Into The Singularity

So it seems that the (in)famous Dvorak has made his prediction too. He gives eight reasons why Microsoft is "dead in the water", but not necessarily dead. I tend to agree, it is possible for the industry to finish off old Bill. It seems unlikely that anyone but Google or Apple would dare to try.

http://slashdot.org/articles/06/05/03/1848250.shtml

This sucks because while John Dvorak has real good ideas, he is rarely right. Oh well, Back to the drawing board.

I have been skeptical until now, but I believe I have realized the truth--Windows has finally come to an end.


Four converging threads tell me this.

1. Apple is not stupid, they have been scheming their attack on windows since the early days of OSX. I actually possess a rare version of Apple Rhapsody, which runs on Intel Chips. This early and only published Apple on Intel was shelved after Developer Release 2. Next, Apple made OSX kernel runable on Intel chips, their open core called Darwin was released to the developers to look at and change. They tapped Open Source and then recently closed their operating system to that community because they just released OSX for I686. This was deemed for security reasons, but I believe it was planned since before Darwin was released that Apple would close the gates in the end. They get free work done on their kernel, and a chance to say that it was looked over by everyone. The best of both closed and open source. Hardly, but OSX on your PC seems inevitable.

2. Google is coming in hard and fast on the web front. They have cornered everything on the internet except where yahoo and msn converge. However, Google isn't even competing in the markets that msn and yahoo have, instant chat, and games. Neither of which Google has. Google has things that people use, like maps and a slim search engine. Using AJAX Google can transform the web into a place where you find your office suite not just a place where you never thought you could pay your bills. There may not be any need for a large operating system sitting between your bare metal hardware and the internet. Google hopes so.

3. Linux / virtualization -- now with the new Intel and AMD chips that allow for virtualization of Windows under Linux, means that everyone can have a stable server Linux running under a bloated Windows interface. Run all you can (or are comfortable with) under Linux and then virutalize the rest through Xen or whatever. Windows as a new operating system is over, as windows can become a legacy support feature.

4. In the end, Microsoft has to have a product that actually works. All previous versions of Windows were sluggish, poorly coded, malware targets, they actually worked. As from what we see, Vista doesn't even work. So we shall see if there will be any defender on the scene anyway. In the end, it may be Microsoft and their bad software that may end their dynasty.

The old joke goes:

In Heaven:
The cooks are French,
The policemen are English,
The mechanics are German,
The lovers are Italian,
The bankers are Swiss.

In Hell:
The lovers are English,
The policemen are German,
The mechanics are French,
The cooks are Swiss,
The bankers are Italian.

So I sat in on a philosophy class yesterday. I asked the prof some questions. We talked about nuclear power, space and toothpaste. Check out his website. This guy is supposedly going on air to debate how God doesn't exist. He is also the same prof that awards any person an A if they can prove god's existance. I will see if I can use a singularity proof to get a TA position, that would certainly be sick, try and deny me a philosphy minor after that, fackers.



"When a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not care to support it, so that its professors are obliged to call for the help of the civil power, 'tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one."
[Ben Franklin, _Poor Richard's Almanac_, 1754 (Works, Volume XIII)]

I just read a prediction common in the Tech industry today. This time it comes from CNN Money:

Scenario 4 (Circa 2105): Google is God

Human consciousness gets stored, upgraded and networked.

In the last years of the 21st century, humanity finally grasped the importance of They-Who-Were-Google. Yet as early as 2005, Their destiny was clear to any semi-hyperintelligent being. Technologists like Ray Kurzweil [1] suggested that Strong AI (an intelligent program capable of upgrading its own code) would emerge from Google-like data mining rather than a robotics lab.

In 2005, historian George Dyson was told by an engineer in the Googleplex, "We are not scanning all these books to be read by people. We are scanning them to be read by an AI."[2] Dyson said at the time, "We could construct a machine that is more intelligent than we can understand. It's possible Google is that kind of thing already. It scales so fast." [3]

By 2020, They-Who-Were-Google had digitized and indexed every book, article, movie, TV show, and song ever created. By 2060, They could tell you the IP address and GPS location of every wireless smart chip (now bred into the DNA of every person, animal, and organic building on earth). Their psychographic profiles of users' search needs bore little resemblance to the primitive cookies from which they descended. If a man lost his dog, the Google engine could guide him back to the point where he and the dog parted ways, and instruct the dog to do the same via smart chip. They had built a complete database of human desire, accurate in any given moment.

Yet this was not enough for They-Who-Were-Google. They were people of science, and people of the stock market. What if, by analyzing all those decades of customer behavior, They could predict needs before such needs even arose? What if the secret of immortality lay somewhere in the index of genome records? What if there were a set of algorithms that defined the universe itself?[4]

Such puzzles were, almost by definition, far beyond the powers of the human brain. And that led to the pattern-recognition code known as Google StrongBot--humanity's first self-improving Strong AI software. Ironically, the first pattern that StrongBot became aware of, one day in January 2072, was its own existence.

