"I don't think it's completely irrelevant. If there is a huge number of minke whales then they are competing with the "actually endangered" species and thinning them out a little might actually help the other endangered whale species."
No, that's really not how things work, if it were the case that Minke whales were a limiting factor on blue whale growth, then Minke whales would always have had a higher population, and Blues always a lower population (in our recorded history at least), Blues previously had a higher population because they were fit enough in their environment to achieve that in place of Minke whales, therefore Minke whales wont be inhibiting growth of species like Blues because Blues are already more fit (just not fit enough to survive decimation by human hunting!). The growth of the Blue whale populations et. al. will therefore naturally displace the populations of Minke whales, it doesn't need any help on our behalf to achieve that. The fact that Blue whale populations were once much higher is evidence in itself that Blues can sufficiently outcompete other species where there is a need for competition to grow their population without our help - these are after all creatures where evolution occurs relatively slowly due to very long life spans so it's pretty safe to believe bar human hunting, Blues are as fit now as they were a few hundred years ago, as only a couple of generations have passed anyway.
In fact, I'm not convinced man can ever manage species better than nature can, certainly there seems to be no real evidence of it ever working without serious knock on effect in practice, bar the elimination of invasive species which has mixed results (Hello Cane Toad), and ironically is typically the result of failed methods of man intervening to control in the first place. In Scotland there is a similar argument, that the deer population is over populated such that many deer are starving to death and should be put out of their misery, but the fact is that Scotland's predator population of both land based predators and raptors is severely depleted, and even a starving deer has converted enough plant material into meat to help grow those populations. We have farmers who like to tell us they're doing a favour by fox hunting because it's population control and yet they're the first to complain when their crops subsequently get blighted by rabbit population explosions.
This is where I agree with your point about Japan's dishonesty, because I think it's part of a bigger pattern of dishonesty anyway in the world of species control. To pretend it's okay if we kill a few because we're "helping" nature is folly, and ironically I have a problem with that argument for the same reason you have a problem with the Japanese argument, it's not grounded in honesty. When people like Eva Shockey claim they're doing conservation whilst not even having a basic grasp of what conservation is and requires what they're actually saying is "I like killing shit, I'm uncomfortable with the fact I enjoy that, so I'm going to pretend I'm actually doing good in the world to justify it to myself." - great, but no one with any capability for rational thought is buying it, and we'd have a lot more respect if such people were just honest and said "Look, I know it's selfish but I just like taking the lives of living things, and fresh meat is tasty". Much as if the Japanese were honest and said "Look, we know we're flagrantly violating international law, but we want to show we're a strong enough nation to stand up to the rest of the world, so fuck you we're making this political." you could at least credit them for being honest, and standing by something for the reasons they state - it would at least show they believe in their viewpoint enough to not have to make up a lie for doing it. I don't really have a problem with sustainable hunting, but I do have a problem with people who claim they're somehow doing anyone other than themselves a favour - nature doesn't need favours, it's managed the last 13.7bn years just fine by i
A large part of the reason Minke whales have such a large population are because they've had to fill the void left by the decimation of other species of whale - whale help to fertilise the oceans by spreading nutrients around, which in turn help grow fish stocks by making sure ample food is present.
Should the population of large whales increase, the population of Minke whales will decrease to a point of equilibrium determined by survival of the fittest. The problem is that populations of whales typically take decades to return to their natural levels of balance, thus it'll take a long time before blue whales and so forth can reach a population size at which they would naturally be expected to achieve.
So species such as Minke whales are able to fill the void the missing blue whales otherwise would, thus it's irrelevant that there are lots of them - you need a certain level of whale biomass to prevent problematic algae build up, and to help keep fish stocks healthy amongst other things. Hence, just because Minke whales are well populated doesn't make it okay to hunt them, it just means that as yet unrecovered populations of other previously over-hunted whale species will be coupled with reduced Minke populations and in turn will mean we end up with a level of whale biomass too small to perform it's task in the ecosystem to a suitable degree. This in turns leads to environmental problems and reduction of fish stocks.
The IUCN simply ranks species based on how at threat they are from extinction - this isn't simply a question of population, for example, some plant species have healthy population numbers in the hundreds of thousands, but only grow on rocky outcrops that are tagged for potential mining - in that case the population numbers are good, but the threat of extinction is still high. What the IUCN does not do is take into account the impact of hunting a species, thus it's not true that a least concern ranking on the IUCN list correlates with "Okay to hunt". It's possible for something to be near extinct, but fine to hunt to extinction because it has little relevance to it's ecosystem, just as it's for something to be least concern, but still a bad idea to hunt as in this case. Suggesting that because something is ranked as least concern that it must be okay to hunt is a completely invalid way to interpret IUCN rankings because that's not what they measure - it's a measure of population health and NOT a measure of population value within the ecosystem.
There has been a particular focus on whales over the years for precisely the fact that they have a high ecosystem value, more recently the same is beginning to be realised for sharks also having long been characterised as evil pointless predators. Contrary to what the Japanese, Icelanders and so forth will tell you, the IWC itself, and the ICJs rulings are as they are not because of emotion, but because they're important to help make sure we can maintain healthy oceans. This something we're already struggling to do as is with over-fishing in general, much more so if we end up with even greater reduced fish stocks due to ecosystem problems due to whale over-hunting.
Because whaling boats can move faster than whales, and whales still have to surface for air at some point, so the whaling ships just chase them until they're near dead from exhaustion, which is something they do regularly anyway.
So out of interest, what makes subs so hard to defend against?
I remember my grandfather telling me even in World War II they had nets that used to be attached on struts underneath the ships at a distance and these nets used to catch/detonate underwater mines and torpedoes away from the ship to try and prevent catastrophic damage from the ship. I guess it was a kind of sea-borne equivalent of slat armour we typically see on many modern armoured vehicles.
Is there some reason such a technology can't be created in a manner that it can be deployed when needed and retracted when not? Is it really not possible to create some kind of strong netting that's deployed out from a ship on struts strong enough to prevent a torpedo from pushing through and detonating right against the hull?
I guess the biggest problem may be the weight of such a system as it'd have quite a lot of area to cover?
My perspective on the cost of things has been broken ever since the UK announcement of HS2's £50bn price tag. It's a new "high speed" rail line from London to Birmingham and Leeds that's going to cost £50bn ($75bn US) and doesn't even use maglev tech so isn't even remotely cutting edge (it also pulls up outside of city centres meaning any time gained by moving faster is lost getting to where you actually want to be - the city centres making the whole scheme pointless). For the price of a 200 mile railway line and some new trains we could apparently buy 17 of these ships.
Even our entirely nuclear deterrent renewal including new ICBMs, new submarine design and production and so on is only going to cost half of what HS2 will. Our entire war in Afghanistan that lasted about 13 years and required 10s of thousands of helicopter and plane flights, millions of bullets, bombs and mortar shells expended, reconstruction of dams, the building of a military base the size of the city of Reading, and the feeding of thousands of troops for that whole time only came to £36bn.
I'm working on the assumption that HS2 is a massive transfer of billions in public money into private hands, a large scale theft from the state by vested interests, because otherwise, what's $4.4bn for a cutting edge ship? It's nothing at the end of the day, if a government can blow $75bn on a pointless boondoggle, then what's $4.4bn on something that may actually be at least sometimes useful?
Yes all of them and the Japanese even admit that but claim it's a byproduct of the research. This is why their hunt is illegal because international courts ruled that there is no scientific merit to their programme that requires killing of the whales and yet all the meat ends up being sold for profit.
This is an illegal commercial hunt and the courts have determined it as such. Pretending there is any actual science here is nothing more than a well destroyed lie at this point.
Japan has created itself a real problem now, because it expects countries like China to respect international law over it's territorial disputes with China, whilst defying international law in the southern oceans to carry out illegal commercial hunts. At this point Japan cannot rationally complain if China does further tighten it's stance on disputed territory because it can't on one hand pretend international law governing the seas only applies to everyone else. It could just pull out of the IWC of course like Norway, but again they want to pretend they're good players in international diplomacy land and sign up to laws so that they can try and hold others to them when it suits. Essentially Japan wants it cake, and wants to eat it too.
