And how do you show 'a spark' of free will? They can make independant choices, but are easily influenced by pressure from friends and family? We have a way to quantify free will now?
Agreed that the issue is somewhat orthogonal to religion. Religion has 'fate' while atheism has 'determinism'.
Just critizising the article, really. I find "Free Will" to be very much an abuse of semantics, anyway. A 'pseudoproblem', I believe it's called. The term shouldn't be used in an scientific article. If they mean that the fly's behaviour is neither completely random nor easily predictible from external factors, then they should write so (But of course, where's the sensationalism in that?)
Replying to myself here, but compare the value of having kids go, "Oh, this seems like a mesial temporal lobe epileptical attack" when they saw someone have a seizure, versus having them follow the tought "Man, my computer could do this," with "So I'll make it do it for me!"
Making a computer solve arbitrary tasks for you could potentially become an essential skill in the future. How many people do you know that will regularly spend an hour doing some routine task like renaming files, adding or removing a newline at the start of each line, etc. Programming languages are becoming high enough level that it is at least conceivable to have basic programming skills be part of common education. It's worth at least researching, in a 'what if' sci-fi scenario kind of way.
Speaking of which, are there any updated video demos of the interface? I remember seeing the demos about half a year ago and thinking it was awful. Completely crippled, nothing looked quite integrated (especially Squeek), etc. Their website has screenshots, and it looks better now, but it's hard to tell without seeing it in action. On their website they claim that "OLPC is about to revolutionize the existing concept of a computer interface." That's a risky experiment to be doing on the side of such a big project. Being an early deployer carries the risk of getting an unpolished product...
Funnily enough, reading the GP's reformated post worked extremely well for me. I just zigzag down, taking in three lines at a time. I don't know if it was just some kind of illusion from the greater amounts of lines, but it felt much faster. Your text doesn't work at all that way, since I have to scan around for the beginning of sentences. It doesn't seem to matter much where you break it, since with such short linebreaks I'm not really pausing at any particular point, any more than if I had just read it horizontally.
And wasn't the possibility of DNA testing of astronauts mentioned in that NASA spacetravel ethics report? I wonder what will happen if they find out that DNA testing could give an appreciable decrease in risk for a Mars mission.
Not directly, but each of them would have to compete by their own merits in their respective fields. Microsoft apps wouldn't use secret hooks in the Windows API. When IE6 stagnated for years, the OS team could make the right decision and, say, make a deal to bundle Opera instead. It would be more difficult for them to force their way into the games market by eating their losses with profit from other parts of the compay, etc.
Completely OT, but actually, I'd imagine you could. I'm not too sure about making a silk purse out of a sow's ear, though. I guess you'd need some kind of silk pig? Mythbusters need to step up here, both of these are long overdue.
Ahem. Back to the issue at hand, this particular turd has proven to be highly moldable, and polish is what it is lacking. Yes, incompabilities and poor standard coverage is a bitch, but the technology itself is adequate. If you had to make a web page/web app/whatever you had in mind when you wrote your comment, but with the guarantee that all visitors would use the same recent and 100% standards compliant browser, what would your main complaint be?
Core HTML is designed to represent a static document, yes, but the vast majority of the web is representable as such, animated interactive flash ads and embedded multimedia aside. What's new is mostly ever fancier styling, and loading some of that static content in a dynamic way.
I am not seeing the signs of age, but of immaturity. Browsers have aquired new capabilities that have made them a viable platform for more complex content, but early adopters face the hazzle of incompatible and incomplete implementations.
Going from your post, I don't think you really want a better successor to HTML and the browser. You sound like you want something completely unrelated, maybe a zero-install securely sandboxed app delivery system, but you are being forced to implement it as a web app? (Guessing wildly, sorry in advance.) Did you perchance have anything specific in mind as a successor to the common web page? Maybe one could do it in something portable, extensible and modern like XML... Oh, wait.
I love Python to death, but the file handling in a standard Python install is awful enough that I've on occasions just ran a.bat file from my script rather than dealing with it. They seriously need to include a decent path class. For a shell language it also gets redundant having to quote filenames and add parenthesis to all commands. I find that even simple things like doing something to all files in a directory matching some pattern, with or without recursion, behave quirky in Python. Now I've seen people pimping Python in/. shell articles before, so either I need to be set straight with some Python advice, or we are talking about a different Python. Are you people by any chance managing your system with real living pythonidae?
