Who says that your style of conversation is _true_ and mine is _false_? The purpose of conversation to me is to exchange information and enhance both parties' pool of knowledge. "Small talk" conversation does little or nothing to really "connect" me with people, it is a waste of time. I connect much better with people who can exchange information--something I don't know for something they don't know.
Most people seem to feel the opposite. That's the whole point. Frankly this comment seems more like a troll than informative or insightful.
Actually I've been told by friends doing hiring that it's a no-no to actually apply for something unless you meet all requirements perfectly, and that it's usually the HR department and its cronies that construct these unrealistic requirements, that the HR department effectively prevents resumes from getting to the hiring managers by their combination of impossible-to-meet requirements and their weeding out anyone who doesn't actually meet them.
Re:My tandy 2000 works fine just FINE thankyou!
on
Legacy-Free PCs
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· Score: 1
The Tandy 2000 _did_ have 720K 5.25" floppy drives, and _did_ have a high-res color card available with those non-standard specs. It was quite an interesting machine for its time, though of course the march of standards was not kind to their design and left customers orphaned without support.
Re:Pray away, sucker - they won't stop with Iraq.
on
Updates on War in Iraq
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· Score: 1
Seeing that they see anti-war groups as potential terrorists (several are listed on their official "list of dangerous organizations"), and that they are at war with terrorists, they are therefore at war with anyone that has sympathies with anti-war groups. Their actions and the Orwell\h\h\h\h\h\hPatriot act show that they will resort to mind games, wiretapping, bugging, secret mind control beams, or anything else to find out who might even _think_ something bad about our government.
So, if I, as someone who refuses to support this war, or to be more accurate, this carefully constructed movement towards police control of the world by the United States without requirement of proof of guilt or even a tip of the hat to world authorities we have committed ourselves to, do I not commit treason?
The official definition of treason is a betraying, treachery, or breach of allegiance. I hereby break my allegiance to our government insofar as it has breached its agreements with governments and world organizations, crowning itself emperor of all things. Where are my two witnesses? I proudly confess to treason when it comes to the current administration.
Of course some would claim that I actually have to bear arms against my government, or actually come up with a substantial plot to undermine it, to be executed as a traitor. But it seems the government doesn't require that level of proof when it comes to Iraq's "treachery", so why should they treat me any differently? One might say they are obligated to because I am a citizen, but the Big Brother Act and other similar failures of our liberties indicate that even citizenship won't guarantee any rights.
Go to http://www.dago.pmp.com.pl/messer/ and give Messer a try. It's meant for recording lectures and presentations on a regular schedule, but it can obviously be made to record recurring radio programs. I've used it for this purpose in the past. Can write to.wav or directly to.mp3 files.
Certainly the context shows that "cool" doesn't mean they like it in this case. Think of "hot, lukewarm, cool". I think they tried to get too fancy in saying that audiophiles don't like the DRM technology.
Point taken, but I still think they might have reason to design chipset stuff in-house.
Here's a good question--could they hack Altivec support into a chipset, or license it to AMD, and create an Intel-based platform that can run Altivec instructions? It's mostly a matter of how difficult it is to compile/port those instructions over to another architecture, now that they're depending on them.
This way they would end up creating an almost-X86 around AMD's core. Once again, might not be practical when thinking in terms of commodity hardware, but as a way out of sour deals with Motorola it might do service.
Hey, I never said it would be to _Apple's_ benefit to provide VMWare, or even to port to X86. I just said that if it happened I think they're more likely to design something without 20-year-old PC-compatible roots, more along the lines of their existing PPC motherboards.
I also think it would be silly for them to move to X86 for the reason mentioned above; someone would port VMWare to it, and native software would become more difficult to justify.
I think everyone is _still_ not thinking far enough outside the commodity X86-box market when they say "it will run on a finite set of specs".
Think rather, "Apple will design its own motherboards from scratch, with the only thing in common with other X86 boards being the presence of an x86-compatible chip".
