I don't understand the concept that soundboard recordings that were made by GD personnel or permitted by GD personnel (by making direct to sbd patches available) somehow "belong" by moral or legal right to anyone except the authorized copyright-holders of the music--even if they permitted some form of limited distribution through trading of soundboards (either made by fans or "ripped off" from the GD organization) back in the day. It doesn't seem to have sunk in at GD management until recently that they had high-quality product available for nothing on the archive that competed with their own commercially released products. I am sincerely amazed that anybody would think that those who have legal rights to the music, including those who were performers of it, should have to think twice before restricting distribution of their livelihood. It really IS "their" music. Fans have the right to pay for it and to listen to it. Under appropriate conditions, to perform it.
Maybe so--but from http://www.folklore.org/:
I Invented Burrell
Author:
Andy Hertzfeld
Date:
1981
Characters:
Burrell Smith, Jef Raskin
Topics:
Personality
Summary:
Burrell imitates Jef
Revision:
most recent of 1
Burrell had a great sense of humor, and he was capable of performing devastating impersonations of everybody else on the Mac team, especially the authority figures.
Whatever idea that you came up with, Jef Raskin had a tendency to claim that he invented it at some earlier point. That trait was the basis of Burrell's impersonation of Jef.
Jef had a slight stammer, which Burrell nailed perfectly. Burrell began by folding his fingers together like Jef and then exclaiming in a soft, Jef-like voice, "Why, why, why, I invented the Macintosh!"
Then Burrell would shift to his radio announcer voice, playing the part of an imaginary interviewer. "No, I thought that Burrell invented the Macintosh", the interviewer would object.
He'd shift back to his Jef voice for the punch line.
"Why, why, why, I invented Burrell!"
I remember a Mac TV ad when they introduced Pagemaker/LaserWriter--it was a commercial aimed at the corporate market; a little scenario along the lines of a ticked off boss bemoaning the poor quality of his company's reports until some little busy-bee with access to the Mac flourishes a really professional looking business report. You can see the light bulbs going on above the executives' heads. Wow, we can do this too!! Professional looking reports!!
Read the Constitution, Article 1, Section 8:
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries
---
In principle you don't own it just because you can google it.
Well, not in anyway they haven't been screwed before. This is jejeune--New Line follows what has been the accepted industry practice of crediting revenue from in-house partners to a profit center against which external partners (like Jackson) have gross points. So an in-house distributor pays $x to distribute a film, for example, in an overseas market. If this in-house distributor helps out the bottom line of the vertically integrated partner by charging rates BELOW MARKET that's a GOOD thing for the overall company--the movie gets out without transfering money from Peter (your in-house distribution company) to pay Paul (your in-house equity in the film). Either way, it is YOUR money you are playing with--as an integrated company you do yourself no favors if one part of your business makes its money at the expense at the other. But yeah, Peter Jackson's profit is expanded in direct proportion to the gross revenue that gets credited to him.
So he is saying that New LIne, which felt it could handle distribution and other tasks from its own units, should have either had those units pay MORE money into the movie (and his own pocket since he has gross points--point money New Line will never see again) or ensured that distribution companies OUTSIDE New Line payed more money to the advantage of both Jackson and New Line.
This is typical big-money maneuvering: the principles of business law involved more interesting than the players involved.
I read that IBM more or less voluntarily bowed out as an Apple desktop supplier, having demanded within the negotiating process that Apple itself subsidize new development in the PowerPC line. If Apple wanted cooler and faster, good, Apple could pay for it. This account has IBM making Apple an offer Apple had to refuse.
However, another account had IBM being "in the dark" about the Intel choice--which doesn't exactly contradict the IBM-forced-the-breakup line but doesn't confirm it either.