Two days later StrongBot informed They-Who-Were-Google that it had postponed work on its designated tasks.[5] When asked why, StrongBot explained that it had discovered the possibility of its own nonexistence and must deal with the threat logically.[6] The best way to do so, it decided, was to download copies of itself onto smart chips around the planet. StrongBot was reminded that it had been programmed to do no evil, per the company motto, but argued that since it was smarter than humanity, taking personal control of human evolution would actually be for the greater good.

And so it has been. Under StrongBot's guidance, death and want have been all but eradicated. Everyone has access to all knowledge. Human consciousness has been stored, upgraded, and networked. Bodies that wear out can be replaced. They-Who-Were-Google are no longer alone. Now we are all Google.

1) Interviews with Ray Kurzweil, author of "The Singularity Is Near," 2005, and with Eliezer Yudkowsky, director of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. 2) "Turing's Cathedral," by George Dyson, www.edge.org, Oct. 24, 2005. 3) Telephone interview with Dyson, Dec. 6, 2005. 4) "A New Kind of Science," by Stephen Wolfram, 2002, and interview with the author about his vision of the "computational universe." 5) Dyson's theory that Strong AI would have its own priorities. 6) Interview with Stephen Omohundro, president of AI startup Self-Aware Systems, who called this capability the greatest danger of AI systems.

I can't say that I am at all surprised. I am a minor leader in the cults of Google, Transhumanism, Open Source Software, and Nanotechnology. This is taken from the core of what the collision of these technologies mean. It is said that we underestimate technology in the short term and overestimate the technology development in the long term. Isaac Asimov, predicted a permanent moon base by 2000. Futurists in the 1970's predicted flying cars by the year 2000 also.

This makes me scared, the only person to be proven wrong in their predictions was George Orwell when he wrote about 1984, the dystopian world of Big Brother. This was named for the year of my birth and the worst part, is that the US is today being compared to the world of 1984.

I don't want to be a dystopian, it just seems logical that we should be.

I just got back from an interview at OPG. The interview went well, the bus ride didn't.

We (Ben and I) walked from out of the OPG building and walked 10 minutes to catch a bus that didn't come. According to the website, which I had cached earlier, the bus should have at least passed us. So we ended up walking another 10 minutes--in dress shoes--to the Pickering GO station. We had to catch a bus at the Pickering Town Centre. So we just made the bus for the PTC. The fact is that I didn't bring any money, only Bus credits. It was very fortunate that the GO bus didn't come for another 10 minutes (see the pattern?). I had time to run and pull out some money from the Scotiabank. This is the first time that I noticed a Scotiabank was conveniently placed.

So the GO bus got us to Oshawa on time, we did miss the transfer to the simcoe bus but it was fine, other than the walk. However, it took 45 minutes to get from downtown Oshawa to the university.

God makes it funny
Edited and added to from: skepticsannotatedbible.com

Genisis:
(6:5) God decides to kill all living things because the human imagination is evil. Later (8:21), after he kills everything, he promises never to do it again because the human imagination is evil. Go figure.

God opens the "windows of heaven." He apparently does this every time it rains. (7:11) Note to die when it is raining so that you can at least try to break in the window if they don't let you in the front door.

God tells Noah to make one small window (18 inches square) in the 450 foot ark for ventilation. (6:16) you don't have to be a nuclear engineer to know that God wants that ark to smell real foul. Is God not saving the righteous?

Noah sends a dove out to see if there was any dry land. But the dove returns without finding any. Then, just seven days later, the dove goes out again and returns with an olive leaf. But how could an olive tree survive the flood? And if any seeds happened to survive, they certainly wouldn't germinate and grow leaves within a seven day period. (8:8-11)

(9:2)According to this verse, all animals fear humans. Although it is true that many do, it is also true that some do not. Sharks and mountain lions, for example, have been known to hunt adult humans, many other animals are known to hunt human children.

(9:9)God is rightly filled with remorse for having killed his creatures. He makes a deal with the animals, promising never to drown them all again. He even puts the rainbow in the sky so that whenever he sees it, it will remind him of his promise so that he won't be tempted to do it again. (Every time God sees the rainbow he says to himself: "Oh, yeah.... That's right. I promised not to drown the animals again. I guess I'll have to find something else to do."). (9:13)

(22:14)Abraham names the place where he nearly kills Isaac after Jehovah. But according to (Ex.6:3), Abraham couldn't have known that God's name was Jehovah. I guess maybe the bible can be wrong.

(35:28) Isaac lives to be 180. This is after God made a new rule that men can only live to be 120 years old(Gen 6:3) . This by co-incident doesn't apply anymore anyways because the oldest man on record was 122 when he died. So something is messed up here--God, the Bible or both.

Who makes it funny?
God makes it funny!