They could dispense with lots of the legacy bullcrap that way--use something similar to Open Firmware, eliminate unnecessary layers of BIOS bullcrap, leave out any legacy support for ISA in the chipset, support a reasonable interrupt architecture, whatever else they want.
Plus, software like VMWare could still probably be made to run Windows on such an architecture, since these are the kinds of things that can be virtualized, and the things that aren't necessary. I doubt Windows would run out-of-the-box on such an architecture without some virtualizing mechanism to emulate missing things. But you'd still get better speed than with an X86 emulator on PPC.
I think it would be cool, actually, and even useful if VMWare were ported to it.
Keep your eyes on the progression of Python. They haven't fixed all the braindead scoping rules, but there appears to be an underground movement to move them towards something remotely more sane. Lots of work being done on Python between 2.0 and 2.2 . . .
Re:Real speed improvement?
on
Gentoo Linux 1.2
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I think much of the speed improvement comes from the distribution's infrastructure--servers aren't started by default unless you installed something that needs them, the appropriate libraries are compiled shared for all apps that need them if you put them in USE, overall the memory usage is less because of this. I feel Slackware is faster than Redhat for this reason; it doesn't load the kitchen sink by default.
A 5% to 30% increase in speed is not a big deal for a single program but if you can get it for the entire system without much inconvenience it really starts to add up. So whatever server processes are left run efficiently.
Also, if you use X Gentoo makes it very easy to install the preemptive and realtime kernel patches, and at least KDE works well with that. It does make a big difference in interactive speed. No, you won't see some number-crunching program working miracles once you install Gentoo, but it is much more pleasant to me.
I find the system as a whole so clean that even if it were a binary-only system I'd prefer it to Debian and RedHat derivatives. Very easy base to expand upon _without_ branching from the original, which is a new thing to me. I'd expect central storage of binary packages, keyed to the specific processors and optimizations used, to be integrated into Portage in the future without breaking anything.
Remember that until fairly recent times (Beethoven is often mentioned as the first) most well-known composers were supported by a state (royalty) or church, both of them amounted to the same thing anyway in most places in Europe. They just about _belonged_ to the local noble or church official, and had to churn out lots of fill for the sake of parties, church services, and propaganda. They were used as pawns in a big prestige game.
Yes, some of these composers became well-known, but there were hundreds and thousands of other composers who never lasted. In fact until the mid 1800s even these composers were mostly forgotten; the idea of a canon of time-honored masterpieces itself doesn't go much farther back than the 1840s or 1850s.
Johannes Brahms was one of the first composers we remember that never accepted commissions for works. Even Beethoven the freelancer had to accept commissions to live. Brahms made his living teaching lessions, taking conducting posts here and there (and invariably getting frustrated and leaving), and being supported by friends and family.
All these composers came up with lots of "fill" and a few masterpieces.
Actually, if it's tech support anything like what I've done before, the 10 people who think they need you to do their work will quickly find that the problem is a user error that goes away when noticed, just a social/political need to blame problems on someone, or an outright lie meant to get back at someone in the office pecking order. Okay, maybe 1 or 2 of those will be actual problems that need solving, or are in my area of responsibility.
Actually, this is probably not true. I worked for a satellite network service provider who offered a commercial (site/citywide) version of this for folks who couldn't get a landline to their town for reasonable price.
Most commonly used network protocols do not consider the minimum 500ms latency involved in communicating via geosynchronous satellite. The signal goes up to the satellite, down to the hub center, out to the Internet, back to the hub center, back up to the satellite, and back down to your dish; light and radio signals can only move so fast.
We "solved" the problem by supplying turnkey Linux servers with TCP proxy software (vendor will remain unnamed, lest I get zapped for disclosure beyond public company documents) and all outgoing traffic was routed through this. It would hijack the TCP connections and use some kind of satellite-specific protocol when talking to our data center. It broke some of the strict semantics of TCP, going to a NAK-based protocol and increasing the window size. By clustering ACKs, using forward error correction, and increasing window size it allowed higher throughput on TCP connections and made terminal sessions just about tolerable, the local echo would start working in.5 seconds and it _seemed_ much more responsive. Same for web page loads--no more waiting 5 seconds for each one to start.