Some publishing requirements cannot be adequately set down as an algorithm even with fault tolerances included: the more your required graphic placement depends upon text length that is variable juxtaposed to graphics that must be placed in proximity to certain text keys but are themselves of varying sizes the less successful the batch processing method of TeX is. I used to work in a TeX shop (directories): TeX is very, very good in cooperating with data bases, XML export, etc. for the obvious reasons--but their project manager confirmed that TeX style sheets could not accommodate the layout requirements for a scientific journal employing tables and graphs that had proxmity rules without intensive tweaking
no, he wants to continue his day job as an industrial designer--this is a guy who went through two cubes until he got us to buy the mini--who periodically revamps his computers to mimic their accessories and vice versa--not to mention that the whole point was to reclaim the Mac (on humiliating terms, true) not to kill it
Adobe's commitment is not unlimited. They have already slowed or ceased development for the Mac platform--Framemaker, which may admittedly be something of an orphan for Adobe, is no longer supported on the Mac. Adobe Capture, an OCR scan to Word and PDF is not available for the Mac. This means that, with PDF drivers that are available for PC but not Mac, Adobe has already decided to cut Mac out of future commercial participation in advanced Adobe production techniques.
Again, for those of you who are graphic artists this may not mean much--but even Adobe's support for Mac is already a junior effort to their PC effort. Heck, does Adobe even have to be asked whether they will support continued Wintel developments?
Look, can it really be possible that a 1.4 GHZ PowerPC in the mini = 2.8 GHZ P4 chip when a) the figure in dispute is not the average clockspeed per se of all PC's but the average used for a comparably priced PC box currently against whatever mojo RISC points you want to assign and,
b) as noted elsewhere Steve has abandoned the logic behind the premise--and not necessarily, it is true, due to some objective PPC vs i86 engineering aesthetic decision but due to production and spread-sheet imperatives.
This is not an opportunity, this is not a good thing, this is not a hopeful stride into a future anymore than getting laid off is a wonderful career change--prelude possibly to a positive career change but only as in making a silk purse out of a sow's ear.
At best the top managers at Apple felt they had to do this to stay in business as a computer maker, at worst they felt they absolutely positively had to do this as their laptop lines fatigued and iPod inventory began to pile up. This was not a desired step: this was compelled--and it does not help the Apple cause to insist that Mac customers are too special to care about hardware profit markups that diverge too widely from commodity boxes--IMHO this segment of the installed base is not enough to ensure stability even should Mac insist upon a high-margin designer tax model
I'm sure IBM helped out on the home front too--and you are exaggerating with the 1/16th Jews, at least as far as Germany went. If a German had only one Jewish grandparent and had not been religiously converted to Judaism that German (and we are talking grandparents here, not great grandparents) was considered a menshling--a "mixed breed"--deportations of these Germans (who were not Jews, incidentally--under our rules a person who has no Jewish parents and does not convert is not a Jew--the racial concept of "1/16th" Jew is a non-sequittur under Jewish tradition) began relatively late in the war and many did actually survive.
If you were looking to buy the question is what do I need to do on this computer--am I more comfortable, happier, today, doing it on a Mac.
For example I use the Mac to watch DvDs and w/Photoshop to scan slides on a slide scanner and send to the printer--I am very happy with color coordination using Colorsync and my current drivers. Let's say my e-mac blows up this afternoon. I would have to ask myself:
a) Well, I like my software working on the Mac, I like DvD player: can I see, worst case, buying another Mac and holding onto it for 3-5 years before then switching to Wintel?
b) do I want to buy new software or upgrade? will binaries be available say three years from now for the software I am considering?
Unless I will be very unhappy having to coast on my current software for 3 or so years with my new Mac I don't know that I gain anything for making the switch to the PC now. Would I upgrade from an e-mac to a tower? No, but I don't need the tower.
So, buy an e-mac...
A good substitute for many users for Photoshop is Photoshop Elements 3.0. For something like 40 bucks you get a nice little program that is familliar to Photoshop users with a lot of the functionality and some nice little tools for photograph digital editing--their shadows/highlights tool is worth the price of admission.
That Adobe software is ready to run on Intel today does not guarantee that it will be ready to run on Mac OS X running on Intel tomorrow. Does it?
