I wouldn't be sure of that. I run linux, and download a ton of anime. I'd be nervous about downloading software, because of trojans and the like. I only pirate software that I really need -- like XP (on vmware), office, and mathematica.
I don't listen to any music. But if I did, I doubt my public library has that good of a collection. And if I knew where to get pirated books, I probably wouldn't go to the library at all.
The big problem with humans is we're so low bandwidth. We can type at, what, 50 WPM, and talk maybe twice that? If you gave an AI a reasonable connection to the internet, I thing you could train it a lot faster.
If there is going to be a singularity (I don't really see why there wouldn't) strong AI wouldn't be the really world-changing thing. Humanoid robots are way, way, old school, and not really that interesting. The interesting thing would be what would happen when humanity is networked together with a high-speed connection, without a bottleneck at the eyeballs.
"Data is structured (or information about the structure of the data is communicated) using mechanisms that are respected by all tools involved."
But it's a plain fact that not all data is structured. The powershell commands may output and input XML, or whatever it is they do. But not everyone uses XML. Oh, sure, maybe everyone SHOULD use XML. But they don't. It's like Java. If you mandate a monolithic platform, compatability problems go away by definition. Your new problem is to convert everyone to your language of choice. How enticing -- replace computer problems with theological problems.
I think PowerShell is an interesting idea, don't get me wrong. But this is a horrible, horrible assumption to make. The problems you mentioned: ftp, environment variables, and so on are a consequence of not having a powerful enough filesystem. Plan 9 can mount FTP shares, I think. Reiser 4 treats files as objects, but it does it at the kernel level, and it doesn't involve XML. Doing that stuff in the shell is just dumb, because it locks you into that shell, and offers no backwards compatibility. Or, more likely, you have to import stuff in, and then export it back out.
The whole point of a traditional shell, IMHO, is to be an interface to the kernel. Sure, you have loops, conditionals, and variables, but they're really just window dressing. A traditional shell is supposed to just be a thin veneer over the surface. If you really want seamless ftp, it really should go in the kernel (as a daemon), so that everything can get at it, instead of just your shell. Likewise, if you want better inter-process communication, the thing to do would be to build out DBUS.
That's not to say that a higher level shell wouldn't be a good thing. But it should be much more like a programming language than a traditional shell. Abandon all pretense of pipes, executables, and so on; you're really making library calls. If you want higher-level semantic pipe, screw XML. Go with stream operators. Frankly, the whole concept of 'programs that you run to get stuff done' is sort of a hack anyway; really, everything should either be a kernel, a daemon or a library. Executables are used as commands, in bash. But it shouldn't be that way at all. The semantics of your user interface should be contained by the user interface daemon, the "shell".
Of course, there is an advantage to having executables as commands. It makes it really easy (trivial, in fact) for the shell to modify itself (change its keywords). Most programming languages, on the other hand, completely suck at modifying themselves. Hence, if you really want the ultimate shell, you would probably want to go a full step higher, and look at something like lisp or perl 6. Of course, it would be optimized for dealing with files and that sort of thing. Of course, that brings up the question of why we still deal with files and such at all.
This is the core of computer science. You try to decouple the interface from the implementation. Ultimately, this is impossible, because the interface gets its semantics from the implementation. Ultimately, as interfaces become higher-level, you start thinking of user daemons as kernel daemons, the 'kernel' gets bigger, and everything gets shoved down a level. That's what should happen. You should not go down into the lower layers and rework it to make it object-oriented, or use XML, or whatever. This was a discussion the linux devs had -- should the proc filesystem use XML? Of course it shouldn't. First, as was pointed out, it's complete overkill. Second, XML exists at a much higher level of abstraction. It's quite a high-level means of representing data. That's the whole fucking point of 'abstraction'; not mixing high-level ideas and low-level ideas. Oh, sure, you can try. You can have your self-hosting compilers, kernels that bootstrap themselves, and so on. But such things generally mark a big important turning point, because thinking on multiple levels of abstraction is hard, especially when they bend around and bite their tail. Once
I used to have a really slick script that would record with mencoder and pipe it to mplayer, so I could see myself talk, and then just hit q when I was done. Unfortunately, I accidentally deleted it.
