wolves in thir own shepherds.
Two ways to make an "intelligent" machine, whatever that means:
1) Rebuild (or simulate) every single neuron and make it fit into a human-like structure which we can't even begin to make conjectures about. This goal may be slightly beyond a 10 years term...
2) Don't try to follow the human architecture, or forget the brain paradigm altogether. The former is Hugo De Garis' method, the second is good old symbolic AI (Minsky, Schank et al.).
The only way to deem those things "intelligent" is to compare them with ourselves. Turing test, stuff like that. The concept of intelligence is totally human-centered. Therefore, to call such a machine "more intelligent than human" is plainly impossible. Either it is roughly as intelligent as man, or it is considered as "something else", but certainly not intelligent.
How could you define intelligence otherwise ? Ability to solve problems ? Come on, your gnuchess program can do this, would you really call gnuchess intelligent ? Ability to overcome complex problems ? Matter of time before a brute force genetic program generation can solve incredibly complex problems (at least when proper modelling is possible), and sorry, I will not admit a genetic algorithm is intelligent. Ability to overcome men's attempts at destroying it ? In this case the Black Plague bacillum is probably the most intelligent lifeform that has ever existed on this planet.
I like Arthur C. Clarke when he writes fiction. He should try to do only that - exactly like Hugo de Garis does.
Thomas PS : Don't come and tell me De Garis is serious about what he writes, I won't believe you:p
Artemis is primarily the goddess of hunting (ESR's Geeks with Guns might be modern equivalents to this Chick with Bows...).
The real goddess of the moon is Selene (look out for "Selenium" in Medeleiev's table). Pale, thin woman with long black hair - the contrary of healthy, athletic Artemis.
However it is true that those two goddesses have often been confused, even in antiquity. This may come from the former identification of her brother Apollon (god of light, sports and music, among others) with Helios (god of the Sun - ever noticed all those sun-related words that begin with "helio" ?), although those two guys are also different gods with different genealogies and all that.
This may explain why those stupid Romans, when they adopted greek mythology, mixed both Artemis and Selene into one single woman - known as Diana, goddess of hunting and of the moon. BTW, ever wondered where the word "Dianetics" comes from ?...
Try to guess what they're hunting after !
Thomas Happy/.ing to all. PS: If you're a student of French or any other latin language, mythology can be quite a funny way to improve your vocabulary : many Greek gods - and nearly all Roman gods - have names that can be found in many words of these languages.
Strange nobody wrote this before. It seems rather obvious to me.
Well, maybe we'll wait till next year, and give this year's award to Eric S. Raymond, but after that, the Slashdot founders are likely to get it...
Besides, maybe the year after we'll have to give it to the KDE team, for by that time KDevelop will be the No 1 IDE and KOffice will ship more copies than MSOffice and Staroffice together; but in 2001, you can be sure our lovely friends will be the happy winners...
Oh, I forgot Alan Cox... And Marc Ewing too.. and BSD's Hubbard.. And Gnome's de Icaza.. And the guys of Apache... And Phil Zimmermann.. And Donald Knuth (if still alive)... and...
Oh, well, they're young after all, let's hope they'll get the prize before they're too old to type on a keyboard...
Since the novel is very short and has very precise themes, we are still in the field of mathematical games - that is, arranging a finite number of element according to a finite set of rule in order to reach an arbitrary kind of configuration.
It is evident that computers are intrinsically better than humans at mathematical games stricto sensu. I don't understand why some people were so shocked after Deep Blue's victory over Kasparov. The real miracle is that men are still able to compete with computers today ! This is merely a matter of time before we can get machines powerful enough to calculate and try the entire tree of a game (or, for more complex games, significant parts of it) and be almost sure to win.
By design, machines are better than human at mathematical games. Chess are a mathematical game. Writing a very short story on a precise subject can still be roughly modelled as a mathematical game, at least for the structure of the story, while the "creative sugar" may be a difficult bit. Writing a full novel with complex stories and deep, meaningful dialogues is beyond that reach.
The problem is, are there still many people who actually read complex stories - especially with deep, meaningful dialogues ? This Brutus-1 computer is just a machine equivalent for Barbara Cartland or industrial pop-music songwriters. CACDBS - Computer-Aided Celine Dion BullShit - is only years away.
You see, this is a little like Babelfish : on its own, it's useless (too buggy), but used as a "preparser" to do the bulk of the job so the humans only have to correct the errors and add little twists every here and there, it can drastically enhance productivity. My opinion is, it will be very successful in America.
(This is not an attempt at US-bashing : I'm sure the books it'll write will have tremendous success even in Europe - simply, european editors might be more reluctant to adopt this machine than their american counterparts. Damn intellectuals. Still don't understand the market is always right)
Potential problem : this might lead to some endless "my-country-does-it-better-than-yours" flamebait, and more precisely a great deal of America-Bashing (which is almost as popular a sport in continental Europe as M$-Bashing is among Linux lovers - wonder why:o)
I don't even want to think about pseudo-political debates where nobody would understand what the other means ("socialist" or "liberal" have very different meaning on either side of the ocean).
I know this. I have even done it - foolish me:o)
All in all, is/. (or any other open forum) ready for the big culture shock ? And wouldn't this "shock" mean a mere swallowing (minor cultures/languages being swallowed by the Big Bad Dumbing Yankees, one world, one culture, one language - a deep and recurrent fear among many European countries)?
CmdrTaco writes: For some reason this amuses me greatly.
Hmmmm. My guess is this "reason" involves a significant amount of eSAB (extreme Saturday Afternoon Boredom).
