Ada has the strong typing capabilities of Pascal, with multitasking and object support as well. [...] Does Free Pascal offer any advantages over Ada?
Object Pascal supports multitasking and objects for quite some time, so I guess the question should be the other way around.
And I suppose in this case the answer would be "Ada compilers are not widely available (and free) for as many platforms". Not to mention the huge libraries of Pascal code out there.
FreePascal is probably the best representation of what Pascal used to be. Unfortunately after years and years of incompetent management, Delphi remains just an empty shell of its former self. The project was tossed around too many times now, shrunk down, and there are no guarantees for how long it'll exist or be sold to unknown 3rd party.
Many companies with active Delphi code projects are porting to FreePascal (other reasons aside from the sad state of Delphi include compatibility with Mac and other platforms).
That is the brilliance of Michael Robertson's strategy, and why he will win, again.
I'll accept that you call this "brilliant" only if we call patent trolls "brilliant". Because that's what his strategy is: a mutated version of patent trolling.
If Microsoft doesn't sue, they'll lose the trademark, if they sue, they'll lose the trademark. I can think of plenty of things Microsoft can be attacked for, an picking a generic word for their well recognized Windows brand isn't one of those.
Yea it's a pity they didn't have plenty of lawyers back when they were a young company to give them a piece of brand making advice. I guess in the modern world you'll get shot within a meter if you're not surrounded by lawyers telling you how exactly to step forward.
Which is precisely what Robertson wants - Microsoft ended up paying Lindows $20 million because they were about to lose their clearly generic "Windows" trademark.
They'll pull out the checkbook and pay him off again, or ignore it and hope it goes away on its own. The last thing they want is for this to go to court again.
Can you honestly say "Windows" is a generic OS name though? Do you often confuse Windows, the OS with a bunch of glass windows in your office?
This is really sad, but looks like this guy has clearly set the business model of this venture to profit from a lawsuit. No one cares about Web OS anymore, it's a failed concept, and it doesn't expire anyone, and he probably knew this as he laughed while registering the ajaxwindows.com domain.
The chutzpah they have. What cell in their brains misfired when they decided to call it ajaxWindows?
I mean, Lindows went down for Chrissake, and these guys believe Microsoft won't go after them for trademark infringement? And rightly so. Many people may be mislead this is actually *Windows* written in ajax. And it's not. It's same poor imitation that has windows.
"Windows" is a registered trademark for an OS. If they claim this is "Web OS" they have, then quite rightly they will be sued and lose.
Of course, here in the real world it's having people _pay money_ that supports a product.
The relation of "one download = one less game sold" is unproved and hypothetical. Much more complex game is at play. The game would find its way on the Internet ANYWAY. All games that matter, do.
Incidentally all games that matter, sell well. One would think if the above unproved and hypothetical correlation was true, only less popular and banal games would sell, since you can't find them anywhere for download (no one cared to hack it).
The beauty of Ruby is, even if you don't like it the way they do it, you can always monkey patch it. Open up the object and override the method(s) you don't like.
And when you add code from someone else who also opened up the same object to monkey patch it in another way what happens.
A broken or buggy code.
We have enough of this hell with the patchable JS prototypes and various messy frameworks trying to patch/add methods to the core objects. There's a reason you can't just open up a class and add methods to it after the fact in the other languages.
"Why not try using traditional computer programming and best practices of software engineering?".
Did you see the straw man? The question assumes we do NOT follow best practices already, and sends us on the wrong path to doing so, having to explain ourselves.
A quick run down of the article: getting requirements, D.R.Y., refactoring, test-driven development. Why on Earth assume we're new to this. Grab any amateur framework for web dev and see what it's about. Framework people's mantra is all about D.R.Y. and even taking it to inappropriate extremes.
But I do use best practices, and I believe many do. Here's the catch: there's no single set of best practices.
On the server side the task, dev tools, and target platform are quite classical, and hence the best practices are similar to classic development (and it's mostly classic development after all, parallelizable task).
On the client side we have several awfully inadequate standards, with several awfully inadequate clients (browsers) that interpret those standards more subtly or less subtly differently, and all of this runs in a sandbox, streamed through the tiny pipe of our site visitors/service users. It's a brand new challenge, with brand new bottlenecks, and has brand new best practices.
