I started programming when I was 8 by taking apart the IBM Advanced Basic demos that came with our IBM XT at home. If it wasn't for that already working source code from which to start hacking I wouldn't have gotten started with programming until much later.
Source code isn't the solution for everyone, but it can be for some -- especially for those of us who were quite bored with the regular curriculum.
The word soccer came from England, as a shorthand way of referring to "association football", or football with the modern rules. The US uses it now since switching would be a pain (since the common word is reserved for something else, just like in Canada and Australia, btw). However, we didn't start it; kind of like the shitty measurement system we also inherited.
Re:Reminds me of this "classic" prose...
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New AIBO Demo'd
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Usually people aren't allowed to change the rules of a game while they play it. The major parties like the current election system since it makes it hard for any other parties or moderate coalitions to suceed. Every once in a while it bites them back, and they cry, but never do anything about it in the long run. No, I don't feel sorry for a cantidate who lost, who never even tried to fix the system during his long political career until after he lost by it.
Re:Where our PC tech really came from
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New AIBO Demo'd
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
Hi Jack, have you ever seen this website that addresses your lies? I bet you have, and you probably dislike it.
No, posting the same damn hackneyed argument over 20 times is being a troll. You seem to have a lot of free time and advocate protecting IP over the lives of people in foreign countries. Tell me, are you an Objectivist?
You are forced to receive a framebuffer across the network.
Funny, you sound like you know about X, and then you say this. Most systems besides X send the buffer. X does not, which you would know if you knew anything about X.
Berlin tried to make a more intelligent server end but that makes it (1) much harder to make compatible server implementations (2) more of a headache to program for since the program really is running in two locations now.
If you are SO OFFENDED by QuickTime, then I suggest that you sit down and write an RMS-Approved & Endorsed version of QT for Linux.
We would, except that it would be illegal, thanks to the wonderful corporate tool of software patents. There already are QuickTime stream decoders, but they aren't allowed to leagally reverse engineer and distribute the patented-protected Sorensen codec so that they could actually view the movie content.
How would you feel if Slashdot decided tomorrow that it was only available for Linux and BSD users? What if HTTP, TCP, and IP were only available for commercial Unices and BSD, where they originated? I bet you wouldn't like that... but that's the way some corparations now want the world to head. The internet works well today because of open standards and formats. Unfortunately, several companies like the idea of milking open standards while hijacking everything else they can.
Users of open standards can make their data free to the world, and never have to worry about paying royalties to see or share their own work. Those who use closed formats are data format hostages of the companies that control the software. This is an old concept that large customized software system vendors learned long ago, which they used for milking their corporate clients. The new revolution is bringing this leverage to the single user. I don't expect you to understand this, but a few more will and many already do. It's a pity you don't see it coming...
> Frankly, this is a silly statement. If you want proof of that, just look north. AFAIK, Canada does not
> have an equivalent to the 2nd amendment. To say that Canada is in danger of becoming a fascist state
> is completely ridiculous. Ditto for most Europeans countries, I would suspect.
Germany in the 1930s doesn't count? One of their first steps was to remove citizen owned guns for "safety" reasons.
The US commits more homicides without guns than the totals for many other countries. We're a violent people, not a bunch of violent guns. Countries spawned by violent revolutions tend to have larger crime rates; it goes with the territory.
We have fewer gun crimes per gun than any nation I have found statistics for. If it's the fault of the weapon, shouldn't the ratio be about constant?
OTOH, which country would you not want to go to war with?
> All these ones can only be find through image processing.
Hence the use of the most advanced vision system available to modern science: Humans.
As someone who has worked on computer vision systems I can assure you that computers are very slow and not very good when it comes to computer vision tasks like this. Maybe in 20 years there will be some competition. They'll also have a very nice dataset to train/test new algorithms against: The data NASA is collecting now using humans.
You must be joking. Let's compare it to its peers; Network transparent windowing systems with a wide base of application support, accelerated drivers for 3D support, cross platform support for the base library, free implementations, and accelerated drop in replacements by third party vendors.
