"Anyone who has a good paying job in the US today is lucky."
Why is that? Are good paying jobs handed out by lottory? There are many good paying jobsgoing vacant. My company will give me a $2,500 bonus if I can find some one to work here. The way I see it is that if you are un-skilled you will never find a good job. There are just to many un-skilled people all after the same low-end retail and service jobs but at the high end there is a real shortage of people.
"To build a machine that is intelligent, we need to understand how our own intelligence works. If our intelligence was simple enough to understand and decipher, we humans would be too simple to understand it or decipher it."
That's an old argument. The answer to it is that human ORGANIZATIONS can be much smarter than humans. Already we can build software systems so complex that one one person on the project understands how they work. I've worked on a number of these. One had about 200 software engineers. This is the level where managers earn their pay. What happens in theory is that the problem is divided into parts and the parts are solved one at a time. So while no one time no human can be more complex then himself, he can work for many years and with many others and the comulative results can be much more complex then any one human
An early mathmatical proof done inthe 40's (I think) showed that self-replicating machines were possable. People had argued that the knowage to build a machine could not be stored in a machine because the machine would have to be larger then the knowlage base if it were to contain the knowlage base. The key here was that blocks of informatin can be re-used kind of like standarized parts. In effect he proposed a general purpose "contractior" that could be re-used many times each time with different programming.
Bottom line is that we can show both by example and analogy to a mathmatical proof that your argument is wrong. No offence meant, it is a good argument used for thousands of years that was only disproved in the 20th century
"The right thing to do would be to focus on abstract things, namely the human mind itself,"
This swings back and forth. If you folow AI from the 1960's to present. Almost all of the first projects were very abstract and did not attempt at all to minic biology. This work produced some nice by small nd fradgile systems, then as computers got more powerfull we moved to looking at biology.
Some people now are hoping for a merger of top down and bottom up. I think this is what humans are. To re-create a human yu have to understand it from both directions. I think it will take a long time. But I think in 50 years we will have some very usful AI, but "only" usful not human level.
"Singularity" Does not require exponential growth. All you need is steady linear progress until you get to a "tipping point". That point is when computers can design computers, then you have crossed a threshold.
This happened onece before. These pre-humans were pretty dumb. I mean the only technology that had was the sharp rock. Tey only had rocks for a million years then finally 100,000 years ago they invented the "sharp rock tied to a stick" but the big invention was language which enabled culture and passing on complex skills and ideas. This was the "tipping point" that enabled humans to harness more skill then one person could learn in one lifetime and in 100,000 year the race eploded and took over the Earth. Basically a million years with no progress and then "boom".
That is a "Singularity" when humans crossed that theshold. Some day computers will cross a threshold too. Exponetal growth only gets yu to a threshold faster
"How the hell do they intend to pull that off without collateral damage. Force fields? Giant shark balloons?"
I assume some kind of eltromagnetic pulse device. It would fry the eltronic engine controls.. Dumping spiks on the runway would work too but only until they were swept off
It would not be easy to do, but physically possable. First off the Sun'ssurface is not all that, hot. Just under 6000K. That is about the temperure of the filiment inside a light bulb. The collon expression for this temperure is "white hot". Welding torches are much hotter than this. There are plenty of materials that will work at this temperure.
Next problem is how to get ruid of the heat? There is only one way. You have to conduct the heat to a radiator that is hotter then the surounding temperure. That means the radiator must be hotter then "white hot". A laser working in the ulta vilot would in theory work. That laser could radiate thouands of watts into space.
In theroy it could be done but not with today's technology. It would take a LOT of breakthoughs befor ths could happen.
That said. Isn't there already a "mission to the Sun" there is a spacecraft in solar polar orbit a I write this. No need to actually go to the Sun when you can look with a telscope from orbit.
"...You speak as if reducing CO2 emissions is entirely a cost-free enterprise. But it's not. It would have enormous dislocating economic effects. That means it will greatly reduce the size and health of the future world economy, slow down scientific and technological progress (which both depend on a healthy economy to pay for them), and greatly strain social and political agreements that keep world peace..."