The fact is, how much a country will listen to you when you cry international law, will depend on how many you sign up to and how well you adhere to it yourself. Japan basically now has no credibility on this front and cannot really complain when countries like China ignore it's cries. If Chinese boats fish in waters Japan claims then it's frankly tough shit, not a leg to stand on.
"Unlike rice or apple or onion, banana plants do not 'sexually reproduce'
Banana plants produce its 'offspring' by the root, very much like bamboo"
No, this isn't true. All such plants sexually (or asexually) reproduce as it's the method by which they obtain genetic diversity, were that not the case they'd have been wiped out long ago in this very manner.
The problem is that we've taken defective members of the species that have suffered mutations by which they do not produce seed and have taken clones of those individuals. Those offspring you talk of grown from the root are not offspring, they're just lumps of the same plant with the exact same genetic identity, but that can be chopped off and rooted down as clones.
There's nothing inherently special about the banana, we could do the same with Apples and other fruits - create seedless varieties that are just clones, and then we'd have the same problem. The fact that the banana is a key example of a species which we've merely grown from clones of one single genetic source is the real problem.
This is the key problem (IMO) with GM - we're talking about in many cases repeating the mistakes we have with the banana. Imagine this exact same problem with ALL crops and that's the problem that we're being pushed towards with monoculture where we grow supposed "superior" strains, superior until they're not, because they get wiped out due to lack of genetic diversity. We then get to pay companies for new strains - effectively we're paying companies to do evolution for us, but less competently than nature itself can.
A better solution would've been to invest in creating better banana hybrids that do produce just a few seeds - not enough to make the fruit annoying to eat, but enough to create a strain of banana plant that both tastes good and has genetic diversity, exactly as we've done with the Apple, the potato, and so on and so forth (as the GP pointed out, in that case in part as a response to the Irish potato famine - we now have potato species that could've survived that particular blight). Contrary to what you say it's as easy to engineer new banana plants as it is Apples and so forth (that's precisely why we have had different species of Banana after others have wiped out - where else would they come from?), it's just no one's bothered to put more effort into it because the industry is stuck in it's ways with the Cavendish et. al. and then they wonder why shit like this happens.
Or why in contrast blue whales live 80 - 90 years.
Obviously it's not just about size if your average hamster is gone in what, 8 years? I don't know how long they live but a blue whale can live to 90.
I don't even think the metabolism argument holds true universally, I don't think the "wearing out" argument in general is true. I think that some species simply have better regenerative capabilities than others. How long a species lives is driven more by that species' place in the ecosystem and what age span benefits the species more than anything. You need new members of a species to be produced to allow evolution to occur and to ensure genetic diversity to protect against things like disease. That explains why Blue Whales can live so long, because they're so big that they don't face many evolving threats, and so don't themselves need to breed and hence evolve with such frequency as something small like a mouse living in a highly competitive forest environment where there are lots of predators that also co-evolve to constantly adapt their hunting strategies.
Of course that only gives us the answer to what determines life span and why a species has the life span it does, but it doesn't given us the mechanism that limits that life span. I'd wager there is no one single mechanism but a combination of factors that all need to be in sync for maximum lifespan - durable organs, good regenerative capabilities and so on. There's no point having a heart and organs that could take you to 200, if your teeth and jaw joints are so far gone that you can't eat and die far earlier anyway for example. Joints wear, so even if your organs are sorted you need to be able to regenerate those joints and such somehow also.
We could produce dogs that live much longer already by selecting for those that live longer, but instead we keep breeding breeds with defects for looks, or breeds like Alsatians that don't live that long because they're incredibly versatile as anything from guide dogs, to bomb disposal dogs, to assault dogs, to police dogs, to making good pets. We select for utility and looks rather than age with dogs right now.
The article talks about Classic ASP, which shouldn't be conflated with ASP.NET. ASP most definitely is basically extinct, no one is using it for new projects and it's barely even being used for legacy stuff. The fact they even found anything worth testing is a miracle in itself and it's not surprising it's vulnerable as any code base using it likely pre-dates many now commonly known security vulnerabilities. The same is true of Coldfusion, the same is however not true of PHP which is still being used to actively develop new projects and maintain existing ones on a widespread basis.
Neither Coldfusion nor Classic ASP are in the top 3 languages for kludging together new functionality - languages like Ruby, Python, C#, Java, and probably even Perl undoubtedly have far larger userbases nowadays. This is why the summary used the language it did - maybe extinct is technically wrong if code still exists for it, but "almost extinct" would be perfectly adequate.
"You have to split your limited assets and make sure you meet the minimum requirements of two institutions."
Those requirements are hardly difficult to achieve though. The government has an agreement with banks such that even homeless people can get basic bank accounts (with no frills things like overdrafts excluded) - this was to allow the government to pay welfare digitally rather than have to maintain a process of having to provide, manage, and secure, cash handouts.
Basically anyone in the UK should be able to open two bank accounts one way or another in this day and age even if it means you have to have a special account because you have a history of financial fraud, or defaults against you.
"What's wrong with cash? Or is that too independent / liberty-y for the brits? Using two banks just doubles your risks of card / account / user/pass getting stolen."
You wont get interest paid on cash held, so it'll lose value over time compared to that held in a savings account.
In the UK, having your banking details stolen is not too big a deal. Unless the bank can prove you were seriously negligent (which they basically have never been able to do unless you really did something stupid like posted your plain text payment details to an online forum) then they're liable to cover your losses.
The principle here is that the very job of banks is to keep your money safe - that was there core, founding reason for existence, and as such that is their job. Therefore, if money gets stolen from you because say, your card details were stolen from an online shopping site, then that's not your fault, because the bank issued you the card as a payment method, thus the bank is responsible for the security of that payment method (again, bar you being completely and almost wilfully negligent). The bank may pursue the retailer in court for compensation of course if the retailer had shit security, but you'll never see any of that as a consumer - you'll typically get your money back and a new card within weeks and will often be given an interest free overdraft in the meantime to make sure you can still pay your bills etc. until they return your money to your account.
Actually it's unlikely this will net the banks any additional profit and will in fact lower profits per-bank. If you stay in credit in the UK then they simply skim the interest paid by the central bank on your proportion of their holdings and pay themselves with that.
Say for example you had £100 in your account for a year, and central bank interest rates were 3% then they'll just take that £3 as payment. I believe the average rolling holdings in a UK current account is something like £1500 and interest rates have been 0.5% for a long time, so they're netting about £7.50 a year per account right now.
Of course that's not the only way they make money, they can also use your money as capital for investments too and make profits that way, similarly they can convince you to pay for extra services (like travel insurance), tempt you with a credit card and charge you interest on use of that, or simply hope that you go into the negative on your current account and pay penalty fees as a result.
Given that here people wont have more money, nor will they pay more money, but will simply spread the same money across multiple accounts there's no really benefit for the individual bank, only for the sector as a whole in that people's finances will inevitably become more evenly spread if shared between banks - the wealthier banks will lose out, and the poorer banks will do better from encouraging this policy. This guy works for The Bank of England, which is pretty much our equivalent of the Federal Reserve - so there may be some policy benefit for them in this policy, in that making people hedge their money across banks and hence balance money stored across banks more evenly will help stabilise the banking system as a whole. It means well capitalised banks will see some money moved to less capitalised banks allowing those less capitalised banks to be better capitalised and hence less likely to ever need a bailout in future.
Hence, whilst more of this sort of hedging wont help any individual bank, it will help protect the tax payer and make the Bank of England and the government's job a lot easier.
"I have had two applications refused in the last year because the version of my address in the database that the bank uses to auto-complete my address when I type it into the application form is different from the version it then looks up in the electoral roll."
