From my perspective as an AI / neuroscience researcher, the main weakness in his approach is that he only thinks about the cortex...
No disrespect, but don't you see the fact that none of you can all agree on anything (within this domain) as a bad sign? You're all bright individuals. But it's very similar to the fact that philosophers don't uniformly agree on any philsophical viewpoint. That's because there's nothing concrete that can be said in that domain, as has already been understood for centuries by Zen masters. Or the fact that the profileration of self-help books proves that none of them work.
I mean, I'm sure every AI researcher believes that the A* search is a practical way to arrive at a solution to a certain class of problems. But that won't help you pass the Turing test.
Does it ever occur to you that the brain you study was not manufactured based on any model or draft? If there were, it would be a lot easier to extract that model and agree on it. I don't think "we're not there yet" cuts the mustard. Look at physics. Geniuses have been refining that model for centuries. And where did they end up? Quantum physics, which almost flat out tells them "you'll never know anything more" right within its own theories.
It's true that many computer programmers have delusions about what the things their craft can make possible. Hell, just look at the scheduling problems on just about any development project. Arguably, all programmers are delusional about their ability.
However, you weaken your own point by bringing up "heresy". You're not going to sway anybody that way. Nobody gives a crap about heresy. A heretic belief is one that that goes against the beliefs of some (religious) authority. Big deal. Those authorities are all human. By fancying themselves authorities, they are being just as vain as the people they condemn for not following them.
I'm not going to touch the "god" thing because that word is a homynym with several intended meanings depending on the speaker. You could have simply proposed that it's impossible to encode the process of life. That's what it comes down to. The living moment is just plain ungraspable in words or any other sort of code. That includes the function of a human brain.
It's not that the brain is "too complex". It's that it's just way too simple. As soon as you speak about any kind of code, language or programming you're already way more complex than a brain is, and there's no way to work backward from that. I believe this, and I'm sure most people on Slashdot don't, but it's a better argument than yours. No need to bring your personal religious inclinations into it.
This is because every child, quite literally, makes his own brain, through growth.
Can you really stand by this claim? I mean, do you believe you grew your own brain? If you said you grew that plant sitting in the pot on the shelf, I would believe you because you watered it regularly, etc. But when the cells started to divide in your mother's womb, where were you?
Well, not completely. A spokesperson for the product is reported saying:
Our customers are happy with the level of protection that our product offers. Normally, the amount of security is sufficient, not everyone has the technical expertise that you have.
This is quite a different statement from the one made near the start of the article.
The stick was commissioned by the French government and - according to the company's press release - the result is revolutionary, ultra safe and approved by the French intelligence service.
Funny part is, all they did was run the program in a debugger, put a breakpoint after the clearly labelled "VerifyPassWord" function, and change the return value from 0 to 1. Pretty embarassing. But the article went pretty easy on them after that. Really good read by the way.
Most GH fans that own the PS2 GH1 is most GH fans. Xbox Live Marketplace is targeting the remainder. And within that remainder, those willing to part with more than $2 per song. I hope they enjoy selling to 8 people.
Anyone who falls into the category of a Guitar Hero addict already owns all of these songs on Guitar Hero 1 for PS2.
But if that's a good deal to you, I'm also willing to sell you your own car. I'm also having a sale on that shirt and pants you're wearing. Totally worth it.
Then you need the Harmonix group to separate the guitar tracks from the vocals, and the second guitar tracks from the vocals (why this has to be a live recording rather then using an MP3 from Itunes). Then finally you have to make a note chart for all four difficulties as well as a note chart for co-op. Test them to make sure they aren't too hard or easy.
Your point would be much more valid if they hadn't already done all of that... 18 months ago. These are all recycled Guitar Hero 1 songs. Most GH fans can play them right now, without spending any extra money, by popping the disc in their PS2.
If Red Octane and Harmonix had recorded some new content, exclusive to Xbox Live Marketplace, that would be exciting, and totally worth it. But they didn't. As it stands, this is just a lazy and obvious cash-grab attempt.