You use v4l:// as your source, the video device is probable/dev/video0, and the audio device is probably/dev/dsp1. Notice the 1. That took me about 3 hours to figure out. Then you have to figure out how to encode to mpeg. Or if you want to take the easy way out, you use VLC and open your camera as a v4l source using the GUI. Of course, VLC is also a fat, fickle bitch, but that's another story.
I've never gotten any of the dedicated cam programs working. I think most of them are intended for firewire or something. Oh, and I wouldn't plan on doing much editing either. KDenLive is probably the best I've seen, even though its still a rather buggy beta.
I was impressed with Kopete, though. It worked right out of the box.
The actual hosting and distribution is much less than the cost of the song. Crappy consumer comcast at monopoly prices is less than $1/GB. Same for disk space.
"by the time i get it all ripped, some other storage media'll come along and make my new digital collection obselete."
Get a 500 GB hard drive and a good sound card, and copy it while you can. What will you do when your record player breaks? Get it repaired? Buy a new one? Fix it yourself? Maintaining obsolete equipment becomes a losing proposition really quickly. And once your player is gone, your media is just so much plastic.
By all means, copy it while you can, unless you really don't care about it.
Don't forget the franco-prussian war, the french revolution, and Henry V. After Henry, they had to have a girl take it back. Seriously, the french have lost a LOT of wars. And a lot of them were on their own ground, too. It's one thing to lose your colonies; that happens to everyone. But to get repeatedly pwned over the centuries is sort of special, I think.
That book sort of pissed me off. If evolution can develop a strong AI, why the hell wouldn't we be able to? And if we took a bunch of brains and networked them together (with a phat pipe, unlike interhuman interaction) wouldn't we have something that is superintelligent?
Maybe I'm oversimplifying. Still, as skeptical as I am, I can't think of a reason why we won't have singularity in 2042. Unless we run out of resources or kill ourselves off with nuclear weapons. Frankly, I'm more worried about luddites with bombs than inherent, physical limitations.
Hell, if we could somehow enslave the planet, and spend everyone's extra money on supercomputers, we could probably have a full brain simulation in a couple of years.
People will jump through all kinds of hoops in order to justify their belief in free will. At the same time, they want to find a computationally easy model of the universe, and sometimes even take this as their purpose in life. So they generally end up doing a Descartes, and positing the existance of some kind of soul. These are the people will dismiss christianity as superstition, while making up bullshit about consciousness, "the inner self", and "the beauty of mathematics". Which, of course, is incredibly ironic.
THIS is my philosophy of mind:
Water, 35 liters. Carbon, 20 kilograms. Ammonia, 4 liters. Lime, 1.5 kilograms. Phosphorus, 800 grams. Salt, 250 grams. Niter, 100 grams. Sulfer, 80 grams. Fluorine, 7.5 grams. Iron, 5 grams. Silicon, 3 grams. And trace amounts of 15 other elements. Those are the ingredients of an average adult human body... Just as a side note, you can buy these ingredients at the market with the pocket money of a child.
Get a few apps running at once, especially with a memory-heavy, interpreted language like Python, and your 128MB of RAM will be full in no time, and applications will start crashing.
Crashing is the one thing it won't do, unless they seriously fuck things up. When I first tried linux, I ignorantly installed RH9 on a system with 64M of ram and 32M of swap. It ran *unbelievably* slowly. But it never crashed.
What blows my mind is the fact that they are using Gnome. For a system like that, you want a light WM like fvwm, Firefox, Gimp, gvim or xemacs, and Abiword (OO is fucking huge). If you want a fancy file manager, you go with rox. I like Gnome and KDE as much as the next bloke, but for a system like this they are really overkill.
If I was building a system like this (hah, hah) I'd start with an LFS base, and work up from there. LFS is *the* minimal self-compiling distro, and makes gentoo look bloated. I wouldn't use some kind of fancy, experimental UI based on Gnome. I'd have an FVWM button to launch each app. It might look like ass (I don't have leet fvwm theming skillz), but it would be as stable and functional as hell. It would be a system that they could hack and extend. And it would definitely run in 128M. If anything, the "disk" space would be more of a worry. With only 256M of the stuff, you're severely limited, especially given that the LFS base is 86M. I imagine you'd end up playing strange games with filesystem compression, removing all the headers, stripping out Xorg, and so on.