This seems odd, addresses are broken down into discrete fields in UK credit reference data so unless the bank is doing something really odd then it sounds more like one of these databases (the credit data, or the ER data) has a completely different address, which is more likely if the problem has spanned multiple banks for you.
I would suggest getting a copy of your credit report (you can get much of this for free online nowadays - Google for Noddle) and check that credit data held about you is correct. Don't be misled by the term credit either - it's not just for loans and credit cards, this data is typically even used for current and savings accounts nowadays due to the fact they often offer things like overdraft products. If there's something wrong here either contact the source of the data, or contact the relevant credit reference agency and they have a legal obligation to sort it.
You shouldn't really be having problems opening a UK account if you're a UK resident and if you are that does point to either a bad financial history or some invalid data on you that needs correcting somewhere.
I'd certainly be keen to see some evidence that a substantial amount of AI researchers back that view and make such claims. I'd also be intrigued to see it compared against other fields to see if AI researchers make such claims with greater frequency than researchers make far fetched claims in other fields. According to a post yesterday ageing will be cured in 5 years, and god knows how many times I've heard Fusion is just around the corner. I've also heard both these sorts of things many times before too, but see little reason to condemn the fields of biology and physics in their entirety because of a few rogue over-excited scientists.
All fields have the odd outlier that make over-ambitious claims, and the media always pick up on those claims and parrot them without getting the views of others in the field. AI would not appear to be exceptional or an outlier in this respect as far as I can see.
Once again Slashdot's resident PC Repair Man oversteps his level of knowledge, makes a fool of himself, and throws a hissy shit fit.
Please just stop, it's embarassing. PC repair man is right at the bottom of the ladder, know your place and accept it when your betters explain why you're wrong.
Maybe one day you'll go from PC repair man (which is basically something even absolute amateurs typically do for themselves nowadays) to professional support guy, to system administrator, to network engineer, to architect or go a different route like development or EE and you'll have something useful to contribute, but until then you're still just PC repair man and that will still always be bottom of the ladder - which isn't a problem, if you accept that, but you pretend you're some kind of elite hardware engineer and developer all in one whilst still being PC repair man.
We'll come to you when we want to know which graphics cards are selling best for you, but when we want to know about how software is written, about network security, or about console design decisions, then give please, just give up, you're not even remotely qualified for those types of discussion so stop pretending you are.
I'm not worth wasting your time, and yet here you are again wasting your time being wrong and crying at me. Okay then.
You're grossly overstating the case that was put forward as to how rapidly AI would advance, the fact is following the Dartmouth Conference there were decades of debate as to whether strong AI would ever even be possible at all (See for example Searle's Chinese Room argument). The very fact such debate occurred means there was clearly a spectrum of thought on the topic, and yet entertainment media chose only to cover one extreme end of the debate.
I don't even blame the media in many ways, in some ways it's great that it's been perceived to be an exciting enough topic to make any entertainment media on at all, and much like Star Trek that has undoubtedly got people interest in the relevant sciences, but the issue is that when it is one sided like this, it does create unrealistic expectations. The problem isn't that they make films like Terminator, the problem is that it's Terminator or nothing, there's no middle of the road films that cover much more plausible AI catastrophe scenarios such as a battle of AI optimisation algorithms bringing the world economy down, a near future automated drone self-targeting when it shouldn't creating a geopolitical shit storm and so on and so forth.
You'd have had a point if your fundamental premise wasn't completely wrong, if it weren't for the fact that there clearly was a wide spectrum of opinion and there were opinions ranging from strong AI in 10 years, all the way to strong AI never. The fact you've picked the former and tried to imply it's the only case though kind of proves my point - people only see that side, and have an incredibly naive and ignorant view of both the history of AI, and what it does and can achieve and in what time frame, that is in large part fed by the over-ambitious view of AI fed by the media - even if you had been correct then that still doesn't explain why the last 20 years has still seen that early over-ambitious view pushed since it's turned out to be wrong. You can't simply absolve the media of blame in painting an unrealistic one sided picture. The fact is the media like that picture because it's the most exciting, but it's also wrong and misleading.
But how exactly do you get to that "Pure AI" of yours? It's like saying we shouldn't be misled by physics, Newton shouldn't have come up with those broken laws, he should've gone straight to that grand unified theory or it's just not physics!
You're really proving my point - people like yourself believe AI has failed because it's not magic, because we haven't jumped straight from the start of the topic to the end goal.
I'm not really sure it's academia's fault, but more that the entertainment industry got a bit carried away with stories about future AI, and now people think that if it doesn't look like that, then it's not AI, all the while missing the massive advances in computing that AI research has netted them from facial recognition, to self repairing networks, from spell/grammar check to siri, and from Google search results from increasingly natural language type queries through to computer run video game opponents.
Effectively saying AI has failed is like saying Physics has failed because we don't yet have an all encompassing grand unified theory of the universe. These things are the long term goal, and we're not even remotely far along the journey towards that goal, so to criticise because we're not there yet is exactly like being the screaming kid in the back of the parents car shouting "ARE WE THERE YET?".
Not that it matters, because AI research is bearing commercial fruit anyway so it doesn't really matter what the public thinks of it, money will keep being poured into it regardless. AI is fortunate that it's a self-sustaining area of scientific research, it doesn't need good PR with the public when it's churning out cash for corporations. In that respect it has it much easier than many areas of science do, such as space exploration for example that is still somewhat struggling to get necessary funding for it's goals so perhaps it's as much that the AI research industry doesn't care what the public thinks as it is that it's failing to sell itself well in the court of the public opinion. The public are consuming it's results and paying money for the privilege regardless of the opinion they hold of the field - how many iPhones 6s were sold over the competition thanks in part to things like gesture recognition, learning autocomplete on the keyboard, and Siri? how many ads are to be sold on Google? and how many BB-8s are ending up under the tree this Christmas?
Some years back, Panorama, perhaps the worst TV show the BBC has ever insisted on continuing to make did one of it's drivel episodes as it does on exactly this topic.
As is usual for Panorama, it spread some crock of shit about how in Finland or wherever it was a real recognised issue and you could get help for it, so asked the question why that's not the case here? That would be great if it were actually true, because at the time Finland had actually said that it WASN'T a real thing and removed it from it's official list of recognised problems you can get state help for.
I was working in IT at the time, supporting schools, and Panorama suggested schools should consider shutting down their WiFi, so we spent the next few weeks firefighting requests about whether we needed to disable wifi at all 170 schools we supported from the head teachers. One such teacher even magically developed symptoms after hearing all about this and started taking lots of sick leave because of it, which I'm sure was fantastic for him until we quietly disabled wifi and confirmed no other wifi signals in the area for 3 days whilst he continued to complain of symptoms before the head informed him that there wasn't even any wifi for him to get sick from and eventually managed to fire him for the fact he'd been taking time off ill based on lies.
So it's possible the cause of this problem was this mother believing a lie filled episode of Panorama all those years ago. Given that I myself have seen Panorama's bullshit cause no end of real trouble, I wouldn't be surprised if it was also the cause of this mother believing such bullshit also had she been feeding her daughter the idea that she's had this since a young age (when the program must've been broadcast in what, 2006 or something?).
If this is the case, it would be nice to see the BBC finally reprimanded for showing such a non-factual lie filled episode that caused real actual damage to companies and individuals lives alike. Panorama is basically the BBC's answer to The Daily Mail and given that every time it's made an episode on something I do no about like is wifi safe, or is minecraft killing your children etc. and it's been clearly full of shit, I now simply assume that it's telling me a load of shit on topics I don't know anything about too.
"So asking about an OS architecture and its capabilities is trolling now? Well wtf is the point of asking questions here, lets all just wave our little flags like a bunch of fanbois, shall we?"
No, jumping to conclusions that a platform you prefer less must be more primitive is trolling, but you knew that.
"And how does it not have to do with the OS being primitive when it comes to multitasking when PCs have been able to do this for years and do so with ease?"