Yes, exactly. In fact, very few people in the world really get excited about Web 2.0 apps. But, being on the web, these people are a very vocal minority. They blog about it, and stuff. So as an observer, if you're easily fooled, you might walk away with the impression that Web 2.0 apps are huge. "much-dominated web age" as the summary puts it.
Google Maps and some other things are great, and everything, but it only goes so far. The web platform is a piece of crap platform to develop desktop applications on. It wasn't even designed to be a platform, and it still isn't. You can do it, and people will use your stuff, but it's never going to "trump" the desktop for desktop-oriented tasks.
When you wrote "assess", for a second I thought you said you need to count the number of "asses" sitting in front of Macs vs PCs. That would be accurate.
If you're downloading games and patches, you should probably use your home Internet connection, and not Verizon's outdoor-wireless service. I don't think you really need to download America's Army at the beach.
If I implement a language on one platform, and you implement the same language on a completely different platform, any program written in that language will now run just fine on both platforms.
You mean "Write Once, Run Anywhere" like in Java? You know how that ended up turning out, right?
If you make a career outside of the very sheltered world of Xbox and PS3 programming, you'll see that endless performance tweaking in very low level languages is not only useless, but it is wastefully stupid.
I've had an array of development experience, and I will say that game console programming is, in fact, less sheltered than other environments. The whole point of the higher-level approach used in other types of development is that it shelters you. And the performance tweaking that we do is not endless. It ends when we ship. And while it's a must to understand assembly (the very low level language you must be referring to), nobody writes in it. The closest you get is a few compiler intrinsics.
Anyway, I feel like I'm writing this more for your benefit than for my own.
Yeah, they're looking ahead too eagerly. That's what academics do.
Let's not forget that Intel and IBM both recently found a manufacturing process to keep Moore's law going for the next several years. Most people in 2006 thought we hit a wall, and that the multicore revolution was inevitably under way, but that just might not be true anymore. That said, it is always nice to have at least a few cores in available in your system.
At the same time, AMD's Fusion strategy looks pretty interesting. I really wonder what's going to become of that.
I recently shipped an Xbox 360 game and am about to ship a PS3 game, and having done a lot of system-level programming and optimization for both, I can tell you don't know what you're talking about. You're probably a smart guy and a good programmer but you're obviously speaking out of academic experience without having much real-world experience.
The key to performance and stability does not lie in the discovery of high-level tools that abstract away all the hardware details for you. And it definitely doesn't lie in a functional language. They key is knowing your hardware and designing your software for it, right down to the low level. You have to create and manage your tasks/jobs/threads/fibers, each to do a specific thing, and you manage their lifetimes and the flow of data between them. If want need more performance, you need clever ways of pipelining your data.
Anyway, just thought I'd share that. If you make a career in programming, you'll eventually learn that having a low-level understanding of each platform, and just using existing tools, is far more productive than trying to research and develop new programming tools. I'm downloading TFA's video right now, look forward to hearing whatever it is they have to say.
MP3 patents have generated tens of millions in royalty payments for the nonprofit Fraunhofer, including $143 million in 2005, when the number of companies buying MP3 licenses peaked.
Presumably then, MP3 technology is going to net Fraunhofer over $1 billion over its lifetime.
Does this strike anyone else as kind of ridiculous? I mean, it's nice that cool inventions are rewarded. But $1 billion for one invention? I feel like this is the flipside of how patent law skews things in computer science. The other side being the cases where a tiny company is sued out of existence for using a linked list.
I can't help but scratch my head when people talk about Wikipedia having a shaky reputation. Look at the About Wikipedia page. Nowhere do they claim to be reliable or authoritative source of information. They fully disclose the fact that they're an encyclopedia "project" that anyone can edit. Everyone knows it. And that's what they are. I always thought you have to be found making false claims in order to gain a bad reputation. But I don't see any false claims here.
As for the content, of course the quality of it is questionable. You know what website you're looking at. What do you expect? It doesn't mean Wikipedia failed. They are what they say they are. Of course they'll never reach the refined, well-edited state of a traditional encyclopedia. But nobody is demanding you to pay $1500 for a gold-trimmed set of Wikipedia volumes sitting on your shelf either.
