Comment Re:The Text (Score 1) 727
What do you think this is, wikipedia?[citation needed]
Cultural References
"What do you think this is, Wikipedia?" was referenced in an episode of Family Guy, when Stewie BUSH SUCK RETRADS HAHAHAH
Comment Re:Firefox actually seems to be better known (Score 5, Insightful) 290
I think this is going to play havoc on people's understanding of the internet. Most people already think IE is the internet, but at least they knew that google was a thing on the internet. Now Google is going to be another internet that looks like a sort of three-colored button, next to the old internet that looks like a blue "e", and on both you can have Google, but you can't have the blue e on the Google internet.
Expect some calls from confused family members, people.
Comment Re:Yes. (Score 1) 794
This also means that various software updates need to be installed when the machine boots, which makes a boot time of 15 minutes seem quite realistic (these corporate software management systems are usually horrible pieces of crap).
Comment Re:pettyness (Score 3, Funny) 231
I think if you're shitting on your junk, you've got a problem to begin with.
Comment Re:godelstheorem? (Score 1) 209
That depends on where the nondeterminism comes from. If it arises from a chaotic process, then the system (if not the exact behavior) can be modeled in a computer. Computers can approximate this kind of non-determinism very well. (Strictly speaking it's deterministic, but given some non-zero measuring error it becomes non-deterministic).
If the non-determinism stems from some quantum process, and this is truly the key to intelligence then there may be some trouble (I think this is Penrose's thesis), but I really seriously doubt that this is the case. Neurons by themselves are pretty simple machines. It's the fact that there's 20 billion of them that makes AI a difficult question.
The emergence of intelligence from a large interconnected network of simple machines is the problem. I can't imagine that the whole system is chaotic, but small bits of it may be, to provide some kind of randomness to the brain. Considering how easy it is to write a random number generator on a deterministic computer, I doubt this will be a big part of the problem either.
Comment Re:English names only? (Score 1) 277
Don't you love it when the Slashdot moderation system cuts off the set up, and leaves only a punchline like this?
Wikipedia's New Definition of Truth 428
Hugh Pickens writes "Simson Garfinkel has an interesting essay on MIT Technology Review in which he examines the way that Wikipedia has redefined the commonly accepted use of the word 'truth.' While many academic experts have argued that Wikipedia's articles can't be trusted because they are written and edited by volunteers who have never been vetted, studies have found that the articles are remarkably accurate. 'But wikitruth isn't based on principles such as consistency or observability. It's not even based on common sense or firsthand experience,' says Garfinkel. What makes a fact or statement fit for inclusion is verifiability — that it appeared in some other publication, but there is a problem with appealing to the authority of other people's written words: many publications don't do any fact checking at all, and many of those that do simply call up the subject of the article and ask if the writer got the facts wrong or right. Wikipedia's policy of 'No Original Research' also leads to situations like Jaron Lanier's frustrated attempts to correct his own Wikipedia entry based on firsthand knowledge of his own career. So what is Wikipedia's truth? 'Since Wikipedia is the most widely read online reference on the planet, it's the standard of truth that most people are implicitly using when they type a search term into Google or Yahoo. On Wikipedia, truth is received truth: the consensus view of a subject.'"
Opera Develops Search Engine For Web Developers 31
nk497 writes "The Metadata Analysis and Mining Application (MAMA) doesn't index content like a standard search engine, but looks at markup, style, scripting and the technology behind pages. Based on those existing MAMA-ed pages, 80.4 per cent of sites use cascading style sheets (CSS), while the average web page has 47 markup errors and 16,400 characters. Should you want to know which country is using the AJAX component XMLHttpRequest the most, MAMA can tell you that it's Norway, with 10.2 per cent of the data set."
Additional coverage is available at Computerworld, and a deeper explanation is up at Opera's Dev site.