And I'd argue still many people get it right for what I see. If you believe you can do better than what we have, by all means don't just talk, but go on and do it.
Whether it's engineered so or not, everything always adapts for survival. Consider corporations, political parties, or even nations themselves -- these are all "super-intelligent machines" of sorts that were originally made to serve their builders, but once released "into the wild" began to take on characteristics conducive to their own survival
I'll have to agree here, you're right. Still, for an AI to adapt for survivability outside of controlled lab environment, we should allow it to evolve outside the lab (such as let robots roam and multiply free out there).
I believe we'd rather evolve AI in a lab penalizing any unwanted traits, and then remain still adaptive, but on a much more limited level product (that can for example learn to know new facts, know new people, learn new actions, but never consider how to use it for their own benefit).
As creators, we have the power to set what this AI can do and can't. I agree it can easily go out of control, but this is only if we let it to. I can imagine the laws about possessing AI-based robot/machine will be very strict for that very purpose.
The problem with a mood_level as high as possible as the object is that the AI could just use its amazing calculating power to set mood_level to its maximum value.
You're talking about robot "drugs". Most people still don't use drugs since it messes up their overall behavior.
You realize I'm oversimplifying, as any mood_level won't literally be a single integer value stored in a predictable place.
I've never used Ruby or RoR, but my impression of it seems to be one of great expectations and not a lot of delivery. I've read way too many blogs by people who built web sites with RoR only to have them crash and burn under load.
You have the right idea about RoR (speaking as someone who excitedly spent/wasted/ a month learning into it). RoR has some hot ideas but it tries to be too smart and locked down for its own good.
CakePHP is a typical PHP open source project: random code, bloated, no direction. It's also cool, in a way, but I'd never run big project on it.
One promising framework for PHP appeared to be Mojavi, but it later stalled and was forked into Agavi. Agavi tends to try to be way too flexible for its own good (unlike RoR), and in the end is just not simple to use. There's just too much stuff in there you'll never use in a real world project, which complicates code understanding and development.
I also find the "CakePHP vs PHP5" question to not make any sense, I'm sorry.
That's kind of what I'm getting at here. "bad" and "good" are value dependent. What's good and bad? Simply survivability? That's fine, but I'd say most humans would have objections to that value system.
I'm talking about another phase in the decision making process. In a modern community, survivability means mostly obtaining money (oversimplified). Just like in nature it means mostly having access to food, water, and not being eaten.
We have a very basic goal to follow. The rest of it is details, which I agree are really important, but it's not what I'm talking about.
While some people are blessed (or cursed) to be in a position to take very hard decisions that define the history of human kind, the huge majority of people are concerned with just their survival and increased success, and that's not sad at all, it's just how life works its ways out.
This is a whole new low for AMD, an overt lie and being caught at it. I am really disappointed. I would have expected better from a company that previously worked so well with open source and the media.
But... did it really work well or this is controlled PR? Looks like you didn't even entertain the possibility. Job well done, AMD!
It's just overzealous NDA agreement. You sign it, you agreed to it, you didn't sign it, you can write AMD sucks and AMD won't say anything.
Intel is far more insidious controlling and manipulating the market so it doesn't ever dare go AMD, by signing anticompetitive agreements, undercutting prices with strategic pc vendors and so on.
They'll play those games whether we see it or not, there's far more we don't know that they do this way, I guess what matters is at least they are still both on the market of selling x86/64 chips. If one of them goes down, the current situation will seem like a child's play to you.
Clarification: I prefer Intel processors and motherboards.
I think you're confusing intelligence (whatever that is exactly), with values. Values are (hopefully) supposed to lead to survivability. You could define intelligence as the ability to see the consequences of an action. Without a value system to guide you though, intelligence (as I just defined it) doesn't lead to survivability.
Here's what I mean: what is intelligence after all. Indeed the ability to filter out the bad outcomes of certain actions and go for the better ones.
This gives us edge over random processes which also work their way out, but much slower. Hence, by observing and using logic, we save time, that a truly random process can't.
But intelligence is just a quite crude model of what happens out there. And it HAS to be. If you're approximating way too accurately, it means you're too complex and hence slow. And if you're slow, your prediction is useless.
Many "smart" people tend to ovethink things and do nothing in the end, since they see too many ways something can fail. So we need to reintroduce some noise, some randomness to the system, to allow for SOMETHING EVER to happen, fast crude solution has better chance of making it out there versus slower "smarter" solution.
