I mean for the love of Christ they call me an "MS Ninja" for DARING to point out you can't sell Linux to consumers in its current state when what do we see right here on this very forum? That unless the hardware OEMs constantly release new drivers, even for old hardware that isn't even fricking being sold anymore, that the software WILL NOT WORK with current kernels.
I see these complaints all the time, but in ten years of using various distros I've only had ONE problem with drivers, and that was over 5 years ago (maybe closer to ten). I got a new video card with an S-Video output so I could use the TV as a monitor, and although it worked with a real monitor, it was only garbage on the TV screen under both Suse and Mandriva (there wasn't any Ubuntu then), but it worked fine under Windows. That card is now happily humming right along on kubuntu 10, so someone has obviously fixed that problem.
OTOH I've had many driver problems with Windows. When I first upgraded from 98 to XP, the first thing Windows did was to replace the perfectly good network driver with one that didn't work at all. I have another box, a real old one I'm fixing for a friend that had XP with a nastily corrupted registry on it. I FDISKed and formatted the drive, reinstalled Windows, but the Dell driver disk seems to contain no drivers. Of course, no NIC drivers and Windows stupidly asks me if I want to look for them on the internet... ON A MACHINE WITHOUT A NIC DRIVER! I just hope the ones I DLed from Dell last night on a different machine work, because the latest version of Linux I can get to run on the old underpowered thing is Mandriva 2005.
You want Linux boxes in your shop? Easy enough to do, just install it alongside the already installed Windows. Of course, you'll lose money on support, because Linux doesn't get bogged down like Windows does, and people don't bother writing malware for it.
there should be no damned reason why my customer should have to update his GPU driver just to run the latest XBMC or any other software for that matter
Hmmm, I've been thinking of trying XMBC out, I'll have to get back to you on that. But I've never seen an app update break any drivers (although like I said, the newest Flash won't work without a gig of memory).
If that's the case, then you probably heard about UEFI secure boot? You know, that thing where everything, including the kernel AND the kernel drivers will have to be signed?
I swear, kids should learn history, because they keep coming back with the same old bad shit over and over again until a clueless generation accepts it. Back in the late '80s there was a boycott against copy protection, and companies dropped it -- for a decade or so, when it was reborn as DRM, and you kids pretty much accepted it.
Ten years ago they had Palladium and we users squashed it like a bug. Now MS is trying to do the same goddamned thing all over, and you kids aren't complaining nearly loud enough.
My eye implant is powered by the eye's muscles. Most cybernetic implants are non-electronic and likewise are powered by the cyborg's human musclature. There are probably a lot more artificial joints than there are pacemakers and cochlear implants.
Counter hacking doesn't seem like a good idea, because they, being criminals, are somewhat less hindered by morals and laws than you are
Some criminals steal with a gun, others steal with a pen. If you think MNCs give two shits about the law or morality (Sony's XCP for example) or revenge, you're awfully naive. Hell, a better example than XCP is this. Note that Sony was never charged with a crime, and nobody from the mining company was charged with negligent homicide (as they should have been IMO). As much as I hate Sony for rooting my computer, I hate Purina more -- they killed my grandfather. Nobody went to jail for his death, either.
Corporations have no morals and no fear of the law. They are all sociopathic and some are simply parasites on society.
That makes no sense whatever, and sounds like a really fucking BAD, lying excuse for Nvidea's hostility to Linux. If a thing is patented, its design and workings are open knowledge. Unless, of course, you're telling us it has to keep its shit secret because it knows it's willingly violating other companies' patents? Either way, it's evil.
TFA talks of the Uncanny Valley and little about actual gene sequencing, I didn't read much past the Valley graph; nothing I didn't already know. What did interest me was the two chatbots conversing; it looks like bots haven't improved much since 1983 when I wrote Artificial Insanity on a fantastically underpowered computer. I posted this on my old Quake site ten years ago:
Alice joined the game About 20 years ago, frustrated that otherwise serious researchers and scientests seemingly thought they could program a computer to think, (without, of course, understanding what "thought" actually is; nobody knows that) I wrote a simulation that appears to think, in order to completely debunk the fools and those fooling them who think computers can think.