By the way, now that DN registration goes international (with France Telecom, among others), it might be interesting to port this script over other languages.
www.BarreObliquePoint.org (French version for SlashDot - zis maighte bi véry interestinge)
www.FrischFleisch.net (German Freshmeat - no comment)
www.AltaVista.com (Spanish for High View - but this would be rather silly since there nobody would give a web site such a ridiculously vain name as "high view", would they ?)
www.Youpi.com (French for Yahoo - and the worst is, it actually exists ! Check it out, it's worth the click:o))
Possible extension : add a speech-synthetisis program to pronounce each word - loud and with a Relic-like southern american accent. You might not see the point, but believe me this would be great fun for us little eurokids:o)
I notice that the OpenIPO system is basically a system relying on competition among bidders. Which is not unusual indeed. However, I also understand that the OpenIpo principles let the "elected" bidders pay only as much as the lowest elected bidder offered, whatever their own offer was.
This led me to the following conclusion : if we all get together and establish a common price, and then flood the IPO with bids at that same price, we are likely to set a maximum to the price that we shall pay : if enough (ie many) people bid at a given price, they will almost certainly get their shares at this price or at a lower price.
This brute force attack may have two drawbacks/flaws:
If
too many people join the gang, some will not be able to get their shares. But that's the rule in any kind of IPO.
If a few folks come and offer incredible amounts of money, we're fucked as well, for those guys will get all the share and there'll be nothing left for us; still that's also common to all IPOs.
This may be totally illegal. I'm not a jurist and I don't know about american laws (except that it's forbidden to have sex out of marriage in some states:o) ) but what I'm talking about might well be delictuous. So what ? Who will ever be able to prove you actually participated into the plot ? We may set up this price together, display it for all to see on an non-US based website, and then do what you want !
Thank you for your attention. Sorry for using up your precious time.
't was more kind of the opposite; I read "socialist suck". Probably didn't understand well. Sounded a little too much like the man-without-a-clue who equates anything labelled "socialist" with collectivization and gulags. Knee jerk reaction : flame. A bit excessive, probably.
They already had kde 1.1.2 packed as a lovely RPM at Rpmfind.net quite a few days before I could read the announcement of the Tarball release on/.
For Red-Hat : if they're suicidal enough to depart from Mandrake, they'll regret it sooner or later. The guys at Mandrake really do a hell of a job. Red Hat may decide to benefit from it (Open Source mind : Good Thing) or they just may close up and lock themselves into some ivory tower (MS mind ; Bad Thing).
Tell me : what would be the gain of consciously cutting compatibility with all the nifty things the Mandrakers are doing right now ?
Thomas Miconi Karma Police - Please be calm, be quiet, be at ease, please don't try to escape...
An example : French TV channel "Canal +" has a popular daily show which looks more or less like a political "Muppet Show" (the Brits know this as "Spitting Image"). In this show, they make fun of basically anything that is powerful/rich/famous. Ok.
Now Vivendi (one of the biggest service companies in the world, mind you, eg the water you drink is not unlikely to come from them) buys a big part of Canal+. Vivendi, that is, its boss : Jean-Marie Meissier, a nice-and-polite-business tycoon who is not as downright evil as Citizen Murdoch, but who is still rather frightening when you consider his media/financial power (owns a few zillions companies and even more newspapers). Uh.
So what do the guys at Canal+ decide when they learn they belong to Jean-Marie Meissier ? They immediately make a puppet for Meissier, and they start portraying him as a monomaniac businessman whose interests may be summarized as money, money and money.
Should learn from those frogs. Repeat after me : A media-oriented company can criticize and make fun of the guys who own it, because if those guys have even the slightest notion of what PR is, they'll never take the risk of shutting you up (or -even less- down) ! Slashdot gets so much traffic and has so many dedicated readers (including myself), why would andover.net or anybody else damage this monstruous popularity and have thousands of angry/.'ers hate them for life ?
Thomas Miconi Karma Police - One's ego must end where someone else's begins.
You write: No one held a gun to these idiots heads and said, buy store bought pre built pcs. You could very easily order the parts, build your own pc
Yeeeaah ! This is exactly what Microsoft relies on ! All the pre-manufactured PCs with WinXX inside, locking Linux into the tiny niche of those who know enough about computers to build up one. Great !
Besides, the question is not here. The question is precisely to know whether or not Microsoft used illegal tactics to impose its OS on PC manufacturers, thus cheating the market (that is me and you, dear [whatever]fscker). In other words, you're blaming a "socialist" government because he wants to enforce what you're asking for : letting the market decide !
Thomas Miconi PS : Please do not think I'm saying you're stupid. Ireally don't need to. The title of your original post is enough to establish the negativity of your IQ beyond reasonable doubt.
Well, the article is interesting, and probably some proportion of so-called "geeks" and "nerds" exhibit mild autism. But I think the article is rather misleading, as most people who would consider themselves "geeks" or "nerds" are simply intelligent and often a bit introverted (i.e. shy).
Right !
To an outside observer, they may appear to lack social skills. However, these people often have strong empathic traits, and are overly sensitive to social cues (which are opposite to autistic tendencies).
Maybe less right. Extreme sensitiveness to interation with other people is a defining character of some autistic types. Bursting into tears for apparently no reason (in fact, something you said that gave them an emotional shock), violent crisis in reaction to a simple emotively-significant contact. Still this is perfectly compatible with seemingly total indifference towards other people 95% of the time.
I don't like to take movies as scientific examples (!), but "Rain Man" is extremely well documented on the subject, and gives an idea of what this may mean. Another example from american popular culture would be "Forrest Gump" (the book, not the movie !), which is even more explicit.