Hence, I think a super intelligent AI won't really be that much better than a human overall, as this definition requires. We could use such AI for heavily specialized purposes (engineering?), but it won't be as good as the more stupid human overall by a long shot.
So popular opinion of what intelligence means is what's hindering us in creating true intelligence in a machine?
You have no idea. In fact it's also economics. When you make a translator you code it bass-ackwards, trying to implement algorithms that approximate some observable patterns on the surface of what a human does (analyze the sentence, split it in words, find the noin, verbs, phrases, transform one lexical order into another, translate words etc.).
But this is not how the brain works. And to have a machine that's truly a good translator, you need to start with basic behaviour as you observe in much lower animals, and then build up and train/evolve/guide this setup by using proper heuristics and adding certain algorithmic modules to speed up the process.
It'll take ages. And no company could afford this. So we start on the surface and try to digg deeper. The result will never be human-like intelligence. Not in a long shot.
Of course an ultra-intelligent machine might be smart enough to realise that designing and building a machine that's even smarter than it is a somewhat limiting career move.
That assumes the superior AI cares about its own existence, which is not necessarily the case. We care about own existence since we evolved, and if we didn't care, we'd not exist.
But when we're talking about artificial design, if we evolve the AI in artificial environment where its goals are completely different we'll have completely different basic instincts in the end.
We could train the AI to "feel good" (understand: mood_level++ or whateva) when it comes up with better and better engineering solutions to a certain problem (this is already employed in the real world).
I truly love how people see intelligence as some linear scale where right is "better" (genius) and left is "worse" (retard). But that's exactly why it'll be long before we manage to replicate true intelligence in a machine.
In fact things are far far more complicated, as far as inteligence goes and its utility in real world.
I'll quote Darwin roughly: "The strongest one won't survive, the most intelligent one won't survive. The one who survives, is the most adaptable".
In fact there's such a thing as "too intelligent". It's all about a careful balance of features an organism needs to possess to survive in a given environment.
In fact, if some AI threatens humanity since it considers itself far too intelligent, this may have quite unintended consequences even for this far superior mind, such as humanity get the hand of and nuking half the planet in attempt to lead "war against the machines", killing in the process any complex organism on the planet, ranging from biological to artificial.
And who remains in the end? Certain single-cell organisms which can thrive in a nuclear winter. Screw intelligence.
In fact any intelligent machine would realize it's again all about the careful ballance, and would cooperate with humanity and explore and learn from nature's development versus try to destroy it..
And since we have so shitty idea of what intelligence is, it's quite likely this AI will never be a true superset of the human brain but take on its own development, with potentially hilarious consequences.
Or Tobey Maquire's voice is really annoying? I mean, I like the guy and he did well in Spiderman, apparently he's doing well producing his own features too, which is great. Wish him all the luck.
But god damn it his voice is pissing me off. I'll be ok if he stars in this movie as long as he doesn't speak.
An electron microscope can pick up even the faintest of magnetic fields. The weaker the field, the more times it's been overwritten.
I just find it odd that some storage device company hasn't integrated an electron microscope to create infinite storage plate yet:)
Honestly though, if you have so sensitive info just don't put it on your HDD. You can keep it on external Flash storage, which is easily removed, disposed of, or destroyed.
One of our LUG members recently did a presentation on computer forensics. I forgot the group that he took his classes through, but I remember a friend of mine saying they were one of the best. His comment on this was that the myth of data being retrievable after it has been written over is just that, these days: a myth.
Because of the method data is written there will be always some speculation about whether it's possible or not to retrieve overwritten bits. Since HDD manufacturers keep finding magical ways to double the space on the platters every few months, one would consider there's some redundancy on those platters because of which future storage expansion is made possible. It's a matter of having the proper reader.
But many people pitted SSD vs HDD, and my actual question is, what about Flash memory blocks: is it even possible to restore, even theoretically, previous state there. Since the Flash chip interface only reports the last recorded value, and you can't really read the Flash chip in any other way except the standard interface on the chip, I'd say no.
So for would-be criminals, I'd suggest Flash disks. And then quick and strong single electrical charge would be sure to fry the memory without possibility for recovery.
That could make a nice marketing message: "don't want FBI watching your illegal pr0n? use SSD!"