Our optimizing software did NOTHING for UDP, but we hijacked FTP connections and tossed them through a proxy cache hierarchy. I'm sure this software has probably improved since then, and might have the capability to hijack well-known UDP-based protocols and process them the same way--substituting a satellite-efficient protocol in the middle.
If they're selling this product mostly to Windows folks, they've decided to support this optimizing software on Windows only. It might be a poor technical choice, but I assure you that "connection optimizing software" isn't a figment of their imagination.
Wrong. It is _very_ difficult to find a job doing anything related to computers even now.
Not for lack of jobs, but rather for other silly reasons:
* the language you use in job postings (after applying for several hundred positions using the same language as yours, I assume you won't be interested in obvious qualifications due to an overabundance of applicants)
* the requirement to go through HR hiring-droids who can't even understand the dumbed-down version of what I do, and the associated reliance on resume scanners which eliminate human contact
* impossible prerequisites (10 years of Windows XP experience), and inflexibility in matching skills (I've used many free and commercial database systems, relational and non-relational, SQL and non-SQL, with various APIs, but I don't have experience with the exact version of Oracle you run to pull a few reports out of so no hire)
* and a general lack of _postings_ at all (most jobs are unadvertised but how can we get to know everyone who's hiring when simple information cold-calls get hung up on by rude HR people or receptionists)
I understand that there are lots of folks like you out there looking for employees, assuming your post isn't just another Slashdot troll, but when you hear "We can't find jobs" people are telling the truth. There are so many layers of outright deceptive communication between jobs _available_ and jobs _one can find out about_, it's ridiculous.
You can not claim to be a representative example if you're actually willing to solicit information one-on-one from potential candidates, and to discuss the job with them.
I've been looking for anything from behind-the-counter burger flipper to systems administrator for 15 months now, with a 10+-year background including UNIX systems administration, network design and administration, software prototyping, databases, and several kinds of programming, with great references, and even take interviewing classes to make sure I present myself well. Nobody is interested; anything short of senior admin positions, people consider me _over_qualified, but for senior admin positions people consider me _less qualified than the 50 other people in the queue_.
Even now, with recovery from a nonexistent constructed recession in progress, one needs experience to do even entry-level jobs.
Actually, it's not all that hard. I remember in my typing class (around 1988) that we were encouraged to practice on a sheet of paper marked with keyboard layout. I routinely end up tapping my fingers on a desktop to remember things I usually type, since I remember the keystrokes rather than the letters themselves.
This would be absolutely perfect for use on a Palm device. My only real worry is that it wouldn't keep up with 120WPM typing.
Not exactly a portable TRS-80 . . .
on
Tandys Never Die
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· Score: 1
The Model 100 was certainly a very early practical portable machine, and definitely had similar capabilities to a stripped down TRS-80, but it runs on an Intel 8085.
I have one and I still use it when going to the library, to keep track of books I'm looking for and to take notes. You can pump the memory up to a meg or so and use that memory with cetain word processing packages. Now that I have a Psion 5mx it gets used less often.
No, that would be the job of A.H., or "Artificial Humanity".
People too often use "intelligence" as the label for everything a human can do. I fully believe that artificial emotional and communication responses are possible, I think far _more_ of emotion and mind-models can be emulated in software than we realize.
Most of our communication and emotional patterns are surprisingly robotic and fall into various known patterns. Read some Robert Anton Wilson (Prometheus Rising is good for this), learn about Leary's circuits, travel off the beaten path into speculative realsm, and you'll find that there are models for lots of this. Imprefect, unproven models to be sure, but there's a start in modeling _lots_ of what makes us human.