In fact the real problem here is amalgam. People tend to see autists as one uniform class of people, and so do they for geeks. This is simply stupid. "Autism" is a syndrom (a bunch of symptoms) that can cover a wide range of extremely different cases, just as "geekness" or "nerdess". In fact, the very existence of these two different terms "nerds" and "geeks" is already a hint at this, although my poor understanding of English prevents me from making a clear dinstinction (but I understand there's an ongoing debate on this..:o)).
The fact that a particular kind of autism might be related to a particular kind of "nerdness" is an interesting idea, which I think should not be despised. Using this to assert "Geek = Autist" only proves a real, severe and unquestionable mental disorder in the person who emits such a statement !
Thomas Miconi Karma Police - enforcing peace of mind by all possible means.
I am also tired of people not understanding the difference between someone who is just different and someone who is functionally impaired and needs help. The best line I can think of from I Never Promised You a Rose Garden is "Please, Doctor, my difference is not my sickness."
Who said there's no difference ? The paper is only stating that both behaviours (autism / "nerdness") might be two flavours of the same thing, one being overwhelmingly more severe than the other (well, maybe not overwhelmingly, but more severe anyway).
We all know that kerosene and bitume are two products of the same process (petrol refinement); still nobody would argue that kerosene and bitume are the same thing !
Thomas Miconi
Karma Police - enforcing peace of mid by all possible means.
Watch "Rain Man". Read "Forrest Gump" - the book, not the movie. Doesn't it sound familiar to you ?
Quick intelligence, overwhelming shyness, strange (sometimes even downright irritating/childish) behaviour. Inability to understand most social codes of the outside world. In some cases, total inability to entertain a simple, meaningless conversation.
Most striking fact : In some occasions, the surging of bad memories (remembering a difficult or even simply embarrassing situation) launches a brutal burst of shaky movements, sometimes with a clear self-destructive origin (such as brutally grasping your own head), maybe coming with bribes of sentences that an observator would find totally meaningless. These movements can be controlled, especially when there are people around, but at the price of significant effort - and even then a big, odd kind of shiver is noticed.
The above may be taken as a good description of autism. It also happens to be a description of many people that can be called geeks, including myself - even for the last part, which may not be the case for everybody.
Still, of course, I'm not a real autist, I have friends (even non-geek friends !:o)), I can talk to people - although I am extremely reluctant to talk to people I don't know, and the simple fact of having to give a phone call is scaring.
We have learnt to adopt an attitude that does not induce blatant hostility from the outside world. For many of us, we have learnt it the hard way. For some of us, this has been done by trying to cut down almost any social contact. Re-learning social skills is a difficult task that some (quite few, in fact) never achieve.
We are aborted autists, just the same way as Jupiter is an aborted star.
Thomas Miconi PS - Of Course, I'm not talking about *all* of you, dear readers. Still, I think many among you will understand what I mean.
It seems that the point here is to set up a censorship at the ISP level, that is, making the ISP 100% responsible for the contents it hosts.
Fortunately, this is exactly what has been deemed as impossible recently by French legislation.
There was quite a gossip in Frogland about this case : a free web-hoster (Valentin Lacambre, founder of the great altern.org, an anti-commercial web-hosting service) had been sued by top model Estelle Halliday because a website on his server featured intimate photographs of her.
This trial was taken very seriously by french internauts, and made its way through media coverage and government intervention (as usual in France). Premier Lionel Jospin and Minister of Justice (=~ Attorney General) Elisabeth Guigou expressed concern over the case.
Finally, a new law was voted by the parliament, wich carries more or less the following statement:
"All in all, the one who is accountable for an on-line publication is the one who authored it. The ISP is only held responsible if he deliberately refused to shut down access to this document, even after being told to do so by justice."
Now all of you Anglo-saxon libertarians will frown upon this : "This still gives censorship power to government, after justice decision." It may be so, but tell me : if someone ever puts a very private (:o) ) photograph of you (or your girlfirend) on a website, won't you be happy to have a way to stop it ??
Moreover, the necessity of justice intervention for closing down a web site/page is much better than the Munich conference project, where "censorship" is decided from what the ISP sees as "dangerous" for his audience (ie his profits), and where any ISP that does not filter sexual/violence contents by default is exposed to serious trouble.
Freedom of expression is well-established in the EU. Most european countries (Britain and southern countries put aside, maybe) have well-balanced laws on the subject. The French jurisprudence over this case provides a much better model for law enforcement over the web than Bertelsmann & Co.'s project.
Oh, BTW... maybe I didn't read well, but I did not see France Telecom anywhere in the paper... I think wee little froggies may be reasonably optimistic over the Munich draft.:o)
Thomas Miconi Karma Police - enforcing peace of mind by all possible means.
All a population needs to evolve is non-perfect self-replication. This is often seen as a prerequisite for life, but it is not a strict definition of it.
Computer programs can evolve, in the very darwinian meaning of the word; would you call them "alive" ??
The current theory is that bunches of self-replicating molecules (DNA, RNA or something even simpler that we still don't know of) appeared at some time, and grew more and more complex - until they gave something that could be called a really *living* thing.
Thomas Miconi Quel vent souffle, O passant ? / Quel Ouest expire ? De quels dieux terrifiants / s'eteint l'Empire ?
Seems like the gene-designers will need a lot of the knowledge from the software area. After all, it's us coders who are gurus about things like editing, compiling, debugging, bootstrapping... Looking forward to first GPL-ed gene-libraries.
Oh my... imagine Microsoft taking up on genetic engineering !!
