Developers at Microsoft, don't want to use code written by an unfamiliar Microsoft team and apparently get away with reimplementing the same functionality.
Could it be poor documentation or a too fast release schedule from the other team? Didn't the antitrust trials establish that Microsoft doesn't write documentation, not even for internal use only?
Remember Hanlon's Razor: always try explaining things by incompetence before you move on to extreme incompetence.
If reading a patent trebles the potential damages, but reduces the probability of infringement to less than one-third of the original probability of infringement, then reading the patent is better than ignoring it.
True, but you have to know before reading it what the effect on the expected damages are from reading it. But you can't do that very well without reading it.
So you really have to evaluate the average risk of reading a patent over all patents your employees would read [which probably depends on patent titles and their personalities].
It is thus possible to enumerate all true statements by enumerating all deductions.
It implies that there is no algorithm to decide whether a given statement is true -- but this has nothing to do with enumerating all true statements.
I'm confused. Please clarify.
If it's possible to enumerate all valid proofs I propose the following proving algorithm: Run through all valid proofs; once you get to a proof whose conclusion is the theorem you want to prove, return that proof.
[if you don't know whether your theorem is true or not, run the above algorithm on its negation as well].
What's wrong with my algorithm?
(Yes, I am a mathematician)
FWIW, At my university, computer scientist are presented with Gödel's theorem before the mathematicians are. Yes, I am a computer scientist. Just in case anyone cares about anyone's credentials more than their arguments.
But wouldn't Godel's theorem imply that it'd be impossible to build a flawless, all-encompasing intelligence, not necessarily an imperfect one?
Gödel's theorem's concludes, simplified a bit, that it's impossible to know the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about sufficiently complex math. In this context, sufficiently complex means "anything that includes addition and multiplication of natural numbers".
An AI may be able to prove that sum(range(1, n+1)) == n*(n+1)//2 for all natural numbers n; that is, it may output a string that's a valid proof. Smart ones can, dumb ones can't. Just like humans. Intelligence is what limits you.
But if a set of axioms and inference rules don't allow for a proof of a given theorem T, no matter how smart you are, even if your silicon brain is smarter than all of mankind, monkeykind and birdkind added up, you can't transcend any limitation that's found wholly outside your intelligence. As in this case, where it's the nature of the mathematics you've made that prevents T from being proven, and not your inability to find the proof.
Similarly, if we agree that no evidence or reasoning can prove or disprove the existence of god, then no AI can know whether god exists: it's not your knowledge or ability to reason that limits you, it's the nature of knowledge and reasoning itself.
Looked upon that way, Gödel's theorem doesn't say anything about AI. It says something about the world.
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? To implement that, all we lack is the ability to store unbounded information in a world of finitely many atoms. Can intelligence do something more than Turing machines? Does that mean the answer is no? Or that we need to connect nerves to the PCI bus?
I've actually dealt with a D-Link USB WiFi adapter that the USB connector wasn't soldered to the board.
Someone should really punk the management a draw them a nice graph.
Draw a vertical line, labeled "$". Draw to horizontal lines right of it, and tag the three regions "bad engineering", "decent engineering", "excellent engineering".
For every dollar you save in the zone of excellent engineering, you lose one cent of lost sales to those who want high-end gear. For every dollar you save in the zone of decent engineering, you lose twenty cents in feature-specific-driven sales to competitors. For every dollar you save in the bad engineering zone, you lose ten dollars due to increased load on the customer service, or lost sales due to poor customer service, or lost sales due to nephew Melvin telling aunt Tillie not to buy dlink.
Do the market research, use the right numbers. But talk to the suits in a language they can understand; i.e. bash or perl: every word starts with a dollar sign;)
not long ago they were hammering a tier-1 NTP server with their firmware (and the poor guy was footing the bill for them on his own).
The poor guy in question was Paul-Henning Kamp (known on slashdot as phkamp), a freeBSD hacker of some note.
I saw him give a talk to my local UUG about varnish, a server-side HTTP cache (i.e. a slashdot resistance layer). Good talk, nice guy.