And yes, it should be able to compile itself. Anything else would defeat the purpose of using OSS. Yes, I'm looking at you, Ubuntu.
This is the actual essay. To me, it seems pretty obvious that he's trolling IRL, but I guess law enforcement has little sense of humor.
Blood sex and Booze. Drugs Drugs Drugs are fun. Stab, Stab, Stab, Stab, poke. "So I had this dream last night where I went into a building, pulled out two P90s and started shooting everyone, then had sex with the dead bodies. Well, not really, but it would be funny if I did." Umm, yeah, what to wright about I'm leaving to join the Marines and I really don't give a (obscenity) about my academics, so why does the only class that's complete Bull Shit, happen to be the only required classenough said. The model citizen would stay around to vote in new board member to change the 4 years of English policy, but no one really stays around to vote for that kind of local crap, so whoever gets there name on the Ballet with a pretty face gets to do what the (obscenity) ever they want with local ordinance. A person is smart, but people are dumb selfish animals. We can't make rules for ourselves so we vote others to do it for us, but we can't even do that right, I meen seriously, Bush for President? And our other option was John Kerry who claimed to parktake in Vietnam Special Forces missions that haven't been declassified.(obscenity) Bull Shit. So Power Flower Super Mario. Pudge, hook, rot, dismember "Fresh Meat." Mostly new/young teachers are laid back, and cooperative with students as feedback and input into the curriculum and atmosphere. My current English teacher is a control freak intent on setting a gap between herself and her students like a 63 year old white male fortune 500 company CEO, and a illegal immigrant. If CG was a private catholic school, I could understand, but wtf is her problem. And baking brownies and rice crispies does not make up for it, way to try and justify yourself as a good teacher while underhandedly looking for complements on your cooking. No quarrel on you qualifications as a writer, but as a teacher, don't be surprised on inspiring the first cg shooting.
In my experience, the primary attraction of youtube is not the content at all, but the "community". It is difficult to understand until you try it, but posting videos can be incredibly entertaining, due to the amount of attention it is possible to get. With no mods, one can post anything at all that isn't actually obscene, which, practically speaking, makes youtube the perfect environment for a troll. Owing to the way the system counts views and comments (whether positive or not) and gives you honors, anything moderately inflammatory will easily get you on the most-discussed list. Simply put, youtube enables normal people have their own cadre of fanbois.
That's not to say that I haven't used youtube to watch whole TV series, but if all the copyrighted content were to disappear, I agree that they wouldn't be much affected.
I don't know how effective the "great firewall of china" is, but from reading the news, it seems to be fairly effective. I don't think it's necessarily a given that the wild and wooly internet will always win.
Admittedly, given the peer-to peer nature of it, the internet is much harder to censor than real life. And once we get real wireless, they won't be able to cut you off at the ISP as easily. But still, it is possible, and it's very scary.
It really is slower overall. My mother got a brand new laptop with 512 MB (not much, I know, but not bad for XP). It took forever to boot up. Sure, you can turn off aero. Control Panel still takes several seconds to appear.
With a couple of gigs, though, sure its going to be fast. It may even be faster. But vista definitely is a hell of a ram hog.
Compressing filesystems is the wave of the future, b/c it sacrifices processor processor time for IO speed. According to Reiser, anyway, it gave an overall speedup.
I'll second this. I've always had pretty good luck with MPlayer, even on windows. The UI takes some getting used to (it is keyboard only), but once you learn it, you'll never want anything else. In comparison, WMP, QuickTime, and PowerDVD seem bloated and buggy as hell.
For example, I've tried to play movies on WMV (for which it did not have the codec) and locked up the computer. Which should definitely not happen. Quicktime, hooks its tray icon into your registry, tries to update itself over the internet, and generally makes an ass of itself. And of course, PowerDVD will make you watch those previews at the beginning of the DVD. It will also show you the DVD menus, which I hate.
VLC is good for playing corrupted movies, and it handles multiple audio tracks a little better than MPlayer, but it is also pretty bloated.