I wrote Artificial Insanity in less than 20K (that's Kilo, not mega) bytes- smaller than modern viruses, that ran on the Timex TS-1000 tape driven computer. I later ported it to a Radio Shack computer, then an Apple IIe, and finally ported it to MS-DOS.
The DOS version's source code is still under 20k (I didn't change the algorythm, only the syntax for the different programming language) although compiled into an.exe it takes about 400k- still tiny by today's standards, as far as simulation software and games go.
As I mentioned, I did it in response to "Elijah" and all the other similar programs that attempt to fool you into thinking they can think. As far as I know, mine is the only one that is NOT claimed to actually posess intelligence. None really ARE intelligent, I'm just the only one not making the claim. Debunking the claim was my reason for writing it. I go into more detail about it at the Artificial Insanity page.
Another thing different about Art from all the other intelligence simulations is that I wanted it to be fun, yet annoying. Kind of like playing Quake on a 28.8 against a bunch of LPBs. So I made it a smartass.
Also, for example, I added little things like a routine that occasionally runs that, instead of answering the questioner, asks if he or she wants to play a game. Of course, most folks consider Art a game any way (although like the Sims, you can't win or lose). Any negative response to "Do you want to play a game" loops back to "Do you want to play a game?" When the hapless player finally gives up and answers "yes" in exasperation, Art answers "you lose".
Art cost a friend of mine a keyboard. A friend of his literally destroyed it playing with Art, typing as hard as he could.
I ran across yet another program that claims to think like a human the other day.
The "Alice Bot" is basically your typical Elijah like program- BORING. As boring as small talk with the dumbest, most boring person you know. Alice is a lady. If she was a whore she might be fun, but I digress.
I wondered what would happen if Art had a conversation with Alice. Alice has a web based presence, so I didn't even have to install it.
I was expecting Alice to choke. I expected Art to kick Alice's ass.
I fired up Art and logged in to Alice (you dirty minded...)
Here is the transcript. Art's responses are in blue, alice's are in red. [Note: no color here, so Art is bold and Alice is italic.] Alice starts: "What is your name?" I should have asked Art, but I answered this first question for him, and type in Art
Alice replies: I like art very much too, especially the contemporary stuff. Are you for real? Yes I am real AI whatever gave you that idea? My brain uses AIML to format responses to your inputs, but I don't have one for that. Look, I'm good, but I'm not a Cray
For fuck's sake, Sheldon, the T and F are right next to each other. He's probably at work and forced to use IE 6 or 7, which don't have spell checkers.
Frag somebody for spelling "lose" with two "O"s, changing the meaning of the sentence, and you have a point. Otherwise the only point is on your head.
What is so offensive about repurposing hardware? What is so offensive about writing quick and dirty single-use code? What is so offensive about pen testing your own network?
Son, if you think hackers are offensive, you're on the wrong site, and so is the idiot who modded you "insightful." Not knowing there are white, gray, and black hat hackers shows a complete and utter lack of insight.
Goddamnit, I wish you people would learn to read and write. I completely misunderstood your comment until I realized you were talking about an engine failure rather than dropping the first stage. "Lose" and "loose" are both verbs with completely different meanings, and in the case of your comment the repeated misspelling completely changed the meaning of what you wrote.
Considering the "bonobo's" twice in his comment, my guess is either a) he's not a native speaker, so he may not have made it up, and is either accurate or he may have mis-written it and changed the meaning completely from what he meant to write, or b) He's a fucking high school dropout and the last book he ever read was Cat In The Hat and nothing he says should be given any credibility whatever.
To paraphrase Twain, the aliterate has no advantage over the illiterate. If you sound like an ignorant dufus, there's a good chance you are an ignorant dufus. You should always be skeptical of anybody who doesn't know the difference between lose and loose, there their and they're, and when, when not, and why an apostrophe should be used. Anyone who has read more than a handful of books doesn't make those retarded mistakes.
I have to agree with the GP, whose post I didn't see because it was modded to oblivion. One expects "I'd imagine your right" to preface something about your right to do or not do something, and when it's followed by "but I'm not a biologist" there's a bit of brain lag that sets in; "I'd imagine your right butt, I'm not a biologist."