Let's compare this to another problem. Go back to New York 150 years ago. How to remove Horse mmanuer from the streets. What would happen if some one said "let's build mechanical devices to replace the horse and we will power them with refined oil". You complain that it would cost to much, we'd have to build huge automotie factories, train repair people, repave every road. The cost and disruption would be way to much. Well we did it and the new effect was MORE economic activity and net growth,
Same with "Going Green" It will be more complex, cost more and so on but the net effect will be more people working in higher paid more skilled jobs and an overall better quality of life.
And you know what" It WILL happen, maybe in 25 years maybe in 100 but some day oil will just become so rare and expensive no one would think of burning it. That day is comming soon, I think and the person who has the next big Green energy sourse will get rich. It will happen, likey this centruy is the last to be powerd by oil.
You may have the math right but the Sun is NOT variable at the few tenths of a percent level. The ice ages we've had are cause by shits in the Earth's spic axis, not changes in solar output.
"...Linux for me does not yet have a killer app, K3B (CD/DVD burner) and Amarok are better than anything in Windows, but for a start, there is nothing like Photoshop, and no killer video capture and editing software, and for some, games are important too..."
Yes the whole rerason you have an OS is so you can run applications on it. If you ned a Photoshop-like app "gimp" can do what most people need but it still lacks abilty to work in 16-bit per channel color and color managment is not easy in Linux at all. As for video editing there are some good programs look here: http://cinelerra.org/docs.php
"I understand your whole argument except the 'free software' implication. I don't see how paying for software, or getting it for free, has anything to do with one's ability to preserve privacy and political security..."
"Free" has two meaning (1) "Free beer" means you don't have to pay and (2) "Free Speach" means you are no t trestricted or "free" as in non-slave
When we say "free software" we mean the second kind, software that is free is restrictions. Many times this software is also given away at no cost. but the no-cost part is only a side effect.
That said very, very few people care about "freedon", "rights" and all that rubish. Money matters more to most people. So when they hear "free software" all they care is that they don't have to pay.
"...seems like you don't ever "own" any of your devices, your phone is somehow tied into your cell provider, your computer is the *AA's if you don't use Linux, the makers of game consoles constantly try to brick you..."
How sad to think that "geek" is some guy who just passivily plays media, play games, listen to music, watch videos.. Has it come to this already? I hope not Hopefully there are still people who just likethe technology and like writing software and soldering.
Here in California. The standards have actually gone up. I graduated high school in 1976. Back then kids who were on drugs and slept in class passed but now I have a kid in high school and I see they do have objective standards that seem to be reasonable. Teachers tell me the same thing, that I went to school during a period when standards were low. Schools are controls at the local and state level so I don't know about what happens outside my local areas
That said student achievment is way, way down on average. This is most due to demographic. Now we have so many more children of poor recent emigants as well as a general broadening of the lower economic classes. But if you control and only look at middle class americal families they are doing as well or beter as ever.
That's exactly what my tests showed too. The MySQL does not scale well. If you have many concurrent clients it slows. The reason is just that it locks entire tables. PostgreSQL and others have a finer ganularity locks that ca lock rows. With the fine lock more people can get in at ones ut with my SQL they all just stand in line waiting for their turn to hold the lock.
We were hitting MySQLs limit at about 10 concurrent users but it would vary based on how active each of them are and the desiggn of the database. In out case One user was doing on order of a thousand writes per second while the others were doing periodic reads, ever minutes or so they read a few thousand rows out. Wit 10 users the thing just died.
PostgreSQL and Oracle were about the same except that PostgreSQL had some oddball cases hwere some little thing you did "wrong" could just kill perfomrance, and a siple re-write the query would fix it. Oracle was more even and scales well.
No, the safety zone that that keep in back of an airliner like the 747 is not due to the engines. It is due to what they call wing tip votices. This is caused by the high presure air rolling around the ends of the wing into the low pressure zon on the top of the wing. The plane leaves a 'wake" that is like two horizonal toranados.