Okay I'm beginning to wonder if you're right and you're not trolling, and in fact, you really just don't understand operating systems, though I always thought based on past posts that you did.
Please explain how a single core handling voice chat, friends lists, streaming, recording, general OS duties, achievement services, background applications and so on is not multi-tasking before you continue. It's pretty clear the reserved core is doing a lot of multi-tasking alone.
"I get that for the majority of its life consoles have been single tasking systems but surely they could hire some OS developers to get them up to speed, yes? "
This statement would be less painfully stupid if it weren't for the fact that consoles like the Xbox typically use the same core Kernel as Windows or a slight modification of. They have OS developers, there's no need to get upto speed because unlike you they already know exactly what they're talking about and exactly what they're doing.
"Because dedicating an entire X86 APU to the UI, let alone two? I'm sorry but you can scream and whine all you want, that is wasteful and inefficient as hell which is why PCs,be they Apple,Linux, or Windows do not do this, in fact the last personal computers that did such a thing was IIRC the first edition of BeOS. "
So again, did you intentionally miss the point? are you really that dumb? It's pretty clear from my last post that I pointed out that they're doing an awful lot more than merely running the UI on those reserved cores.
"And it isn't flag waving to point out when an OS has capabilities another apparently does not"
No it's being a fanboy when you're being wilfully dumb and missing half the explanation because it cuts your pre-defined master race PC stance to pieces on this particular issue and you find being wrong uncomfortable.
Like I said, these OS are perfectly capable of multi-tasking and they do that perfectly fine. They just reserve cores to guarantee a minimum amount of processing will be available for all those common services that the console provides and performs so that those process can never be interrupted or disturbed by a game developer chewing up too many resources and making those core services fail. Users are going to be pissed if they have an epic moment in the game, record it, and realise half the video was skipped because an over zealous game developer left no resources for that recording because he could use all cores leaving none for that core functionality all because someone on Slashdot without the slightest clue in OS and console design said that's the way it should be.
So stop pretending it's about an inability to multi-task, obviously that's false based on the fact these console provide way more ongoing services than there are reserved cores. As has been explained to you, it's about guaranteeing that the OS will always have one core free for OS and common functionality. It's about guaranteed resource allocation and absolutely nothing more than that.
If you still have a problem with that you instead need to change your argument to why console users should have to accept that common background functionality should fail when a badly written game is running. Good luck with that though.
Christ, whilst it looks like you're trolling because you're one of Slashdot's premier PC master race guys and displaying a certain arrogance towards the guys who designed these consoles assuming they must just be less competent for only producing a primitive OS (when the reality is they're undoubtedly smart guys, making smart choices), I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and answer.
It's got nothing to do with one being more primitive than the other. On the contrary, because consoles can do away with all the legacy and general processing cruft that PCs have to be able to cater, coupled with the fact you're looking at dedicated hardware fulfilling a specific goal if anything the opposite is true - console OS are less primitive, because they don't have to cater to decades of previous software like Windows has to. It doesn't matter though because primitive is an entirely subjective term anyway. A lightweight cutting edge OS written yesterday might be primitive because it's lightweight and it lacks features, or it might be cutting edge because it was written yesterday.
The reason is simply that the two systems are different, neither is superior to the other, both have different purposes and goals and that inevitably results in different design decisions being made.
Consoles perform a lot of background services, and whilst talk of console cost-performance ratios inevitably involves some smartass pricing up some PC components that they claim are superior for the same price the reality is that they never are as they typically exclude everything in the box from the game controllers, through to the very bespoke hardware that achieves certain types of processing more efficiently than an equivalently priced PC ever good. The Xbox One for example constantly handles background processing of gesture recognition, voice recognition, multi-user voice chat, friends list, constant recording of games with the ability to save off the last 5 minutes of that record to disk, streaming of said video across the internet, as well as background apps including things like live TV display and so on. The reality is that you cannot build for £250 a PC that can do all that whilst still pulling off 1080p, 60fps or equivalent with other areas of high graphical fidelity.
Which isn't to say that you can't pay more and build a PC that does all that and then some - that's not my point, I'm not saying one is better than the other, merely making the point that there is nothing inherently deficient about console hardware for the price. It's good at what it does, it gives you the best gaming processing for that amount of money, but certainly if you have money to spare then yes, absolutely, a PC can do you all that and then more without a doubt.
So with that out the way, to answer why they reserved cores, the answer is that it's about user experience, yes, I know that's a wishy-washy term, but bare with me. On a PC you're in charge of the system, you're in control and that means you've both in control in terms of having flexibility of what you want to do, but also have to take responsibility when you fuck things up - if you decide to farm bitcoins whilst trying to play a game and either or end up crawling to a halt and being useless then that becomes your problem, you have to make a concious choice to do one or the other, or to restrict one or the other to do both. Consoles don't give you that choice nor are they meant to, they're meant to be easy to use and for you to not have to have any hassle with that, and as such the Xbox team has to make different design choices to the Windows team - whilst the Windows team gives you full control of your system, the Xbox team needs to make sure the system can always perform it's minimum baseline without fail and that anything the developers do or don't do doesn't break that.
And this is where it comes to a head, essentially if you fuck something up that impacts performance of a game or a background task on a PC then that's your problem, but if on a console a game stutter
"This is a poor assumption, there are plenty of web based only services out there that don't provide a service compelling enough to be able to use a pay model so they use advertising as a means of revenue. People are not going to take up a subscription of $9.99/mo, $4.99/mo, or even $19.99/yr for each service they use because there are just to many."
I agree, but what you're really highlighting here is the underlying problem - the market place is crowded and in a crowded market place profits will always be pushed towards zero with the least competitive going out of business and this is accelerated in a globalised world where Western companies entering such a market place are up against entrepeneurs in low salary 3rd world nations that have inherently lower costs. The problem is that these sites feel they have a right to make large profits, and that's the issue - these companies rather than recognising the reality they're operating in are instead trying to fruitlessly change that reality and yet all they're doing is alienating their users and accelerating their decline towards absolute failure.
So the choices are two fold, accept this isn't the great mythical dot com unicorn land where you get rich by just making a website and the reality is that you'll barely scrape a living and be happy with that because that's just the way it is, and that's what you have to live with, or figure out how to beat the competition and become a top tier site such that you can paywall, or can live with even 90% of your users blocking ads on your site.
You can't change the technology, and you can't change people so your only option is to accept reality and run with it or stay the fuck out of the business and find some other way to make money.
I have literally no idea what it's about, I only know that it's suddenly getting spammed to Slashdot like 10 times a week.
What is it? some American TV show I assume? Have literally never heard of it. Care to enlighten why it's special and what separates it from the billion other shows that exist?
"Wouldn't two more cores, or approximately 25% of the processor power of the system, be useful to gamers that want better gameplay?"
Yeah but it'd also mean no free resources to support things like a common interface for inviting friends to your game, or still chatting to friends playing different games and so forth.
It'd mean no resources to just hop out of the game to check a video on YouTube if you're stuck, or resources to record your gameplay and stream it without each and every game having to support these things themselves.
Fact is modern consoles have a baseline of functionality that is common between games - friends lists, chat, recording/streaming gameplay and so on and that needs dedicated resources.
All that's happened here is that they've realised they don't need quite as many resources as they originally thought they might to support this baseline functionality.
It benefits game developers and users too - developers don't have to implement this stuff themselves, and users don't have to put up with completely different implementations between every game they're in, so it's a good thing.
You obviously really really hate being wrong on the internet to shed that many tears over it.
Sucks to be you, I'd hate to spend my life as stressed and angry over life as you clearly are.
But then, you do live in a country where it's legal for companies to fuck you over in this sort of way so it's not surprising you assume you'll get fucked. Me? Nah, I ain't gonna get fucked, my country has sane laws, I'm protected whatever happens because corporations don't run my country like they do yours, but thanks for your concern.