Great. I'm looking forward to searching my history, and getting advertising tailored to my interests.
Oh, wait. I spend most of my time switching back and forth between slashdot and 4chan. Turns out I'm mostly interested in guro, linux, and trolling. Now those "sponsored links" can be even more horribly accurate.
"Do you need a life? Click here for more details!" "Nude Vampire Carcass. Find what you're looking for on ebay!" "Is the MPAA in league with extraterrestrials? Read the shocking truth!"
It's called error *correction* for a reason. You can take information and spread it out over more bits, in a way so that you can correct up to one error, up to two errors, and so on. And it's way more efficient than making three copies. With simple replication, if each of the three files is different in different places, you're screwed. Also with checksums, the checksum is much shorter than your 40GB raws, and there is much less chance of screwing it up.
I'm sure there's plenty of research on this sort of thing. Ideally you'd use a system like bittorrent: just a bunch of small, redundant nodes each hosting pieces, and each piece checksummed. Ideally, all that would be handled transparently by your filesystem. Unfortunately, if such a thing exists, it hasn't really become mainstream yet.
Slashdot Mirror
The only real rule of the internet is "ZOMG NONE!111"
I wouldn't be sure of that. I run linux, and download a ton of anime. I'd be nervous about downloading software, because of trojans and the like. I only pirate software that I really need -- like XP (on vmware), office, and mathematica.
I don't listen to any music. But if I did, I doubt my public library has that good of a collection. And if I knew where to get pirated books, I probably wouldn't go to the library at all.
The big problem with humans is we're so low bandwidth. We can type at, what, 50 WPM, and talk maybe twice that? If you gave an AI a reasonable connection to the internet, I thing you could train it a lot faster.
If there is going to be a singularity (I don't really see why there wouldn't) strong AI wouldn't be the really world-changing thing. Humanoid robots are way, way, old school, and not really that interesting. The interesting thing would be what would happen when humanity is networked together with a high-speed connection, without a bottleneck at the eyeballs.
"Data is structured (or information about the structure of the data is communicated) using mechanisms that are respected by all tools involved."
But it's a plain fact that not all data is structured. The powershell commands may output and input XML, or whatever it is they do. But not everyone uses XML. Oh, sure, maybe everyone SHOULD use XML. But they don't. It's like Java. If you mandate a monolithic platform, compatability problems go away by definition. Your new problem is to convert everyone to your language of choice. How enticing -- replace computer problems with theological problems.
I think PowerShell is an interesting idea, don't get me wrong. But this is a horrible, horrible assumption to make. The problems you mentioned: ftp, environment variables, and so on are a consequence of not having a powerful enough filesystem. Plan 9 can mount FTP shares, I think. Reiser 4 treats files as objects, but it does it at the kernel level, and it doesn't involve XML. Doing that stuff in the shell is just dumb, because it locks you into that shell, and offers no backwards compatibility. Or, more likely, you have to import stuff in, and then export it back out.
The whole point of a traditional shell, IMHO, is to be an interface to the kernel. Sure, you have loops, conditionals, and variables, but they're really just window dressing. A traditional shell is supposed to just be a thin veneer over the surface. If you really want seamless ftp, it really should go in the kernel (as a daemon), so that everything can get at it, instead of just your shell. Likewise, if you want better inter-process communication, the thing to do would be to build out DBUS.
That's not to say that a higher level shell wouldn't be a good thing. But it should be much more like a programming language than a traditional shell. Abandon all pretense of pipes, executables, and so on; you're really making library calls. If you want higher-level semantic pipe, screw XML. Go with stream operators. Frankly, the whole concept of 'programs that you run to get stuff done' is sort of a hack anyway; really, everything should either be a kernel, a daemon or a library. Executables are used as commands, in bash. But it shouldn't be that way at all. The semantics of your user interface should be contained by the user interface daemon, the "shell".
Of course, there is an advantage to having executables as commands. It makes it really easy (trivial, in fact) for the shell to modify itself (change its keywords). Most programming languages, on the other hand, completely suck at modifying themselves. Hence, if you really want the ultimate shell, you would probably want to go a full step higher, and look at something like lisp or perl 6. Of course, it would be optimized for dealing with files and that sort of thing. Of course, that brings up the question of why we still deal with files and such at all.