Now, whether it will be done in real-time, within my lifetime, I'm not sure.
And never mind the question of whether _human_ intelligence is the only intelligence, or even the most valuable kind of intelligence, to model.
Unfortunately it's the _employers_ out there putting emphasis on a "major" in "Using Microsoft Word Version 6 Build 388.49", and not accepting anyone without an _exact_ match.
Even _with_ extensive personal contacts and 10 years of experience doing things very similar to what employers want, plus a computer science degree, they aren't interested. Rather they want the certification course and degree program of the hour.
Colleges and universities are in league with the HR departments. Need to break the cycle at _both_ ends. Oh, and the software/hardware companies that sell expensive certifications are in league with all of the above. I wouldn't mind the certifications scam if they actually seemed to serve the greater good, but of course it's not valid to expect philanthropy from corporations. Hail to the almighty dollar.
There's been a distinct cultural shift against accepting intelligence and a proven background learning new technologies quickly, and towards only accepting specific training, as if the people hiring have never encountered anyone who learned "by the seat of the pants". Most likely because they themselves learned through some kind of coursework.
Do not misunderstand what constitutes face recognition. Face recognition is done by most people as a reflex action, it's handled by a part of the brain that develops a "snapshot" of the distance between integral facial features.
People without this natural ability can learn some degree of facial recognition by analyzing the face with the apparatus used for regular visual processing. But it takes quite a bit longer, and is more error-prone. It is heavily dependent on lighting, social context, clothing, hairstyles, and posture.
I remember showing up to a show to play with a band; I had played a few shows with them already, and had met all of them in a different environment. I was _entirely_ unable to recognize even the three of them together, I kept asking where my "bandmates" were, and they tried to explain to me that they were the people I was looking for. The lighting was low and red-colored. They were very offended. For the life of me I couldn't make an assessment. Their voices eventually cued me on to who they were.
Don't be so quick to deny the differences in the way people operate in this world. Yes, there are lots of people using things like face-blindness as excuses but they are very real. But just the same, don't let anyone tell you they can't get along in the world just because of face-blindness. It takes some extra effort, but can be done.
I'll leave quality/durability issues of the iBook, positive or negative, for others to discuss. But I've read lots about OS X on iBook.
Lots of Macintosh folks like OS X on the iBook, but they recommend 256M of RAM or even more before it starts responding well. Remember that they haven't had lots of time to optimize for memory/speed, and the system has roots in NextStep, and that camp was always known for very high memory requirements compared to other software of the day.
Adding memory beyond 256MB can significantly reduce swapping; 384MB is a figure I see quoted on the Net as providing good responsiveness. Add too much RAM beyond this break-even point, and the RAM itself starts to be a sink on battery life.
OS X likes to keep LOTS of stuff in the memory subsystem, and will swap to high heaven without sufficient RAM. Eliminate the swapping, and it performs nicely on older G3 laptops and on iBooks.
The fact that most hiring managers don't even _know_ that most UNIX variants have wide areas of similarity makes it even _more_ important that you have contacts on the inside. I administered UNIX systems for 10 years, and have been exposed to just about everything out there, but any job you apply for through a database/resume matching drone will only work if you have the _exact_ brand name and version number that they're looking for.
They just _don't_ understand the similarity even if pointed out to them, and forget it if you've used a different version of Solaris than they're interested in.
Do yourself a favor and do what I never did: Start making contacts among people who do admin work. Go to local user groups and join a professional society. They seem like useless social banter until you end up unemployed because you were clueless about human networking instead of computer networking.
Many people have the misconception that a CS program is about learning programming/networking/admin skills for the workforce. Nope. CS is preparation for getting a master's degree in CS, which is preparation for getting a doctorate in CS, which is prerequisite for working in academia and at the cutting edge of research involving electronic computers and their intersection with mathematics and philosophy.