It's only clear communication if you have to move your lips when you read. To those of us who are literate, it slows reading speed and takes away comprehension. it's annoying and we wish you aliterates would read a few books now and then. As Twain said, someone who doesn't read has no advantage over someone who can't read.
I'm pretty sure jellomiser isn't a native speaker, and he did a lot better than I would have written it writing in Spanish. And a lot better than quite a few native English-speaking slashdotters. Here's the above comment translated into a form of English that doesn't take a literate person as long to parse as it does an aliterate:
I think the Issue with mobile phones is that the new coding standards mean less fuss about hardware-level coding. The Intel PC had came from a long legacy where a lot of programs were written using a fair amount of custom Assembly coding, mostly due to the fact that we didn't have a robust library set.
These legacy systems had passed from one generation to the next, keeping software locked on platforms. When mobile devices got popular, they put more effort into more platform-independent coding. Using systems that rely more on pre-made libraries and almost no Low Level coding allowed applications and even large parts of the OS to be ported from one Platform to the next with very little work.
Perhaps a bigger reason for using Assembly back then is that processors were 4000 times slower, or even worse, and drive space and memory were at a premium. In the 1980s most PCs had no more than 20 megs of drive space, and megagytes of memory were only seen on mainframes and minis.
I do. The easiest way to install it is from a CD or a DVD. I keep a collection of older distros in case somebody has an old Windows machine with the OS so corrupt that there's no fixing it without a reinstall and they don't have their Windows disks.
Simply saying "it's because you're fat!" is an oversimplification. Even very healthy people get heart disease. That said, obesity itself is a medical problem; if losing weight was easy, everyone would be skinny.
Indeed, your genetic makeup is as important as lifestyle, maybe even moreso. I've been thin all my life except when I was on Paxil and gained 40 pounds. When I got off the Paxil it just came off, not only did I never diet, it was an effort to keep some of the weight I'd gained on.
A friend of mine was a construction worker, so he got plenty of excersize and was by no means overweight. Yet he died three years ago at age 42 from a sudden heart attack. Niether my lack of obesity or his heart attack were from lifestyle.
If your grandparents all died of heart disease before age 60, you're not likely to live to be 70 no matter how healthy your lifestyle.
It's Microsoft, why would you expect anything else? MS OSes always look like they're geared to small children. Maybe that's deliberate, hook 'em early and keep 'em away from those nasty nasty Linuxes and Appleses.
The use of peer to peer file sharing, an excellent method of getting your music to people's ears that independant artists have used for over a decade. The RIAA is only against file sharing because they have radio. The fight against "piracy" is really a fight against their independant competetion.
They (and their criminal co-conspirators in the MPAA) also stifled artistic innovation by bribing Congress into passing he Bono act. Art is like science and engineering, in that every new innovation is built on what has come before. Imagine how technological innovation would stagnate if patents lasted as long as copyrights?
My cybernetic implant is already powered by glucose. It's an artificial lens on struts that was implanted in my left eye to replace the natural lens, and the muscles that focused the natural lens (before I got middle aged) focus the implant (I'm 60 and need no corrective lenses, not even reading glasses). Since muscles are powered by food, part of what powers the lens is glucose.
It seems like they could design any number of electronic implants to be powered by the body's natural movement. Maybe a pacemaker powered by the heartbeat? A cochlear implant powered by chewing? They used to have wristwaches that were powered by the movement of the wearer's arms; they called them "self-winding watches". Seems the same principle could be used for electronic implants.
Indeed. He said it had to be small and light, I'd say get a stock Acer Aspire One for about $250 at WalMart and slap just about any flavor of Linux on it you want. When the kids break it, just buy another one; I've had three of them stolen, and in each case I was damned glad they weren't MacBooks. I'd have been REALLY pissed if they weren't so cheap.