So he's on here, but hates what you do to his website;)
I think the "amicable resolution" between phk and dlink was the creation of an RFC of ntp client best practices, which dlink can now choose to ignore if it feels like being a bad network citizen. Why shouldn't it?
Works fine in zsh too. I think you mean that it's either (1) non-posix, or (2) doesn't work in bash when invoked as "sh", or (3) doesn't work in dash, or (4) doesn't work in your/bin/sh, whatever that is [typically a symlink to bash or dash unless you poke it].
Bsh tries to act posix-correctly when invoked as "sh"; dash is a shell optimized for posix-compatible scripting, it probably doesn't have many extra features.
Or >90% usage of mem and swap. Happens to my office mate's box. She is not happy, but she managed to run top on it once to identify the culprit. I think she's switching to kpdf [she doesn't like the ubuntu orange].
There's advantages and disadvantages to both approaches.
I've had.tex files die in a horrible wildcard related accident. Nothing big, just old linear algebra handins and I have compiled pdfs still.
But whoever would have expanded that probably wouldn't have known to check my Makefile whether I was deleting sources or targets. Zero all.
On dos you can rename fairly intuitively, "ren *.txt *.text". On Linux, you're likely to hurt yourself and/or your files (most likely in a different order) if you try that.
But rename(1) can do perl-regex-based renaming. There's also 'mmv' which can handle renaming cycles and tries to do everything else topologically sorted.
They're not as discoverable, points to DOS for that. But DOS is not so flexible, so points to Linux for that.
Linux provides universal wildcard support. It also means that you may speak in zsh wildcards to a bash user and create horrible confusion.
Try zsh today. If you're the kind of person who wants to spend an hour up front learning new things to save the time many times over, spread out over the next weeks/months/long-term, I can recommend it.
<off-topic> That, and swapping escape/caps, and the dvorak keyboard layout. If you switch to mousing with your left hand (really easy except the first two days), you'll have copy-paste and the numeric keypad below your keyboarding hand at a natural position.
If you want to give your hands a real treat, invest in a Kinesis keyboard (I'm a happy Ergo Elan user, except I can only get shitty ps2/usb adaptors). And get a Logitech Marble Mouse, and use EmulateWheel. The horizontal scrolling capability is one of those neat things you never know you want until you try it. </off-topic>
How about human viewable disk space? "Baobab", the gnome disk usage analyzer, or konqueror's file size view or RadialMap view? I find that a lot easier to work with: looking at relative sizes works a lot faster than comparing numbers.
(Okay, they're not command line tools and as such a bit OT, but they're awesome tools)
I'm not sure if anyone in our society remembers them, but I think parent is talking about our kin with superhexadecichromatic vision. They were worshiping religious "icons" and the "hand of god". They could survive much greater monitor luminance than we.
A strange breed, really. Lost in the mist of history.
`combine', out of the package moreutils: $ combine file1 operator file2 picks out the lines that are both in file1 and (e.g.) file2; assumes the lines are sorted according to sort.
`sponge', buffers all of stdin in memory, then dumps it into "$1". Ever done sort lines.txt | grep -v dirty-words > lines.txt? You meant '| sponge lines.txt' instead of '> lines.txt'.
There's of course the downloaders for shell scripting: wget and curl. Then there's the GUI interaction window makers, kdialog and zenity.
If you use bash because it's the default, have a look at zsh. It takes a little while to get used to, but I like it and I don't even know it very well yet. You can stick all the static prompt information that's nice to have out on the right hand, it'll tell you about non-zero exit statuses, it'll ask whether it should correct typos, it'll protect you from rm * if you want it to.
For X: unclutter hides the mouse curser after "$1" seconds. autocutsel fixes the clipboard if you run two instances (on for CLIPBOARD, one for PRIMARY). xbindkeys lets you have the controls of your music play always available (I use mpd).
There's no "technically" anything when it comes to race. Race is a fiction with no scientific basis.
The classification of individuals into races is always fuzzy, but just because there's no sharp line doesn't mean that there isn't a spectrum with clearly definable lines.
Subsaharan Africans have different AIDS-resistance properties than Caucasians. Is that not a racial feature?