At my office, the installed Adobe base is suboptimal on the G5s for critical Acrobat conversion procedures more consistently keyed to our Office suite on the PC. This may not seem like a big deal--but the programming assurances I hear here that with this or that code option programs will be compiled without difficulty (or much time) is not borne out by the actual history of support for the Mac platform which is DIMINISHING with each Mac transition, despite whatever assurances are given by whatever VPs. Adobe probably, as posters mention here, focuses on development for the PC platform FIRST. Adobe already has announced that it will not maintain Mac development for its production XML/print tool Framemaker. I would seriously doubt that this new transition will induce them to reverse that decision.
A non-programmer, I still cannot believe that re-compiling code even to a familiar x86 base is trivial for large programs. Given its current limited market share, I don't see how Apple turns abandoning the PPC for x86 into a positive inducement for developers to reorder priorities and shift more resources into expanding the OS X's "mind share" footprint.
The one thing developers will probably consider is not the theoretical advantages in cross-platform operability in elevating their Mac issues (are there any? a closed Mac box is a closed Mac box, no?) but the cost-benefit ratio in doing the work that is necessary to re-port versus the market share irretrievably lost in, on the far side, telling Mac clients to wait or switch.
My working experience on doing text publishing on a PC as opposed to working on a Dual G5 tower is that the Mac is marginally more kludgy than the PC. Maybe image processors feel differently but I wonder. If I have commercial responsibilities to justify budgetary allocations for Mac computers my job just got harder, not easier. I don't know how many managers have the luxury of explaining that all computers, after all, are essentially SOS after two years.
I would have to assume that there are contractual agreements between Intel and Apple as to price and supply.
IMHO the issue of speed is a minor issue--the more interesting issue is whether Office will now READ XML files and convert them to font-interpreted readable document files with minimal tweaking and in the Office environment. I can see the extension of XML-aware technologies to permit the export of a world-type document into a tagged XML files across the Office family, although I am curious as to whether XSLT/DTD etc. stylesheets are created on export. The more interesting question, to me, is whether novice operators will be able to open XML tagged data and easily convert them to print-ready documents. There are a lot of XML data-base derived files out there waiting for an easy print-ready solution and currently niche-market proprietary systems serve this need. I believe that all the discussion on the relative speeds of binary vs. XML documents is a side issue from a market point of view. Even if Office reads in and swops out open formats, the Office technology, the wrapper, the interface is bound to contain proprietary and protectable elements--as far as I can tell, MS is moving to further its footprint in XML development.
Curious bystanders might consider purchasing the newly released DVD of the 1965 film "Incubus," not only starring Shatner but featuring Esparanto dialogue--Shatner's work with Ernest Borgnine in "The Devils Rain" (1975) covers satanic shenanigans in tumbleweed country and has been shown in TV--the earlier film is more obscure: "Shot in black and white around Big Sur, California, the story is about a nobleman who becomes enticed by a Succubus and lured towards evil only to later incur the wrath of the male Incubus when he fails to give his soul to the lost dark side." (http://www.kaos2000.net/archives/film/incubus/)
It's premature to conclude Adobe is killing off Framemaker. Adobe is still flogging Frame as a batch automated work-flow solution to editing and printing structured files (XML/dbase). Frame is a pretty high-maintenance path to converting XML files to print but a network of consultants support Adobe's marketing and I would be very surprised if Adobe intends to kill Frame off.
"Har. In my own experience, these 'copy editors' have the approximate technical skill level of a McDonald's fry-cook trainee...I know many researchers whose manuscipts have actually had errors introduced by the copy-editing process."
Let's not forget that the immediate point of departure for this thread is IEEE and its process. As someone who has worked as a copy editor for IEEE I can assure you, that, empirically, the authorial and review process that precedes the submission of a draft for publication does not eliminate errors that need to be corrected. Your experience may be reading errors introduced by the non-technically oriented copy editors. My experience, not only with IEEE, has been that formatting and content style mistakes have to be corrected by somebody outside of the original authorial process.