Well, I guess it doesn't have any peers then, does it? Guess I'll keep using it then.
Sure X has its faults, but features is not one of them. If I had to give up networked windows for native alpha channels, or multiplatform support or 3D acceleration for easier setup (though XF4.0 sets up in a few minutes if all you have are the manuals for your hardware), I would not make that trade. BTW, I do code XLib, and find it easier than Windows' and MacOS's ugly-ass window system interfaces. All three of course are very dated and could use a facelift, of course. Perhaps BeOS could help here, but X will definitely not disappear. You should realize that even with BeOS you'd be using X as soon as you wanted to open up a window from another machine (even Windows has several X server implementations)
If you'd acually like to learn how to code Xlib then I'd be happy to give you my GPL'ed C++ Xlib wrapper that lets you create windows and draw on them in a few lines of code.
The result will be a UNIX operating system product line that runs on IA-32, IA-64 and Power microprocessors, in computers that range from entry-level to large enterprise servers.
Sounds exactly like their current strategy for Linux. No wonder it got the ax.
Stuck in Linux? You obviously haven't used Debian.
Debian's apt+deb can do pretty much everything ports can do, and vice-versa. Automatic download, install, upgrades, etc. Each.deb has a matching source tarball if you want it.
When you're done revelling in your superiority maybe we could actually address the problems still present in things like ports and apt/deb. Then again nobody seems to be addressing that anyway.
Windows can suceed now because of competetion forcing it to improve faster than it would without competition.
I think the OS and Apps company will be around for quite a while, and with more openness and modulartity (as per ruling), both ISV and MS products will probably improve. They can finally put functionality before monopoly-maintenance
... and you fail to see that development entails further research.
Ever written a big program? Did you think of the optimal solution for everything in the first implementation?
More likely you'd find that you run into interesting subproblems and areas that could use later improvement. This is what's been going on with Coda, and many other systems projects.
I'm currently working on such a thing to learn soccer strategies for RoboCup. The general idea is to couple feedback type reinforcement learning with a large, distributed tournament-style evolution system.
A computer simply executes the instructions given it. It has no choice in and of itself to choose whether or not it will execute an instruction or subroutine.
And your evidence that humans are not like this is? Try willing your retinal neurons into not firing.
Given the same conditions, the exact same path will always be followed.
Not if it has any form of learning, or if it has sensors observing the real world, which is chaotic and always changing even if slightly. Then the situation is never identical.
I know evolutionary programming is not a new science and that it's pioneers knew it held promise for evolving intelligent systems. I'm baffled though that the focus of Artificial Intelligence as an academic discipline has forever been on top-down approaches. It's a wonderful thing to be able to completely understand a phenomenon and then engineer machinations that apply the understood theory, but it seems to me plainly obvious that with our use of evolution as a tool, we're much closer to creating amazingly complex and possibly intelligent systems than we are to understanding them.
Ask yourself this question: What's the most complex program that has been evolved to date?
When you find the answer, you will realize why people still use top-down engineering.
> If thousands or even millions of these neurons > could be connected to form an even larger > network, wouldn't you get a higher form of > AI than you would using digital circuits?
No, you'd get something that wouldn't do anything. The point is they have to be connected the right way, not just connected. This is the problem with bottom up AI (rule based, genetic algorithms, neural nets, etc...).
We don't know how to make them scale well yet. For example, no neural net has successfully been used to do things like planning or eliza-like talking. They work well for things like low-level control or walking however. A common saying in the community is that "Neural Nets are the second best way to do everything".
Current computer processors are built top down, just connecting a bunch of logic gates would not get you much. The same is true for NNets...
Slashdot Mirror
I started programming when I was 8 by taking apart the IBM Advanced Basic demos that came with our IBM XT at home. If it wasn't for that already working source code from which to start hacking I wouldn't have gotten started with programming until much later.
Source code isn't the solution for everyone, but it can be for some -- especially for those of us who were quite bored with the regular curriculum.
