Those may be the poster-childs in the "desktop", but in the corporate world they're Linux itself and the Apache web server, the former of which started with a random Finnish guy posting on USENET about his Minix clone, while the latter began it's life as a collection of patches made by random people for a government-funded web server whose code has been long gone. Not exactly what I'd call "high church".
For Ubuntu, well, it works:D so did Fedora last time I tried it, though, and haven't used SuSE in almost half a decade, so I can't say whether it's "better" than either of them, but I haven't seen anything that'd make me say it's "worse", either..DEBs, though, were originally better than.RPMs in that the dpkg+apt combo was *way* more useful than rpm alone ever was, and though that changed with yum, inertia plus the more standardized naming format (inherited from Debian) have kept me in the.DEB camp and, therefore, using Ubuntu.
It just goes to show that Ubuntu being popular has nothing to do with it's packaging system OR anything to do with it being any good as a distribution. Mark Shuttleworth really knows how to market things..
Fact != Perception. The fact that whatever technology you're taught in school is almost certainly going to be obsolete by the time you even begin to write your CV doesn't mean that the people in charge of purchasing decisions don't believe it'll matter.
It's hard to fault them for thinking as such, though... after all, I studied math in school using my dad's books, which my grandpa had bought for him second-hand when he was a kid, and they served me just fine. For all the advancement in the more 'theoretical' fields of mathematics, basic algebra and geometry has stayed pretty much the same for the last two hundred years or so.
Still, I wish more people outside of the technological fields would realize the breakneck speeds at which it's changing. Too many stupid policies and laws are being made due to ignorance of that fact.
First, because for most people buying a nice, low-end GPU is easier and cheaper than buying a full-blown console. Yeah, not gonna be playing Crysis on that, but Team Fortress 2 and Guild Wars aren't a problem even in an "ancient" FX5200.
Second, because for MMOs, RTSs and FPSs, controllers suck. Sorry, that's just a fact of life. And while yes, you can often connect a keyboard+mouse combo to a console, finding a place to put them is troublesome (whereas in a computer those problems are already solved).
And third, because there's a much, much, *MUCH* bigger indie dev scene in PC than on consoles. Apparently, free SDK > consistent hardware for most devs, who would've thought.
Well, either we take them to mean what they originally meant, in which case China is no more capitalist than it is communist (perhaps even less so, since at least small-scale socialism isn't illegal, IIRC), or we take them as the real-world degenerations of them have been, in which case China is definitely communist, being much closer to what the USSR once was, than to what the US is today (allegedly the modern paragons of both philosophies).
Basically my point is: you have to stretch definitions *WAY* too thin to call China a capitalist country.
Too bad the hardware is expensive as hell, comes from only one company, and you lose a lot of that wonderful app support if you decide to use a different interface than the non-UNIXy one Apple provided you with.
Me, I'd go with Solaris.
Why not? they're only of dubious legality in the US and other countries with software patents, but there's plenty of countries that have saner legal systems, and no reason why distros can't cater to them instead.
I haven't met many people in China who were dumb enough to believe that it is anything other than Capitalist, not in the cities anyway.
Capitalism, as in free, unregulated markets with healthy competition? or just the stupid red herring notion of "Capitalism = get as much money as you can, while stomping on anyone who gets in the way"?
Perhaps it's you who needs to read some Adam Smith before calling China "Capitalist".
Or both. There's no such thing as "too much money to fight the RIAA", and these things get entertaining to watch;) like the SCO case of a few years ago, you start wondering what's the next idiotic stuff they'll claim in court.
"But, your honor, he makes us look incompetent by winning the cases! you can't allow that!"
Link to some decent music under such licenses? I personally like: * Queen * Bee Gees * Cat Stevens
Dear sir, your tastes suck;) still, I'd recommend browsing through Magnatune.com's Rock section, the selection is quite good, including two of my favorite albums ever (Jade Leary's Fossildawn and Brad Sucks' Out of It). Though given my intense hatred for Queen, that's more of a warning than a recommendation;) still, you may find something you like if you go there with an open mind, instead of looking for Yet Another Queen Cover Band.
along with a few others. I don't like: * Metallica * Britney Spears * AC/DC * Whatever other rubbish people are squeezing out these days
Anything resembling *that* is not, by definition, decent. Though there's some good pop in Magnatune.com too, like Lisa DeBenedictis, but she's closer to Sarah Brightman or Celine Dion on her good days than she is to the turd-in-a-leotard that's Britney Spears. Thank God.
So when DeBeers advertises diamonds it's ok to go out and pull off a diamond heist?
