Since neurologists have been using models of the neuron for sometime I suggest there is.
Information is the fundamental quality - to propose humans cognition is incomputable is to suggest something informationless is going on. I would sure like to see the physical process where that happens. Otherwise reduction works just fine for me.
Frankly given the number of shitty interfaces produced by commercial interfaces I find that reasoning specious - especially since the 'No business model... no mass market product.' argument equally works against spending money on UIs unless it is cost effective leading to the aforementioned plethora of shitty interfaces.
The simple fact is that user interfaces are HARD to do right. What is required is understanding and implementing best practices.
I see no evidence that this is reliant on a commercial model - indeed some of the best examples of the use of the principal of using best practices come from the Open Source world where doing so simply helps lubricate the process in the first place - especially the larger the projects are.
Also because it's a hell of a lot harder to make better gameplay than it is to simply package higher-res textures. The former requires a great deal more research and creativity than the later.
Whilst people are happy to buy the same game but shinier this isn't likely to change.
If you have multiple non-interacting programs then that means you're just running a lot of sequential programs together. That's obviously a non-problem but it does limit the processing speed to the limit of the sequential execution and the goal here is to exploit parallelism in order to get better performance.
There are certainly better ways of constructing parallel programs and ensuring they are well behaved and correct (I am in fact working on a data flow language as a final year project that touches on these issues) but there's nothing that can automatically make this any easier as far as constructing the algorithms to run with threads. We cannot even do the simplest of things such as prove that deadlocks cannot occur in a system (which is pretty damn important really). Unfortunately it has rarely been the case that the best practises in computing have been applied so I suspect that threads will persist as the de facto solution for programming concurrency and our future systems will suffer from it as they suffer now from the inadequacies of the most popularly used imperative-style languages.
There are pleanty of GUI classes to do with formatting et al. The only real issue here, as far as creating a wrapper, is that things that expect 'String's couldn't work with your subclass because there's no way of producing a valid inheretance for it. As ever, there's more than one way to do these things and there are trade-offs in either approach.
Although to be perfectly pedantic Linux only means the kernel and hence has nothing to do with DVD/CD burning whatsoever - that's merely bundling by people who package the kernel along with stuff that runs on it (the Distro faeries).
Not really. Only one party or government can be in power at a time.
According to what? The universe? There are examples in the world TODAY of power-sharing governments.
If I, as an individual citizen, am unhappy with "Bush Warfare and Welfare, Inc.," I can't simply switch to "Kerry's Welfare and Warfare Collective" or "Badnarik Leave-Me-Alone Enterprises" the same way I could switch operating systems.
You can't do it simply no. But then the whole point of the Windows Monopoly is that it's only simple to switch in theory - in practice Windows will probably extend to affect your computer use if you choose to let it or not.
What you are describing is a series of monopolies over time.
I see - and what example is there in any market in the world of a system where monopolies will regularly exchange with each other at regular time periods? At best thinking of a government as a monopoly is an analogy - governments don't generally adhere to economic theory because they're not economic entities so when you stretch the anlogy too far it becomes ludicrous.
IT'S NOT FAIR! That is the point! Jeez, you people are slow on the take-up.
Either way your example doesn't really map to real world examples of anti-monopolistic regulation. It is *not* the product, it is the effect on the *market*. The whole point is to stop the market from becoming grossly unbalanced - as is the case with Microsoft, AT&T, AOL etc...
Only some forms of government are monopolies - to be a monopoly implies that there is only one seller of a product/service. If you consider government a service then according to/. demographics you probably live in a duopoly. Any sort of totalitarian regime would be a monopoly. A referenda based democracy would be pure competition under these anologies.
Microsoft is a monopoly. Monopolies are bad for the consumer. Monopolies work to remove competition. Competition is good for the consumer. Linux is competition. Consumers elect governments. Governments make regulation for electees. Monopoly regulation is designed to enable competition. Ergo:
I see no reason it can't be a transparent part of web browsing. "Oh, hey, there's a bittorrent download option, I'll just click that and - hey, Firefox is downloading it.