While a laptop can make a decent synthetizer, sequencer, recorder, metronome, cue carder, etc., it should definitely be coupled with a more appropriate input device. I've seen some cool virtual instruments that are played with a laptop touchpad, but I doubt I could woo an audience with my elite ~5 cm finger movements. A midi keyboard would be the traditional choice, but using, say, a wiimote or a DDR pad could work out. And of course, all hail the mighty Power Glove. This thing should provide for some decent tone control and eyecandy.
You can't just take any kind of victimization and label it as stealing. Did the perpetrator somehow gain the 'exclusivity' that the victim lost? Is murder just a matter of theft of life? We are trying to maintain a precise language with words specific enough to actually convey information.
As a matter of fact, exclusivity was not even lost. The exclusivity you speak of is 'the exclusive right of the copyright holder to copy his or her work', you say? Well, the copyright holder still has that right after someone made an illegitimate copy. That right is what makes the copying illegal.
And yeah, without exclusive right to use of one's works, our system for granting exclusive right to use one's work is worthless and might as well be not having rights to control use of one's work. Your attempt to balance out your contradictions with a tautology at the end is duly noted and appreciated.
When you know what it taste like, you've already bought it, though. I don't have the time to extensively research each and every piece of confectionry I buy. When you are making claims about your wares that under most people's definition are incorrect, that is fraud. Is the government not supposed to stop fraud? Should we just let the market sort out all those Nigerian scams and pyramid schemes?
You fail at reading comprehension. Let's rephrase: The current scheduler runs in O(1) time. To do this, it uses an algorithm that sometimes isn't optimal; that is, it isn't entirely fair. The relation between fairness and algorithmic complexity, is that you may sacrifice fairness to get a lower complexity. This is just rephrasing GP, I don't know shit enough about schedulers to comment on the actuall algorithms.
On the other hand, I find that wikis are about the only place you can get good and up to date information for large projects. Professional ventures will often have good pure technical specification, but especially how-tos tend to get outdated rapidly, or omit things because the developers see things differently from the users. I don't use any particular wiki either, though. They just augment my Google. About your properly-indexed wiki idea; A lot (most?) of the distro wikis out there seem to employ some form of open license, so there would be a lot of readily stealable content. Though if you really had an such an amazing documentation wiki layout, it could be easier to just make indexes in already existing wikis.
Actually, as a side point; the behaviour that a lot of nerds will exhibit around women, trying to be 'respectful' aka. 'safe distance' can easily be interpreted by people accustomed to more social competence as a freezeout, which can be very uncomfortable when the nerds are a large majority. Or so I'm told, anyway. I keep doing it, as I wouldn't be able to tell how close is too close, so best err on the safe side.
Still, it is good to see a "real" party speaking out on copyright. When I first saw the article, I thought it was just another irrelevant statement from Unge Venstre, but it seems it really is the main party's opinion. I find it especially important that they speak out against the ridiculous length of copyright we have today, the creators lifetime + 70 years. It would never stand up in good debate. I'm not sure how strongly they are planning to push this agenda, and it could easily turn out to be just a weak attempt at vote grabbing by pandering to the youth, but I actually think this could net them votes like mine if they followed up on it with hard plans.
I'm using Norwegian dvorak, where the æøå keys have been added, and the punctuation is more similar to standard Norwegian. English and norwegian letter usages are similare enough to give a decent typing pattern and hand alternation, and I suspect this would hold true with at least most Germane languages. The author of the layout notes that although some keys are more and less used in Norwegian, like kj and qw, it's probably not worth the trouble to introduce major differences to the standard dvorak.
I find the finger movements I do while writing with dvorak somehow feels more comfortable than qwerty, even disconsidering any RSI effects, with which I've never been troubled. This may not be easily quantifiable, but it is very noticable to me.
(Rest of comment not specific to parent.)
Any direct comparison with regards to typing speed is difficult, as I never really learned proper touch typing with qwerty. The test here rated me as only 62 wpm, so I've certainly not attained any godlike speed from the switch. I'd say that if you're like I was, and have never really learnt proper touch typing, you might as well start with dvorak as with qwerty, since the extra unfamilarity could just as easily be a good thing when you're unlearning your old writing habit.
I find it works well with the standard vim keymap, where the keys layout isn't very logical to begin with, except for the hjkl, which ends up in acceptable locations, though you need to use both hands. The worst common combo on dvorak would be the ctrl+x/c/v keys, that require moving the left hand to the right side of the keyboard if your right hand is on the mouse. The only shortcuts I've edited to accomodate my dvorak layout is foobar2000, where I have winamp-like z/x/c (on dvorak æqj) for stop/play/next.