"Well, I love the new gen. mod. pet you sold me, but the problem is it falls right asleep every time I touch him !"
The problem being that with living animals, you cannot just reboot and forget it...:p
Thomas Miconi Karma Police - Enforcing Peace of Mind by all possible means.
[From the 'help-me-get-my-feet-back-on-the-ground-again' dept.]
The minute the structure of genetics were discovered, creating artificial life from scratch was only a matter of time. We knew we could do it. The difficulty was in discovering, then controlling the high number of different elements that get in the process of creating a body from DNA code, and replicating this very DNA code.
From what I read in the article, we now have finished the discovering part, and are not too far from mastering the controlling part too. Good.
Question : what's next ?
Multi-cellular bodies, probably. We still don't have a clue how they really appeared from single-cells beings (we have hypotheses, but nothing more). This could be great for testing.
Then, "Computer-Aided Evolution". Yeah ! Heard about Genetic Programming ? Generate a few thousands simulated bacteries, each with a given DNA; test these in software against a particular problem (eg disaggregating petrol pollution); apply Genetic algorithms principles, and once you've got the DNA sequence, "implement" it ! That is, make a real living bacteria out of the computer-designed DNA sequence.
Sounds nice, uh ? Technology has so often imitated nature - not it's time to give a little back !:o)
Oh, BTW, for you all computer-lovers : Computers and Genetics were, as we all know, the 2 big revolutions of this century. But they happen to be more intermixed than you might think.
The DNA architecture, and the possibility to have some automaton replicating itself, was at the Heart of good ol'John Von Neumann's works. He designed several self-replicating systems, and was inspired by the Turing machine idea (a code read and executed by some machine) to the point of imagining a scheme were the reader-executer would be an arm, assembling several components following the code instructions, in order to build another machine exactly similar to itself...
Now doesn't this sound familiar ? You got it, this is DNA. And the guy imagined this at a time when nobody knew how DNA works. Wonder...
Thomas Miconi Karma Police - enforcing peace of mind by all possible means.
(From the help-me-get-my-feet-back-on-the-ground dept...)
Ok, what do we have here ? We have a machine that allows data input (the CD drive and the telnet port), remote access and data output (outgoing ports).
So far, we do not know how the stuff inside works. For example, we do not have any Dreamcast emulator. But this may happen soon.
IF we manage to understand the inner protocols of the system (after all, it has been done for the playstation, it is probably feasible for a WinCE machine, isn't it ?), then we might produce slightly modified CDs to have the console do rather cool things:
Remote Dreamcast playing on your computer. Setting some mechanism to redirect display directives through the outgoing port, and accept commands from incoming. Ever tried a 20-players Destruction Derby over the internet ?...
This might work the other way round : by telnetting into the console and interfering with its display output, we might modify the look of the games at will - imagine : themes for your Dreamcast !
X servers for Dreamcast. Yeah. Now this may have implications that I cannot even imagine - or it may just be plain bullshit as well. I don't know. I don't even want to know. The very concept in itself (come on, X on a console !) is enough to make me wonder.
Thomas Miconi Karma Police - enforcing peace of mind by all possible means
This message, although very clear and insightful, carries on a blatantly false statement : "Java is weakly supported under Linux"
I am currently using my Linux Boxes (RH 5.2 & Mandrake 6.0) to develop Java 1.2software.
Yes, I use the 1.2 version, from Blackdown, ported to Linux thanks to Sun's "more-open-than-close-software" policy.
And it runs fine ! AWT, Swing, whatever you want, it's there and working, and just as fast as with Win98 versions.
The only problem is, it's hard to resist the temptation to write my programs with vi, which makes my co-workers think I'm some highly dangerous kind of psycho...:o)
Thomas Miconi, Karma Police Foreign Dept. "Enforcing peace of mind by all possible means"
Slashdot Mirror
French police is composed of the Police Nationale (ordinary police, civilian, mainly in cities and urban areas) and the Gendarmerie (military police, mainly in the country or in little towns).
You can bet that the real army wouldn't care about little flashy notebooks if they had to set up a strong communication system in a hostile country; but here we're not talking about soldiers and fighters, we're talking about policemen. Therefore the constraints are less drastic, and the systems may be less noise-tolerant. Furthermore, when the communication devices in use were created, nobody thought that UHF communication might ever be integrated into a mass-market product.
They (the gendarmerie) have thousands of offices all over the country, most of time in isolated areas (countryside, very small towns, mountains - they are the guys who will save your life if you ever get lost in a hole in the Alps). They want to have a working communication system and they don't want to dump all their communication devices jus because of a few notebooks.
I don't think there will be a real problem, though : 50-meters range is not significant in regard to the distances covered by their networks. But if there is a clash, and the choice is between iBooks and the Gendarmes, by money is on the latter.
Thomas
(OK, this message may be a little provocative)
:
I want to compare current status of Gnome and KDE. So I open two Netscape windows, one on www.kde.org, the other on www.gnome.org, and I read what's going on in Desktopland.
KDE : "Well, we've just finished reimplementing Visual Studio from scratch (the last beta is shipped with Mandrake 6.1), and we're almost done with Office, but you'll have to wait a little because KWord still flicks every now and then"...
Gnome : "Well, we've got a woooonderful spreadsheet and a nifty little editor, and we're currently working on getting together every piece of productivity software we find to set up some kind of office suite (boy, they call it a 'meta-project' !) and as for develoment tools, well, Emacs is fine after all, isnt'it ?"
Admittedly, the last sentence is forged. But the rest is painfully true. So far, in massive projects as well as in little funny tools, KDE has the lead and doesn't seem anything like close to lose it.