Maybe people criticize Wikipedia because they use the "encyclopedia" moniker. But this is just semantics. Wikipedia has expanded the meaning of what an "encyclopedia" can be. But if you're narrow-minded and you think "encyclopedia" must mean "something that is always right", of course you'll end up complaining.
Is nobody else actually impressed by the quality of the entries they visit? When Wikipedia started, I expected pure crap. I still expect most of it to be crap. So it's a pleasant surprise to find to find good stuff, and there's a lot of really good stuff. (The entries on discrete cosine transformation, network protocols, and a lot of religions come to mind.) For many subjects, there was no source of information on the web with an equivalent level of quality before Wikipedia. People should appreciate that and stop whining. You're on the damn Internet, you should expect garbage everywhere.
As for the guy faking a bunch of degrees, I'm not surprised. At least he didn't fake his way into a job. He faked his way onto a free encyclopedia project. Like that's a big revelation: There's a weirdo on the Internet. You can only wonder why he went to all the trouble. Anyway, it doesn't change Wikipedia's reputation at all in my eyes. The site is still exactly the site it claims to be.
So please anybody who feels the urge to do so, don't always keep bringing up how OS X on the iPhone will change the landscape.
OK, after reading the whole chain of comments leading up to this point, I see the point you were making. Your point is that the fact that the iPhone will "run on OS X" is, technically, irrelevant. And you are totally right. I don't think "OS X on the iPhone will change the landscape" either. I don't care if the iPhone runs on OS X or grilled cheese. It's neither here nor there. And in fact, it's pretty obvious the OS really won't be OS X. At best, it will be a port, with a similar but reduced API. Like Windows CE. The only reason why Apple brags "it will run on OS X" is because of a marketing strategy. They know that people will enjoy the iPhone, and they want to fool people into believing OS X is the reason for it. If people believe that, they might then think, "Hey, Apple has computers that run on OS X, too." It's pretty obvious strategy.
However, you got modded up by gadget-tinkering nerds because you pointed out the iPhone being a closed platform. That's what spurred me to reply. The name of the OS has nothing to do with that.
Although you're being sarcastic, yours is the only comment I've seen in this thread which points out exactly why it's boneheaded to compare the 2007 iPhone with the 1993 Newton.
The Newton was based 100% on its handwriting recognition, and the handwriting recognition didn't work. The iPhone, on the other hand, is not based on handwriting recognition.
There's only one reason why anyone would write an article comparing the two devices, and that is, to be an ass.
Come on, it just isn't important for the iPhone to be "open".
Think of the iPhone as being closed in the same sense that the Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, PSP and DS are all "closed". Because that's exactly the sense in which it's going to be closed. It doesn't mean there will be no third-party developers. It means that all third-party products will have to pass Apple's technical certification requirements. It's quality control. Video game platforms have done this for decades.
The only drawback is that guys like you and me won't be able to write crappy homebrew software for the iPhone and upload it to whatever website. But Apple never promised us the ability to do that. So who cares? If you want to tinker with hardware, there's plenty of other hardware out there to tinker with. And besides, it's a safe bet the iPhone will be hacked open just like every other closed platform anyway. It just won't be authorized.
Why not concentrate on the bottlenecks rather than what is already one of the fastest components in any system?
RAM speed is one of the biggest bottlenecks on your system. It's called a cache miss. When your CPU tries to access data outside its local cache, it has to wait for that cache line to come from system RAM. Your CPU currently spends a huge fraction of its execution time doing that. If IBM can provide a significantly faster type of system RAM, they can reduce that huge fraction, which would noticeably speed up the entire system.
Cache misses are also the whole reason why hyperthreading ended up being a good idea: it minimizes the amount of time wasted during cache misses. If system RAM was always able to deliver memory without any latency, there would not have been any point to hyperthreading.
You're just attaching a different definition to the word "extension". You took it to mean "consequence" or "result". I intended for it to mean "inseparable part".