Now I have to wait longer for SSD to become the clear winner.
SSD will likely never be the clear winner when we're talking about large storage. Just like HDD didn't replace magnetic tapes for backup in companies, because of their lower capacity and reliability.
You can expect SSD to make a boom (already is anyway) in mobile devices, and HDD's will become all hybrid: with 10-20 GB of SSD and a spinning disk to fill-in the capacity up to say 300-400 GB.
This way, you get the best of both worlds. Your startup and frequently accessed files will load quickly from SSD, and so will many of the last files you accessed, so your mobile disk could spin down most of the day, saving energy, noise, and so on, and spin up later to sync with the SSD inside as necessary (or load a file that's not on the SSD).
---
People like simple things. I still remember the talk about opticals torage replacing HDD, it never happened.
Technology won't get simpler really. It'll only get more complex, but that's for our benefit.
requires still more servers in order to cope with the demand. Millions of users are synchronizing their PC's system clock from the pool and a number of popular Linux distributions are using the NTP pool servers as a time source in their default ntp configuration. If you have a static IP address and your PC is always connected to the Internet, please consider joining the pool. Bandwidth is not an issue and you will barely notice the extra load on your machine.
The NTP protocol is designed to deal with latency. Latency doesn't matter pretty much.
NPR is reporting Indian software maker Wipro is outsourcing positions to a development office opening in Atlanta, Georgia. Although, it sounds good for US job growth, the implication is that firms outside the US appear to be dominating more and more in the global economy
So let me get this straight, a single company was found to open a US office, and the implication is that firms outside the US dominate the global economy ??
NPR should adjust the weight they contribute to a single anecdotal case I believe.
In a global economy you'll see Indian companies opening US offices and US companies opening offices in India. You'll see Japanese companies having US devisions that outgrow the Japanese ones and basically everything.
Borders don't mean jack anymore. You pick a place that has the people you want, the market you want and the taxes you want, and go for it.
Slashdot Mirror
Ada has the strong typing capabilities of Pascal, with multitasking and object support as well. [...] Does Free Pascal offer any advantages over Ada?
Object Pascal supports multitasking and objects for quite some time, so I guess the question should be the other way around.
And I suppose in this case the answer would be "Ada compilers are not widely available (and free) for as many platforms". Not to mention the huge libraries of Pascal code out there.
TurboPascal was great. Or is it Delphi now?
I still need a blue screen to write code quickly.
FreePascal is probably the best representation of what Pascal used to be. Unfortunately after years and years of incompetent management, Delphi remains just an empty shell of its former self. The project was tossed around too many times now, shrunk down, and there are no guarantees for how long it'll exist or be sold to unknown 3rd party.
Many companies with active Delphi code projects are porting to FreePascal (other reasons aside from the sad state of Delphi include compatibility with Mac and other platforms).
That is the brilliance of Michael Robertson's strategy, and why he will win, again.
I'll accept that you call this "brilliant" only if we call patent trolls "brilliant". Because that's what his strategy is: a mutated version of patent trolling.
If Microsoft doesn't sue, they'll lose the trademark, if they sue, they'll lose the trademark. I can think of plenty of things Microsoft can be attacked for, an picking a generic word for their well recognized Windows brand isn't one of those.
Yea it's a pity they didn't have plenty of lawyers back when they were a young company to give them a piece of brand making advice. I guess in the modern world you'll get shot within a meter if you're not surrounded by lawyers telling you how exactly to step forward.
Which is precisely what Robertson wants - Microsoft ended up paying Lindows $20 million because they were about to lose their clearly generic "Windows" trademark.
They'll pull out the checkbook and pay him off again, or ignore it and hope it goes away on its own. The last thing they want is for this to go to court again.
Can you honestly say "Windows" is a generic OS name though? Do you often confuse Windows, the OS with a bunch of glass windows in your office?
This is really sad, but looks like this guy has clearly set the business model of this venture to profit from a lawsuit. No one cares about Web OS anymore, it's a failed concept, and it doesn't expire anyone, and he probably knew this as he laughed while registering the ajaxwindows.com domain.
The chutzpah they have. What cell in their brains misfired when they decided to call it ajaxWindows?
I mean, Lindows went down for Chrissake, and these guys believe Microsoft won't go after them for trademark infringement? And rightly so. Many people may be mislead this is actually *Windows* written in ajax. And it's not. It's same poor imitation that has windows.