Recently I've seen a couple of references to a 'Colemak' layout. At first glance it looks more uncomfortable than dvorak to me, but I guess these things have to be felt. At the risk of sounding like a qwerty user with respect to dvorak, it just hasn't been worth my time to learn a new layout when I already can touchtype pretty well, though I'd look into it if i had time. One of it's strengths and weaknesses seem to be that the standard layout can access most international characters, thus enabling one standard layout over multiple languages, while making the entry of said characters a bit awkward.
As an aside, The Typing of the Dead (cheesy horror arcade FPS converted to cheesy typing training game) and iSketch (online pictionary game) can both be fun ways to train your touchtyping.
Rule #1 when learning touch typing: Never look at the keys. Print out your keyboard layout and have it by your computer, but don't train yourself to look directly at the keyboard. The habit will linger. This is why all serious touch training programs show the layout on the screen.
I just can't imagine what people that take that claim as a challenge will call the next four microbots. Well, at least it keeps a simple naming scheme. I'd like to see Emacs, the microbot, though... It makes toast, does taxes and raises your children, but unfortunately it has the size and weight of a phone book, draws a kilowatt of power and the wheels don't quite reach the ground. (Disclaimer:wq)
The mp3s mentioned in the article was, as I understand it, the same encoded mp3, but with different tagging (ID3, replay gain etc.) It's not too uncommon on p2p networks to see three or four versions of a mp3 with so similar size that it's almost certainly just differing tags. (And of course, it's always the file with least sources that has the best tags...) I actually was going to suggest this on the eMule forum just yesterday, simply attaching some kind of tag agnostic hash attribute to music files, but I was to lazy to register. Guess I don't have to now. Thank you for your attention.
Maybe because they have some interesting places/stories/gameplay/people, but buried in a ton of grinding, back-and-forth travel and miscellaneous cheap crack. Applies to most online games I've played, really. Especially annoying is the keep-up-with-your-friends-who-play-twice-as-much-a s-you incentive, that eventually turns me off most MMORPGs. Or that explorating and taking interesting quests often gives almost no XP compared to grinding. I've played a lot of games that were mostly fun, but had minor or major elements of tedium that I wish were automatic.
Not that I doubt that some chess entusiast out there gets off on watching his computer play with itself...
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And how do you show 'a spark' of free will? They can make independant choices, but are easily influenced by pressure from friends and family? We have a way to quantify free will now?
Agreed that the issue is somewhat orthogonal to religion. Religion has 'fate' while atheism has 'determinism'.
Just critizising the article, really. I find "Free Will" to be very much an abuse of semantics, anyway. A 'pseudoproblem', I believe it's called. The term shouldn't be used in an scientific article. If they mean that the fly's behaviour is neither completely random nor easily predictible from external factors, then they should write so (But of course, where's the sensationalism in that?)
Replying to myself here, but compare the value of having kids go, "Oh, this seems like a mesial temporal lobe epileptical attack" when they saw someone have a seizure, versus having them follow the tought "Man, my computer could do this," with "So I'll make it do it for me!"
Making a computer solve arbitrary tasks for you could potentially become an essential skill in the future. How many people do you know that will regularly spend an hour doing some routine task like renaming files, adding or removing a newline at the start of each line, etc. Programming languages are becoming high enough level that it is at least conceivable to have basic programming skills be part of common education.
It's worth at least researching, in a 'what if' sci-fi scenario kind of way.
Speaking of which, are there any updated video demos of the interface? I remember seeing the demos about half a year ago and thinking it was awful. Completely crippled, nothing looked quite integrated (especially Squeek), etc. Their website has screenshots, and it looks better now, but it's hard to tell without seeing it in action.
On their website they claim that "OLPC is about to revolutionize the existing concept of a computer interface." That's a risky experiment to be doing on the side of such a big project.
Being an early deployer carries the risk of getting an unpolished product...
So you're an edacious thinker, then!
Funnily enough, reading the GP's reformated post worked extremely well for me. I just zigzag down, taking in three lines at a time. I don't know if it was just some kind of illusion from the greater amounts of lines, but it felt much faster.
Your text doesn't work at all that way, since I have to scan around for the beginning of sentences. It doesn't seem to matter much where you break it, since with such short linebreaks I'm not really pausing at any particular point, any more than if I had just read it horizontally.
And wasn't the possibility of DNA testing of astronauts mentioned in that NASA spacetravel ethics report? I wonder what will happen if they find out that DNA testing could give an appreciable decrease in risk for a Mars mission.
Not directly, but each of them would have to compete by their own merits in their respective fields. Microsoft apps wouldn't use secret hooks in the Windows API. When IE6 stagnated for years, the OS team could make the right decision and, say, make a deal to bundle Opera instead. It would be more difficult for them to force their way into the games market by eating their losses with profit from other parts of the compay, etc.