Interestingly, though, how do you really know the earth doesn't spring from us? You're basing your assertion on a big body of evidence collected in books and fossils and scientific theories. But you weren't actually there in person to confirm there was an earth that existed before you did. I realize it sounds like an absurd way of invalidating your point. But it's interesting when you consider that according to Taoism, all dualities emerge simultaneously, mutually creating each other. There may be some truth to that.
Slashdot Mirror
No disrespect, but don't you see the fact that none of you can all agree on anything (within this domain) as a bad sign? You're all bright individuals. But it's very similar to the fact that philosophers don't uniformly agree on any philsophical viewpoint. That's because there's nothing concrete that can be said in that domain, as has already been understood for centuries by Zen masters. Or the fact that the profileration of self-help books proves that none of them work.
I mean, I'm sure every AI researcher believes that the A* search is a practical way to arrive at a solution to a certain class of problems. But that won't help you pass the Turing test.
Does it ever occur to you that the brain you study was not manufactured based on any model or draft? If there were, it would be a lot easier to extract that model and agree on it. I don't think "we're not there yet" cuts the mustard. Look at physics. Geniuses have been refining that model for centuries. And where did they end up? Quantum physics, which almost flat out tells them "you'll never know anything more" right within its own theories.
It's true that many computer programmers have delusions about what the things their craft can make possible. Hell, just look at the scheduling problems on just about any development project. Arguably, all programmers are delusional about their ability.
However, you weaken your own point by bringing up "heresy". You're not going to sway anybody that way. Nobody gives a crap about heresy. A heretic belief is one that that goes against the beliefs of some (religious) authority. Big deal. Those authorities are all human. By fancying themselves authorities, they are being just as vain as the people they condemn for not following them.
I'm not going to touch the "god" thing because that word is a homynym with several intended meanings depending on the speaker. You could have simply proposed that it's impossible to encode the process of life. That's what it comes down to. The living moment is just plain ungraspable in words or any other sort of code. That includes the function of a human brain.
It's not that the brain is "too complex". It's that it's just way too simple. As soon as you speak about any kind of code, language or programming you're already way more complex than a brain is, and there's no way to work backward from that. I believe this, and I'm sure most people on Slashdot don't, but it's a better argument than yours. No need to bring your personal religious inclinations into it.
Can you really stand by this claim? I mean, do you believe you grew your own brain? If you said you grew that plant sitting in the pot on the shelf, I would believe you because you watered it regularly, etc. But when the cells started to divide in your mother's womb, where were you?
Well, not completely. A spokesperson for the product is reported saying:
This is quite a different statement from the one made near the start of the article.
Funny part is, all they did was run the program in a debugger, put a breakpoint after the clearly labelled "VerifyPassWord" function, and change the return value from 0 to 1. Pretty embarassing. But the article went pretty easy on them after that. Really good read by the way.
Well at this rate, you'll be able to download it from Marketplace for $97.92.
Most GH fans that own the PS2 GH1 is most GH fans. Xbox Live Marketplace is targeting the remainder. And within that remainder, those willing to part with more than $2 per song. I hope they enjoy selling to 8 people.
Anyone who falls into the category of a Guitar Hero addict already owns all of these songs on Guitar Hero 1 for PS2.
But if that's a good deal to you, I'm also willing to sell you your own car. I'm also having a sale on that shirt and pants you're wearing. Totally worth it.
Your point would be much more valid if they hadn't already done all of that... 18 months ago. These are all recycled Guitar Hero 1 songs. Most GH fans can play them right now, without spending any extra money, by popping the disc in their PS2.
If Red Octane and Harmonix had recorded some new content, exclusive to Xbox Live Marketplace, that would be exciting, and totally worth it. But they didn't. As it stands, this is just a lazy and obvious cash-grab attempt.
Yes, exactly. In fact, very few people in the world really get excited about Web 2.0 apps. But, being on the web, these people are a very vocal minority. They blog about it, and stuff. So as an observer, if you're easily fooled, you might walk away with the impression that Web 2.0 apps are huge. "much-dominated web age" as the summary puts it.