Most distros of Linux (at least the ones I've tried/used) are dirt-simple to install, nothing like the PITA W98 and XP were.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean for the love of Christ they call me an "MS Ninja" for DARING to point out you can't sell Linux to consumers in its current state when what do we see right here on this very forum? That unless the hardware OEMs constantly release new drivers, even for old hardware that isn't even fricking being sold anymore, that the software WILL NOT WORK with current kernels.
I see these complaints all the time, but in ten years of using various distros I've only had ONE problem with drivers, and that was over 5 years ago (maybe closer to ten). I got a new video card with an S-Video output so I could use the TV as a monitor, and although it worked with a real monitor, it was only garbage on the TV screen under both Suse and Mandriva (there wasn't any Ubuntu then), but it worked fine under Windows. That card is now happily humming right along on kubuntu 10, so someone has obviously fixed that problem.
OTOH I've had many driver problems with Windows. When I first upgraded from 98 to XP, the first thing Windows did was to replace the perfectly good network driver with one that didn't work at all. I have another box, a real old one I'm fixing for a friend that had XP with a nastily corrupted registry on it. I FDISKed and formatted the drive, reinstalled Windows, but the Dell driver disk seems to contain no drivers. Of course, no NIC drivers and Windows stupidly asks me if I want to look for them on the internet... ON A MACHINE WITHOUT A NIC DRIVER! I just hope the ones I DLed from Dell last night on a different machine work, because the latest version of Linux I can get to run on the old underpowered thing is Mandriva 2005.
You want Linux boxes in your shop? Easy enough to do, just install it alongside the already installed Windows. Of course, you'll lose money on support, because Linux doesn't get bogged down like Windows does, and people don't bother writing malware for it.
there should be no damned reason why my customer should have to update his GPU driver just to run the latest XBMC or any other software for that matter
Hmmm, I've been thinking of trying XMBC out, I'll have to get back to you on that. But I've never seen an app update break any drivers (although like I said, the newest Flash won't work without a gig of memory).
If that's the case, then you probably heard about UEFI secure boot? You know, that thing where everything, including the kernel AND the kernel drivers will have to be signed?
I swear, kids should learn history, because they keep coming back with the same old bad shit over and over again until a clueless generation accepts it. Back in the late '80s there was a boycott against copy protection, and companies dropped it -- for a decade or so, when it was reborn as DRM, and you kids pretty much accepted it.
Ten years ago they had Palladium and we users squashed it like a bug. Now MS is trying to do the same goddamned thing all over, and you kids aren't complaining nearly loud enough.
Wake up, you're being oppressed. Fight back.
My eye implant is powered by the eye's muscles. Most cybernetic implants are non-electronic and likewise are powered by the cyborg's human musclature. There are probably a lot more artificial joints than there are pacemakers and cochlear implants.
He's just jealous that he isn't a cyborg.
Counter hacking doesn't seem like a good idea, because they, being criminals, are somewhat less hindered by morals and laws than you are
Some criminals steal with a gun, others steal with a pen. If you think MNCs give two shits about the law or morality (Sony's XCP for example) or revenge, you're awfully naive. Hell, a better example than XCP is this. Note that Sony was never charged with a crime, and nobody from the mining company was charged with negligent homicide (as they should have been IMO). As much as I hate Sony for rooting my computer, I hate Purina more -- they killed my grandfather. Nobody went to jail for his death, either.
Corporations have no morals and no fear of the law. They are all sociopathic and some are simply parasites on society.
That makes no sense whatever, and sounds like a really fucking BAD, lying excuse for Nvidea's hostility to Linux. If a thing is patented, its design and workings are open knowledge. Unless, of course, you're telling us it has to keep its shit secret because it knows it's willingly violating other companies' patents? Either way, it's evil.
TFA talks of the Uncanny Valley and little about actual gene sequencing, I didn't read much past the Valley graph; nothing I didn't already know. What did interest me was the two chatbots conversing; it looks like bots haven't improved much since 1983 when I wrote Artificial Insanity on a fantastically underpowered computer. I posted this on my old Quake site ten years ago:
Alice joined the game .exe it takes about 400k- still tiny by today's standards, as far as simulation software and games go.