Go to www.theskepticsguide.org, listen to all the episodes. The hosts have talked about races at some point, and they're probably what influences what I say the most on this matter (i.e. they're my source; they're a good one but I reference them poorly). Or try Evolution 101 [google.com].
You can't take a cell sample from somebody and pop it in an analyzer and come back and say "this person is 93% black and 7% white".
There's no test that will say you're "93% Autistic". That doesn't make it meaningless to talk about autism and an autistic spectrum.
If you're denying the entire field of psychiatry, take migraine headaches instead. They're diagnosed by the clinical picture they produce (i.e. what patients complain about) and not pathophysiology (i.e. the very kryptonite-rich cluster of nerve cells in your parietal lobe or the iron bar rammed through your orbitofrontal cortex). There's no test. But you can medicate away symptoms, much to the enjoyment of patients.
Are migraines without scientific basis?
Requiring an arbitrary test, that's not how science works. Unless you only have your own arguments, please cite your sources who say there is no such thing as race.
Also, what does it even mean "there is no such thing as race"? If I drew a bunch of stick figures on a blackboard, then drew circles around the clusters, would you claim the circles aren't real? How are races different?
Slashdot Mirror
why it's invalid because a common household item is prior art.
And that of course includes all the one-of-a-kinds you build out of duct tape and solder in your basement according to the patent.
Developers at Microsoft, don't want to use code written by an unfamiliar Microsoft team and apparently get away with reimplementing the same functionality.
Could it be poor documentation or a too fast release schedule from the other team? Didn't the antitrust trials establish that Microsoft doesn't write documentation, not even for internal use only?
Remember Hanlon's Razor: always try explaining things by incompetence before you move on to extreme incompetence.
They're probably better at reading code than the programmers are at reading patent claims.
Who does best; programmers operating a dictionary, or lawyers operating a computer? :P
If reading a patent trebles the potential damages, but reduces the probability of infringement to less than one-third of the original probability of infringement, then reading the patent is better than ignoring it.
True, but you have to know before reading it what the effect on the expected damages are from reading it. But you can't do that very well without reading it.
So you really have to evaluate the average risk of reading a patent over all patents your employees would read [which probably depends on patent titles and their personalities].
For any set of axioms you pick for arithmetic, there are true statements of arithmetic that cannot be proven from those axioms.
Or false statements that can be proven. Consider the set of all well-formed formulas.
It is thus possible to enumerate all true statements by enumerating all deductions.
It implies that there is no algorithm to decide whether a given statement is true -- but this has nothing to do with enumerating all true statements.
I'm confused. Please clarify.
If it's possible to enumerate all valid proofs I propose the following proving algorithm: Run through all valid proofs; once you get to a proof whose conclusion is the theorem you want to prove, return that proof.
[if you don't know whether your theorem is true or not, run the above algorithm on its negation as well].
What's wrong with my algorithm?
(Yes, I am a mathematician)
FWIW, At my university, computer scientist are presented with Gödel's theorem before the mathematicians are. Yes, I am a computer scientist. Just in case anyone cares about anyone's credentials more than their arguments.
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.
It's not random, it's just that every ten seconds you get a hard disk and feel like doing an integrity check.
No reason why a machine has to be different. [zomfg, I just googled "mecha porn". Rule 34 works, biatches].
But wouldn't Godel's theorem imply that it'd be impossible to build a flawless, all-encompasing intelligence, not necessarily an imperfect one?
Gödel's theorem's concludes, simplified a bit, that it's impossible to know the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about sufficiently complex math. In this context, sufficiently complex means "anything that includes addition and multiplication of natural numbers".
An AI may be able to prove that sum(range(1, n+1)) == n*(n+1)//2 for all natural numbers n; that is, it may output a string that's a valid proof. Smart ones can, dumb ones can't. Just like humans. Intelligence is what limits you.
But if a set of axioms and inference rules don't allow for a proof of a given theorem T, no matter how smart you are, even if your silicon brain is smarter than all of mankind, monkeykind and birdkind added up, you can't transcend any limitation that's found wholly outside your intelligence. As in this case, where it's the nature of the mathematics you've made that prevents T from being proven, and not your inability to find the proof.