The 747 would have this same kind os wake evn if all four engines were shut down.
We dont know what happended to the pad yet. my guess is something to do with the combination of heat and old age.
Wrong. Your argument is like saying termite eat mostly wooden houses only because there are more wooden houses and leave all those concrete parking stuctures alone because there are so few of them that it is not worth bothering. No. Termites can't eat concrete. Same with Unix. Apple's Mac OS X is in fact Unix and viruses don't "eat" Unix not because there are few of them but because it is made differently of stuff that viruses don't like.
Believe me, amoung the hackers you'd get the reputation of a lifetime if you could write a Mac virus. Many have tried. It's a prize that lots of people want. But so far no one has ben able to write one that spreads on it's own. It would be like genetically breading termites to attack a concrete building -- way hard.
Of all operating system in the world, going back to the 1960's only Windows has had an out of control virus problem
Wow, that's right. I figured the title was correct and they were pllanning a low speed text only network. I forgot this is the Internet and there are no editors.
Did they say "25Mhz". If so then this is not a high speed system. We are talking kilo-bits per second at best not megabits. So this would not be a broadband service It would be like a slow dial up speed. Good for email and text based pages but not audio/video content.
"has the modern gene pool been dramatically changed due to southern neighbors migrating north?"
I think finding the answer to that question might be one reason to do this study. How else to know but to actually compare the present and older populations?
Of couser you can record anything that you can hear but the 10 cent "web" verson of the song is only at most 128Kb per second so your recording is low quality. If you pay the extra 79 cents you get a better quality recording
In the old days we did not use heak sinks. My first conputer was a Z80 running 2Mhz and it ran CP/M just fine 10 years later we had Pentiums with forced air cooled heat sinks. Now in 2008 my Apple iMac never runs the fan, although I'm told there is a fan inside i've never hear it run. There are not vents and no air holes and the think gets only mildly warm the future wil be like the past eventually no heat sinks at all. Heat is after all wasted energy.
The only real problem is that if is to slow. In a standard system that uses init.d each script is run one at a time. But what if you happen to have one of those eight-core systems and a very fast disk array. Whouldn't it be great if the system could take advantage of those eight cosres to make startup run 8X faster? Solaris does this. It looks at dependancies between services and starts up as many as it can in parallel. Once you have a dependancy graph (that says for example that FTP and Apache need networking but FTp does not need apache then you can launch both FTP and Appache in parallel. You can also take advantage of the graph wen you stop services too to prevent errors like bringing down the network when it is needed by FTPd. The whole init.d and "run level" idea is just not well suited to this new idea.
So Windows is unstable because Microsoft has to support many different hardware configurations. Then what about Linux? Linux supports maaaaaybe 4 or 8 times more hardware than Windows. Maybe even 10 oe 20 times more. Yet Linux is more stable than Windows. No the reason Linux and Mac OS and Solaris and BSD and, well every other OS is more stable than Windows is because it has a more resonable design. The worst thing you can do in software design is make every part tightly couopled to every other part. That is what Windows has done to itself.
Yes Psystar is taking a gamble but the HOPE Apple does sue them. I think they are looking forward to being in court. If they loose they have almost zero asests so nothing is at risk but if they win they win big. There is a very good chance that Apple's EULA could be declared invalid. Then once Psystar gets the right to build Mac clones they can sell the company to some one with some capital or just get some investers but they can't atract the big money untill after Apple takes them to court. Notice that Apple is not doing this. If it were a legal "slam dumk" Apple would have already.
You really do NOT want a DBMS, use a spread sheet.
on
F/OSS Flat-File Database?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Your problem is that you are looking for a "database". This is a very complex kind of program that is total overkill for your purpose. Will you really be storing hundreds of thousands of records and wanting to do some complex querries? Ifnot why not just use a speadsheet? If you want a free spreadsheet look at OpenOffice.
What was found here was missing __baryonic matter__ the bigger question is still unanswered. Bryonic matter is the normal stuff we are made of but most of the "stuff" in the universe is non-baryonic and still "missing".