This is the core of computer science. You try to decouple the interface from the implementation. Ultimately, this is impossible, because the interface gets its semantics from the implementation. Ultimately, as interfaces become higher-level, you start thinking of user daemons as kernel daemons, the 'kernel' gets bigger, and everything gets shoved down a level. That's what should happen. You should not go down into the lower layers and rework it to make it object-oriented, or use XML, or whatever. This was a discussion the linux devs had -- should the proc filesystem use XML? Of course it shouldn't. First, as was pointed out, it's complete overkill. Second, XML exists at a much higher level of abstraction. It's quite a high-level means of representing data. That's the whole fucking point of 'abstraction'; not mixing high-level ideas and low-level ideas. Oh, sure, you can try. You can have your self-hosting compilers, kernels that bootstrap themselves, and so on. But such things generally mark a big important turning point, because thinking on multiple levels of abstraction is hard, especially when they bend around and bite their tail. Once
Today, a mob of angry geeks stormed AACSLA headquarters. They seem do be chanting 09 F9 11 ... Bob, do you know why this is?
You're not really hardcore if you didn't get it tattooed on your ass.
I used to have a really slick script that would record with mencoder and pipe it to mplayer, so I could see myself talk, and then just hit q when I was done. Unfortunately, I accidentally deleted it.
/dev/video0, and the audio device is probably /dev/dsp1. Notice the 1. That took me about 3 hours to figure out. Then you have to figure out how to encode to mpeg. Or if you want to take the easy way out, you use VLC and open your camera as a v4l source using the GUI. Of course, VLC is also a fat, fickle bitch, but that's another story.
Read this:
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Install_a_webcam
You use v4l:// as your source, the video device is probable
I've never gotten any of the dedicated cam programs working. I think most of them are intended for firewire or something. Oh, and I wouldn't plan on doing much editing either. KDenLive is probably the best I've seen, even though its still a rather buggy beta.
I was impressed with Kopete, though. It worked right out of the box.
The actual hosting and distribution is much less than the cost of the song. Crappy consumer comcast at monopoly prices is less than $1/GB. Same for disk space.
"by the time i get it all ripped, some other storage media'll come along and make my new digital collection obselete." Get a 500 GB hard drive and a good sound card, and copy it while you can. What will you do when your record player breaks? Get it repaired? Buy a new one? Fix it yourself? Maintaining obsolete equipment becomes a losing proposition really quickly. And once your player is gone, your media is just so much plastic. By all means, copy it while you can, unless you really don't care about it.
Don't forget the franco-prussian war, the french revolution, and Henry V. After Henry, they had to have a girl take it back. Seriously, the french have lost a LOT of wars. And a lot of them were on their own ground, too. It's one thing to lose your colonies; that happens to everyone. But to get repeatedly pwned over the centuries is sort of special, I think.
That book sort of pissed me off. If evolution can develop a strong AI, why the hell wouldn't we be able to? And if we took a bunch of brains and networked them together (with a phat pipe, unlike interhuman interaction) wouldn't we have something that is superintelligent?
Maybe I'm oversimplifying. Still, as skeptical as I am, I can't think of a reason why we won't have singularity in 2042. Unless we run out of resources or kill ourselves off with nuclear weapons. Frankly, I'm more worried about luddites with bombs than inherent, physical limitations.
Hell, if we could somehow enslave the planet, and spend everyone's extra money on supercomputers, we could probably have a full brain simulation in a couple of years.
THIS is my philosophy of mind:
What blows my mind is the fact that they are using Gnome. For a system like that, you want a light WM like fvwm, Firefox, Gimp, gvim or xemacs, and Abiword (OO is fucking huge). If you want a fancy file manager, you go with rox. I like Gnome and KDE as much as the next bloke, but for a system like this they are really overkill.