Similarly, if we agree that no evidence or reasoning can prove or disprove the existence of god, then no AI can know whether god exists: it's not your knowledge or ability to reason that limits you, it's the nature of knowledge and reasoning itself.
Looked upon that way, Gödel's theorem doesn't say anything about AI. It says something about the world.
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? To implement that, all we lack is the ability to store unbounded information in a world of finitely many atoms. Can intelligence do something more than Turing machines? Does that mean the answer is no? Or that we need to connect nerves to the PCI bus?
When Bug 1 is closed, that year is the year of Linux on the Desktop.
(https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1)
No no, it's released on the ninth of august 2011. No one ever said it was easy to read dates when written in the American way ;)
I've actually dealt with a D-Link USB WiFi adapter that the USB connector wasn't soldered to the board.
Someone should really punk the management a draw them a nice graph.
Draw a vertical line, labeled "$". Draw to horizontal lines right of it, and tag the three regions "bad engineering", "decent engineering", "excellent engineering".
For every dollar you save in the zone of excellent engineering, you lose one cent of lost sales to those who want high-end gear. For every dollar you save in the zone of decent engineering, you lose twenty cents in feature-specific-driven sales to competitors. For every dollar you save in the bad engineering zone, you lose ten dollars due to increased load on the customer service, or lost sales due to poor customer service, or lost sales due to nephew Melvin telling aunt Tillie not to buy dlink.
Do the market research, use the right numbers. But talk to the suits in a language they can understand; i.e. bash or perl: every word starts with a dollar sign ;)
not long ago they were hammering a tier-1 NTP server with their firmware (and the poor guy was footing the bill for them on his own).
The poor guy in question was Paul-Henning Kamp (known on slashdot as phkamp), a freeBSD hacker of some note.
I saw him give a talk to my local UUG about varnish, a server-side HTTP cache (i.e. a slashdot resistance layer). Good talk, nice guy.
So he's on here, but hates what you do to his website ;)
I think the "amicable resolution" between phk and dlink was the creation of an RFC of ntp client best practices, which dlink can now choose to ignore if it feels like being a bad network citizen. Why shouldn't it?
It's bash specific
Works fine in zsh too. I think you mean that it's either (1) non-posix, or (2) doesn't work in bash when invoked as "sh", or (3) doesn't work in dash, or (4) doesn't work in your /bin/sh, whatever that is [typically a symlink to bash or dash unless you poke it].
Bsh tries to act posix-correctly when invoked as "sh"; dash is a shell optimized for posix-compatible scripting, it probably doesn't have many extra features.
</pedantic>
So when parent^n said "that people can share with their friends", meant it in the sense of what's easy to do, not what's legal.
Yep, I missed the point :(
In the legalize-all-noncommercial-distribution scenario, my post makes a lot more sense, right?
Or >90% usage of mem and swap. Happens to my office mate's box. She is not happy, but she managed to run top on it once to identify the culprit. I think she's switching to kpdf [she doesn't like the ubuntu orange].
There's advantages and disadvantages to both approaches.
I've had .tex files die in a horrible wildcard related accident. Nothing big, just old linear algebra handins and I have compiled pdfs still.
But whoever would have expanded that probably wouldn't have known to check my Makefile whether I was deleting sources or targets. Zero all.
On dos you can rename fairly intuitively, "ren *.txt *.text". On Linux, you're likely to hurt yourself and/or your files (most likely in a different order) if you try that.
But rename(1) can do perl-regex-based renaming. There's also 'mmv' which can handle renaming cycles and tries to do everything else topologically sorted.
They're not as discoverable, points to DOS for that. But DOS is not so flexible, so points to Linux for that.
Linux provides universal wildcard support. It also means that you may speak in zsh wildcards to a bash user and create horrible confusion.
Try zsh today. If you're the kind of person who wants to spend an hour up front learning new things to save the time many times over, spread out over the next weeks/months/long-term, I can recommend it.