Slashdot Mirror
"I don't think it's completely irrelevant. If there is a huge number of minke whales then they are competing with the "actually endangered" species and thinning them out a little might actually help the other endangered whale species."
No, that's really not how things work, if it were the case that Minke whales were a limiting factor on blue whale growth, then Minke whales would always have had a higher population, and Blues always a lower population (in our recorded history at least), Blues previously had a higher population because they were fit enough in their environment to achieve that in place of Minke whales, therefore Minke whales wont be inhibiting growth of species like Blues because Blues are already more fit (just not fit enough to survive decimation by human hunting!). The growth of the Blue whale populations et. al. will therefore naturally displace the populations of Minke whales, it doesn't need any help on our behalf to achieve that. The fact that Blue whale populations were once much higher is evidence in itself that Blues can sufficiently outcompete other species where there is a need for competition to grow their population without our help - these are after all creatures where evolution occurs relatively slowly due to very long life spans so it's pretty safe to believe bar human hunting, Blues are as fit now as they were a few hundred years ago, as only a couple of generations have passed anyway.
In fact, I'm not convinced man can ever manage species better than nature can, certainly there seems to be no real evidence of it ever working without serious knock on effect in practice, bar the elimination of invasive species which has mixed results (Hello Cane Toad), and ironically is typically the result of failed methods of man intervening to control in the first place. In Scotland there is a similar argument, that the deer population is over populated such that many deer are starving to death and should be put out of their misery, but the fact is that Scotland's predator population of both land based predators and raptors is severely depleted, and even a starving deer has converted enough plant material into meat to help grow those populations. We have farmers who like to tell us they're doing a favour by fox hunting because it's population control and yet they're the first to complain when their crops subsequently get blighted by rabbit population explosions.
This is where I agree with your point about Japan's dishonesty, because I think it's part of a bigger pattern of dishonesty anyway in the world of species control. To pretend it's okay if we kill a few because we're "helping" nature is folly, and ironically I have a problem with that argument for the same reason you have a problem with the Japanese argument, it's not grounded in honesty. When people like Eva Shockey claim they're doing conservation whilst not even having a basic grasp of what conservation is and requires what they're actually saying is "I like killing shit, I'm uncomfortable with the fact I enjoy that, so I'm going to pretend I'm actually doing good in the world to justify it to myself." - great, but no one with any capability for rational thought is buying it, and we'd have a lot more respect if such people were just honest and said "Look, I know it's selfish but I just like taking the lives of living things, and fresh meat is tasty". Much as if the Japanese were honest and said "Look, we know we're flagrantly violating international law, but we want to show we're a strong enough nation to stand up to the rest of the world, so fuck you we're making this political." you could at least credit them for being honest, and standing by something for the reasons they state - it would at least show they believe in their viewpoint enough to not have to make up a lie for doing it. I don't really have a problem with sustainable hunting, but I do have a problem with people who claim they're somehow doing anyone other than themselves a favour - nature doesn't need favours, it's managed the last 13.7bn years just fine by i
A large part of the reason Minke whales have such a large population are because they've had to fill the void left by the decimation of other species of whale - whale help to fertilise the oceans by spreading nutrients around, which in turn help grow fish stocks by making sure ample food is present.
Should the population of large whales increase, the population of Minke whales will decrease to a point of equilibrium determined by survival of the fittest. The problem is that populations of whales typically take decades to return to their natural levels of balance, thus it'll take a long time before blue whales and so forth can reach a population size at which they would naturally be expected to achieve.
So species such as Minke whales are able to fill the void the missing blue whales otherwise would, thus it's irrelevant that there are lots of them - you need a certain level of whale biomass to prevent problematic algae build up, and to help keep fish stocks healthy amongst other things. Hence, just because Minke whales are well populated doesn't make it okay to hunt them, it just means that as yet unrecovered populations of other previously over-hunted whale species will be coupled with reduced Minke populations and in turn will mean we end up with a level of whale biomass too small to perform it's task in the ecosystem to a suitable degree. This in turns leads to environmental problems and reduction of fish stocks.
The IUCN simply ranks species based on how at threat they are from extinction - this isn't simply a question of population, for example, some plant species have healthy population numbers in the hundreds of thousands, but only grow on rocky outcrops that are tagged for potential mining - in that case the population numbers are good, but the threat of extinction is still high. What the IUCN does not do is take into account the impact of hunting a species, thus it's not true that a least concern ranking on the IUCN list correlates with "Okay to hunt". It's possible for something to be near extinct, but fine to hunt to extinction because it has little relevance to it's ecosystem, just as it's for something to be least concern, but still a bad idea to hunt as in this case. Suggesting that because something is ranked as least concern that it must be okay to hunt is a completely invalid way to interpret IUCN rankings because that's not what they measure - it's a measure of population health and NOT a measure of population value within the ecosystem.
There has been a particular focus on whales over the years for precisely the fact that they have a high ecosystem value, more recently the same is beginning to be realised for sharks also having long been characterised as evil pointless predators. Contrary to what the Japanese, Icelanders and so forth will tell you, the IWC itself, and the ICJs rulings are as they are not because of emotion, but because they're important to help make sure we can maintain healthy oceans. This something we're already struggling to do as is with over-fishing in general, much more so if we end up with even greater reduced fish stocks due to ecosystem problems due to whale over-hunting.
Because whaling boats can move faster than whales, and whales still have to surface for air at some point, so the whaling ships just chase them until they're near dead from exhaustion, which is something they do regularly anyway.
So out of interest, what makes subs so hard to defend against?
I remember my grandfather telling me even in World War II they had nets that used to be attached on struts underneath the ships at a distance and these nets used to catch/detonate underwater mines and torpedoes away from the ship to try and prevent catastrophic damage from the ship. I guess it was a kind of sea-borne equivalent of slat armour we typically see on many modern armoured vehicles.
Is there some reason such a technology can't be created in a manner that it can be deployed when needed and retracted when not? Is it really not possible to create some kind of strong netting that's deployed out from a ship on struts strong enough to prevent a torpedo from pushing through and detonating right against the hull?
I guess the biggest problem may be the weight of such a system as it'd have quite a lot of area to cover?
My perspective on the cost of things has been broken ever since the UK announcement of HS2's £50bn price tag. It's a new "high speed" rail line from London to Birmingham and Leeds that's going to cost £50bn ($75bn US) and doesn't even use maglev tech so isn't even remotely cutting edge (it also pulls up outside of city centres meaning any time gained by moving faster is lost getting to where you actually want to be - the city centres making the whole scheme pointless). For the price of a 200 mile railway line and some new trains we could apparently buy 17 of these ships.
Even our entirely nuclear deterrent renewal including new ICBMs, new submarine design and production and so on is only going to cost half of what HS2 will. Our entire war in Afghanistan that lasted about 13 years and required 10s of thousands of helicopter and plane flights, millions of bullets, bombs and mortar shells expended, reconstruction of dams, the building of a military base the size of the city of Reading, and the feeding of thousands of troops for that whole time only came to £36bn.
I'm working on the assumption that HS2 is a massive transfer of billions in public money into private hands, a large scale theft from the state by vested interests, because otherwise, what's $4.4bn for a cutting edge ship? It's nothing at the end of the day, if a government can blow $75bn on a pointless boondoggle, then what's $4.4bn on something that may actually be at least sometimes useful?
Yes all of them and the Japanese even admit that but claim it's a byproduct of the research. This is why their hunt is illegal because international courts ruled that there is no scientific merit to their programme that requires killing of the whales and yet all the meat ends up being sold for profit.
This is an illegal commercial hunt and the courts have determined it as such. Pretending there is any actual science here is nothing more than a well destroyed lie at this point.
Japan has created itself a real problem now, because it expects countries like China to respect international law over it's territorial disputes with China, whilst defying international law in the southern oceans to carry out illegal commercial hunts. At this point Japan cannot rationally complain if China does further tighten it's stance on disputed territory because it can't on one hand pretend international law governing the seas only applies to everyone else. It could just pull out of the IWC of course like Norway, but again they want to pretend they're good players in international diplomacy land and sign up to laws so that they can try and hold others to them when it suits. Essentially Japan wants it cake, and wants to eat it too.