Style editing, as opposed to substantive (subject-matter) editing is not a superfluous task to be handled by McDonald's fry-cook trainees. Cost issues for publishers are critical, particularly as libraries cut back on costly subscriptions that in the past could be relied upon to subsidize the publications, and some do respond by allowing quality control to lapse in the editorial process--but no individual class of editors, including volunteer subject-matter editing are immune from error. Some publications, to my knowledge, attempt to solve the problem by raising the qualifications bar for their editorial position as high as possible so that "copy editors" have knowledge of the subject matter.
No. This work is NOT done for free. IEEE standards (I cannot speak for other publications) require extensive staff-editing for style--copyeditors (usually freelance or contractual) work with IEEE staff editors and relevant authors/overseers. Yes, IEEE attempts to get paid editors to work as cheaply as possible but I don't know that IEEE can make a free-labor based system work any better than a for-fee based publication system. I have worked at associations that did charge authors a fee for publication as well as subscription fees (and the authors did pay).
My initial objection (or the its object) may have been too cute and hasty--it was not head-on to the generalized formulation that AI might be a system defined as unconscious taking its components separably but nevertheless conscious as an ensemble but the translation (transformation) of that statement into the supposition that we are unconscious beings who only think we are conscious--if you were to say or the statement had intended the less paradoxical assertion that human beings are ensembles of processes analytically "non-conscious" if taken separably but "conscious" collectively I would concede that a physical science of mind more or less has to proceed on that basis (or do what?). Androids conceivably dream of musky electric sheep, in color.
While a color or quality as a quality is not representable per se--it cannot be duplicated through representation but only referenced (or caused to be duplicated in sensory awareness by duplicating the physical ground state)--I admit that I cannot preclude the possibility of automatic duplication in the consciousness of a posited self-aware AI device of qualia through appropriate duplication of the physical ground state, without engaging in circular logic or tautalogical definition. But I am not convinced that the tautology is not valid. Nevertheless, I see the objection to the tautology (mute components, mute ensembles).
The AI environment, unless I am mistaken, in which Searle forwarded his paradox/rasberry was precisely advocacy of traditional rule-based symbol processers--guys were drawing linguistic parsers and contextual trees of semantic relationships as if the organizing thinking they brought to the programs was embedded immanently in the program itself--as if the success of computational programs in generating axioms manipulating symbolic logic counters was equivalent to computational programs "doing math": programs manipulating (literally, at the level of the program language) words--even if the initial construction of the program required a prior understanding of the semantic (real-word-environment) set-and-setting of the verbal counters by the programmers--must, by this assumption, eventually, if not definitionally, "do thinking".
Searle's strongest argument is that no possible concatentation of LISP-type linguistic analyses executed solely in an encapsulated and hermetic symbolic environment are ever going to think about anything.
But developed this far, yes, this remains only an inferred and back-door argument against the possibility that a computational operation per se is inherently unscalable to AI.
Motivations to skepticism: a) mysticism (Richard Dawkins doesn't convince me either--I am a believing monotheist); b) historical temptation of AI advocates to flip the parent-child authorship of the programmer to program to infer that the parent is theoretically an ensemble of children that, in practice, are clearly impossible without the prior existence of the parent--see also a)
Sure you can prove it: the statement that you are an "unconscious" process miming conscious processes is a self-contradiction to begin with. The premise is that definitionally your consciousness of your syntactic manipulations is one level of hierarchy above syntactic manipulation. Basically the rejection of this proposition is a denial of qualitative awareness of sensory states apart from the binary representation of those states--if not a philosophical denial of qualities themselves: the color red, as a color. etc. Rejections of of Searle assume there that claiming no distinction between consciousness per se and "output" is the equivalent of stating there is no distinction between consciousness and the representation of output. Cats, after all, think, have consciousness, make decision, interact with the world--but don't manipulate symbols. The claim that cat's somehow engage "unconsciously" in the very computer processes that are supposedly producing "consciousness" in computers that do engage in them is not convincing. I was unaware, admittedly as an English major that any computer in the real world anywhere has passed a Turing Test, yes?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't understand the concept that soundboard recordings that were made by GD personnel or permitted by GD personnel (by making direct to sbd patches available) somehow "belong" by moral or legal right to anyone except the authorized copyright-holders of the music--even if they permitted some form of limited distribution through trading of soundboards (either made by fans or "ripped off" from the GD organization) back in the day. It doesn't seem to have sunk in at GD management until recently that they had high-quality product available for nothing on the archive that competed with their own commercially released products. I am sincerely amazed that anybody would think that those who have legal rights to the music, including those who were performers of it, should have to think twice before restricting distribution of their livelihood. It really IS "their" music. Fans have the right to pay for it and to listen to it. Under appropriate conditions, to perform it.