Completely OT, but actually, I'd imagine you could. I'm not too sure about making a silk purse out of a sow's ear, though. I guess you'd need some kind of silk pig? Mythbusters need to step up here, both of these are long overdue.
Ahem. Back to the issue at hand, this particular turd has proven to be highly moldable, and polish is what it is lacking. Yes, incompabilities and poor standard coverage is a bitch, but the technology itself is adequate. If you had to make a web page/web app/whatever you had in mind when you wrote your comment, but with the guarantee that all visitors would use the same recent and 100% standards compliant browser, what would your main complaint be?
Core HTML is designed to represent a static document, yes, but the vast majority of the web is representable as such, animated interactive flash ads and embedded multimedia aside. What's new is mostly ever fancier styling, and loading some of that static content in a dynamic way.
I am not seeing the signs of age, but of immaturity. Browsers have aquired new capabilities that have made them a viable platform for more complex content, but early adopters face the hazzle of incompatible and incomplete implementations.
Going from your post, I don't think you really want a better successor to HTML and the browser. You sound like you want something completely unrelated, maybe a zero-install securely sandboxed app delivery system, but you are being forced to implement it as a web app? (Guessing wildly, sorry in advance.) Did you perchance have anything specific in mind as a successor to the common web page? Maybe one could do it in something portable, extensible and modern like XML... Oh, wait.
I love Python to death, but the file handling in a standard Python install is awful enough that I've on occasions just ran a .bat file from my script rather than dealing with it. They seriously need to include a decent path class. /. shell articles before, so either I need to be set straight with some Python advice, or we are talking about a different Python. Are you people by any chance managing your system with real living pythonidae?
For a shell language it also gets redundant having to quote filenames and add parenthesis to all commands.
I find that even simple things like doing something to all files in a directory matching some pattern, with or without recursion, behave quirky in Python.
Now I've seen people pimping Python in
While a laptop can make a decent synthetizer, sequencer, recorder, metronome, cue carder, etc., it should definitely be coupled with a more appropriate input device.
I've seen some cool virtual instruments that are played with a laptop touchpad, but I doubt I could woo an audience with my elite ~5 cm finger movements.
A midi keyboard would be the traditional choice, but using, say, a wiimote or a DDR pad could work out. And of course, all hail the mighty Power Glove. This thing should provide for some decent tone control and eyecandy.
Just wait until I charge them for their use of my copyrighted number 77 77 77 2E 6D 70 61 61 2E 6F 72 67!
You can't just take any kind of victimization and label it as stealing. Did the perpetrator somehow gain the 'exclusivity' that the victim lost? Is murder just a matter of theft of life? We are trying to maintain a precise language with words specific enough to actually convey information.
As a matter of fact, exclusivity was not even lost. The exclusivity you speak of is 'the exclusive right of the copyright holder to copy his or her work', you say? Well, the copyright holder still has that right after someone made an illegitimate copy. That right is what makes the copying illegal.
And yeah, without exclusive right to use of one's works, our system for granting exclusive right to use one's work is worthless and might as well be not having rights to control use of one's work. Your attempt to balance out your contradictions with a tautology at the end is duly noted and appreciated.
When you know what it taste like, you've already bought it, though. I don't have the time to extensively research each and every piece of confectionry I buy.
When you are making claims about your wares that under most people's definition are incorrect, that is fraud. Is the government not supposed to stop fraud? Should we just let the market sort out all those Nigerian scams and pyramid schemes?
You fail at reading comprehension. Let's rephrase: The current scheduler runs in O(1) time. To do this, it uses an algorithm that sometimes isn't optimal; that is, it isn't entirely fair.
The relation between fairness and algorithmic complexity, is that you may sacrifice fairness to get a lower complexity.
This is just rephrasing GP, I don't know shit enough about schedulers to comment on the actuall algorithms.
The Chuck Norris bank; Where you log in with your fist.
On the other hand, I find that wikis are about the only place you can get good and up to date information for large projects.
Professional ventures will often have good pure technical specification, but especially how-tos tend to get outdated rapidly, or omit things because the developers see things differently from the users.
I don't use any particular wiki either, though. They just augment my Google.
About your properly-indexed wiki idea; A lot (most?) of the distro wikis out there seem to employ some form of open license, so there would be a lot of readily stealable content. Though if you really had an such an amazing documentation wiki layout, it could be easier to just make indexes in already existing wikis.