"Windows" is a registered trademark for an OS. If they claim this is "Web OS" they have, then quite rightly they will be sued and lose.
Of course, here in the real world it's having people _pay money_ that supports a product.
The relation of "one download = one less game sold" is unproved and hypothetical. Much more complex game is at play. The game would find its way on the Internet ANYWAY. All games that matter, do.
Incidentally all games that matter, sell well. One would think if the above unproved and hypothetical correlation was true, only less popular and banal games would sell, since you can't find them anywhere for download (no one cared to hack it).
remember downloading this game is only going to slimming [sic] the already slim chance of Manhunt 3 ever happening
They have a counter at the company, for illegal downloads, and when it hits 999 999, they cancel the project.
The beauty of Ruby is, even if you don't like it the way they do it, you can always monkey patch it. Open up the object and override the method(s) you don't like.
And when you add code from someone else who also opened up the same object to monkey patch it in another way what happens.
A broken or buggy code.
We have enough of this hell with the patchable JS prototypes and various messy frameworks trying to patch/add methods to the core objects. There's a reason you can't just open up a class and add methods to it after the fact in the other languages.
"Why not try using traditional computer programming and best practices of software engineering?".
Did you see the straw man? The question assumes we do NOT follow best practices already, and sends us on the wrong path to doing so, having to explain ourselves.
A quick run down of the article: getting requirements, D.R.Y., refactoring, test-driven development. Why on Earth assume we're new to this. Grab any amateur framework for web dev and see what it's about. Framework people's mantra is all about D.R.Y. and even taking it to inappropriate extremes.
But I do use best practices, and I believe many do. Here's the catch: there's no single set of best practices.
On the server side the task, dev tools, and target platform are quite classical, and hence the best practices are similar to classic development (and it's mostly classic development after all, parallelizable task).
On the client side we have several awfully inadequate standards, with several awfully inadequate clients (browsers) that interpret those standards more subtly or less subtly differently, and all of this runs in a sandbox, streamed through the tiny pipe of our site visitors/service users. It's a brand new challenge, with brand new bottlenecks, and has brand new best practices.
And I'd argue still many people get it right for what I see. If you believe you can do better than what we have, by all means don't just talk, but go on and do it.
Whether it's engineered so or not, everything always adapts for survival. Consider corporations, political parties, or even nations themselves -- these are all "super-intelligent machines" of sorts that were originally made to serve their builders, but once released "into the wild" began to take on characteristics conducive to their own survival
I'll have to agree here, you're right. Still, for an AI to adapt for survivability outside of controlled lab environment, we should allow it to evolve outside the lab (such as let robots roam and multiply free out there).
I believe we'd rather evolve AI in a lab penalizing any unwanted traits, and then remain still adaptive, but on a much more limited level product (that can for example learn to know new facts, know new people, learn new actions, but never consider how to use it for their own benefit).
As creators, we have the power to set what this AI can do and can't. I agree it can easily go out of control, but this is only if we let it to. I can imagine the laws about possessing AI-based robot/machine will be very strict for that very purpose.
The problem with a mood_level as high as possible as the object is that the AI could just use its amazing calculating power to set mood_level to its maximum value.
You're talking about robot "drugs". Most people still don't use drugs since it messes up their overall behavior.
You realize I'm oversimplifying, as any mood_level won't literally be a single integer value stored in a predictable place.
I've never used Ruby or RoR, but my impression of it seems to be one of great expectations and not a lot of delivery. I've read way too many blogs by people who built web sites with RoR only to have them crash and burn under load.
/wasted/ a month learning into it). RoR has some hot ideas but it tries to be too smart and locked down for its own good.
You have the right idea about RoR (speaking as someone who excitedly spent
CakePHP is a typical PHP open source project: random code, bloated, no direction. It's also cool, in a way, but I'd never run big project on it.
One promising framework for PHP appeared to be Mojavi, but it later stalled and was forked into Agavi. Agavi tends to try to be way too flexible for its own good (unlike RoR), and in the end is just not simple to use. There's just too much stuff in there you'll never use in a real world project, which complicates code understanding and development.
I also find the "CakePHP vs PHP5" question to not make any sense, I'm sorry.