This is even becoming a point in the Oh-So-Holy-War of knowing whether Linux should be called "Gnu/Linux" : The day KDE 2.0 ships (and that seems to be very soon), talking about "KDE/Linux" systems will make much more sense for a significant proportion of Linux users who will spend almost all of their time using KDE tools.
So the question is
When are you going to remember that you're actually making a desktop environment - not an academic project - and that this time, unlike older GNU success-stories, you have a tough competitor that stands exactly in the same niche as you ?
Emacs took almost ten years to become more or less usable by novice users without spending days and nights trying to figure out how to configure X or Y parameters. I'm afraid Gnome won't have as much time as its glorious predecessor to break through. In ten years, people will already have chosen their side. So far, Gnome quite doesn't look like the winner.
Thomas Miconi
Oh dear, I can't believe it. The timing just seems so incredibly perfect !
/.ing to all.
Wherever this (rather muddy) story ends up, I can't help noticing the fact that it is brought to public attention just after Disney's acquired Infoseek and decided to set up its new "kids-safe" portal GoGuardian.
Even more flabbergasting [tm] is the fact that this scandal rises just as Disney launches its "SafeSurfing week" in Europe. This campaign is aimed at "giving children and parents basic tips of safety on the internet". Paedophilia is among its primary subjects...
This is no conspiracy stuff. I simply find it extremely amusing to see those oh-so-virtuous people discovering wolves in thir own shepherds.
Thomas
Happy
Two ways to make an "intelligent" machine, whatever that means :
:p
1) Rebuild (or simulate) every single neuron and make it fit into a human-like structure which we can't even begin to make conjectures about. This goal may be slightly beyond a 10 years term...
2) Don't try to follow the human architecture, or forget the brain paradigm altogether. The former is Hugo De Garis' method, the second is good old symbolic AI (Minsky, Schank et al.).
The only way to deem those things "intelligent" is to compare them with ourselves. Turing test, stuff like that. The concept of intelligence is totally human-centered. Therefore, to call such a machine "more intelligent than human" is plainly impossible. Either it is roughly as intelligent as man, or it is considered as "something else", but certainly not intelligent.
How could you define intelligence otherwise ? Ability to solve problems ? Come on, your gnuchess program can do this, would you really call gnuchess intelligent ? Ability to overcome complex problems ? Matter of time before a brute force genetic program generation can solve incredibly complex problems (at least when proper modelling is possible), and sorry, I will not admit a genetic algorithm is intelligent. Ability to overcome men's attempts at destroying it ? In this case the Black Plague bacillum is probably the most intelligent lifeform that has ever existed on this planet.
I like Arthur C. Clarke when he writes fiction. He should try to do only that - exactly like Hugo de Garis does.
Thomas PS : Don't come and tell me De Garis is serious about what he writes, I won't believe you
Artemis is primarily the goddess of hunting (ESR's Geeks with Guns might be modern equivalents to this Chick with Bows...).
/.ing to all.
The real goddess of the moon is Selene (look out for "Selenium" in Medeleiev's table). Pale, thin woman with long black hair - the contrary of healthy, athletic Artemis.
However it is true that those two goddesses have often been confused, even in antiquity. This may come from the former identification of her brother Apollon (god of light, sports and music, among others) with Helios (god of the Sun - ever noticed all those sun-related words that begin with "helio" ?), although those two guys are also different gods with different genealogies and all that.
This may explain why those stupid Romans, when they adopted greek mythology, mixed both Artemis and Selene into one single woman - known as Diana, goddess of hunting and of the moon.
BTW, ever wondered where the word "Dianetics" comes from ?...
Try to guess what they're hunting after !
Thomas
Happy
PS: If you're a student of French or any other latin language, mythology can be quite a funny way to improve your vocabulary : many Greek gods - and nearly all Roman gods - have names that can be found in many words of these languages.
Strange nobody wrote this before. It seems rather obvious to me.
/.ing to all.
Well, maybe we'll wait till next year, and give this year's award to Eric S. Raymond, but after that, the Slashdot founders are likely to get it...
Besides, maybe the year after we'll have to give it to the KDE team, for by that time KDevelop will be the No 1 IDE and KOffice will ship more copies than MSOffice and Staroffice together; but in 2001, you can be sure our lovely friends will be the happy winners...
Oh, I forgot Alan Cox... And Marc Ewing too.. and BSD's Hubbard.. And Gnome's de Icaza.. And the guys of Apache... And Phil Zimmermann.. And Donald Knuth (if still alive)... and...
Oh, well, they're young after all, let's hope they'll get the prize before they're too old to type on a keyboard...
Thomas
Happy
Since the novel is very short and has very precise themes, we are still in the field of mathematical games - that is, arranging a finite number of element according to a finite set of rule in order to reach an arbitrary kind of configuration.
It is evident that computers are intrinsically better than humans at mathematical games stricto sensu. I don't understand why some people were so shocked after Deep Blue's victory over Kasparov. The real miracle is that men are still able to compete with computers today ! This is merely a matter of time before we can get machines powerful enough to calculate and try the entire tree of a game (or, for more complex games, significant parts of it) and be almost sure to win.
By design, machines are better than human at mathematical games. Chess are a mathematical game. Writing a very short story on a precise subject can still be roughly modelled as a mathematical game, at least for the structure of the story, while the "creative sugar" may be a difficult bit. Writing a full novel with complex stories and deep, meaningful dialogues is beyond that reach.
