One year ago today: May 5, 2013, home-made ROM.
Five years ago today: May 5, 2009, the heist.
Early this morning I rode to the mall to pick up a new kryptonite bike lock and returned to find some kind soul had left this spanking new Pentium motherboard with 4meg RAM slots on my doorstep. I’ll have that running by nightfall. You know something odd I found? People out there are overly suspicious of enabling the computer terminal function. They’ll plug into the Internet no qualms but they go weird when you enable two computers to talk on the shop bench. Strange in the brain, those people. I found out about this phobia while asking around if anyone knew how to use ISP instead of terminal IDs.
There was no Internet but instead we had bulletin boards. They were much the same in content. Dating (except it was 99% geeks), used cars, and a lot of tech talk. But there were terminal services and I’m curious if they still exist. They were quite secure compared to packet switching (Internet).
Then in 1991, along came browsers that made the Internet so easy that the masses could use it. The original big browsers were clunky affairs. Many browsers were free to consumers but businesses had to pay for them. The best one on the market was Netscape Navigator, the worst was AOL’s “portal”, a type of poor-man’s browser. And the one that spread viruses was Internet Explorer. So, you ask, how did Internet Explorer gain such huge market share? Illegally, that’s how.
Who remembers the big MicroSoft anti-trust trial last century? The government proved MicroSoft had used illegal methods, but I remain displeased on how the prosecution “proved” it. Take the example that MicroSoft claimed that their browser (Internet Explorer) was an integral part of their operating system. All that was necessary would have been to hold up the separate installation disks that were available for Win 95. There was no need for endless hours of cross-examination. Unless, that is, someone is billing by the hour. The mere existence of separate disks solidly shows that if the bowser later became part of Windows, it is because MicroSoft deliberately put it there.
My displeasure is that the prosecution chose not to present any simple and compelling evidence. They relied totally on slick but computer-illiterate lawyers to trip up every executive MicroSoft put on the stand. Without ever knowing any material facts, it was enough to verbally trap each witness using only lawyer talk. I understand this ability carries real status in the legal profession. Yet, I fundamentally disagree with theatrics having such an influential role in the courtroom. It’s bad enough when pretty women do not go to jail, we don’t need a justice system that consistently favors personality over facts and logic. It smacks of job protectionism.
For those unfamiliar with what MicroSoft was doing wrong, it is broadly called suppression of trade. The way capitalist America works is the powerful established businesses could easily band together and wipe out any upstarts. There are so few railroads because the existing companies used to ship freight for free until any new ventures went under. So it was with Windows, which was intended to be an operating system, not a “bundle” of extra applications like word processing or games.
MicroSoft does not like competition. They began to integrate Internet Explorer in with Win 98 and onwards. They’d claim this software could not be removed without degrading system performance. Thus, when you purchased a computer with Windows, it also had Internet Explorer pre-installed. Why is that anti-trust? Because in that era, it took around a half-hour just to download Netscape on a modem, even if you knew how to install the program. That was the company MicroSoft was trying to bankrupt and MicroSoft succeeded.
MicroSoft saw that if Netscape kept growing like it was, that might eventually take Internet market share away from Redmond. There are precedents. I remember when running Windows would disable Apple video software and lock up Java. MicroSoft had previously wiped out [the spreadsheet] Lotus 1-2-3. By injecting a glitch in Win 95 that caused Lotus 1-2-3 to malfunction, it caused businesses flock to MicroSoft Office, which included a spreadsheet called Excel. (MicroSoft miraculously fixed the browser gremlin shortly after Lotus declared bankruptcy.) Never get to thinking MicroSoft is big business because they provide a superior product.
End of history lesson.
What’s this article about a blood exchange in rats reversing the aging process? I’ve always said it was a protein process and further that it was genetically based. They only need to find the gene that allows aging and there’s your Fountain of Youth. But there will be severe side effects. Imagine the cost of keeping somebody the size of Bernie Madoff in prison for 250 years. Do we really want another hundred years of Kim Il Jong? And who wants Justin Beiber around in 2020, much less 2320? Just remember, when the genetic link is finally discovered, you read it here first. Okay, so maybe I’m not the first overall, but first to make it understandable.
ADDENDUM
I stayed up till 1:00AM reading on AI, or A.I., for artificial intelligence. Several articles say the date they exceed humans in capability is 2029. That’s pessimistic because for unknown reasons, a lot of people think a robot has to pitted against the very best humans to be rated a success. Not so at all. Look at some facts. Wallace loved to brag about his family, how one of his nephews was a teenage chess champ that could wax me. This is probably true, because I can’t play chess. (I did it once and found it to be only slightly less boring than the people who can.) Here’s the reality.
See that old Pentium 486 in my corner? Give me a week and I could design an algorithm on that piece of junk that would defeat 99.9999999% of all humans on Earth. And that’s good enough for me to conclude computers are already smarter than most people. And that includes the people who think setting up a society that favors the masses is going to save themselves. This got me thinking why some people think A.I. is so difficult. Ah, because they think the computer code has to have a routine for every conceivable situation.
Why do they think that? Because people who only “think” they are smart do think in exactly that way. These are the people who think they’ve seen it all. That they can become smart enough to have a procedure for every conceivable event. You know the sort of pea-brains I mean. But even chess does not work that way. Chess is a series of set moves and that is all that has to be programmed. Just the rules, not the moves.
The way it works is I don’t even have to know which move wins the game. I simply have to know the statistics. Calculate the odds for the maximum 16 pieces which has the highest probability of success and keep choosing that for each subsequent move. Like the robot battle I described a few days back, my first few games will be lost, but after that there will be no repeat mistakes. Consider the following.
While the total number of possible moves is immense, only a tiny subset have any potential for victory. The robot need only play a few games to calibrate itself to win, probably within the first few opening moves. So much for all the whiz kids on the block. They are thus already substantially dumber than my oldest, slowest computer. The situation is much worse, for in the videos I watched, when asked what they considered important in a robot the most common answer was, “Load my dishwasher.”
We are doomed.
I further conclude one main reason intelligent robots are slow to arrive is the way A.I. is presented. If you’ve ever seen those decision tree models or sentence parsing, I think they are a waste of time. If I wanted to defeat humankind, the last thing I would do is try to duplicate anthropoidal thinking and speech. I’d write code to win, not waste time trudging along at the creature level. I don’t know, but I’d guess that explains why the early IBM computers needed so much power. They were trying to win every game against an expert. Robots only have to win 50.0001% of the time, guys.