Probably not, but a closer analogy would be if you instead went to your basement, started pouring tequila into your imported mexican machine, then used the resulting diamonds to build a ring identical to the one advertised in the DeBeers ad. Do you think you should be sued for that?
It is important to consider the cost savings that proprietary libraries might provide. It is obvious that the OP has a specific goal in mind apart from just having the program written. If OS X has a built-in library that does the job well, the expense of the operating system and hardware may very well be less than the time he or a contracted party would spend re-implementing the same functionality using only OSS libraries.
Except that it's not just the OS and hardware to run the app on, but also the expense of finding and hiring programmers skilled in that particular toolkit, which is what the GP is saying.
For a more concrete example, writing the exact same application in Java is much cheaper than doing so in Smalltalk, because undergrad CS courses all use Java nowadays, and practically no one has ever used Smalltalk. What's easier and cheaper, finding a bunch of fresh graduates who know Java, or a contractor who's skilled in Smalltalk?
For the outstanding majority of people who don't buy music, TV shows, movies and iPhone apps however, it still is. Have fun in Apple-land, 'cause it seems you ain't getting away from it any time soon.
Exactly. Now, my question is, is an AI required to answer such questions? is an AI even required to be able to add two numbers? Godel's theorem as I understand it essentially states that any system (in this case, our AI), when faced with some questions, will either ignore the answer or give an answer that contradicts itself, but is that a problem?
As you say, Godel's theorem says more about the world than it does about intelligences per se, and if not being able to prove or disprove a specific statement means our AI isn't intelligent, by Godel's theorem nothing can be, not even us.
I don't know what a "perfect" intelligence is. One that can solve all NP problems in O(1) time and space? Or s/NP/Recursive/? Or just something that can solve all recursive problems in finite time?
I was thinking more like a religious God: an intelligence that knows anything and everything in all possible ways that they can be known. But is that the minimum for an AI? I'd be happy with a virtual pet that eats, poops, and barks at strangers without being programmed to know what it means to eat, poop, bark, or what's a stranger. No need to demonstrate long-standing mathematical problems or even do my children's math homework.
One of Penrose's conclusions was that any attempt at artificial intelligence is necessarily incomplete, so it won't be possible
But wouldn't Godel's theorem imply that it'd be impossible to build a flawless, all-encompasing intelligence, not necessarily an imperfect one? fsck, even I as a human (allegedly the "superior" intelligence) sometimes feel that my decisions are based solely on the output of a Random() call in my brain rather than logical thought, no reason why a machine has to be different.
AI isn't about trying to build God, it's just about something that can learn new stuff, or at least that's my take of it.
That it can be fixed doesn't help much, not much is stopping people from rewriting many of the parts they don't like in Windows or OS X either. Sure it may involve rewriting a complete finder like application on your own instead of just changing parts of the source-code, but it can still be done.
But the problem is, that may not be completely legal. Applicable laws may vary, I'm not a lawyer, I'm certainly not *your* lawyer, you know the drill, but both Microsoft and Apple's EULAs are pretty fuckin' nasty, and you may even run afoul of the DMCA if you're particularly unlucky.
So yeah, it's a negligible difference for someone who can't write a metric fuckton of working code, agreed, but it *is* a difference, and I personally regard my ability to modify Amarok to build a nuclear device as a feature, thankyouverymuch;)
But the truth is, what works for one person may not work for somebody else. That's why the market for media players is so lively in Windows-land, despite Microsoft bundling WMP with the OS.
How many times has an attractive woman looked at the customized UI for your software and thought "Wow. There's a guy I'd like to get it on with". (Answer: Zero)
How many times has an attractive woman looked at the stock UI for your software and thought "Wow. There's a guy I'd like to get it on with"? Answer: Zero.
Besides your poor attempt at a strawman, however, there's the basic issue that not everybody prefers the same interface, and being able to change it without changing the entire program is widely considered to be a good thing.
In fact, I'd say that themes are only a poor substitute for the true solution, that of having a process worried about managing libraries and playing music, and another, separate one for the actual interface, like with MPD on Linux. I have my clean, simple Sonata, you may have the busy, iTunes-like Ario, and somebody else may prefer the CLI-only MPC, and since we all use the same backend, we can switch among them as will, even during the middle of a song with no problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Those may be the poster-childs in the "desktop", but in the corporate world they're Linux itself and the Apache web server, the former of which started with a random Finnish guy posting on USENET about his Minix clone, while the latter began it's life as a collection of patches made by random people for a government-funded web server whose code has been long gone. Not exactly what I'd call "high church".