The fact is, how much a country will listen to you when you cry international law, will depend on how many you sign up to and how well you adhere to it yourself. Japan basically now has no credibility on this front and cannot really complain when countries like China ignore it's cries. If Chinese boats fish in waters Japan claims then it's frankly tough shit, not a leg to stand on.
"Unlike rice or apple or onion, banana plants do not 'sexually reproduce'
Banana plants produce its 'offspring' by the root, very much like bamboo"
No, this isn't true. All such plants sexually (or asexually) reproduce as it's the method by which they obtain genetic diversity, were that not the case they'd have been wiped out long ago in this very manner.
The problem is that we've taken defective members of the species that have suffered mutations by which they do not produce seed and have taken clones of those individuals. Those offspring you talk of grown from the root are not offspring, they're just lumps of the same plant with the exact same genetic identity, but that can be chopped off and rooted down as clones.
There's nothing inherently special about the banana, we could do the same with Apples and other fruits - create seedless varieties that are just clones, and then we'd have the same problem. The fact that the banana is a key example of a species which we've merely grown from clones of one single genetic source is the real problem.
This is the key problem (IMO) with GM - we're talking about in many cases repeating the mistakes we have with the banana. Imagine this exact same problem with ALL crops and that's the problem that we're being pushed towards with monoculture where we grow supposed "superior" strains, superior until they're not, because they get wiped out due to lack of genetic diversity. We then get to pay companies for new strains - effectively we're paying companies to do evolution for us, but less competently than nature itself can.
A better solution would've been to invest in creating better banana hybrids that do produce just a few seeds - not enough to make the fruit annoying to eat, but enough to create a strain of banana plant that both tastes good and has genetic diversity, exactly as we've done with the Apple, the potato, and so on and so forth (as the GP pointed out, in that case in part as a response to the Irish potato famine - we now have potato species that could've survived that particular blight). Contrary to what you say it's as easy to engineer new banana plants as it is Apples and so forth (that's precisely why we have had different species of Banana after others have wiped out - where else would they come from?), it's just no one's bothered to put more effort into it because the industry is stuck in it's ways with the Cavendish et. al. and then they wonder why shit like this happens.
Or why in contrast blue whales live 80 - 90 years.
Obviously it's not just about size if your average hamster is gone in what, 8 years? I don't know how long they live but a blue whale can live to 90.
I don't even think the metabolism argument holds true universally, I don't think the "wearing out" argument in general is true. I think that some species simply have better regenerative capabilities than others. How long a species lives is driven more by that species' place in the ecosystem and what age span benefits the species more than anything. You need new members of a species to be produced to allow evolution to occur and to ensure genetic diversity to protect against things like disease. That explains why Blue Whales can live so long, because they're so big that they don't face many evolving threats, and so don't themselves need to breed and hence evolve with such frequency as something small like a mouse living in a highly competitive forest environment where there are lots of predators that also co-evolve to constantly adapt their hunting strategies.
Of course that only gives us the answer to what determines life span and why a species has the life span it does, but it doesn't given us the mechanism that limits that life span. I'd wager there is no one single mechanism but a combination of factors that all need to be in sync for maximum lifespan - durable organs, good regenerative capabilities and so on. There's no point having a heart and organs that could take you to 200, if your teeth and jaw joints are so far gone that you can't eat and die far earlier anyway for example. Joints wear, so even if your organs are sorted you need to be able to regenerate those joints and such somehow also.
We could produce dogs that live much longer already by selecting for those that live longer, but instead we keep breeding breeds with defects for looks, or breeds like Alsatians that don't live that long because they're incredibly versatile as anything from guide dogs, to bomb disposal dogs, to assault dogs, to police dogs, to making good pets. We select for utility and looks rather than age with dogs right now.
The article talks about Classic ASP, which shouldn't be conflated with ASP.NET. ASP most definitely is basically extinct, no one is using it for new projects and it's barely even being used for legacy stuff. The fact they even found anything worth testing is a miracle in itself and it's not surprising it's vulnerable as any code base using it likely pre-dates many now commonly known security vulnerabilities. The same is true of Coldfusion, the same is however not true of PHP which is still being used to actively develop new projects and maintain existing ones on a widespread basis.
Neither Coldfusion nor Classic ASP are in the top 3 languages for kludging together new functionality - languages like Ruby, Python, C#, Java, and probably even Perl undoubtedly have far larger userbases nowadays. This is why the summary used the language it did - maybe extinct is technically wrong if code still exists for it, but "almost extinct" would be perfectly adequate.
"You have to split your limited assets and make sure you meet the minimum requirements of two institutions."
Those requirements are hardly difficult to achieve though. The government has an agreement with banks such that even homeless people can get basic bank accounts (with no frills things like overdrafts excluded) - this was to allow the government to pay welfare digitally rather than have to maintain a process of having to provide, manage, and secure, cash handouts.
Basically anyone in the UK should be able to open two bank accounts one way or another in this day and age even if it means you have to have a special account because you have a history of financial fraud, or defaults against you.
"What's wrong with cash? Or is that too independent / liberty-y for the brits? Using two banks just doubles your risks of card / account / user/pass getting stolen."
You wont get interest paid on cash held, so it'll lose value over time compared to that held in a savings account.
In the UK, having your banking details stolen is not too big a deal. Unless the bank can prove you were seriously negligent (which they basically have never been able to do unless you really did something stupid like posted your plain text payment details to an online forum) then they're liable to cover your losses.
The principle here is that the very job of banks is to keep your money safe - that was there core, founding reason for existence, and as such that is their job. Therefore, if money gets stolen from you because say, your card details were stolen from an online shopping site, then that's not your fault, because the bank issued you the card as a payment method, thus the bank is responsible for the security of that payment method (again, bar you being completely and almost wilfully negligent). The bank may pursue the retailer in court for compensation of course if the retailer had shit security, but you'll never see any of that as a consumer - you'll typically get your money back and a new card within weeks and will often be given an interest free overdraft in the meantime to make sure you can still pay your bills etc. until they return your money to your account.
Actually it's unlikely this will net the banks any additional profit and will in fact lower profits per-bank. If you stay in credit in the UK then they simply skim the interest paid by the central bank on your proportion of their holdings and pay themselves with that.
Say for example you had £100 in your account for a year, and central bank interest rates were 3% then they'll just take that £3 as payment. I believe the average rolling holdings in a UK current account is something like £1500 and interest rates have been 0.5% for a long time, so they're netting about £7.50 a year per account right now.
Of course that's not the only way they make money, they can also use your money as capital for investments too and make profits that way, similarly they can convince you to pay for extra services (like travel insurance), tempt you with a credit card and charge you interest on use of that, or simply hope that you go into the negative on your current account and pay penalty fees as a result.
Given that here people wont have more money, nor will they pay more money, but will simply spread the same money across multiple accounts there's no really benefit for the individual bank, only for the sector as a whole in that people's finances will inevitably become more evenly spread if shared between banks - the wealthier banks will lose out, and the poorer banks will do better from encouraging this policy. This guy works for The Bank of England, which is pretty much our equivalent of the Federal Reserve - so there may be some policy benefit for them in this policy, in that making people hedge their money across banks and hence balance money stored across banks more evenly will help stabilise the banking system as a whole. It means well capitalised banks will see some money moved to less capitalised banks allowing those less capitalised banks to be better capitalised and hence less likely to ever need a bailout in future.
Hence, whilst more of this sort of hedging wont help any individual bank, it will help protect the tax payer and make the Bank of England and the government's job a lot easier.
"I have had two applications refused in the last year because the version of my address in the database that the bank uses to auto-complete my address when I type it into the application form is different from the version it then looks up in the electoral roll."
