Unanswerable questions of our time, number one: If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich? And number two: If your new PC’s so much better than your old one, how come it don’t work properly? Having a gigabyte of fast memory and a 2GHz processor is, for a computer, like having a Mensa-grade IQ is for us humans: looks great on paper but in practice it just means you get into more trouble faster. Read the editorial at ZDNet.
Autonomic Computing Changes Gear
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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… because I don’t care making money out of a shitload of things I am really good at. When I do them, there are more than OK, but they are often not what I would wanna do for a living. Maybe I am intelligent because I do certain things a lot better than people who decided to do a living with them, maybe I am stupid because I don’t go for it.
My main PC is 300@450 and for 99% (in time, not apps) you can’t tell the difference to 2 GH…
And btw, intelligence hasn’t measured in IQ for decades anymore… of course, that doesn’t mean IQ-tests are taken any more, only, they are not regarded as a measure of intellinge, so says Mensa themselves…
In order to simplify things, we are going to complicate them. Yeah, that’s right. The computer industry capitalists have their thinking caps on again. “We will make more money by releasing something that’s not new (because making new things costs us too much investment) but that people will be able to believe is new and will desire it?”
If you don’t want to redesign things to make them more efficient and intelligent… throw more layers on top of the old things to try keeping them in order.
This is how we will create a thinking computer system: by accident. The existing bad ideas will continue to get new components stitched to them until there is no person anywhere that knows how to manage them or predict any outcome from any action.
And it will certainly choose to eliminate us.
(yes I’m being silly, now)
What’s the difference between autonomic computing and “regular” computing? I mean, the OS is *already* supposed to handle background stuff like memory management and errant programs. The only thing I got from the article is that they want to increase the range of actions and responses the computer can do without human interference. So, when does that become “autonomic”? Or for that matter, when does that become artificial intelligence?
I mean, you can get the computer to handle any number of activities as long as the programmers can think of them and code a response for them. I guess the real question is how do you get a computer to deal with novel and unexpected problems, the kinds that the programmers didn’t think of?