A CS degree is a great way to get a well-rounded background, perhaps a stint at tech school in parallel with the rest of your CS work would be useful. Or some certification courses in areas you are interested in; those will help your job prospects and take focus off the raw theory into the realm of (barely) practical use.
This is even more true now that HR departments are staffed mostly by people who are clueless about the breadth of a CS education. Without certifications they won't even listen to you, even with 10+ years of experience using the exact technologies they want. It's a cultural shift in the business, one likely to never go away; the people hiring can't imagine anyone having the broad background and intelligence to learn things without taking a certification or tech school program in it, so they assume you're lying when you say "10+ years of experience" and see no such educational path.
Slashdot Mirror
Most people seem to feel the opposite. That's the whole point. Frankly this comment seems more like a troll than informative or insightful.
Actually I've been told by friends doing hiring that it's a no-no to actually apply for something unless you meet all requirements perfectly, and that it's usually the HR department and its cronies that construct these unrealistic requirements, that the HR department effectively prevents resumes from getting to the hiring managers by their combination of impossible-to-meet requirements and their weeding out anyone who doesn't actually meet them.
The Tandy 2000 _did_ have 720K 5.25" floppy drives, and _did_ have a high-res color card available with those non-standard specs. It was quite an interesting machine for its time, though of course the march of standards was not kind to their design and left customers orphaned without support.
So, if I, as someone who refuses to support this war, or to be more accurate, this carefully constructed movement towards police control of the world by the United States without requirement of proof of guilt or even a tip of the hat to world authorities we have committed ourselves to, do I not commit treason?
The official definition of treason is a betraying, treachery, or breach of allegiance. I hereby break my allegiance to our government insofar as it has breached its agreements with governments and world organizations, crowning itself emperor of all things. Where are my two witnesses? I proudly confess to treason when it comes to the current administration.
Of course some would claim that I actually have to bear arms against my government, or actually come up with a substantial plot to undermine it, to be executed as a traitor. But it seems the government doesn't require that level of proof when it comes to Iraq's "treachery", so why should they treat me any differently? One might say they are obligated to because I am a citizen, but the Big Brother Act and other similar failures of our liberties indicate that even citizenship won't guarantee any rights.
_Never_ put swap on a flash drive of any kind.
Go to http://www.dago.pmp.com.pl/messer/ and give Messer a try. It's meant for recording lectures and presentations on a regular schedule, but it can obviously be made to record recurring radio programs. I've used it for this purpose in the past. Can write to .wav or directly to .mp3 files.
Certainly the context shows that "cool" doesn't mean they like it in this case. Think of "hot, lukewarm, cool". I think they tried to get too fancy in saying that audiophiles don't like the DRM technology.
Point taken, but I still think they might have reason to design chipset stuff in-house.
Here's a good question--could they hack Altivec support into a chipset, or license it to AMD, and create an Intel-based platform that can run Altivec instructions? It's mostly a matter of how difficult it is to compile/port those instructions over to another architecture, now that they're depending on them.
This way they would end up creating an almost-X86 around AMD's core. Once again, might not be practical when thinking in terms of commodity hardware, but as a way out of sour deals with Motorola it might do service.
Hey, I never said it would be to _Apple's_ benefit to provide VMWare, or even to port to X86. I just said that if it happened I think they're more likely to design something without 20-year-old PC-compatible roots, more along the lines of their existing PPC motherboards.
I also think it would be silly for them to move to X86 for the reason mentioned above; someone would port VMWare to it, and native software would become more difficult to justify.
I think everyone is _still_ not thinking far enough outside the commodity X86-box market when they say "it will run on a finite set of specs".
Think rather, "Apple will design its own motherboards from scratch, with the only thing in common with other X86 boards being the presence of an x86-compatible chip".
They could dispense with lots of the legacy bullcrap that way--use something similar to Open Firmware, eliminate unnecessary layers of BIOS bullcrap, leave out any legacy support for ISA in the chipset, support a reasonable interrupt architecture, whatever else they want.