The word soccer came from England, as a shorthand way of referring to "association football", or football with the modern rules. The US uses it now since switching would be a pain (since the common word is reserved for something else, just like in Canada and Australia, btw). However, we didn't start it; kind of like the shitty measurement system we also inherited.
I did, and guess what, you're wrong.
Usually people aren't allowed to change the rules of a game while they play it. The major parties like the current election system since it makes it hard for any other parties or moderate coalitions to suceed. Every once in a while it bites them back, and they cry, but never do anything about it in the long run. No, I don't feel sorry for a cantidate who lost, who never even tried to fix the system during his long political career until after he lost by it.
Hi Jack, have you ever seen this website that addresses your lies? I bet you have, and you probably dislike it.
No, posting the same damn hackneyed argument over 20 times is being a troll. You seem to have a lot of free time and advocate protecting IP over the lives of people in foreign countries. Tell me, are you an Objectivist?
You are forced to receive a framebuffer across the network.
Funny, you sound like you know about X, and then you say this. Most systems besides X send the buffer. X does not, which you would know if you knew anything about X.
Berlin tried to make a more intelligent server end but that makes it (1) much harder to make compatible server implementations (2) more of a headache to program for since the program really is running in two locations now.
If you are SO OFFENDED by QuickTime, then I suggest that you sit down and write an RMS-Approved & Endorsed version of QT for Linux.
We would, except that it would be illegal, thanks to the wonderful corporate tool of software patents. There already are QuickTime stream decoders, but they aren't allowed to leagally reverse engineer and distribute the patented-protected Sorensen codec so that they could actually view the movie content.
How would you feel if Slashdot decided tomorrow that it was only available for Linux and BSD users? What if HTTP, TCP, and IP were only available for commercial Unices and BSD, where they originated? I bet you wouldn't like that... but that's the way some corparations now want the world to head. The internet works well today because of open standards and formats. Unfortunately, several companies like the idea of milking open standards while hijacking everything else they can.
Users of open standards can make their data free to the world, and never have to worry about paying royalties to see or share their own work. Those who use closed formats are data format hostages of the companies that control the software. This is an old concept that large customized software system vendors learned long ago, which they used for milking their corporate clients. The new revolution is bringing this leverage to the single user. I don't expect you to understand this, but a few more will and many already do. It's a pity you don't see it coming...
Special? Not really; I've had a T22 for more than a month; Our lab bought two at the cmu computer store in late July. And it's happily running Debian.
That would explain all the bombs; No wait, it wouldn't.
> Frankly, this is a silly statement. If you want proof of that, just look north. AFAIK, Canada does not
> have an equivalent to the 2nd amendment. To say that Canada is in danger of becoming a fascist state
> is completely ridiculous. Ditto for most Europeans countries, I would suspect.
Germany in the 1930s doesn't count? One of their first steps was to remove citizen owned guns for "safety" reasons.
Just like matches... (though guns are not nearly as effective)
The US commits more homicides without guns than the totals for many other countries. We're a violent people, not a bunch of violent guns. Countries spawned by violent revolutions tend to have larger crime rates; it goes with the territory.
We have fewer gun crimes per gun than any nation I have found statistics for. If it's the fault of the weapon, shouldn't the ratio be about constant?
OTOH, which country would you not want to go to war with?
All but one picture is the Aibo ERS-111 (e.g. version 1.1), not the Aibo 210 (aka Aibo-II). Also, several of the stats were wrong.
So this is neither a good comparison, nor was it really all that funny. Perhaps the mistitled story put me in the wrong mood?
Anyway, if you want to see a real cat fighting an Aibo go here.
> All these ones can only be find through image processing.
Hence the use of the most advanced vision system available to modern science: Humans.
As someone who has worked on computer vision systems I can assure you that computers are very slow and not very good when it comes to computer vision tasks like this. Maybe in 20 years there will be some competition. They'll also have a very nice dataset to train/test new algorithms against: The data NASA is collecting now using humans.