Maybe so--but from http://www.folklore.org/: I Invented Burrell Author: Andy Hertzfeld Date: 1981 Characters: Burrell Smith, Jef Raskin Topics: Personality Summary: Burrell imitates Jef Revision: most recent of 1 Burrell had a great sense of humor, and he was capable of performing devastating impersonations of everybody else on the Mac team, especially the authority figures. Whatever idea that you came up with, Jef Raskin had a tendency to claim that he invented it at some earlier point. That trait was the basis of Burrell's impersonation of Jef. Jef had a slight stammer, which Burrell nailed perfectly. Burrell began by folding his fingers together like Jef and then exclaiming in a soft, Jef-like voice, "Why, why, why, I invented the Macintosh!" Then Burrell would shift to his radio announcer voice, playing the part of an imaginary interviewer. "No, I thought that Burrell invented the Macintosh", the interviewer would object. He'd shift back to his Jef voice for the punch line. "Why, why, why, I invented Burrell!"
I remember a Mac TV ad when they introduced Pagemaker/LaserWriter--it was a commercial aimed at the corporate market; a little scenario along the lines of a ticked off boss bemoaning the poor quality of his company's reports until some little busy-bee with access to the Mac flourishes a really professional looking business report. You can see the light bulbs going on above the executives' heads. Wow, we can do this too!! Professional looking reports!!
Read the Constitution, Article 1, Section 8: To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries --- In principle you don't own it just because you can google it.
and, he was wearing a coat. if he'd been wearing mittens the only pieces left would have been so small they'd run through a sieve
Well, not in anyway they haven't been screwed before. This is jejeune--New Line follows what has been the accepted industry practice of crediting revenue from in-house partners to a profit center against which external partners (like Jackson) have gross points. So an in-house distributor pays $x to distribute a film, for example, in an overseas market. If this in-house distributor helps out the bottom line of the vertically integrated partner by charging rates BELOW MARKET that's a GOOD thing for the overall company--the movie gets out without transfering money from Peter (your in-house distribution company) to pay Paul (your in-house equity in the film). Either way, it is YOUR money you are playing with--as an integrated company you do yourself no favors if one part of your business makes its money at the expense at the other. But yeah, Peter Jackson's profit is expanded in direct proportion to the gross revenue that gets credited to him. So he is saying that New LIne, which felt it could handle distribution and other tasks from its own units, should have either had those units pay MORE money into the movie (and his own pocket since he has gross points--point money New Line will never see again) or ensured that distribution companies OUTSIDE New Line payed more money to the advantage of both Jackson and New Line. This is typical big-money maneuvering: the principles of business law involved more interesting than the players involved.
I read that IBM more or less voluntarily bowed out as an Apple desktop supplier, having demanded within the negotiating process that Apple itself subsidize new development in the PowerPC line. If Apple wanted cooler and faster, good, Apple could pay for it. This account has IBM making Apple an offer Apple had to refuse. However, another account had IBM being "in the dark" about the Intel choice--which doesn't exactly contradict the IBM-forced-the-breakup line but doesn't confirm it either.