About 20 years ago, frustrated that otherwise serious researchers and scientests seemingly thought they could program a computer to think, (without, of course, understanding what "thought" actually is; nobody knows that) I wrote a simulation that appears to think, in order to completely debunk the fools and those fooling them who think computers can think.
I wrote Artificial Insanity in less than 20K (that's Kilo, not mega) bytes- smaller than modern viruses, that ran on the Timex TS-1000 tape driven computer. I later ported it to a Radio Shack computer, then an Apple IIe, and finally ported it to MS-DOS.
The DOS version's source code is still under 20k (I didn't change the algorythm, only the syntax for the different programming language) although compiled into an
As I mentioned, I did it in response to "Elijah" and all the other similar programs that attempt to fool you into thinking they can think. As far as I know, mine is the only one that is NOT claimed to actually posess intelligence. None really ARE intelligent, I'm just the only one not making the claim. Debunking the claim was my reason for writing it. I go into more detail about it at the Artificial Insanity page.
Another thing different about Art from all the other intelligence simulations is that I wanted it to be fun, yet annoying. Kind of like playing Quake on a 28.8 against a bunch of LPBs. So I made it a smartass.
Also, for example, I added little things like a routine that occasionally runs that, instead of answering the questioner, asks if he or she wants to play a game. Of course, most folks consider Art a game any way (although like the Sims, you can't win or lose). Any negative response to "Do you want to play a game" loops back to "Do you want to play a game?" When the hapless player finally gives up and answers "yes" in exasperation, Art answers "you lose".
Art cost a friend of mine a keyboard. A friend of his literally destroyed it playing with Art, typing as hard as he could.
I ran across yet another program that claims to think like a human the other day.
The "Alice Bot" is basically your typical Elijah like program- BORING. As boring as small talk with the dumbest, most boring person you know. Alice is a lady. If she was a whore she might be fun, but I digress.
I wondered what would happen if Art had a conversation with Alice. Alice has a web based presence, so I didn't even have to install it.
I was expecting Alice to choke. I expected Art to kick Alice's ass.
I fired up Art and logged in to Alice (you dirty minded...)
Here is the transcript. Art's responses are in blue, alice's are in red. [Note: no color here, so Art is bold and Alice is italic.] Alice starts: "What is your name?"
I should have asked Art, but I answered this first question for him, and type in
Art
Alice replies:
I like art very much too, especially the contemporary stuff.
Are you for real?
Yes I am real AI
whatever gave you that idea?
My brain uses AIML to format responses to your inputs, but I don't have one for that.
Look, I'm good, but I'm not a Cray
And people still buy Sony products... poor fools. When will they learn?
This guy is a complete moron. First, it's called the CLI, not the CIL
What teh hell might cause such moronity, I wonder?
woosh...
For fuck's sake, Sheldon, the T and F are right next to each other. He's probably at work and forced to use IE 6 or 7, which don't have spell checkers.
Frag somebody for spelling "lose" with two "O"s, changing the meaning of the sentence, and you have a point. Otherwise the only point is on your head.
Shouldn't you be out campaigning, Mitt?
Bill Gates, the inventor of punk rock
HUH????
What is so offensive about repurposing hardware? What is so offensive about writing quick and dirty single-use code? What is so offensive about pen testing your own network?
Son, if you think hackers are offensive, you're on the wrong site, and so is the idiot who modded you "insightful." Not knowing there are white, gray, and black hat hackers shows a complete and utter lack of insight.
Goddamnit, I wish you people would learn to read and write. I completely misunderstood your comment until I realized you were talking about an engine failure rather than dropping the first stage. "Lose" and "loose" are both verbs with completely different meanings, and in the case of your comment the repeated misspelling completely changed the meaning of what you wrote.
Considering the "bonobo's" twice in his comment, my guess is either a) he's not a native speaker, so he may not have made it up, and is either accurate or he may have mis-written it and changed the meaning completely from what he meant to write, or b) He's a fucking high school dropout and the last book he ever read was Cat In The Hat and nothing he says should be given any credibility whatever.