Slashdot Mirror
"Anyone who has a good paying job in the US today is lucky."
Why is that? Are good paying jobs handed out by lottory? There are many good paying jobsgoing vacant. My company will give me a $2,500 bonus if I can find some one to work here. The way I see it is that if you are un-skilled you will never find a good job. There are just to many un-skilled people all after the same low-end retail and service jobs but at the high end there is a real shortage of people.
"To build a machine that is intelligent, we need to understand how our own intelligence works. If our intelligence was simple enough to understand and decipher, we humans would be too simple to understand it or decipher it."
That's an old argument. The answer to it is that human ORGANIZATIONS can be much smarter than humans. Already we can build software systems so complex that one one person on the project understands how they work. I've worked on a number of these. One had about 200 software engineers. This is the level where managers earn their pay. What happens in theory is that the problem is divided into parts and the parts are solved one at a time. So while no one time no human can be more complex then himself, he can work for many years and with many others and the comulative results can be much more complex then any one human
An early mathmatical proof done inthe 40's (I think) showed that self-replicating machines were possable. People had argued that the knowage to build a machine could not be stored in a machine because the machine would have to be larger then the knowlage base if it were to contain the knowlage base. The key here was that blocks of informatin can be re-used kind of like standarized parts. In effect he proposed a general purpose "contractior" that could be re-used many times each time with different programming.
Bottom line is that we can show both by example and analogy to a mathmatical proof that your argument is wrong. No offence meant, it is a good argument used for thousands of years that was only disproved in the 20th century
"The right thing to do would be to focus on abstract things, namely the human mind itself,"
This swings back and forth. If you folow AI from the 1960's to present. Almost all of the first projects were very abstract and did not attempt at all to minic biology. This work produced some nice by small nd fradgile systems, then as computers got more powerfull we moved to looking at biology.
Some people now are hoping for a merger of top down and bottom up. I think this is what humans are. To re-create a human yu have to understand it from both directions. I think it will take a long time. But I think in 50 years we will have some very usful AI, but "only" usful not human level.
"Singularity" Does not require exponential growth. All you need is steady linear progress until you get to a "tipping point". That point is when computers can design computers, then you have crossed a threshold.
This happened onece before. These pre-humans were pretty dumb. I mean the only technology that had was the sharp rock. Tey only had rocks for a million years then finally 100,000 years ago they invented the "sharp rock tied to a stick" but the big invention was language which enabled culture and passing on complex skills and ideas. This was the "tipping point" that enabled humans to harness more skill then one person could learn in one lifetime and in 100,000 year the race eploded and took over the Earth. Basically a million years with no progress and then "boom".
That is a "Singularity" when humans crossed that theshold. Some day computers will cross a threshold too. Exponetal growth only gets yu to a threshold faster
"How the hell do they intend to pull that off without collateral damage. Force fields? Giant shark balloons?"
I assume some kind of eltromagnetic pulse device. It would fry the eltronic engine controls.. Dumping spiks on the runway would work too but only until they were swept off
It would not be easy to do, but physically possable. First off the Sun'ssurface is not all that, hot. Just under 6000K. That is about the temperure of the filiment inside a light bulb. The collon expression for this temperure is "white hot". Welding torches are much hotter than this. There are plenty of materials that will work at this temperure.
Next problem is how to get ruid of the heat? There is only one way. You have to conduct the heat to a radiator that is hotter then the surounding temperure. That means the radiator must be hotter then "white hot". A laser working in the ulta vilot would in theory work. That laser could radiate thouands of watts into space.
In theroy it could be done but not with today's technology. It would take a LOT of breakthoughs befor ths could happen.
That said. Isn't there already a "mission to the Sun" there is a spacecraft in solar polar orbit a I write this. No need to actually go to the Sun when you can look with a telscope from orbit.
"...You speak as if reducing CO2 emissions is entirely a cost-free enterprise. But it's not. It would have enormous dislocating economic effects. That means it will greatly reduce the size and health of the future world economy, slow down scientific and technological progress (which both depend on a healthy economy to pay for them), and greatly strain social and political agreements that keep world peace..."