> Have you tried to make zImage?
That's what modules and bzImage are for.
So do you think BeOS has a smaller memory resident kernel? I doubt it.
You must be joking. Let's compare it to its peers; Network transparent windowing systems with a wide base of application support, accelerated drivers for 3D support, cross platform support for the base library, free implementations, and accelerated drop in replacements by third party vendors.
Well, I guess it doesn't have any peers then, does it? Guess I'll keep using it then.
Sure X has its faults, but features is not one of them. If I had to give up networked windows for native alpha channels, or multiplatform support or 3D acceleration for easier setup (though XF4.0 sets up in a few minutes if all you have are the manuals for your hardware), I would not make that trade. BTW, I do code XLib, and find it easier than Windows' and MacOS's ugly-ass window system interfaces. All three of course are very dated and could use a facelift, of course. Perhaps BeOS could help here, but X will definitely not disappear. You should realize that even with BeOS you'd be using X as soon as you wanted to open up a window from another machine (even Windows has several X server implementations)
If you'd acually like to learn how to code Xlib then I'd be happy to give you my GPL'ed C++ Xlib wrapper that lets you create windows and draw on them in a few lines of code.
Sounds exactly like their current strategy for Linux. No wonder it got the ax.
Stuck in Linux? You obviously haven't used Debian.
.deb has a matching source tarball if you want it.
Debian's apt+deb can do pretty much everything ports can do, and vice-versa. Automatic download, install, upgrades, etc. Each
When you're done revelling in your superiority maybe we could actually address the problems still present in things like ports and apt/deb. Then again nobody seems to be addressing that anyway.
> to protect sensitive information.
The point is, he has nothing to hide.
I think many of you are missing the point.
Windows can suceed now because of competetion forcing it to improve faster than it would without competition.
I think the OS and Apps company will be around for quite a while, and with more openness and modulartity (as per ruling), both ISV and MS products will probably improve. They can finally put functionality before monopoly-maintenance
Q: Did AT&T's parts die after their breakup?
... and you fail to see that development entails further research.
Ever written a big program? Did you think of the optimal solution for everything in the first implementation?
More likely you'd find that you run into interesting subproblems and areas that could use later improvement. This is what's been going on with Coda, and many other systems projects.
I'm currently working on such a thing to learn soccer strategies for RoboCup. The general idea is to couple feedback type reinforcement learning with a large, distributed tournament-style evolution system.
A computer simply executes the instructions given it. It has no choice in and of itself to choose whether or not it will execute an instruction or subroutine.
And your evidence that humans are not like this is? Try willing your retinal neurons into not firing.
Given the same conditions, the exact same path will always be followed.
Not if it has any form of learning, or if it has sensors observing the real world, which is chaotic and always changing even if slightly. Then the situation is never identical.
I know evolutionary programming is not a new science and that it's pioneers knew it held promise for evolving intelligent systems. I'm baffled though that the focus of Artificial Intelligence as an academic discipline has forever been on top-down approaches. It's a wonderful thing to be able to completely understand a phenomenon and then engineer machinations that apply the understood theory, but it seems to me plainly obvious that with our use of evolution as a tool, we're much closer to creating amazingly complex and possibly intelligent systems than we are to understanding them.
Ask yourself this question: What's the most complex program that has been evolved to date?
When you find the answer, you will realize why people still use top-down engineering.
> If thousands or even millions of these neurons
> could be connected to form an even larger
> network, wouldn't you get a higher form of
> AI than you would using digital circuits?
No, you'd get something that wouldn't do anything. The point is they have to be connected the right way, not just connected. This is the problem with bottom up AI (rule based, genetic algorithms, neural nets, etc...).
We don't know how to make them scale well yet. For example, no neural net has successfully been used to do things like planning or eliza-like talking. They work well for things like low-level control or walking however. A common saying in the community is that "Neural Nets are the second best way to do everything".
Current computer processors are built top down, just connecting a bunch of logic gates would not get you much. The same is true for NNets...