Yeah but that's not his point - the question is whether or not that should be INBUILT into Firefox or not.
There are two obvious avenues to resolve this.
Firstly all of the JavaScript-ed chrome stuff should appear in the Extensions menu. There's the core browser code then there's the presentation - they should not be mixed. This also has the benefit of allowing these things to evolve separately - just why should I have to get a Firefox update if say there's a minor change to the options panel to add some XUL widget to access some about:config thingy? The extension updater would work perfectly well there.
Secondly with a 'core extension' library and perhaps 'popular extension' library you can modify the installation to allow people to customise what gets installed - just like everything else does.
Mozilla has a pretty sweet combo with XPFE - they should use it to its fullest.
Re:It's like nothing we've seen .. since Linux
on
A New Kind of OS
·
· Score: 1
The problem is not necessarially technical but how precisely can a system DAIS if the user can't really express what it is they want the system to do? Computers could have human intelligence and still fail since it's certainly manifestly obvious that humans can easily fail to communicate what it is they want from other humans.
Again that is irrelevent. The argument 'If you speak English, Pluto is officially a planet' is patently a nonsense because there is no Académie Anglaise. The dictionary does not make anything official because it DOES NOT dictate the meaning of words, it RECORDS it. It is only by mutual agreement that words can convey meaning - they have no intrinsic meaning of their own.
Um, dictionaries record, they do not define, usage. Therefore your argument boils down to: "Pluto is a planet because that's what we've been calling it, and because that's what we've been calling it that's what's in the dictionary, and because the dictionary says "Pluto is a planet," Pluto is a planet.'
Slashdot Mirror
Since neurologists have been using models of the neuron for sometime I suggest there is.
Information is the fundamental quality - to propose humans cognition is incomputable is to suggest something informationless is going on. I would sure like to see the physical process where that happens. Otherwise reduction works just fine for me.
Unless you can show otherwise there is nothing fundamentally special about human cognition that is not computable.
Frankly given the number of shitty interfaces produced by commercial interfaces I find that reasoning specious - especially since the 'No business model... no mass market product.' argument equally works against spending money on UIs unless it is cost effective leading to the aforementioned plethora of shitty interfaces.
The simple fact is that user interfaces are HARD to do right. What is required is understanding and implementing best practices.
I see no evidence that this is reliant on a commercial model - indeed some of the best examples of the use of the principal of using best practices come from the Open Source world where doing so simply helps lubricate the process in the first place - especially the larger the projects are.
Indeed.
It is well known that men are superior in the kitchen.
Also because it's a hell of a lot harder to make better gameplay than it is to simply package higher-res textures. The former requires a great deal more research and creativity than the later. Whilst people are happy to buy the same game but shinier this isn't likely to change.
If you have multiple non-interacting programs then that means you're just running a lot of sequential programs together. That's obviously a non-problem but it does limit the processing speed to the limit of the sequential execution and the goal here is to exploit parallelism in order to get better performance. There are certainly better ways of constructing parallel programs and ensuring they are well behaved and correct (I am in fact working on a data flow language as a final year project that touches on these issues) but there's nothing that can automatically make this any easier as far as constructing the algorithms to run with threads. We cannot even do the simplest of things such as prove that deadlocks cannot occur in a system (which is pretty damn important really). Unfortunately it has rarely been the case that the best practises in computing have been applied so I suspect that threads will persist as the de facto solution for programming concurrency and our future systems will suffer from it as they suffer now from the inadequacies of the most popularly used imperative-style languages.
There are pleanty of GUI classes to do with formatting et al. The only real issue here, as far as creating a wrapper, is that things that expect 'String's couldn't work with your subclass because there's no way of producing a valid inheretance for it. As ever, there's more than one way to do these things and there are trade-offs in either approach.
My 2.5D has voxels you insensitive clod!
Although to be perfectly pedantic Linux only means the kernel and hence has nothing to do with DVD/CD burning whatsoever - that's merely bundling by people who package the kernel along with stuff that runs on it (the Distro faeries).
Not really. Only one party or government can be in power at a time.
According to what? The universe? There are examples in the world TODAY of power-sharing governments.