For Ubuntu, well, it works :D so did Fedora last time I tried it, though, and haven't used SuSE in almost half a decade, so I can't say whether it's "better" than either of them, but I haven't seen anything that'd make me say it's "worse", either. .DEBs, though, were originally better than .RPMs in that the dpkg+apt combo was *way* more useful than rpm alone ever was, and though that changed with yum, inertia plus the more standardized naming format (inherited from Debian) have kept me in the .DEB camp and, therefore, using Ubuntu.
It just goes to show that Ubuntu being popular has nothing to do with it's packaging system OR anything to do with it being any good as a distribution. Mark Shuttleworth really knows how to market things..
Of course, but that doesn't mean it's not better.
The difference is, OSS supporters would be happy if students knew both, Microsoft wouldn't.
Fact != Perception. The fact that whatever technology you're taught in school is almost certainly going to be obsolete by the time you even begin to write your CV doesn't mean that the people in charge of purchasing decisions don't believe it'll matter.
It's hard to fault them for thinking as such, though... after all, I studied math in school using my dad's books, which my grandpa had bought for him second-hand when he was a kid, and they served me just fine. For all the advancement in the more 'theoretical' fields of mathematics, basic algebra and geometry has stayed pretty much the same for the last two hundred years or so.
Still, I wish more people outside of the technological fields would realize the breakneck speeds at which it's changing. Too many stupid policies and laws are being made due to ignorance of that fact.
"I have gained this from philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law" -- Aristotle
Some of us don't need DRM to keep us honest. You'd be wise to do the same.
First, because for most people buying a nice, low-end GPU is easier and cheaper than buying a full-blown console. Yeah, not gonna be playing Crysis on that, but Team Fortress 2 and Guild Wars aren't a problem even in an "ancient" FX5200.
Second, because for MMOs, RTSs and FPSs, controllers suck. Sorry, that's just a fact of life. And while yes, you can often connect a keyboard+mouse combo to a console, finding a place to put them is troublesome (whereas in a computer those problems are already solved).
And third, because there's a much, much, *MUCH* bigger indie dev scene in PC than on consoles. Apparently, free SDK > consistent hardware for most devs, who would've thought.
Well, either we take them to mean what they originally meant, in which case China is no more capitalist than it is communist (perhaps even less so, since at least small-scale socialism isn't illegal, IIRC), or we take them as the real-world degenerations of them have been, in which case China is definitely communist, being much closer to what the USSR once was, than to what the US is today (allegedly the modern paragons of both philosophies).
Basically my point is: you have to stretch definitions *WAY* too thin to call China a capitalist country.
Too bad the hardware is expensive as hell, comes from only one company, and you lose a lot of that wonderful app support if you decide to use a different interface than the non-UNIXy one Apple provided you with. Me, I'd go with Solaris.
Why not? they're only of dubious legality in the US and other countries with software patents, but there's plenty of countries that have saner legal systems, and no reason why distros can't cater to them instead.
I haven't met many people in China who were dumb enough to believe that it is anything other than Capitalist, not in the cities anyway.
Capitalism, as in free, unregulated markets with healthy competition? or just the stupid red herring notion of "Capitalism = get as much money as you can, while stomping on anyone who gets in the way"?
Perhaps it's you who needs to read some Adam Smith before calling China "Capitalist".
Yeah, leaving debugging features activated in the shipped product, seriously amateur shit that *NO* professional company would ever do.
C'mon, this had a particularly nasty effect, but the causes behind it are as common as they come.
Or both. There's no such thing as "too much money to fight the RIAA", and these things get entertaining to watch ;) like the SCO case of a few years ago, you start wondering what's the next idiotic stuff they'll claim in court.
"But, your honor, he makes us look incompetent by winning the cases! you can't allow that!"
Link to some decent music under such licenses? I personally like:
* Queen
* Bee Gees
* Cat Stevens
Dear sir, your tastes suck ;) still, I'd recommend browsing through Magnatune.com's Rock section, the selection is quite good, including two of my favorite albums ever (Jade Leary's Fossildawn and Brad Sucks' Out of It). Though given my intense hatred for Queen, that's more of a warning than a recommendation ;) still, you may find something you like if you go there with an open mind, instead of looking for Yet Another Queen Cover Band.
along with a few others. I don't like:
* Metallica
* Britney Spears
* AC/DC
* Whatever other rubbish people are squeezing out these days
Anything resembling *that* is not, by definition, decent. Though there's some good pop in Magnatune.com too, like Lisa DeBenedictis, but she's closer to Sarah Brightman or Celine Dion on her good days than she is to the turd-in-a-leotard that's Britney Spears. Thank God.
If it uses the same script as the movie you saw, yes, you will.
So when DeBeers advertises diamonds it's ok to go out and pull off a diamond heist?