Plus, software like VMWare could still probably be made to run Windows on such an architecture, since these are the kinds of things that can be virtualized, and the things that aren't necessary. I doubt Windows would run out-of-the-box on such an architecture without some virtualizing mechanism to emulate missing things. But you'd still get better speed than with an X86 emulator on PPC.
I think it would be cool, actually, and even useful if VMWare were ported to it.
Keep your eyes on the progression of Python. They haven't fixed all the braindead scoping rules, but there appears to be an underground movement to move them towards something remotely more sane. Lots of work being done on Python between 2.0 and 2.2 . . .
I think much of the speed improvement comes from the distribution's infrastructure--servers aren't started by default unless you installed something that needs them, the appropriate libraries are compiled shared for all apps that need them if you put them in USE, overall the memory usage is less because of this. I feel Slackware is faster than Redhat for this reason; it doesn't load the kitchen sink by default.
A 5% to 30% increase in speed is not a big deal for a single program but if you can get it for the entire system without much inconvenience it really starts to add up. So whatever server processes are left run efficiently.
Also, if you use X Gentoo makes it very easy to install the preemptive and realtime kernel patches, and at least KDE works well with that. It does make a big difference in interactive speed. No, you won't see some number-crunching program working miracles once you install Gentoo, but it is much more pleasant to me.
I find the system as a whole so clean that even if it were a binary-only system I'd prefer it to Debian and RedHat derivatives. Very easy base to expand upon _without_ branching from the original, which is a new thing to me. I'd expect central storage of binary packages, keyed to the specific processors and optimizations used, to be integrated into Portage in the future without breaking anything.
Yes, some of these composers became well-known, but there were hundreds and thousands of other composers who never lasted. In fact until the mid 1800s even these composers were mostly forgotten; the idea of a canon of time-honored masterpieces itself doesn't go much farther back than the 1840s or 1850s.
Johannes Brahms was one of the first composers we remember that never accepted commissions for works. Even Beethoven the freelancer had to accept commissions to live. Brahms made his living teaching lessions, taking conducting posts here and there (and invariably getting frustrated and leaving), and being supported by friends and family.
All these composers came up with lots of "fill" and a few masterpieces.
Actually, if it's tech support anything like what I've done before, the 10 people who think they need you to do their work will quickly find that the problem is a user error that goes away when noticed, just a social/political need to blame problems on someone, or an outright lie meant to get back at someone in the office pecking order. Okay, maybe 1 or 2 of those will be actual problems that need solving, or are in my area of responsibility.
Actually, this is probably not true. I worked for a satellite network service provider who offered a commercial (site/citywide) version of this for folks who couldn't get a landline to their town for reasonable price.
.5 seconds and it _seemed_ much more responsive. Same for web page loads--no more waiting 5 seconds for each one to start.
Most commonly used network protocols do not consider the minimum 500ms latency involved in communicating via geosynchronous satellite. The signal goes up to the satellite, down to the hub center, out to the Internet, back to the hub center, back up to the satellite, and back down to your dish; light and radio signals can only move so fast.
We "solved" the problem by supplying turnkey Linux servers with TCP proxy software (vendor will remain unnamed, lest I get zapped for disclosure beyond public company documents) and all outgoing traffic was routed through this. It would hijack the TCP connections and use some kind of satellite-specific protocol when talking to our data center. It broke some of the strict semantics of TCP, going to a NAK-based protocol and increasing the window size. By clustering ACKs, using forward error correction, and increasing window size it allowed higher throughput on TCP connections and made terminal sessions just about tolerable, the local echo would start working in
Our optimizing software did NOTHING for UDP, but we hijacked FTP connections and tossed them through a proxy cache hierarchy. I'm sure this software has probably improved since then, and might have the capability to hijack well-known UDP-based protocols and process them the same way--substituting a satellite-efficient protocol in the middle.
If they're selling this product mostly to Windows folks, they've decided to support this optimizing software on Windows only. It might be a poor technical choice, but I assure you that "connection optimizing software" isn't a figment of their imagination.