Let's compare this to another problem. Go back to New York 150 years ago. How to remove Horse mmanuer from the streets. What would happen if some one said "let's build mechanical devices to replace the horse and we will power them with refined oil". You complain that it would cost to much, we'd have to build huge automotie factories, train repair people, repave every road. The cost and disruption would be way to much. Well we did it and the new effect was MORE economic activity and net growth,
Same with "Going Green" It will be more complex, cost more and so on but the net effect will be more people working in higher paid more skilled jobs and an overall better quality of life.
And you know what" It WILL happen, maybe in 25 years maybe in 100 but some day oil will just become so rare and expensive no one would think of burning it. That day is comming soon, I think and the person who has the next big Green energy sourse will get rich. It will happen, likey this centruy is the last to be powerd by oil.
You may have the math right but the Sun is NOT variable at the few tenths of a percent level. The ice ages we've had are cause by shits in the Earth's spic axis, not changes in solar output.
"...Linux for me does not yet have a killer app, K3B (CD/DVD burner) and Amarok are better than anything in Windows, but for a start, there is nothing like Photoshop, and no killer video capture and editing software, and for some, games are important too..."
Yes the whole rerason you have an OS is so you can run applications on it. If you ned a Photoshop-like app "gimp" can do what most people need but it still lacks abilty to work in 16-bit per channel color and color managment is not easy in Linux at all. As for video editing there are some good programs look here: http://cinelerra.org/docs.php
"I understand your whole argument except the 'free software' implication. I don't see how paying for software, or getting it for free, has anything to do with one's ability to preserve privacy and political security..."
"Free" has two meaning (1) "Free beer" means you don't have to pay and (2) "Free Speach" means you are no t trestricted or "free" as in non-slave
When we say "free software" we mean the second kind, software that is free is restrictions. Many times this software is also given away at no cost. but the no-cost part is only a side effect.
That said very, very few people care about "freedon", "rights" and all that rubish. Money matters more to most people. So when they hear "free software" all they care is that they don't have to pay.
"...seems like you don't ever "own" any of your devices, your phone is somehow tied into your cell provider, your computer is the *AA's if you don't use Linux, the makers of game consoles constantly try to brick you..."
How sad to think that "geek" is some guy who just passivily plays media, play games, listen to music, watch videos.. Has it come to this already? I hope not Hopefully there are still people who just likethe technology and like writing software and soldering.
Here in California. The standards have actually gone up. I graduated high school in 1976. Back then kids who were on drugs and slept in class passed but now I have a kid in high school and I see they do have objective standards that seem to be reasonable. Teachers tell me the same thing, that I went to school during a period when standards were low. Schools are controls at the local and state level so I don't know about what happens outside my local areas
That said student achievment is way, way down on average. This is most due to demographic. Now we have so many more children of poor recent emigants as well as a general broadening of the lower economic classes. But if you control and only look at middle class americal families they are doing as well or beter as ever.
That's exactly what my tests showed too. The MySQL does not scale well. If you have many concurrent clients it slows. The reason is just that it locks entire tables. PostgreSQL and others have a finer ganularity locks that ca lock rows. With the fine lock more people can get in at ones ut with my SQL they all just stand in line waiting for their turn to hold the lock.
We were hitting MySQLs limit at about 10 concurrent users but it would vary based on how active each of them are and the desiggn of the database. In out case One user was doing on order of a thousand writes per second while the others were doing periodic reads, ever minutes or so they read a few thousand rows out. Wit 10 users the thing just died.
PostgreSQL and Oracle were about the same except that PostgreSQL had some oddball cases hwere some little thing you did "wrong" could just kill perfomrance, and a siple re-write the query would fix it. Oracle was more even and scales well.
No, the safety zone that that keep in back of an airliner like the 747 is not due to the engines. It is due to what they call wing tip votices. This is caused by the high presure air rolling around the ends of the wing into the low pressure zon on the top of the wing. The plane leaves a 'wake" that is like two horizonal toranados.