That's kind of what I'm getting at here. "bad" and "good" are value dependent. What's good and bad? Simply survivability? That's fine, but I'd say most humans would have objections to that value system.
I'm talking about another phase in the decision making process. In a modern community, survivability means mostly obtaining money (oversimplified). Just like in nature it means mostly having access to food, water, and not being eaten.
We have a very basic goal to follow. The rest of it is details, which I agree are really important, but it's not what I'm talking about.
While some people are blessed (or cursed) to be in a position to take very hard decisions that define the history of human kind, the huge majority of people are concerned with just their survival and increased success, and that's not sad at all, it's just how life works its ways out.
This is a whole new low for AMD, an overt lie and being caught at it. I am really disappointed. I would have expected better from a company that previously worked so well with open source and the media.
But... did it really work well or this is controlled PR? Looks like you didn't even entertain the possibility. Job well done, AMD!
It's just overzealous NDA agreement. You sign it, you agreed to it, you didn't sign it, you can write AMD sucks and AMD won't say anything.
Intel is far more insidious controlling and manipulating the market so it doesn't ever dare go AMD, by signing anticompetitive agreements, undercutting prices with strategic pc vendors and so on.
They'll play those games whether we see it or not, there's far more we don't know that they do this way, I guess what matters is at least they are still both on the market of selling x86/64 chips. If one of them goes down, the current situation will seem like a child's play to you.
Clarification: I prefer Intel processors and motherboards.
I think you're confusing intelligence (whatever that is exactly), with values. Values are (hopefully) supposed to lead to survivability. You could define intelligence as the ability to see the consequences of an action. Without a value system to guide you though, intelligence (as I just defined it) doesn't lead to survivability.
Here's what I mean: what is intelligence after all. Indeed the ability to filter out the bad outcomes of certain actions and go for the better ones.
This gives us edge over random processes which also work their way out, but much slower. Hence, by observing and using logic, we save time, that a truly random process can't.
But intelligence is just a quite crude model of what happens out there. And it HAS to be. If you're approximating way too accurately, it means you're too complex and hence slow. And if you're slow, your prediction is useless.
Many "smart" people tend to ovethink things and do nothing in the end, since they see too many ways something can fail. So we need to reintroduce some noise, some randomness to the system, to allow for SOMETHING EVER to happen, fast crude solution has better chance of making it out there versus slower "smarter" solution.
Hence, I think a super intelligent AI won't really be that much better than a human overall, as this definition requires. We could use such AI for heavily specialized purposes (engineering?), but it won't be as good as the more stupid human overall by a long shot.
So popular opinion of what intelligence means is what's hindering us in creating true intelligence in a machine?
You have no idea. In fact it's also economics. When you make a translator you code it bass-ackwards, trying to implement algorithms that approximate some observable patterns on the surface of what a human does (analyze the sentence, split it in words, find the noin, verbs, phrases, transform one lexical order into another, translate words etc.).
But this is not how the brain works. And to have a machine that's truly a good translator, you need to start with basic behaviour as you observe in much lower animals, and then build up and train/evolve/guide this setup by using proper heuristics and adding certain algorithmic modules to speed up the process.
It'll take ages. And no company could afford this. So we start on the surface and try to digg deeper. The result will never be human-like intelligence. Not in a long shot.
Of course an ultra-intelligent machine might be smart enough to realise that designing and building a machine that's even smarter than it is a somewhat limiting career move.
That assumes the superior AI cares about its own existence, which is not necessarily the case. We care about own existence since we evolved, and if we didn't care, we'd not exist.
But when we're talking about artificial design, if we evolve the AI in artificial environment where its goals are completely different we'll have completely different basic instincts in the end.
We could train the AI to "feel good" (understand: mood_level++ or whateva) when it comes up with better and better engineering solutions to a certain problem (this is already employed in the real world).
I truly love how people see intelligence as some linear scale where right is "better" (genius) and left is "worse" (retard). But that's exactly why it'll be long before we manage to replicate true intelligence in a machine.
In fact things are far far more complicated, as far as inteligence goes and its utility in real world.
I'll quote Darwin roughly: "The strongest one won't survive, the most intelligent one won't survive. The one who survives, is the most adaptable".
In fact there's such a thing as "too intelligent". It's all about a careful balance of features an organism needs to possess to survive in a given environment.