Google Maps and some other things are great, and everything, but it only goes so far. The web platform is a piece of crap platform to develop desktop applications on. It wasn't even designed to be a platform, and it still isn't. You can do it, and people will use your stuff, but it's never going to "trump" the desktop for desktop-oriented tasks.
I guess only a genius would pay a 50%-100% premium to get that 1080 native display.
By the way, a 720p signal is going to look worse on your 1080 native display than it does on a 720 native display.
When you wrote "assess", for a second I thought you said you need to count the number of "asses" sitting in front of Macs vs PCs. That would be accurate.
If you're downloading games and patches, you should probably use your home Internet connection, and not Verizon's outdoor-wireless service. I don't think you really need to download America's Army at the beach.
You mean "Write Once, Run Anywhere" like in Java? You know how that ended up turning out, right?
I've had an array of development experience, and I will say that game console programming is, in fact, less sheltered than other environments. The whole point of the higher-level approach used in other types of development is that it shelters you. And the performance tweaking that we do is not endless. It ends when we ship. And while it's a must to understand assembly (the very low level language you must be referring to), nobody writes in it. The closest you get is a few compiler intrinsics.
Anyway, I feel like I'm writing this more for your benefit than for my own.
Yeah, they're looking ahead too eagerly. That's what academics do.
Let's not forget that Intel and IBM both recently found a manufacturing process to keep Moore's law going for the next several years. Most people in 2006 thought we hit a wall, and that the multicore revolution was inevitably under way, but that just might not be true anymore. That said, it is always nice to have at least a few cores in available in your system.
At the same time, AMD's Fusion strategy looks pretty interesting. I really wonder what's going to become of that.
I recently shipped an Xbox 360 game and am about to ship a PS3 game, and having done a lot of system-level programming and optimization for both, I can tell you don't know what you're talking about. You're probably a smart guy and a good programmer but you're obviously speaking out of academic experience without having much real-world experience.
The key to performance and stability does not lie in the discovery of high-level tools that abstract away all the hardware details for you. And it definitely doesn't lie in a functional language. They key is knowing your hardware and designing your software for it, right down to the low level. You have to create and manage your tasks/jobs/threads/fibers, each to do a specific thing, and you manage their lifetimes and the flow of data between them. If want need more performance, you need clever ways of pipelining your data.
Anyway, just thought I'd share that. If you make a career in programming, you'll eventually learn that having a low-level understanding of each platform, and just using existing tools, is far more productive than trying to research and develop new programming tools. I'm downloading TFA's video right now, look forward to hearing whatever it is they have to say.
Presumably then, MP3 technology is going to net Fraunhofer over $1 billion over its lifetime.
Does this strike anyone else as kind of ridiculous? I mean, it's nice that cool inventions are rewarded. But $1 billion for one invention? I feel like this is the flipside of how patent law skews things in computer science. The other side being the cases where a tiny company is sued out of existence for using a linked list.
That's like basing the reputation of Apache on the quality of the websites which use it.
I can't help but scratch my head when people talk about Wikipedia having a shaky reputation. Look at the About Wikipedia page. Nowhere do they claim to be reliable or authoritative source of information. They fully disclose the fact that they're an encyclopedia "project" that anyone can edit. Everyone knows it. And that's what they are. I always thought you have to be found making false claims in order to gain a bad reputation. But I don't see any false claims here.
As for the content, of course the quality of it is questionable. You know what website you're looking at. What do you expect? It doesn't mean Wikipedia failed. They are what they say they are. Of course they'll never reach the refined, well-edited state of a traditional encyclopedia. But nobody is demanding you to pay $1500 for a gold-trimmed set of Wikipedia volumes sitting on your shelf either.
Maybe people criticize Wikipedia because they use the "encyclopedia" moniker. But this is just semantics. Wikipedia has expanded the meaning of what an "encyclopedia" can be. But if you're narrow-minded and you think "encyclopedia" must mean "something that is always right", of course you'll end up complaining.