<off-topic>
That, and swapping escape/caps, and the dvorak keyboard layout. If you switch to mousing with your left hand (really easy except the first two days), you'll have copy-paste and the numeric keypad below your keyboarding hand at a natural position.
If you want to give your hands a real treat, invest in a Kinesis keyboard (I'm a happy Ergo Elan user, except I can only get shitty ps2/usb adaptors). And get a Logitech Marble Mouse, and use EmulateWheel. The horizontal scrolling capability is one of those neat things you never know you want until you try it.
</off-topic>
Human readable disk space
How about human viewable disk space? "Baobab", the gnome disk usage analyzer, or konqueror's file size view or RadialMap view? I find that a lot easier to work with: looking at relative sizes works a lot faster than comparing numbers.
(Okay, they're not command line tools and as such a bit OT, but they're awesome tools)
sftp - i really shouldn't need to explain this.
I much prefer sshfs. Diff doesn't work so well over ftp ;)
I'm not sure if anyone in our society remembers them, but I think parent is talking about our kin with superhexadecichromatic vision. They were worshiping religious "icons" and the "hand of god". They could survive much greater monitor luminance than we.
A strange breed, really. Lost in the mist of history.
[increases the IV caffeine rate, grooms beard]
`combine', out of the package moreutils: $ combine file1 operator file2 picks out the lines that are both in file1 and (e.g.) file2; assumes the lines are sorted according to sort.
`sponge', buffers all of stdin in memory, then dumps it into "$1". Ever done sort lines.txt | grep -v dirty-words > lines.txt? You meant '| sponge lines.txt' instead of '> lines.txt'.
There's of course the downloaders for shell scripting: wget and curl. Then there's the GUI interaction window makers, kdialog and zenity.
If you use bash because it's the default, have a look at zsh. It takes a little while to get used to, but I like it and I don't even know it very well yet. You can stick all the static prompt information that's nice to have out on the right hand, it'll tell you about non-zero exit statuses, it'll ask whether it should correct typos, it'll protect you from rm * if you want it to.
For X: unclutter hides the mouse curser after "$1" seconds. autocutsel fixes the clipboard if you run two instances (on for CLIPBOARD, one for PRIMARY). xbindkeys lets you have the controls of your music play always available (I use mpd).
Why doesn't the U.S. do it?
Do you realize what that would cost?!? With the tanking dollar, the U.S. can't afford to import common sense.
So every time the TV says a naughty word, the V-chip gives it a gentle prick?
That'll teach 'em!
There's no "technically" anything when it comes to race. Race is a fiction with no scientific basis.
The classification of individuals into races is always fuzzy, but just because there's no sharp line doesn't mean that there isn't a spectrum with clearly definable lines.
Subsaharan Africans have different AIDS-resistance properties than Caucasians. Is that not a racial feature?
Go to www.theskepticsguide.org, listen to all the episodes. The hosts have talked about races at some point, and they're probably what influences what I say the most on this matter (i.e. they're my source; they're a good one but I reference them poorly). Or try Evolution 101 [google.com].
You can't take a cell sample from somebody and pop it in an analyzer and come back and say "this person is 93% black and 7% white".
There's no test that will say you're "93% Autistic". That doesn't make it meaningless to talk about autism and an autistic spectrum.
If you're denying the entire field of psychiatry, take migraine headaches instead. They're diagnosed by the clinical picture they produce (i.e. what patients complain about) and not pathophysiology (i.e. the very kryptonite-rich cluster of nerve cells in your parietal lobe or the iron bar rammed through your orbitofrontal cortex). There's no test. But you can medicate away symptoms, much to the enjoyment of patients.
Are migraines without scientific basis?
Requiring an arbitrary test, that's not how science works. Unless you only have your own arguments, please cite your sources who say there is no such thing as race.
Also, what does it even mean "there is no such thing as race"? If I drew a bunch of stick figures on a blackboard, then drew circles around the clusters, would you claim the circles aren't real? How are races different?
Well, given that it's a device that isn't designed to be root-accessible by the user
The hack jailbreaks the phone, not roots it.
"Your arm's off!"
"No it isn't."
"Look!"
"Bah, mistakes happen."