This seems odd, addresses are broken down into discrete fields in UK credit reference data so unless the bank is doing something really odd then it sounds more like one of these databases (the credit data, or the ER data) has a completely different address, which is more likely if the problem has spanned multiple banks for you.
I would suggest getting a copy of your credit report (you can get much of this for free online nowadays - Google for Noddle) and check that credit data held about you is correct. Don't be misled by the term credit either - it's not just for loans and credit cards, this data is typically even used for current and savings accounts nowadays due to the fact they often offer things like overdraft products. If there's something wrong here either contact the source of the data, or contact the relevant credit reference agency and they have a legal obligation to sort it.
You shouldn't really be having problems opening a UK account if you're a UK resident and if you are that does point to either a bad financial history or some invalid data on you that needs correcting somewhere.
I'd certainly be keen to see some evidence that a substantial amount of AI researchers back that view and make such claims. I'd also be intrigued to see it compared against other fields to see if AI researchers make such claims with greater frequency than researchers make far fetched claims in other fields. According to a post yesterday ageing will be cured in 5 years, and god knows how many times I've heard Fusion is just around the corner. I've also heard both these sorts of things many times before too, but see little reason to condemn the fields of biology and physics in their entirety because of a few rogue over-excited scientists.
All fields have the odd outlier that make over-ambitious claims, and the media always pick up on those claims and parrot them without getting the views of others in the field. AI would not appear to be exceptional or an outlier in this respect as far as I can see.
Once again Slashdot's resident PC Repair Man oversteps his level of knowledge, makes a fool of himself, and throws a hissy shit fit.
Please just stop, it's embarassing. PC repair man is right at the bottom of the ladder, know your place and accept it when your betters explain why you're wrong.
Maybe one day you'll go from PC repair man (which is basically something even absolute amateurs typically do for themselves nowadays) to professional support guy, to system administrator, to network engineer, to architect or go a different route like development or EE and you'll have something useful to contribute, but until then you're still just PC repair man and that will still always be bottom of the ladder - which isn't a problem, if you accept that, but you pretend you're some kind of elite hardware engineer and developer all in one whilst still being PC repair man.
We'll come to you when we want to know which graphics cards are selling best for you, but when we want to know about how software is written, about network security, or about console design decisions, then give please, just give up, you're not even remotely qualified for those types of discussion so stop pretending you are.
I'm not worth wasting your time, and yet here you are again wasting your time being wrong and crying at me. Okay then.
You're grossly overstating the case that was put forward as to how rapidly AI would advance, the fact is following the Dartmouth Conference there were decades of debate as to whether strong AI would ever even be possible at all (See for example Searle's Chinese Room argument). The very fact such debate occurred means there was clearly a spectrum of thought on the topic, and yet entertainment media chose only to cover one extreme end of the debate.
I don't even blame the media in many ways, in some ways it's great that it's been perceived to be an exciting enough topic to make any entertainment media on at all, and much like Star Trek that has undoubtedly got people interest in the relevant sciences, but the issue is that when it is one sided like this, it does create unrealistic expectations. The problem isn't that they make films like Terminator, the problem is that it's Terminator or nothing, there's no middle of the road films that cover much more plausible AI catastrophe scenarios such as a battle of AI optimisation algorithms bringing the world economy down, a near future automated drone self-targeting when it shouldn't creating a geopolitical shit storm and so on and so forth.
You'd have had a point if your fundamental premise wasn't completely wrong, if it weren't for the fact that there clearly was a wide spectrum of opinion and there were opinions ranging from strong AI in 10 years, all the way to strong AI never. The fact you've picked the former and tried to imply it's the only case though kind of proves my point - people only see that side, and have an incredibly naive and ignorant view of both the history of AI, and what it does and can achieve and in what time frame, that is in large part fed by the over-ambitious view of AI fed by the media - even if you had been correct then that still doesn't explain why the last 20 years has still seen that early over-ambitious view pushed since it's turned out to be wrong. You can't simply absolve the media of blame in painting an unrealistic one sided picture. The fact is the media like that picture because it's the most exciting, but it's also wrong and misleading.
But how exactly do you get to that "Pure AI" of yours? It's like saying we shouldn't be misled by physics, Newton shouldn't have come up with those broken laws, he should've gone straight to that grand unified theory or it's just not physics!
You're really proving my point - people like yourself believe AI has failed because it's not magic, because we haven't jumped straight from the start of the topic to the end goal.
I'm not really sure it's academia's fault, but more that the entertainment industry got a bit carried away with stories about future AI, and now people think that if it doesn't look like that, then it's not AI, all the while missing the massive advances in computing that AI research has netted them from facial recognition, to self repairing networks, from spell/grammar check to siri, and from Google search results from increasingly natural language type queries through to computer run video game opponents.
Effectively saying AI has failed is like saying Physics has failed because we don't yet have an all encompassing grand unified theory of the universe. These things are the long term goal, and we're not even remotely far along the journey towards that goal, so to criticise because we're not there yet is exactly like being the screaming kid in the back of the parents car shouting "ARE WE THERE YET?".
Not that it matters, because AI research is bearing commercial fruit anyway so it doesn't really matter what the public thinks of it, money will keep being poured into it regardless. AI is fortunate that it's a self-sustaining area of scientific research, it doesn't need good PR with the public when it's churning out cash for corporations. In that respect it has it much easier than many areas of science do, such as space exploration for example that is still somewhat struggling to get necessary funding for it's goals so perhaps it's as much that the AI research industry doesn't care what the public thinks as it is that it's failing to sell itself well in the court of the public opinion. The public are consuming it's results and paying money for the privilege regardless of the opinion they hold of the field - how many iPhones 6s were sold over the competition thanks in part to things like gesture recognition, learning autocomplete on the keyboard, and Siri? how many ads are to be sold on Google? and how many BB-8s are ending up under the tree this Christmas?
Some years back, Panorama, perhaps the worst TV show the BBC has ever insisted on continuing to make did one of it's drivel episodes as it does on exactly this topic.
As is usual for Panorama, it spread some crock of shit about how in Finland or wherever it was a real recognised issue and you could get help for it, so asked the question why that's not the case here? That would be great if it were actually true, because at the time Finland had actually said that it WASN'T a real thing and removed it from it's official list of recognised problems you can get state help for.
I was working in IT at the time, supporting schools, and Panorama suggested schools should consider shutting down their WiFi, so we spent the next few weeks firefighting requests about whether we needed to disable wifi at all 170 schools we supported from the head teachers. One such teacher even magically developed symptoms after hearing all about this and started taking lots of sick leave because of it, which I'm sure was fantastic for him until we quietly disabled wifi and confirmed no other wifi signals in the area for 3 days whilst he continued to complain of symptoms before the head informed him that there wasn't even any wifi for him to get sick from and eventually managed to fire him for the fact he'd been taking time off ill based on lies.
So it's possible the cause of this problem was this mother believing a lie filled episode of Panorama all those years ago. Given that I myself have seen Panorama's bullshit cause no end of real trouble, I wouldn't be surprised if it was also the cause of this mother believing such bullshit also had she been feeding her daughter the idea that she's had this since a young age (when the program must've been broadcast in what, 2006 or something?).
If this is the case, it would be nice to see the BBC finally reprimanded for showing such a non-factual lie filled episode that caused real actual damage to companies and individuals lives alike. Panorama is basically the BBC's answer to The Daily Mail and given that every time it's made an episode on something I do no about like is wifi safe, or is minecraft killing your children etc. and it's been clearly full of shit, I now simply assume that it's telling me a load of shit on topics I don't know anything about too.
"So asking about an OS architecture and its capabilities is trolling now? Well wtf is the point of asking questions here, lets all just wave our little flags like a bunch of fanbois, shall we?"
No, jumping to conclusions that a platform you prefer less must be more primitive is trolling, but you knew that.
"And how does it not have to do with the OS being primitive when it comes to multitasking when PCs have been able to do this for years and do so with ease?"