Is nobody else actually impressed by the quality of the entries they visit? When Wikipedia started, I expected pure crap. I still expect most of it to be crap. So it's a pleasant surprise to find to find good stuff, and there's a lot of really good stuff. (The entries on discrete cosine transformation, network protocols, and a lot of religions come to mind.) For many subjects, there was no source of information on the web with an equivalent level of quality before Wikipedia. People should appreciate that and stop whining. You're on the damn Internet, you should expect garbage everywhere.
As for the guy faking a bunch of degrees, I'm not surprised. At least he didn't fake his way into a job. He faked his way onto a free encyclopedia project. Like that's a big revelation: There's a weirdo on the Internet. You can only wonder why he went to all the trouble. Anyway, it doesn't change Wikipedia's reputation at all in my eyes. The site is still exactly the site it claims to be.
This reminds me of the movie Idiocracy. The guy ends up in the future, and is mistakenly identified as Mr. "Not Sure" by the ID processing machine.
I guess it was running Windows Genuine Advantage.
OK, after reading the whole chain of comments leading up to this point, I see the point you were making. Your point is that the fact that the iPhone will "run on OS X" is, technically, irrelevant. And you are totally right. I don't think "OS X on the iPhone will change the landscape" either. I don't care if the iPhone runs on OS X or grilled cheese. It's neither here nor there. And in fact, it's pretty obvious the OS really won't be OS X. At best, it will be a port, with a similar but reduced API. Like Windows CE. The only reason why Apple brags "it will run on OS X" is because of a marketing strategy. They know that people will enjoy the iPhone, and they want to fool people into believing OS X is the reason for it. If people believe that, they might then think, "Hey, Apple has computers that run on OS X, too." It's pretty obvious strategy.
However, you got modded up by gadget-tinkering nerds because you pointed out the iPhone being a closed platform. That's what spurred me to reply. The name of the OS has nothing to do with that.
Although you're being sarcastic, yours is the only comment I've seen in this thread which points out exactly why it's boneheaded to compare the 2007 iPhone with the 1993 Newton.
The Newton was based 100% on its handwriting recognition, and the handwriting recognition didn't work. The iPhone, on the other hand, is not based on handwriting recognition.
There's only one reason why anyone would write an article comparing the two devices, and that is, to be an ass.
Come on, it just isn't important for the iPhone to be "open".
Think of the iPhone as being closed in the same sense that the Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, PSP and DS are all "closed". Because that's exactly the sense in which it's going to be closed. It doesn't mean there will be no third-party developers. It means that all third-party products will have to pass Apple's technical certification requirements. It's quality control. Video game platforms have done this for decades.
The only drawback is that guys like you and me won't be able to write crappy homebrew software for the iPhone and upload it to whatever website. But Apple never promised us the ability to do that. So who cares? If you want to tinker with hardware, there's plenty of other hardware out there to tinker with. And besides, it's a safe bet the iPhone will be hacked open just like every other closed platform anyway. It just won't be authorized.
RAM speed is one of the biggest bottlenecks on your system. It's called a cache miss. When your CPU tries to access data outside its local cache, it has to wait for that cache line to come from system RAM. Your CPU currently spends a huge fraction of its execution time doing that. If IBM can provide a significantly faster type of system RAM, they can reduce that huge fraction, which would noticeably speed up the entire system.
Cache misses are also the whole reason why hyperthreading ended up being a good idea: it minimizes the amount of time wasted during cache misses. If system RAM was always able to deliver memory without any latency, there would not have been any point to hyperthreading.
They're equal. And for the record, I didn't argue what makes a "good" game.
You're just attaching a different definition to the word "extension". You took it to mean "consequence" or "result". I intended for it to mean "inseparable part".
Interestingly, though, how do you really know the earth doesn't spring from us? You're basing your assertion on a big body of evidence collected in books and fossils and scientific theories. But you weren't actually there in person to confirm there was an earth that existed before you did. I realize it sounds like an absurd way of invalidating your point. But it's interesting when you consider that according to Taoism, all dualities emerge simultaneously, mutually creating each other. There may be some truth to that.