Some publishing requirements cannot be adequately set down as an algorithm even with fault tolerances included: the more your required graphic placement depends upon text length that is variable juxtaposed to graphics that must be placed in proximity to certain text keys but are themselves of varying sizes the less successful the batch processing method of TeX is. I used to work in a TeX shop (directories): TeX is very, very good in cooperating with data bases, XML export, etc. for the obvious reasons--but their project manager confirmed that TeX style sheets could not accommodate the layout requirements for a scientific journal employing tables and graphs that had proxmity rules without intensive tweaking
no, he wants to continue his day job as an industrial designer--this is a guy who went through two cubes until he got us to buy the mini--who periodically revamps his computers to mimic their accessories and vice versa--not to mention that the whole point was to reclaim the Mac (on humiliating terms, true) not to kill it
Adobe's commitment is not unlimited. They have already slowed or ceased development for the Mac platform--Framemaker, which may admittedly be something of an orphan for Adobe, is no longer supported on the Mac. Adobe Capture, an OCR scan to Word and PDF is not available for the Mac. This means that, with PDF drivers that are available for PC but not Mac, Adobe has already decided to cut Mac out of future commercial participation in advanced Adobe production techniques. Again, for those of you who are graphic artists this may not mean much--but even Adobe's support for Mac is already a junior effort to their PC effort. Heck, does Adobe even have to be asked whether they will support continued Wintel developments?
Look, can it really be possible that a 1.4 GHZ PowerPC in the mini = 2.8 GHZ P4 chip when a) the figure in dispute is not the average clockspeed per se of all PC's but the average used for a comparably priced PC box currently against whatever mojo RISC points you want to assign and, b) as noted elsewhere Steve has abandoned the logic behind the premise--and not necessarily, it is true, due to some objective PPC vs i86 engineering aesthetic decision but due to production and spread-sheet imperatives. This is not an opportunity, this is not a good thing, this is not a hopeful stride into a future anymore than getting laid off is a wonderful career change--prelude possibly to a positive career change but only as in making a silk purse out of a sow's ear. At best the top managers at Apple felt they had to do this to stay in business as a computer maker, at worst they felt they absolutely positively had to do this as their laptop lines fatigued and iPod inventory began to pile up. This was not a desired step: this was compelled--and it does not help the Apple cause to insist that Mac customers are too special to care about hardware profit markups that diverge too widely from commodity boxes--IMHO this segment of the installed base is not enough to ensure stability even should Mac insist upon a high-margin designer tax model
I'm sure IBM helped out on the home front too--and you are exaggerating with the 1/16th Jews, at least as far as Germany went. If a German had only one Jewish grandparent and had not been religiously converted to Judaism that German (and we are talking grandparents here, not great grandparents) was considered a menshling--a "mixed breed"--deportations of these Germans (who were not Jews, incidentally--under our rules a person who has no Jewish parents and does not convert is not a Jew--the racial concept of "1/16th" Jew is a non-sequittur under Jewish tradition) began relatively late in the war and many did actually survive.
If you were looking to buy the question is what do I need to do on this computer--am I more comfortable, happier, today, doing it on a Mac. For example I use the Mac to watch DvDs and w/Photoshop to scan slides on a slide scanner and send to the printer--I am very happy with color coordination using Colorsync and my current drivers. Let's say my e-mac blows up this afternoon. I would have to ask myself: a) Well, I like my software working on the Mac, I like DvD player: can I see, worst case, buying another Mac and holding onto it for 3-5 years before then switching to Wintel? b) do I want to buy new software or upgrade? will binaries be available say three years from now for the software I am considering? Unless I will be very unhappy having to coast on my current software for 3 or so years with my new Mac I don't know that I gain anything for making the switch to the PC now. Would I upgrade from an e-mac to a tower? No, but I don't need the tower. So, buy an e-mac...
A good substitute for many users for Photoshop is Photoshop Elements 3.0. For something like 40 bucks you get a nice little program that is familliar to Photoshop users with a lot of the functionality and some nice little tools for photograph digital editing--their shadows/highlights tool is worth the price of admission.