The 747 would have this same kind os wake evn if all four engines were shut down.
We dont know what happended to the pad yet. my guess is something to do with the combination of heat and old age.
Wrong. Your argument is like saying termite eat mostly wooden houses only because there are more wooden houses and leave all those concrete parking stuctures alone because there are so few of them that it is not worth bothering. No. Termites can't eat concrete. Same with Unix. Apple's Mac OS X is in fact Unix and viruses don't "eat" Unix not because there are few of them but because it is made differently of stuff that viruses don't like.
Believe me, amoung the hackers you'd get the reputation of a lifetime if you could write a Mac virus. Many have tried. It's a prize that lots of people want. But so far no one has ben able to write one that spreads on it's own. It would be like genetically breading termites to attack a concrete building -- way hard.
Of all operating system in the world, going back to the 1960's only Windows has had an out of control virus problem
Wow, that's right. I figured the title was correct and they were pllanning a low speed text only network. I forgot this is the Internet and there are no editors.
Did they say "25Mhz". If so then this is not a high speed system. We are talking kilo-bits per second at best not megabits. So this would not be a broadband service It would be like a slow dial up speed. Good for email and text based pages but not audio/video content.
"has the modern gene pool been dramatically changed due to southern neighbors migrating north?"
I think finding the answer to that question might be one reason to do this study. How else to know but to actually compare the present and older populations?
Of couser you can record anything that you can hear but the 10 cent "web" verson of the song is only at most 128Kb per second so your recording is low quality. If you pay the extra 79 cents you get a better quality recording
In the old days we did not use heak sinks. My first conputer was a Z80 running 2Mhz and it ran CP/M just fine 10 years later we had Pentiums with forced air cooled heat sinks. Now in 2008 my Apple iMac never runs the fan, although I'm told there is a fan inside i've never hear it run. There are not vents and no air holes and the think gets only mildly warm the future wil be like the past eventually no heat sinks at all. Heat is after all wasted energy.
"What's wrong with /etc/init.d?"
The only real problem is that if is to slow. In a standard system that uses init.d each script is run one at a time. But what if you happen to have one of those eight-core systems and a very fast disk array. Whouldn't it be great if the system could take advantage of those eight cosres to make startup run 8X faster? Solaris does this. It looks at dependancies between services and starts up as many as it can in parallel. Once you have a dependancy graph (that says for example that FTP and Apache need networking but FTp does not need apache then you can launch both FTP and Appache in parallel. You can also take advantage of the graph wen you stop services too to prevent errors like bringing down the network when it is needed by FTPd. The whole init.d and "run level" idea is just not well suited to this new idea.
So Windows is unstable because Microsoft has to support many different hardware configurations. Then what about Linux? Linux supports maaaaaybe 4 or 8 times more hardware than Windows. Maybe even 10 oe 20 times more. Yet Linux is more stable than Windows. No the reason Linux and Mac OS and Solaris and BSD and, well every other OS is more stable than Windows is because it has a more resonable design. The worst thing you can do in software design is make every part tightly couopled to every other part. That is what Windows has done to itself.
Yes Psystar is taking a gamble but the HOPE Apple does sue them. I think they are looking forward to being in court. If they loose they have almost zero asests so nothing is at risk but if they win they win big. There is a very good chance that Apple's EULA could be declared invalid. Then once Psystar gets the right to build Mac clones they can sell the company to some one with some capital or just get some investers but they can't atract the big money untill after Apple takes them to court. Notice that Apple is not doing this. If it were a legal "slam dumk" Apple would have already.
Your problem is that you are looking for a "database". This is a very complex kind of program that is total overkill for your purpose. Will you really be storing hundreds of thousands of records and wanting to do some complex querries? Ifnot why not just use a speadsheet? If you want a free spreadsheet look at OpenOffice.
What was found here was missing __baryonic matter__ the bigger question is still unanswered. Bryonic matter is the normal stuff we are made of but most of the "stuff" in the universe is non-baryonic and still "missing".