Okay I'm beginning to wonder if you're right and you're not trolling, and in fact, you really just don't understand operating systems, though I always thought based on past posts that you did.
Please explain how a single core handling voice chat, friends lists, streaming, recording, general OS duties, achievement services, background applications and so on is not multi-tasking before you continue. It's pretty clear the reserved core is doing a lot of multi-tasking alone.
"I get that for the majority of its life consoles have been single tasking systems but surely they could hire some OS developers to get them up to speed, yes? "
This statement would be less painfully stupid if it weren't for the fact that consoles like the Xbox typically use the same core Kernel as Windows or a slight modification of. They have OS developers, there's no need to get upto speed because unlike you they already know exactly what they're talking about and exactly what they're doing.
"Because dedicating an entire X86 APU to the UI, let alone two? I'm sorry but you can scream and whine all you want, that is wasteful and inefficient as hell which is why PCs,be they Apple,Linux, or Windows do not do this, in fact the last personal computers that did such a thing was IIRC the first edition of BeOS. "
So again, did you intentionally miss the point? are you really that dumb? It's pretty clear from my last post that I pointed out that they're doing an awful lot more than merely running the UI on those reserved cores.
"And it isn't flag waving to point out when an OS has capabilities another apparently does not"
No it's being a fanboy when you're being wilfully dumb and missing half the explanation because it cuts your pre-defined master race PC stance to pieces on this particular issue and you find being wrong uncomfortable.
Like I said, these OS are perfectly capable of multi-tasking and they do that perfectly fine. They just reserve cores to guarantee a minimum amount of processing will be available for all those common services that the console provides and performs so that those process can never be interrupted or disturbed by a game developer chewing up too many resources and making those core services fail. Users are going to be pissed if they have an epic moment in the game, record it, and realise half the video was skipped because an over zealous game developer left no resources for that recording because he could use all cores leaving none for that core functionality all because someone on Slashdot without the slightest clue in OS and console design said that's the way it should be.
So stop pretending it's about an inability to multi-task, obviously that's false based on the fact these console provide way more ongoing services than there are reserved cores. As has been explained to you, it's about guaranteeing that the OS will always have one core free for OS and common functionality. It's about guaranteed resource allocation and absolutely nothing more than that.
If you still have a problem with that you instead need to change your argument to why console users should have to accept that common background functionality should fail when a badly written game is running. Good luck with that though.
Christ, whilst it looks like you're trolling because you're one of Slashdot's premier PC master race guys and displaying a certain arrogance towards the guys who designed these consoles assuming they must just be less competent for only producing a primitive OS (when the reality is they're undoubtedly smart guys, making smart choices), I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and answer.
It's got nothing to do with one being more primitive than the other. On the contrary, because consoles can do away with all the legacy and general processing cruft that PCs have to be able to cater, coupled with the fact you're looking at dedicated hardware fulfilling a specific goal if anything the opposite is true - console OS are less primitive, because they don't have to cater to decades of previous software like Windows has to. It doesn't matter though because primitive is an entirely subjective term anyway. A lightweight cutting edge OS written yesterday might be primitive because it's lightweight and it lacks features, or it might be cutting edge because it was written yesterday.
The reason is simply that the two systems are different, neither is superior to the other, both have different purposes and goals and that inevitably results in different design decisions being made.
Consoles perform a lot of background services, and whilst talk of console cost-performance ratios inevitably involves some smartass pricing up some PC components that they claim are superior for the same price the reality is that they never are as they typically exclude everything in the box from the game controllers, through to the very bespoke hardware that achieves certain types of processing more efficiently than an equivalently priced PC ever good. The Xbox One for example constantly handles background processing of gesture recognition, voice recognition, multi-user voice chat, friends list, constant recording of games with the ability to save off the last 5 minutes of that record to disk, streaming of said video across the internet, as well as background apps including things like live TV display and so on. The reality is that you cannot build for £250 a PC that can do all that whilst still pulling off 1080p, 60fps or equivalent with other areas of high graphical fidelity.
Which isn't to say that you can't pay more and build a PC that does all that and then some - that's not my point, I'm not saying one is better than the other, merely making the point that there is nothing inherently deficient about console hardware for the price. It's good at what it does, it gives you the best gaming processing for that amount of money, but certainly if you have money to spare then yes, absolutely, a PC can do you all that and then more without a doubt.
So with that out the way, to answer why they reserved cores, the answer is that it's about user experience, yes, I know that's a wishy-washy term, but bare with me. On a PC you're in charge of the system, you're in control and that means you've both in control in terms of having flexibility of what you want to do, but also have to take responsibility when you fuck things up - if you decide to farm bitcoins whilst trying to play a game and either or end up crawling to a halt and being useless then that becomes your problem, you have to make a concious choice to do one or the other, or to restrict one or the other to do both. Consoles don't give you that choice nor are they meant to, they're meant to be easy to use and for you to not have to have any hassle with that, and as such the Xbox team has to make different design choices to the Windows team - whilst the Windows team gives you full control of your system, the Xbox team needs to make sure the system can always perform it's minimum baseline without fail and that anything the developers do or don't do doesn't break that.
And this is where it comes to a head, essentially if you fuck something up that impacts performance of a game or a background task on a PC then that's your problem, but if on a console a game stutter
"This is a poor assumption, there are plenty of web based only services out there that don't provide a service compelling enough to be able to use a pay model so they use advertising as a means of revenue. People are not going to take up a subscription of $9.99/mo, $4.99/mo, or even $19.99/yr for each service they use because there are just to many."
I agree, but what you're really highlighting here is the underlying problem - the market place is crowded and in a crowded market place profits will always be pushed towards zero with the least competitive going out of business and this is accelerated in a globalised world where Western companies entering such a market place are up against entrepeneurs in low salary 3rd world nations that have inherently lower costs. The problem is that these sites feel they have a right to make large profits, and that's the issue - these companies rather than recognising the reality they're operating in are instead trying to fruitlessly change that reality and yet all they're doing is alienating their users and accelerating their decline towards absolute failure.
So the choices are two fold, accept this isn't the great mythical dot com unicorn land where you get rich by just making a website and the reality is that you'll barely scrape a living and be happy with that because that's just the way it is, and that's what you have to live with, or figure out how to beat the competition and become a top tier site such that you can paywall, or can live with even 90% of your users blocking ads on your site.
You can't change the technology, and you can't change people so your only option is to accept reality and run with it or stay the fuck out of the business and find some other way to make money.
I have literally no idea what it's about, I only know that it's suddenly getting spammed to Slashdot like 10 times a week.
What is it? some American TV show I assume? Have literally never heard of it. Care to enlighten why it's special and what separates it from the billion other shows that exist?
"Wouldn't two more cores, or approximately 25% of the processor power of the system, be useful to gamers that want better gameplay?"
Yeah but it'd also mean no free resources to support things like a common interface for inviting friends to your game, or still chatting to friends playing different games and so forth.
It'd mean no resources to just hop out of the game to check a video on YouTube if you're stuck, or resources to record your gameplay and stream it without each and every game having to support these things themselves.
Fact is modern consoles have a baseline of functionality that is common between games - friends lists, chat, recording/streaming gameplay and so on and that needs dedicated resources.
All that's happened here is that they've realised they don't need quite as many resources as they originally thought they might to support this baseline functionality.
It benefits game developers and users too - developers don't have to implement this stuff themselves, and users don't have to put up with completely different implementations between every game they're in, so it's a good thing.
My you're an angry little fellow aren't you?
You obviously really really hate being wrong on the internet to shed that many tears over it.
Sucks to be you, I'd hate to spend my life as stressed and angry over life as you clearly are.
But then, you do live in a country where it's legal for companies to fuck you over in this sort of way so it's not surprising you assume you'll get fucked. Me? Nah, I ain't gonna get fucked, my country has sane laws, I'm protected whatever happens because corporations don't run my country like they do yours, but thanks for your concern.