Wrong. It is _very_ difficult to find a job doing anything related to computers even now.
Not for lack of jobs, but rather for other silly reasons:
* the language you use in job postings (after applying for several hundred positions using the same language as yours, I assume you won't be interested in obvious qualifications due to an overabundance of applicants)
* the requirement to go through HR hiring-droids who can't even understand the dumbed-down version of what I do, and the associated reliance on resume scanners which eliminate human contact
* impossible prerequisites (10 years of Windows XP experience), and inflexibility in matching skills (I've used many free and commercial database systems, relational and non-relational, SQL and non-SQL, with various APIs, but I don't have experience with the exact version of Oracle you run to pull a few reports out of so no hire)
* and a general lack of _postings_ at all (most jobs are unadvertised but how can we get to know everyone who's hiring when simple information cold-calls get hung up on by rude HR people or receptionists)
I understand that there are lots of folks like you out there looking for employees, assuming your post isn't just another Slashdot troll, but when you hear "We can't find jobs" people are telling the truth. There are so many layers of outright deceptive communication between jobs _available_ and jobs _one can find out about_, it's ridiculous.
You can not claim to be a representative example if you're actually willing to solicit information one-on-one from potential candidates, and to discuss the job with them.
I've been looking for anything from behind-the-counter burger flipper to systems administrator for 15 months now, with a 10+-year background including UNIX systems administration, network design and administration, software prototyping, databases, and several kinds of programming, with great references, and even take interviewing classes to make sure I present myself well. Nobody is interested; anything short of senior admin positions, people consider me _over_qualified, but for senior admin positions people consider me _less qualified than the 50 other people in the queue_.
Even now, with recovery from a nonexistent constructed recession in progress, one needs experience to do even entry-level jobs.
Actually, it's not all that hard. I remember in my typing class (around 1988) that we were encouraged to practice on a sheet of paper marked with keyboard layout. I routinely end up tapping my fingers on a desktop to remember things I usually type, since I remember the keystrokes rather than the letters themselves.
This would be absolutely perfect for use on a Palm device. My only real worry is that it wouldn't keep up with 120WPM typing.
The Model 100 was certainly a very early practical portable machine, and definitely had similar capabilities to a stripped down TRS-80, but it runs on an Intel 8085.
I have one and I still use it when going to the library, to keep track of books I'm looking for and to take notes. You can pump the memory up to a meg or so and use that memory with cetain word processing packages. Now that I have a Psion 5mx it gets used less often.
No, that would be the job of A.H., or "Artificial Humanity".
People too often use "intelligence" as the label for everything a human can do. I fully believe that artificial emotional and communication responses are possible, I think far _more_ of emotion and mind-models can be emulated in software than we realize.
Most of our communication and emotional patterns are surprisingly robotic and fall into various known patterns. Read some Robert Anton Wilson (Prometheus Rising is good for this), learn about Leary's circuits, travel off the beaten path into speculative realsm, and you'll find that there are models for lots of this. Imprefect, unproven models to be sure, but there's a start in modeling _lots_ of what makes us human.
Now, whether it will be done in real-time, within my lifetime, I'm not sure.
And never mind the question of whether _human_ intelligence is the only intelligence, or even the most valuable kind of intelligence, to model.
Unfortunately it's the _employers_ out there putting emphasis on a "major" in "Using Microsoft Word Version 6 Build 388.49", and not accepting anyone without an _exact_ match.
Even _with_ extensive personal contacts and 10 years of experience doing things very similar to what employers want, plus a computer science degree, they aren't interested. Rather they want the certification course and degree program of the hour.
Colleges and universities are in league with the HR departments. Need to break the cycle at _both_ ends. Oh, and the software/hardware companies that sell expensive certifications are in league with all of the above. I wouldn't mind the certifications scam if they actually seemed to serve the greater good, but of course it's not valid to expect philanthropy from corporations. Hail to the almighty dollar.