Are We Searching Google, Or Is Google Searching Us? 346
An anonymous reader writes "The folks at the Edge have published a short story by George Dyson, Engineer's Dreams. It's a piece that fiction magazines wouldn't publish because it's too technical and technical publications wouldn't print because it's too fictional. It's the story of Google's attempt to map the web turning into something else, something that should interest us. The story contains some interesting observations such as, 'This was the paradox of artificial intelligence: any system simple enough to be understandable will not be complicated enough to behave intelligently; and any system complicated enough to behave intelligently will not be simple enough to understand.' After you read it, you'll be asking the same question the author does — 'Are we searching Google, or is Google searching us?'"
Internet Based Political "Meta-Party" For Massachusetts 227
sophiachou writes "The Free Government Party, a non-profit, open source political 'meta-party' focused on providing citizens with more direct control of Congress through online polling and user-drafted bills, seems to be looking for a candidate to endorse for US Representative of Massachusetts' 8th Congressional District. If you're from the Boston area, you might have seen this already on Craigslist. The chosen candidate will be bound by contract to vote in Congress only as do his or her constituents online. However, they don't seem to be going for direct democracy. To make voting convenient, you can select advisers to cast your votes for you, unless you do so yourself. Supposedly, interviews for the candidate position are already underway. Anyone from MA's 8th Congressional District on Slashdot already apply?"
Casting Doubt On the Hawkeye Ball-Calling System 220
Human judgment by referees is increasingly being supplemented (and sometimes overridden) by computerized observation systems. nuke-alwin writes "It is obvious that any model is only as accurate as the data in it, and technologies such as Hawkeye can never remove all doubt about the position of a ball. Wimbledon appears to accept the Hawkeye prediction as absolute, but researchers at Cardiff University will soon publish a paper disputing the accuracy of the system."
Are C and C++ Losing Ground? 961
Pickens writes "Dr. Dobbs has an interesting interview with Paul Jansen, the managing director of TIOBE Software, about the Programming Community Index, which measures the popularity of programming languages by monitoring their web presence. Since the TIOBE index has been published now for more than 6 years, it gives an interesting picture about trends in the usage of programming languages. Jansen says not much has affected the top ten programming languages in the last five years, with only Python entering the top 10 (replacing COBOL), but C and C++ are definitely losing ground. 'Languages without automated garbage collection are getting out of fashion,' says Jansen. 'The chance of running into all kinds of memory problems is gradually outweighing the performance penalty you have to pay for garbage collection.'"
'Death Star' Aimed at Earth 400
An anonymous reader writes "A spectacular, rotating binary star system is a ticking time bomb, ready to throw out a searing beam of high-energy gamma rays that could lead to a major extinction event — and Earth may be right in the line of fire. Australian science magazine Cosmos Magazine reports: 'Though the risk may be remote, there is evidence that gamma ray bursts have swept over the planet at various points in Earth's history with a devastating effect on life. A 2005 study showed that a gamma-ray burst originating within 6,500 light years of Earth could be enough to strip away the ozone layer and cause a mass extinction. Researchers led by Adrian Melott at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, U.S., suggest that such an event may have been responsible for a mass extinction 443 million years ago, in the late Ordovician period, which wiped out 60 per cent of life and cooled the planet.'"
IE8 Will Be Standards-Compliant By Default 383
A number of readers wrote in to make sure we know about Microsoft's change of heart regarding IE8. The new version of the dominant browser will render in full standards mode by default. Developers wishing to use quirks mode for IE6- and IE7-compatible rendering will have to opt in explicitly. We've previously discussed IE8's render mode a few times. Perhaps Opera's complaint to the EU or the EU's record antitrust fine had something to do with Redmond's about-face.
Google Funds Work for Photoshop on Linux 678
S point 2 writes "Google has announced that they have hired Codeweavers, maker of the popular Wine software to make Photoshop run better on Linux. 'Photoshop is one of those applications that desktop Linux users are constantly clamoring for, and we're happy to say they work pretty well now...We look forward to further improvements in this area.' It is unknown whether or not the entire Creative Suite will be funded for support, but for the time being it seems Photoshop-on-Linux development is getting a new priority under Google."