If I was building a system like this (hah, hah) I'd start with an LFS base, and work up from there. LFS is *the* minimal self-compiling distro, and makes gentoo look bloated. I wouldn't use some kind of fancy, experimental UI based on Gnome. I'd have an FVWM button to launch each app. It might look like ass (I don't have leet fvwm theming skillz), but it would be as stable and functional as hell. It would be a system that they could hack and extend. And it would definitely run in 128M. If anything, the "disk" space would be more of a worry. With only 256M of the stuff, you're severely limited, especially given that the LFS base is 86M. I imagine you'd end up playing strange games with filesystem compression, removing all the headers, stripping out Xorg, and so on.
And yes, it should be able to compile itself. Anything else would defeat the purpose of using OSS. Yes, I'm looking at you, Ubuntu.
*sigh*
I wish the frigging singularity would hurry up and happen. I'm sick of having to eat and sleep.
And elderly grandmothers drive trucks loaded chock full of hookers and viagra. Without knowing it.
In my experience, the primary attraction of youtube is not the content at all, but the "community". It is difficult to understand until you try it, but posting videos can be incredibly entertaining, due to the amount of attention it is possible to get. With no mods, one can post anything at all that isn't actually obscene, which, practically speaking, makes youtube the perfect environment for a troll. Owing to the way the system counts views and comments (whether positive or not) and gives you honors, anything moderately inflammatory will easily get you on the most-discussed list. Simply put, youtube enables normal people have their own cadre of fanbois.
That's not to say that I haven't used youtube to watch whole TV series, but if all the copyrighted content were to disappear, I agree that they wouldn't be much affected.
I don't know how effective the "great firewall of china" is, but from reading the news, it seems to be fairly effective. I don't think it's necessarily a given that the wild and wooly internet will always win.
Admittedly, given the peer-to peer nature of it, the internet is much harder to censor than real life. And once we get real wireless, they won't be able to cut you off at the ISP as easily. But still, it is possible, and it's very scary.
Vacuum tubes _are_ expensive, compared to transistors.
No. They put down "stolen car", and they search the garage. Then when they trip over the body, they can get you for murder too.
However, they couldn't go looking through your home office.
It really is slower overall. My mother got a brand new laptop with 512 MB (not much, I know, but not bad for XP). It took forever to boot up. Sure, you can turn off aero. Control Panel still takes several seconds to appear.
With a couple of gigs, though, sure its going to be fast. It may even be faster. But vista definitely is a hell of a ram hog.
Compressing filesystems is the wave of the future, b/c it sacrifices processor processor time for IO speed. According to Reiser, anyway, it gave an overall speedup.
I'll second this. I've always had pretty good luck with MPlayer, even on windows. The UI takes some getting used to (it is keyboard only), but once you learn it, you'll never want anything else. In comparison, WMP, QuickTime, and PowerDVD seem bloated and buggy as hell.
For example, I've tried to play movies on WMV (for which it did not have the codec) and locked up the computer. Which should definitely not happen. Quicktime, hooks its tray icon into your registry, tries to update itself over the internet, and generally makes an ass of itself. And of course, PowerDVD will make you watch those previews at the beginning of the DVD. It will also show you the DVD menus, which I hate.
VLC is good for playing corrupted movies, and it handles multiple audio tracks a little better than MPlayer, but it is also pretty bloated.
Great. I'm looking forward to searching my history, and getting advertising tailored to my interests.
Oh, wait. I spend most of my time switching back and forth between slashdot and 4chan. Turns out I'm mostly interested in guro, linux, and trolling. Now those "sponsored links" can be even more horribly accurate.
"Do you need a life? Click here for more details!"
"Nude Vampire Carcass. Find what you're looking for on ebay!"
"Is the MPAA in league with extraterrestrials? Read the shocking truth!"
And so on.
It's called error *correction* for a reason. You can take information and spread it out over more bits, in a way so that you can correct up to one error, up to two errors, and so on. And it's way more efficient than making three copies. With simple replication, if each of the three files is different in different places, you're screwed. Also with checksums, the checksum is much shorter than your 40GB raws, and there is much less chance of screwing it up.
I'm sure there's plenty of research on this sort of thing. Ideally you'd use a system like bittorrent: just a bunch of small, redundant nodes each hosting pieces, and each piece checksummed. Ideally, all that would be handled transparently by your filesystem. Unfortunately, if such a thing exists, it hasn't really become mainstream yet.