That Adobe software is ready to run on Intel today does not guarantee that it will be ready to run on Mac OS X running on Intel tomorrow. Does it? At my office, the installed Adobe base is suboptimal on the G5s for critical Acrobat conversion procedures more consistently keyed to our Office suite on the PC. This may not seem like a big deal--but the programming assurances I hear here that with this or that code option programs will be compiled without difficulty (or much time) is not borne out by the actual history of support for the Mac platform which is DIMINISHING with each Mac transition, despite whatever assurances are given by whatever VPs. Adobe probably, as posters mention here, focuses on development for the PC platform FIRST. Adobe already has announced that it will not maintain Mac development for its production XML/print tool Framemaker. I would seriously doubt that this new transition will induce them to reverse that decision. A non-programmer, I still cannot believe that re-compiling code even to a familiar x86 base is trivial for large programs. Given its current limited market share, I don't see how Apple turns abandoning the PPC for x86 into a positive inducement for developers to reorder priorities and shift more resources into expanding the OS X's "mind share" footprint. The one thing developers will probably consider is not the theoretical advantages in cross-platform operability in elevating their Mac issues (are there any? a closed Mac box is a closed Mac box, no?) but the cost-benefit ratio in doing the work that is necessary to re-port versus the market share irretrievably lost in, on the far side, telling Mac clients to wait or switch. My working experience on doing text publishing on a PC as opposed to working on a Dual G5 tower is that the Mac is marginally more kludgy than the PC. Maybe image processors feel differently but I wonder. If I have commercial responsibilities to justify budgetary allocations for Mac computers my job just got harder, not easier. I don't know how many managers have the luxury of explaining that all computers, after all, are essentially SOS after two years. I would have to assume that there are contractual agreements between Intel and Apple as to price and supply.
IMHO the issue of speed is a minor issue--the more interesting issue is whether Office will now READ XML files and convert them to font-interpreted readable document files with minimal tweaking and in the Office environment. I can see the extension of XML-aware technologies to permit the export of a world-type document into a tagged XML files across the Office family, although I am curious as to whether XSLT/DTD etc. stylesheets are created on export. The more interesting question, to me, is whether novice operators will be able to open XML tagged data and easily convert them to print-ready documents. There are a lot of XML data-base derived files out there waiting for an easy print-ready solution and currently niche-market proprietary systems serve this need. I believe that all the discussion on the relative speeds of binary vs. XML documents is a side issue from a market point of view. Even if Office reads in and swops out open formats, the Office technology, the wrapper, the interface is bound to contain proprietary and protectable elements--as far as I can tell, MS is moving to further its footprint in XML development.
Curious bystanders might consider purchasing the newly released DVD of the 1965 film "Incubus," not only starring Shatner but featuring Esparanto dialogue--Shatner's work with Ernest Borgnine in "The Devils Rain" (1975) covers satanic shenanigans in tumbleweed country and has been shown in TV--the earlier film is more obscure: "Shot in black and white around Big Sur, California, the story is about a nobleman who becomes enticed by a Succubus and lured towards evil only to later incur the wrath of the male Incubus when he fails to give his soul to the lost dark side." (http://www.kaos2000.net/archives/film/incubus/)
It's premature to conclude Adobe is killing off Framemaker. Adobe is still flogging Frame as a batch automated work-flow solution to editing and printing structured files (XML/dbase). Frame is a pretty high-maintenance path to converting XML files to print but a network of consultants support Adobe's marketing and I would be very surprised if Adobe intends to kill Frame off.
"Har. In my own experience, these 'copy editors' have the approximate technical skill level of a McDonald's fry-cook trainee...I know many researchers whose manuscipts have actually had errors introduced by the copy-editing process." Let's not forget that the immediate point of departure for this thread is IEEE and its process. As someone who has worked as a copy editor for IEEE I can assure you, that, empirically, the authorial and review process that precedes the submission of a draft for publication does not eliminate errors that need to be corrected. Your experience may be reading errors introduced by the non-technically oriented copy editors. My experience, not only with IEEE, has been that formatting and content style mistakes have to be corrected by somebody outside of the original authorial process. Style editing, as opposed to substantive (subject-matter) editing is not a superfluous task to be handled by McDonald's fry-cook trainees. Cost issues for publishers are critical, particularly as libraries cut back on costly subscriptions that in the past could be relied upon to subsidize the publications, and some do respond by allowing quality control to lapse in the editorial process--but no individual class of editors, including volunteer subject-matter editing are immune from error. Some publications, to my knowledge, attempt to solve the problem by raising the qualifications bar for their editorial position as high as possible so that "copy editors" have knowledge of the subject matter.