Probably not, but a closer analogy would be if you instead went to your basement, started pouring tequila into your imported mexican machine, then used the resulting diamonds to build a ring identical to the one advertised in the DeBeers ad. Do you think you should be sued for that?
Yeah, except that a 9400+9600 hybrid SLI setup isn't the same thing as a twin 9800 SLI one, sorry.
What was that saying? Something about statistics and being made up on the spot.
Prove me wrong, then.
Why would someone even care if there was another music player for the Mac if they weren't already "in Apple-land"?
Why do you assume that anyone who has a Mac would only ever want to use Apple-branded products?
It is important to consider the cost savings that proprietary libraries might provide. It is obvious that the OP has a specific goal in mind apart from just having the program written. If OS X has a built-in library that does the job well, the expense of the operating system and hardware may very well be less than the time he or a contracted party would spend re-implementing the same functionality using only OSS libraries.
Except that it's not just the OS and hardware to run the app on, but also the expense of finding and hiring programmers skilled in that particular toolkit, which is what the GP is saying.
For a more concrete example, writing the exact same application in Java is much cheaper than doing so in Smalltalk, because undergrad CS courses all use Java nowadays, and practically no one has ever used Smalltalk. What's easier and cheaper, finding a bunch of fresh graduates who know Java, or a contractor who's skilled in Smalltalk?
Then it's not a replacement for you.
For the outstanding majority of people who don't buy music, TV shows, movies and iPhone apps however, it still is. Have fun in Apple-land, 'cause it seems you ain't getting away from it any time soon.
Exactly. Now, my question is, is an AI required to answer such questions? is an AI even required to be able to add two numbers? Godel's theorem as I understand it essentially states that any system (in this case, our AI), when faced with some questions, will either ignore the answer or give an answer that contradicts itself, but is that a problem?
As you say, Godel's theorem says more about the world than it does about intelligences per se, and if not being able to prove or disprove a specific statement means our AI isn't intelligent, by Godel's theorem nothing can be, not even us.
I don't know what a "perfect" intelligence is. One that can solve all NP problems in O(1) time and space? Or s/NP/Recursive/? Or just something that can solve all recursive problems in finite time?
I was thinking more like a religious God: an intelligence that knows anything and everything in all possible ways that they can be known. But is that the minimum for an AI? I'd be happy with a virtual pet that eats, poops, and barks at strangers without being programmed to know what it means to eat, poop, bark, or what's a stranger. No need to demonstrate long-standing mathematical problems or even do my children's math homework.
One of Penrose's conclusions was that any attempt at artificial intelligence is necessarily incomplete, so it won't be possible
But wouldn't Godel's theorem imply that it'd be impossible to build a flawless, all-encompasing intelligence, not necessarily an imperfect one? fsck, even I as a human (allegedly the "superior" intelligence) sometimes feel that my decisions are based solely on the output of a Random() call in my brain rather than logical thought, no reason why a machine has to be different.
AI isn't about trying to build God, it's just about something that can learn new stuff, or at least that's my take of it.
That it can be fixed doesn't help much, not much is stopping people from rewriting many of the parts they don't like in Windows or OS X either. Sure it may involve rewriting a complete finder like application on your own instead of just changing parts of the source-code, but it can still be done.
But the problem is, that may not be completely legal. Applicable laws may vary, I'm not a lawyer, I'm certainly not *your* lawyer, you know the drill, but both Microsoft and Apple's EULAs are pretty fuckin' nasty, and you may even run afoul of the DMCA if you're particularly unlucky.
So yeah, it's a negligible difference for someone who can't write a metric fuckton of working code, agreed, but it *is* a difference, and I personally regard my ability to modify Amarok to build a nuclear device as a feature, thankyouverymuch ;)
But the truth is, what works for one person may not work for somebody else. That's why the market for media players is so lively in Windows-land, despite Microsoft bundling WMP with the OS.
How many times has an attractive woman looked at the customized UI for your software and thought "Wow. There's a guy I'd like to get it on with". (Answer: Zero)
How many times has an attractive woman looked at the stock UI for your software and thought "Wow. There's a guy I'd like to get it on with"? Answer: Zero.
Besides your poor attempt at a strawman, however, there's the basic issue that not everybody prefers the same interface, and being able to change it without changing the entire program is widely considered to be a good thing.
In fact, I'd say that themes are only a poor substitute for the true solution, that of having a process worried about managing libraries and playing music, and another, separate one for the actual interface, like with MPD on Linux. I have my clean, simple Sonata, you may have the busy, iTunes-like Ario, and somebody else may prefer the CLI-only MPC, and since we all use the same backend, we can switch among them as will, even during the middle of a song with no problem.