The problem is, are there still many people who actually read complex stories - especially with deep, meaningful dialogues ? This Brutus-1 computer is just a machine equivalent for Barbara Cartland or industrial pop-music songwriters. CACDBS - Computer-Aided Celine Dion BullShit - is only years away.
You see, this is a little like Babelfish : on its own, it's useless (too buggy), but used as a "preparser" to do the bulk of the job so the humans only have to correct the errors and add little twists every here and there, it can drastically enhance productivity. My opinion is, it will be very successful in America.
(This is not an attempt at US-bashing : I'm sure the books it'll write will have tremendous success even in Europe - simply, european editors might be more reluctant to adopt this machine than their american counterparts. Damn intellectuals. Still don't understand the market is always right)
Thomas
Total agreement.
:o)
:o)
/. (or any other open forum) ready for the big culture shock ? And wouldn't this "shock" mean a mere swallowing (minor cultures/languages being swallowed by the Big Bad Dumbing Yankees, one world, one culture, one language - a deep and recurrent fear among many European countries)?
Potential problem : this might lead to some endless "my-country-does-it-better-than-yours" flamebait, and more precisely a great deal of America-Bashing (which is almost as popular a sport in continental Europe as M$-Bashing is among Linux lovers - wonder why
I don't even want to think about pseudo-political debates where nobody would understand what the other means ("socialist" or "liberal" have very different meaning on either side of the ocean).
I know this. I have even done it - foolish me
All in all, is
Thomas , rather French indeed.
CmdrTaco writes :
:o))
:o)
For some reason this amuses me greatly.
Hmmmm. My guess is this "reason" involves a significant amount of eSAB (extreme Saturday Afternoon Boredom).
By the way, now that DN registration goes international (with France Telecom, among others), it might be interesting to port this script over other languages.
www.BarreObliquePoint.org (French version for SlashDot - zis maighte bi véry interestinge)
www.FrischFleisch.net (German Freshmeat - no comment)
www.AltaVista.com (Spanish for High View - but this would be rather silly since there nobody would give a web site such a ridiculously vain name as "high view", would they ?)
www.Youpi.com (French for Yahoo - and the worst is, it actually exists ! Check it out, it's worth the click
Possible extension : add a speech-synthetisis program to pronounce each word - loud and with a Relic-like southern american accent. You might not see the point, but believe me this would be great fun for us little eurokids
I notice that the OpenIPO system is basically a system relying on competition among bidders. Which is not unusual indeed. However, I also understand that the OpenIpo principles let the "elected" bidders pay only as much as the lowest elected bidder offered, whatever their own offer was.
This led me to the following conclusion : if we all get together and establish a common price, and then flood the IPO with bids at that same price, we are likely to set a maximum to the price that we shall pay : if enough (ie many) people bid at a given price, they will almost certainly get their shares at this price or at a lower price.
This brute force attack may have two drawbacks/flaws:
This may be totally illegal. I'm not a jurist and I don't know about american laws (except that it's forbidden to have sex out of marriage in some states
Thank you for your attention. Sorry for using up your precious time.
Thomas Miconi
't was more kind of the opposite; I read "socialist suck". Probably didn't understand well. Sounded a little too much like the man-without-a-clue who equates anything labelled "socialist" with collectivization and gulags. Knee jerk reaction : flame. A bit excessive, probably.
For the rest, I maintain.
They already had kde 1.1.2 packed as a lovely RPM at Rpmfind.net quite a few days before I could read the announcement of the Tarball release on /.
For Red-Hat : if they're suicidal enough to depart from Mandrake, they'll regret it sooner or later. The guys at Mandrake really do a hell of a job. Red Hat may decide to benefit from it (Open Source mind : Good Thing) or they just may close up and lock themselves into some ivory tower (MS mind ; Bad Thing).
Tell me : what would be the gain of consciously cutting compatibility with all the nifty things the Mandrakers are doing right now ?
Thomas Miconi
Karma Police - Please be calm, be quiet, be at ease, please don't try to escape...
An example : French TV channel "Canal +" has a popular daily show which looks more or less like a political "Muppet Show" (the Brits know this as "Spitting Image"). In this show, they make fun of basically anything that is powerful/rich/famous. Ok.
/.'ers hate them for life ?
Now Vivendi (one of the biggest service companies in the world, mind you, eg the water you drink is not unlikely to come from them) buys a big part of Canal+. Vivendi, that is, its boss : Jean-Marie Meissier, a nice-and-polite-business tycoon who is not as downright evil as Citizen Murdoch, but who is still rather frightening when you consider his media/financial power (owns a few zillions companies and even more newspapers). Uh.
So what do the guys at Canal+ decide when they learn they belong to Jean-Marie Meissier ? They immediately make a puppet for Meissier, and they start portraying him as a monomaniac businessman whose interests may be summarized as money, money and money.
Should learn from those frogs. Repeat after me : A media-oriented company can criticize and make fun of the guys who own it, because if those guys have even the slightest notion of what PR is, they'll never take the risk of shutting you up (or -even less- down) ! Slashdot gets so much traffic and has so many dedicated readers (including myself), why would andover.net or anybody else damage this monstruous popularity and have thousands of angry
Thomas Miconi
Karma Police - One's ego must end where someone else's begins.
You write :
No one held a gun to these idiots heads and said, buy store bought pre built pcs. You could very easily order the parts, build your own pc
Yeeeaah ! This is exactly what Microsoft relies on ! All the pre-manufactured PCs with WinXX inside, locking Linux into the tiny niche of those who know enough about computers to build up one. Great !
Besides, the question is not here. The question is precisely to know whether or not Microsoft used illegal tactics to impose its OS on PC manufacturers, thus cheating the market (that is me and you, dear [whatever]fscker). In other words, you're blaming a "socialist" government because he wants to enforce what you're asking for : letting the market decide !