No. This work is NOT done for free. IEEE standards (I cannot speak for other publications) require extensive staff-editing for style--copyeditors (usually freelance or contractual) work with IEEE staff editors and relevant authors/overseers. Yes, IEEE attempts to get paid editors to work as cheaply as possible but I don't know that IEEE can make a free-labor based system work any better than a for-fee based publication system. I have worked at associations that did charge authors a fee for publication as well as subscription fees (and the authors did pay).
My initial objection (or the its object) may have been too cute and hasty--it was not head-on to the generalized formulation that AI might be a system defined as unconscious taking its components separably but nevertheless conscious as an ensemble but the translation (transformation) of that statement into the supposition that we are unconscious beings who only think we are conscious--if you were to say or the statement had intended the less paradoxical assertion that human beings are ensembles of processes analytically "non-conscious" if taken separably but "conscious" collectively I would concede that a physical science of mind more or less has to proceed on that basis (or do what?). Androids conceivably dream of musky electric sheep, in color.
While a color or quality as a quality is not representable per se--it cannot be duplicated through representation but only referenced (or caused to be duplicated in sensory awareness by duplicating the physical ground state)--I admit that I cannot preclude the possibility of automatic duplication in the consciousness of a posited self-aware AI device of qualia through appropriate duplication of the physical ground state, without engaging in circular logic or tautalogical definition. But I am not convinced that the tautology is not valid. Nevertheless, I see the objection to the tautology (mute components, mute ensembles).
The AI environment, unless I am mistaken, in which Searle forwarded his paradox/rasberry was precisely advocacy of traditional rule-based symbol processers--guys were drawing linguistic parsers and contextual trees of semantic relationships as if the organizing thinking they brought to the programs was embedded immanently in the program itself--as if the success of computational programs in generating axioms manipulating symbolic logic counters was equivalent to computational programs "doing math": programs manipulating (literally, at the level of the program language) words--even if the initial construction of the program required a prior understanding of the semantic (real-word-environment) set-and-setting of the verbal counters by the programmers--must, by this assumption, eventually, if not definitionally, "do thinking".
Searle's strongest argument is that no possible concatentation of LISP-type linguistic analyses executed solely in an encapsulated and hermetic symbolic environment are ever going to think about anything.
But developed this far, yes, this remains only an inferred and back-door argument against the possibility that a computational operation per se is inherently unscalable to AI.
Motivations to skepticism: a) mysticism (Richard Dawkins doesn't convince me either--I am a believing monotheist); b) historical temptation of AI advocates to flip the parent-child authorship of the programmer to program to infer that the parent is theoretically an ensemble of children that, in practice, are clearly impossible without the prior existence of the parent--see also a)
Sure you can prove it: the statement that you are an "unconscious" process miming conscious processes is a self-contradiction to begin with. The premise is that definitionally your consciousness of your syntactic manipulations is one level of hierarchy above syntactic manipulation. Basically the rejection of this proposition is a denial of qualitative awareness of sensory states apart from the binary representation of those states--if not a philosophical denial of qualities themselves: the color red, as a color. etc. Rejections of of Searle assume there that claiming no distinction between consciousness per se and "output" is the equivalent of stating there is no distinction between consciousness and the representation of output. Cats, after all, think, have consciousness, make decision, interact with the world--but don't manipulate symbols. The claim that cat's somehow engage "unconsciously" in the very computer processes that are supposedly producing "consciousness" in computers that do engage in them is not convincing. I was unaware, admittedly as an English major that any computer in the real world anywhere has passed a Turing Test, yes?