Actually, as a side point; the behaviour that a lot of nerds will exhibit around women, trying to be 'respectful' aka. 'safe distance' can easily be interpreted by people accustomed to more social competence as a freezeout, which can be very uncomfortable when the nerds are a large majority. Or so I'm told, anyway. I keep doing it, as I wouldn't be able to tell how close is too close, so best err on the safe side.
Still, it is good to see a "real" party speaking out on copyright.
When I first saw the article, I thought it was just another irrelevant statement from Unge Venstre, but it seems it really is the main party's opinion.
I find it especially important that they speak out against the ridiculous length of copyright we have today, the creators lifetime + 70 years. It would never stand up in good debate.
I'm not sure how strongly they are planning to push this agenda, and it could easily turn out to be just a weak attempt at vote grabbing by pandering to the youth, but I actually think this could net them votes like mine if they followed up on it with hard plans.
I'm using Norwegian dvorak, where the æøå keys have been added, and the punctuation is more similar to standard Norwegian.
English and norwegian letter usages are similare enough to give a decent typing pattern and hand alternation, and I suspect this would hold true with at least most Germane languages. The author of the layout notes that although some keys are more and less used in Norwegian, like kj and qw, it's probably not worth the trouble to introduce major differences to the standard dvorak.
I find the finger movements I do while writing with dvorak somehow feels more comfortable than qwerty, even disconsidering any RSI effects, with which I've never been troubled. This may not be easily quantifiable, but it is very noticable to me.
(Rest of comment not specific to parent.)
Any direct comparison with regards to typing speed is difficult, as I never really learned proper touch typing with qwerty. The test here rated me as only 62 wpm, so I've certainly not attained any godlike speed from the switch. I'd say that if you're like I was, and have never really learnt proper touch typing, you might as well start with dvorak as with qwerty, since the extra unfamilarity could just as easily be a good thing when you're unlearning your old writing habit.
I find it works well with the standard vim keymap, where the keys layout isn't very logical to begin with, except for the hjkl, which ends up in acceptable locations, though you need to use both hands.
The worst common combo on dvorak would be the ctrl+x/c/v keys, that require moving the left hand to the right side of the keyboard if your right hand is on the mouse.
The only shortcuts I've edited to accomodate my dvorak layout is foobar2000, where I have winamp-like z/x/c (on dvorak æqj) for stop/play/next.
Recently I've seen a couple of references to a 'Colemak' layout. At first glance it looks more uncomfortable than dvorak to me, but I guess these things have to be felt. At the risk of sounding like a qwerty user with respect to dvorak, it just hasn't been worth my time to learn a new layout when I already can touchtype pretty well, though I'd look into it if i had time. One of it's strengths and weaknesses seem to be that the standard layout can access most international characters, thus enabling one standard layout over multiple languages, while making the entry of said characters a bit awkward.
As an aside, The Typing of the Dead (cheesy horror arcade FPS converted to cheesy typing training game) and iSketch (online pictionary game) can both be fun ways to train your touchtyping.
Rule #1 when learning touch typing: Never look at the keys. Print out your keyboard layout and have it by your computer, but don't train yourself to look directly at the keyboard. The habit will linger.
This is why all serious touch training programs show the layout on the screen.
I just can't imagine what people that take that claim as a challenge will call the next four microbots. Well, at least it keeps a simple naming scheme. :wq)
I'd like to see Emacs, the microbot, though... It makes toast, does taxes and raises your children, but unfortunately it has the size and weight of a phone book, draws a kilowatt of power and the wheels don't quite reach the ground.
(Disclaimer
The mp3s mentioned in the article was, as I understand it, the same encoded mp3, but with different tagging (ID3, replay gain etc.) It's not too uncommon on p2p networks to see three or four versions of a mp3 with so similar size that it's almost certainly just differing tags. (And of course, it's always the file with least sources that has the best tags...)
I actually was going to suggest this on the eMule forum just yesterday, simply attaching some kind of tag agnostic hash attribute to music files, but I was to lazy to register. Guess I don't have to now.
Thank you for your attention.
Oh, really? Then maybe you could point to a couple of examples of good activity-oriented pipeline/OO shells?
Or was that an ironic and handwavy SMOP?
Maybe because they have some interesting places/stories/gameplay/people, but buried in a ton of grinding, back-and-forth travel and miscellaneous cheap crack. Applies to most online games I've played, really. Especially annoying is the keep-up-with-your-friends-who-play-twice-as-much-a s-you incentive, that eventually turns me off most MMORPGs. Or that explorating and taking interesting quests often gives almost no XP compared to grinding.
I've played a lot of games that were mostly fun, but had minor or major elements of tedium that I wish were automatic.
Not that I doubt that some chess entusiast out there gets off on watching his computer play with itself...