Thomas Miconi
PS : Please do not think I'm saying you're stupid. Ireally don't need to. The title of your original post is enough to establish the negativity of your IQ beyond reasonable doubt.
Well, the article is interesting, and probably some proportion of so-called "geeks" and "nerds" exhibit mild autism. But I think the article is rather misleading, as most people who would consider themselves "geeks" or "nerds" are simply intelligent and often a bit introverted (i.e. shy).
:o)).
Right !
To an outside observer, they may appear to lack social skills. However, these people often have strong empathic traits, and are overly sensitive to social cues (which are opposite to autistic tendencies).
Maybe less right. Extreme sensitiveness to interation with other people is a defining character of some autistic types. Bursting into tears for apparently no reason (in fact, something you said that gave them an emotional shock), violent crisis in reaction to a simple emotively-significant contact. Still this is perfectly compatible with seemingly total indifference towards other people 95% of the time.
I don't like to take movies as scientific examples (!), but "Rain Man" is extremely well documented on the subject, and gives an idea of what this may mean. Another example from american popular culture would be "Forrest Gump" (the book, not the movie !), which is even more explicit.
In fact the real problem here is amalgam. People tend to see autists as one uniform class of people, and so do they for geeks. This is simply stupid. "Autism" is a syndrom (a bunch of symptoms) that can cover a wide range of extremely different cases, just as "geekness" or "nerdess". In fact, the very existence of these two different terms "nerds" and "geeks" is already a hint at this, although my poor understanding of English prevents me from making a clear dinstinction (but I understand there's an ongoing debate on this..
The fact that a particular kind of autism might be related to a particular kind of "nerdness" is an interesting idea, which I think should not be despised. Using this to assert "Geek = Autist" only proves a real, severe and unquestionable mental disorder in the person who emits such a statement !
Thomas Miconi
Karma Police - enforcing peace of mind by all possible means.
I am also tired of people not understanding the difference between someone who is just different and someone who is functionally impaired and
needs help. The best line I can think of from I Never Promised You a Rose Garden is "Please, Doctor, my difference is not my sickness."
Who said there's no difference ? The paper is only stating that both behaviours (autism / "nerdness") might be two flavours of the same thing, one being overwhelmingly more severe than the other (well, maybe not overwhelmingly, but more severe anyway).
We all know that kerosene and bitume are two products of the same process (petrol refinement); still nobody would argue that kerosene and bitume are the same thing !
Thomas Miconi
Karma Police - enforcing peace of mid by all possible means.
Watch "Rain Man". Read "Forrest Gump" - the book, not the movie. Doesn't it sound familiar to you ?
:o)), I can talk to people - although I am extremely reluctant to talk to people I don't know, and the simple fact of having to give a phone call is scaring.
Quick intelligence, overwhelming shyness, strange (sometimes even downright irritating/childish) behaviour. Inability to understand most social codes of the outside world. In some cases, total inability to entertain a simple, meaningless conversation.
Most striking fact : In some occasions, the surging of bad memories (remembering a difficult or even simply embarrassing situation) launches a brutal burst of shaky movements, sometimes with a clear self-destructive origin (such as brutally grasping your own head), maybe coming with bribes of sentences that an observator would find totally meaningless. These movements can be controlled, especially when there are people around, but at the price of significant effort - and even then a big, odd kind of shiver is noticed.
The above may be taken as a good description of autism. It also happens to be a description of many people that can be called geeks, including myself - even for the last part, which may not be the case for everybody.
Still, of course, I'm not a real autist, I have friends (even non-geek friends !
We have learnt to adopt an attitude that does not induce blatant hostility from the outside world. For many of us, we have learnt it the hard way. For some of us, this has been done by trying to cut down almost any social contact. Re-learning social skills is a difficult task that some (quite few, in fact) never achieve.
We are aborted autists, just the same way as Jupiter is an aborted star.
Thomas Miconi
PS - Of Course, I'm not talking about *all* of you, dear readers. Still, I think many among you will understand what I mean.
My question comes in three parts :
1) Are you an Alien agent sent to earth in preparation of a global invasion of planet Earth ?
2) In case you are, what are the steps to follow if I want to apply for special (ie favour) treatment when the invasion actually happens ?
3) If the answer to the last question involves boots or leather shoes, are Berlutti's OK ?
Thomas Miconi
karma Police - enforcing peace of mind by all possible means.
It seems that the point here is to set up a censorship at the ISP level, that is, making the ISP 100% responsible for the contents it hosts.
:o) ) photograph of you (or your girlfirend) on a website, won't you be happy to have a way to stop it ??
:o)
Fortunately, this is exactly what has been deemed as impossible recently by French legislation.
There was quite a gossip in Frogland about this case : a free web-hoster (Valentin Lacambre, founder of the great altern.org, an anti-commercial web-hosting service) had been sued by top model Estelle Halliday because a website on his server featured intimate photographs of her.
This trial was taken very seriously by french internauts, and made its way through media coverage and government intervention (as usual in France). Premier Lionel Jospin and Minister of Justice (=~ Attorney General) Elisabeth Guigou expressed concern over the case.
Finally, a new law was voted by the parliament, wich carries more or less the following statement:
"All in all, the one who is accountable for an on-line publication is the one who authored it. The ISP is only held responsible if he deliberately refused to shut down access to this document, even after being told to do so by justice."