If I, as an individual citizen, am unhappy with "Bush Warfare and Welfare, Inc.," I can't simply switch to "Kerry's Welfare and Warfare Collective" or "Badnarik Leave-Me-Alone Enterprises" the same way I could switch operating systems.
You can't do it simply no. But then the whole point of the Windows Monopoly is that it's only simple to switch in theory - in practice Windows will probably extend to affect your computer use if you choose to let it or not.
What you are describing is a series of monopolies over time.
I see - and what example is there in any market in the world of a system where monopolies will regularly exchange with each other at regular time periods? At best thinking of a government as a monopoly is an analogy - governments don't generally adhere to economic theory because they're not economic entities so when you stretch the anlogy too far it becomes ludicrous.
How would that be fair?
IT'S NOT FAIR! That is the point! Jeez, you people are slow on the take-up.
Either way your example doesn't really map to real world examples of anti-monopolistic regulation. It is *not* the product, it is the effect on the *market*. The whole point is to stop the market from becoming grossly unbalanced - as is the case with Microsoft, AT&T, AOL etc...
Note that government is also a monopoly.
/. demographics you probably live in a duopoly. Any sort of totalitarian regime would be a monopoly. A referenda based democracy would be pure competition under these anologies.
Only some forms of government are monopolies - to be a monopoly implies that there is only one seller of a product/service. If you consider government a service then according to
Economics 101 time.
Microsoft is a monopoly. Monopolies are bad for the consumer. Monopolies work to remove competition. Competition is good for the consumer. Linux is competition. Consumers elect governments. Governments make regulation for electees. Monopoly regulation is designed to enable competition. Ergo:
MONOPOLIES ARE NOT TREATED THE SAME!
What is so hard to understand?
I mean look:
Just what the hell *IS* in their database?
The only thing 'bout me is the way I walk - or something.
That rather depends on one's interpretation of Genesis.
So I guess humans had the first batch of crappy eyes and fish got the better ones then?
I see no reason it can't be a transparent part of web browsing. "Oh, hey, there's a bittorrent download option, I'll just click that and - hey, Firefox is downloading it.
Yeah but that's not his point - the question is whether or not that should be INBUILT into Firefox or not.
There are two obvious avenues to resolve this.
Firstly all of the JavaScript-ed chrome stuff should appear in the Extensions menu. There's the core browser code then there's the presentation - they should not be mixed. This also has the benefit of allowing these things to evolve separately - just why should I have to get a Firefox update if say there's a minor change to the options panel to add some XUL widget to access some about:config thingy? The extension updater would work perfectly well there.
Secondly with a 'core extension' library and perhaps 'popular extension' library you can modify the installation to allow people to customise what gets installed - just like everything else does.
Mozilla has a pretty sweet combo with XPFE - they should use it to its fullest.
The problem is not necessarially technical but how precisely can a system DAIS if the user can't really express what it is they want the system to do? Computers could have human intelligence and still fail since it's certainly manifestly obvious that humans can easily fail to communicate what it is they want from other humans.
I thought, "Nah, that can't be right," but it is. Damn that is just lame.
. The point is that an astronomical committee can't dictate the meaning of the English word "Pluto".
Wrong. All it takes is for people to agree with them.
The mutual agreement that caused the term to end up in the dictionary is as close to "official" as it gets.
You remember that next time they bring out the 2007 dictionaries - I'll expect to hear you complaining about the changes.
Again that is irrelevent. The argument 'If you speak English, Pluto is officially a planet' is patently a nonsense because there is no Académie Anglaise. The dictionary does not make anything official because it DOES NOT dictate the meaning of words, it RECORDS it. It is only by mutual agreement that words can convey meaning - they have no intrinsic meaning of their own.
Um, dictionaries record, they do not define, usage. Therefore your argument boils down to: "Pluto is a planet because that's what we've been calling it, and because that's what we've been calling it that's what's in the dictionary, and because the dictionary says "Pluto is a planet," Pluto is a planet.'
It's even more confusing when every true Sci-Fi fan knows Kryten as their favourite ice-cube shaped head android.