There's been a distinct cultural shift against accepting intelligence and a proven background learning new technologies quickly, and towards only accepting specific training, as if the people hiring have never encountered anyone who learned "by the seat of the pants". Most likely because they themselves learned through some kind of coursework.
Do not misunderstand what constitutes face recognition. Face recognition is done by most people as a reflex action, it's handled by a part of the brain that develops a "snapshot" of the distance between integral facial features.
People without this natural ability can learn some degree of facial recognition by analyzing the face with the apparatus used for regular visual processing. But it takes quite a bit longer, and is more error-prone. It is heavily dependent on lighting, social context, clothing, hairstyles, and posture.
I remember showing up to a show to play with a band; I had played a few shows with them already, and had met all of them in a different environment. I was _entirely_ unable to recognize even the three of them together, I kept asking where my "bandmates" were, and they tried to explain to me that they were the people I was looking for. The lighting was low and red-colored. They were very offended. For the life of me I couldn't make an assessment. Their voices eventually cued me on to who they were.
Don't be so quick to deny the differences in the way people operate in this world. Yes, there are lots of people using things like face-blindness as excuses but they are very real. But just the same, don't let anyone tell you they can't get along in the world just because of face-blindness. It takes some extra effort, but can be done.
I'll leave quality/durability issues of the iBook, positive or negative, for others to discuss. But I've read lots about OS X on iBook.
Lots of Macintosh folks like OS X on the iBook, but they recommend 256M of RAM or even more before it starts responding well. Remember that they haven't had lots of time to optimize for memory/speed, and the system has roots in NextStep, and that camp was always known for very high memory requirements compared to other software of the day.
Adding memory beyond 256MB can significantly reduce swapping; 384MB is a figure I see quoted on the Net as providing good responsiveness. Add too much RAM beyond this break-even point, and the RAM itself starts to be a sink on battery life.
OS X likes to keep LOTS of stuff in the memory subsystem, and will swap to high heaven without sufficient RAM. Eliminate the swapping, and it performs nicely on older G3 laptops and on iBooks.
And I don't think iBoks have the titanium shells.
The fact that most hiring managers don't even _know_ that most UNIX variants have wide areas of similarity makes it even _more_ important that you have contacts on the inside. I administered UNIX systems for 10 years, and have been exposed to just about everything out there, but any job you apply for through a database/resume matching drone will only work if you have the _exact_ brand name and version number that they're looking for.
They just _don't_ understand the similarity even if pointed out to them, and forget it if you've used a different version of Solaris than they're interested in.
Do yourself a favor and do what I never did: Start making contacts among people who do admin work. Go to local user groups and join a professional society. They seem like useless social banter until you end up unemployed because you were clueless about human networking instead of computer networking.
Many people have the misconception that a CS program is about learning programming/networking/admin skills for the workforce. Nope. CS is preparation for getting a master's degree in CS, which is preparation for getting a doctorate in CS, which is prerequisite for working in academia and at the cutting edge of research involving electronic computers and their intersection with mathematics and philosophy.
A CS degree is a great way to get a well-rounded background, perhaps a stint at tech school in parallel with the rest of your CS work would be useful. Or some certification courses in areas you are interested in; those will help your job prospects and take focus off the raw theory into the realm of (barely) practical use.
This is even more true now that HR departments are staffed mostly by people who are clueless about the breadth of a CS education. Without certifications they won't even listen to you, even with 10+ years of experience using the exact technologies they want. It's a cultural shift in the business, one likely to never go away; the people hiring can't imagine anyone having the broad background and intelligence to learn things without taking a certification or tech school program in it, so they assume you're lying when you say "10+ years of experience" and see no such educational path.
make a demo freely available for PalmOS- and Symbian-based devices. Or supply me with a source version I can compile on *nixen besides Linux on Intel.
If it's so incredibly simple in design and implementation, I would think those platforms would exist.