Now all of you Anglo-saxon libertarians will frown upon this : "This still gives censorship power to government, after justice decision." It may be so, but tell me : if someone ever puts a very private (
Moreover, the necessity of justice intervention for closing down a web site/page is much better than the Munich conference project, where "censorship" is decided from what the ISP sees as "dangerous" for his audience (ie his profits), and where any ISP that does not filter sexual/violence contents by default is exposed to serious trouble.
Freedom of expression is well-established in the EU. Most european countries (Britain and southern countries put aside, maybe) have well-balanced laws on the subject. The French jurisprudence over this case provides a much better model for law enforcement over the web than Bertelsmann & Co.'s project.
Oh, BTW... maybe I didn't read well, but I did not see France Telecom anywhere in the paper... I think wee little froggies may be reasonably optimistic over the Munich draft.
Thomas Miconi
Karma Police - enforcing peace of mind by all possible means.
All a population needs to evolve is non-perfect self-replication. This is often seen as a prerequisite for life, but it is not a strict definition of it.
Computer programs can evolve, in the very darwinian meaning of the word; would you call them "alive" ??
The current theory is that bunches of self-replicating molecules (DNA, RNA or something even simpler that we still don't know of) appeared at some time, and grew more and more complex - until they gave something that could be called a really *living* thing.
Thomas Miconi
Quel vent souffle, O passant ? / Quel Ouest expire ?
De quels dieux terrifiants / s'eteint l'Empire ?
Seems like the gene-designers will need a lot of the knowledge from the software area. After all, it's us coders who are gurus about things like editing, compiling, debugging, bootstrapping... Looking forward to first GPL-ed gene-libraries.
:p
Oh my... imagine Microsoft taking up on genetic engineering !!
"Well, I love the new gen. mod. pet you sold me, but the problem is it falls right asleep every time I touch him !"
The problem being that with living animals, you cannot just reboot and forget it...
Thomas Miconi
Karma Police - Enforcing Peace of Mind by all possible means.
[From the 'help-me-get-my-feet-back-on-the-ground-again' dept.]
:o)
The minute the structure of genetics were discovered, creating artificial life from scratch was only a matter of time. We knew we could do it. The difficulty was in discovering, then controlling the high number of different elements that get in the process of creating a body from DNA code, and replicating this very DNA code.
From what I read in the article, we now have finished the discovering part, and are not too far from mastering the controlling part too. Good.
Question : what's next ?
Multi-cellular bodies, probably. We still don't have a clue how they really appeared from single-cells beings (we have hypotheses, but nothing more). This could be great for testing.
Then, "Computer-Aided Evolution". Yeah ! Heard about Genetic Programming ? Generate a few thousands simulated bacteries, each with a given DNA; test these in software against a particular problem (eg disaggregating petrol pollution); apply Genetic algorithms principles, and once you've got the DNA sequence, "implement" it ! That is, make a real living bacteria out of the computer-designed DNA sequence.
Sounds nice, uh ? Technology has so often imitated nature - not it's time to give a little back !
Oh, BTW, for you all computer-lovers : Computers and Genetics were, as we all know, the 2 big revolutions of this century. But they happen to be more intermixed than you might think.
The DNA architecture, and the possibility to have some automaton replicating itself, was at the Heart of good ol'John Von Neumann's works. He designed several self-replicating systems, and was inspired by the Turing machine idea (a code read and executed by some machine) to the point of imagining a scheme were the reader-executer would be an arm, assembling several components following the code instructions, in order to build another machine exactly similar to itself...
Now doesn't this sound familiar ? You got it, this is DNA. And the guy imagined this at a time when nobody knew how DNA works. Wonder...
Thomas Miconi
Karma Police - enforcing peace of mind by all possible means.
Ok, what do we have here ? We have a machine that allows data input (the CD drive and the telnet port), remote access and data output (outgoing ports).
So far, we do not know how the stuff inside works. For example, we do not have any Dreamcast emulator. But this may happen soon.
IF we manage to understand the inner protocols of the system (after all, it has been done for the playstation, it is probably feasible for a WinCE machine, isn't it ?), then we might produce slightly modified CDs to have the console do rather cool things
Remote Dreamcast playing on your computer. Setting some mechanism to redirect display directives through the outgoing port, and accept commands from incoming. Ever tried a 20-players Destruction Derby over the internet ?...
This might work the other way round : by telnetting into the console and interfering with its display output, we might modify the look of the games at will - imagine : themes for your Dreamcast !
X servers for Dreamcast. Yeah. Now this may have implications that I cannot even imagine - or it may just be plain bullshit as well. I don't know. I don't even want to know. The very concept in itself (come on, X on a console !) is enough to make me wonder.
Thomas Miconi
Karma Police - enforcing peace of mind by all possible means
This message, although very clear and insightful, carries on a blatantly false statement : "Java is weakly supported under Linux"
:o)
I am currently using my Linux Boxes (RH 5.2 & Mandrake 6.0) to develop Java 1.2software.
Yes, I use the 1.2 version, from Blackdown, ported to Linux thanks to Sun's "more-open-than-close-software" policy.
And it runs fine ! AWT, Swing, whatever you want, it's there and working, and just as fast as with Win98 versions.
The only problem is, it's hard to resist the temptation to write my programs with vi, which makes my co-workers think I'm some highly dangerous kind of psycho...
Thomas Miconi,
Karma Police Foreign Dept.
"Enforcing peace of mind by all possible means"
Just imagine they use this thing to have Celine Dion singing "My heart will go on" for centuries after her death ?...
But, by the way, I'm wondering... Aren't they already using it right now for the Rolling Stones ???
Thomas Miconi
Karma Police - Enforcing peace of mind by all possible means.