To paraphrase Twain, the aliterate has no advantage over the illiterate. If you sound like an ignorant dufus, there's a good chance you are an ignorant dufus. You should always be skeptical of anybody who doesn't know the difference between lose and loose, there their and they're, and when, when not, and why an apostrophe should be used. Anyone who has read more than a handful of books doesn't make those retarded mistakes.
I have to agree with the GP, whose post I didn't see because it was modded to oblivion. One expects "I'd imagine your right" to preface something about your right to do or not do something, and when it's followed by "but I'm not a biologist" there's a bit of brain lag that sets in; "I'd imagine your right butt, I'm not a biologist."
It's only clear communication if you have to move your lips when you read. To those of us who are literate, it slows reading speed and takes away comprehension. it's annoying and we wish you aliterates would read a few books now and then. As Twain said, someone who doesn't read has no advantage over someone who can't read.
I'm pretty sure jellomiser isn't a native speaker, and he did a lot better than I would have written it writing in Spanish. And a lot better than quite a few native English-speaking slashdotters. Here's the above comment translated into a form of English that doesn't take a literate person as long to parse as it does an aliterate:
Perhaps a bigger reason for using Assembly back then is that processors were 4000 times slower, or even worse, and drive space and memory were at a premium. In the 1980s most PCs had no more than 20 megs of drive space, and megagytes of memory were only seen on mainframes and minis.
Who keeps Linux on a shelf?
I do. The easiest way to install it is from a CD or a DVD. I keep a collection of older distros in case somebody has an old Windows machine with the OS so corrupt that there's no fixing it without a reinstall and they don't have their Windows disks.
Elon Musk... wasn't he the scientist that raised Odo? It sure sounds like a Star Trek name, far more than a Bond villian name.
Simply saying "it's because you're fat!" is an oversimplification. Even very healthy people get heart disease. That said, obesity itself is a medical problem; if losing weight was easy, everyone would be skinny.
Indeed, your genetic makeup is as important as lifestyle, maybe even moreso. I've been thin all my life except when I was on Paxil and gained 40 pounds. When I got off the Paxil it just came off, not only did I never diet, it was an effort to keep some of the weight I'd gained on.
A friend of mine was a construction worker, so he got plenty of excersize and was by no means overweight. Yet he died three years ago at age 42 from a sudden heart attack. Niether my lack of obesity or his heart attack were from lifestyle.
If your grandparents all died of heart disease before age 60, you're not likely to live to be 70 no matter how healthy your lifestyle.
It's like a kindergardener's art project!
It's Microsoft, why would you expect anything else? MS OSes always look like they're geared to small children. Maybe that's deliberate, hook 'em early and keep 'em away from those nasty nasty Linuxes and Appleses.
What massive innovation has the RIAA stifled?
The use of peer to peer file sharing, an excellent method of getting your music to people's ears that independant artists have used for over a decade. The RIAA is only against file sharing because they have radio. The fight against "piracy" is really a fight against their independant competetion.
They (and their criminal co-conspirators in the MPAA) also stifled artistic innovation by bribing Congress into passing he Bono act. Art is like science and engineering, in that every new innovation is built on what has come before. Imagine how technological innovation would stagnate if patents lasted as long as copyrights?
My cybernetic implant is already powered by glucose. It's an artificial lens on struts that was implanted in my left eye to replace the natural lens, and the muscles that focused the natural lens (before I got middle aged) focus the implant (I'm 60 and need no corrective lenses, not even reading glasses). Since muscles are powered by food, part of what powers the lens is glucose.
It seems like they could design any number of electronic implants to be powered by the body's natural movement. Maybe a pacemaker powered by the heartbeat? A cochlear implant powered by chewing? They used to have wristwaches that were powered by the movement of the wearer's arms; they called them "self-winding watches". Seems the same principle could be used for electronic implants.
Indeed. He said it had to be small and light, I'd say get a stock Acer Aspire One for about $250 at WalMart and slap just about any flavor of Linux on it you want. When the kids break it, just buy another one; I've had three of them stolen, and in each case I was damned glad they weren't MacBooks. I'd have been REALLY pissed if they weren't so cheap.
Most distros of Linux (at least the ones I've tried/used) are dirt-simple to install, nothing like the PITA W98 and XP were.