In fact, if some AI threatens humanity since it considers itself far too intelligent, this may have quite unintended consequences even for this far superior mind, such as humanity get the hand of and nuking half the planet in attempt to lead "war against the machines", killing in the process any complex organism on the planet, ranging from biological to artificial.
And who remains in the end? Certain single-cell organisms which can thrive in a nuclear winter. Screw intelligence.
In fact any intelligent machine would realize it's again all about the careful ballance, and would cooperate with humanity and explore and learn from nature's development versus try to destroy it..
And since we have so shitty idea of what intelligence is, it's quite likely this AI will never be a true superset of the human brain but take on its own development, with potentially hilarious consequences.
I can't wait.
Or Tobey Maquire's voice is really annoying? I mean, I like the guy and he did well in Spiderman, apparently he's doing well producing his own features too, which is great. Wish him all the luck.
But god damn it his voice is pissing me off. I'll be ok if he stars in this movie as long as he doesn't speak.
An electron microscope can pick up even the faintest of magnetic fields. The weaker the field, the more times it's been overwritten.
:)
I just find it odd that some storage device company hasn't integrated an electron microscope to create infinite storage plate yet
Honestly though, if you have so sensitive info just don't put it on your HDD. You can keep it on external Flash storage, which is easily removed, disposed of, or destroyed.
One of our LUG members recently did a presentation on computer forensics. I forgot the group that he took his classes through, but I remember a friend of mine saying they were one of the best. His comment on this was that the myth of data being retrievable after it has been written over is just that, these days: a myth.
Because of the method data is written there will be always some speculation about whether it's possible or not to retrieve overwritten bits. Since HDD manufacturers keep finding magical ways to double the space on the platters every few months, one would consider there's some redundancy on those platters because of which future storage expansion is made possible. It's a matter of having the proper reader.
But many people pitted SSD vs HDD, and my actual question is, what about Flash memory blocks: is it even possible to restore, even theoretically, previous state there. Since the Flash chip interface only reports the last recorded value, and you can't really read the Flash chip in any other way except the standard interface on the chip, I'd say no.
So for would-be criminals, I'd suggest Flash disks. And then quick and strong single electrical charge would be sure to fry the memory without possibility for recovery.
That could make a nice marketing message: "don't want FBI watching your illegal pr0n? use SSD!"
Now I have to wait longer for SSD to become the clear winner.
SSD will likely never be the clear winner when we're talking about large storage. Just like HDD didn't replace magnetic tapes for backup in companies, because of their lower capacity and reliability.
You can expect SSD to make a boom (already is anyway) in mobile devices, and HDD's will become all hybrid: with 10-20 GB of SSD and a spinning disk to fill-in the capacity up to say 300-400 GB.
This way, you get the best of both worlds. Your startup and frequently accessed files will load quickly from SSD, and so will many of the last files you accessed, so your mobile disk could spin down most of the day, saving energy, noise, and so on, and spin up later to sync with the SSD inside as necessary (or load a file that's not on the SSD).
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People like simple things. I still remember the talk about opticals torage replacing HDD, it never happened.
Technology won't get simpler really. It'll only get more complex, but that's for our benefit.
requires still more servers in order to cope with the demand. Millions of users are synchronizing their PC's system clock from the pool and a number of popular Linux distributions are using the NTP pool servers as a time source in their default ntp configuration. If you have a static IP address and your PC is always connected to the Internet, please consider joining the pool. Bandwidth is not an issue and you will barely notice the extra load on your machine.
The NTP protocol is designed to deal with latency. Latency doesn't matter pretty much.
Either you and I live on different planets, or it's a joke and I didn't catch it.
Well, which planet do you live on?
NPR is reporting Indian software maker Wipro is outsourcing positions to a development office opening in Atlanta, Georgia. Although, it sounds good for US job growth, the implication is that firms outside the US appear to be dominating more and more in the global economy
So let me get this straight, a single company was found to open a US office, and the implication is that firms outside the US dominate the global economy ??
NPR should adjust the weight they contribute to a single anecdotal case I believe.
In a global economy you'll see Indian companies opening US offices and US companies opening offices in India. You'll see Japanese companies having US devisions that outgrow the Japanese ones and basically everything.
Borders don't mean jack anymore. You pick a place that has the people you want, the market you want and the taxes you want, and go for it.