Category Archives: computers

Firefox problems

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UPDATE:  Your Firefox extensions acting up could also be the problem.  I’m checking this now and have removed several like “StumbleUpon, a custom toolbar, and a Video downloader.   If this works I’ll try reinstalls to see if I can duplicate the problem but in meantime see this list of problems for extensions: Firefox Extension problems.

I should have listened to Mark Cuban some weeks ago when he noted the problems with Firefox.   I’d been chalking up the slowdowns and surfing problems to a problem 512meg chip I’m in the process of replacing in the laptop, but it’s now clear the trouble is with Firefox.     I just reinstalled the latest version 2.0.0.7 and still no luck – as a process Firefox quickly grows to absorbing 99% of my CPU capacity and everything slows to a crawl.   I’m using IE for now until this shakes out or my new chip brings me to 1 meg RAM on this laptop which should be enough to compensate for the problem.   I read somewhere that Firefox could be using all of my 512 meg as part of normal operations, and that his is *not* a firefox memory leak.

So, if you are experiencing the Firefox problems consider more memory or switching to IE!

Why “recursive self improvement” could be the key to enlightenment.

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This excellent article by Michael Anissimov describes two versions of how things could shake out in the coming Artificial Intelligence revolution, and suggests that it’s more likely strong AI (that is, computer-like devices that think pretty much like we do) will lead to an explosive increase in intelligence as a result of “recursive self improvement”.    The idea is that the intelligent machines will operate much faster than our brains can function, but will also tend to improve on their own designs.  

For humanity, design improvements on our brain architecture have been a very-very slow process governed primarily by evolutionary challenges.  Basic analytical intelligence almost certainly emerged in animals as an adaptive advantage in terms of survival.   Unlike our cousins the higher apes, human brain power has combined with community history to allow us to build technologies that last through many generations, and more importantly to *improve* as new people grapple with new problems.  This technological explosion is a fairly recent phenomenon but should still be considered a very slow process compared to the type of progress you would expect to see in an environment driven purely towards advancing the technologies surrounding “intelligence”.

If Anissimov and many others in strong AI research are correct, the time between the advent of conscious, recursively self improving computers and a massive explosion of intelligent machines could be very small – a few years or even possibly just a few moments.    

Currently, we humans do a handful of physical transformations that take us off of the slow evolutionary treadmill.   Glasses are a simple technology that changes us.   Corneal transplant and heart stints are “advanced” technological enhancments to our bodies.    Cell phones and computers are technological enhancements to our brains (and yes, the company called “BrainGate” has now connected computer chips directly to brains allowing human brains to directly interface with computers to do simple tasks).   

Still,  earth’s painstakingly slow evolutionary processes has yet to develop a creature that will be able to rebuild itself every few days into a vastly superior version of the former self.   We appear to be within a few  decades of that type of entity.

The implications of this re-evolutionary development cannot be overestimated. 

Wrapping up day 3 of SES San Jose Search Strategies Conference

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For great session coverage of SES see the following sites:

SEO Roundtable

Search Engine Land

SEOmoz

Bruce Clay

Technorati “SES” tag

TopRank Blog

Yesterday’s “Is Buying Links Evil” was by far the most interesting and heated of the sessions. Google’s Matt Cutts was under heavy fire from Todd Malicoat and Michael Gray regarding Google’s aggressive policies on paid linking and the application of the NOFOLLOW tag. The best question came from Rand Fishkin who asked Matt Cutts if it would be preferable to do without NOFOLLOW and have better, scalable, algorithmic ways to determine link relationships. Matt indicated it would and this gets to the huge middle ground in the paid linking debate. I think SEO folks, especially those who worked back in the gravy days of massive paid linking, should have expected Google to crack down on the practice but I would *strongly* criticize Google for not bringing more transparency to this issue by clarification of their paid link penalty structure and what appears to be a lot of leniency for paid linking in many situations. Many links, such as those a brief aquaintance might give to another person who opens a new website, are probably in line with guidelines but are essentially identical in structure to a paid link. In this case adding nofollow is totally inappropriate since the goal is to indicate a mild endorsement of the new site. I suspect this type of link is treated favorably by Google and I’m wildly guessing that they err on the side of not penalizing this type of link, but that is not clearly indicated in the policy statements or in the talks I’ve had with Google search folks. This failure to clarify, combined with Google asking for “help” in finding paid links, has led to more frustration in the Webmaster community than Google thinks it has caused. One indication of this was the huge applause given to parts of the “anti Google” presentations yesterday. As always Matt Cutts handles this with great composure and I think a very sincere desire to make things work well for all players, but I’d recommend that Google really examine the linking policies carefully and issue a detailed and full clarification of “legitimate linking practices” with, literally, thousands of examples. Will this be reverse engineered for SEO benefit? Yes, but if it’s written correctly it can improve the web rather than leading to confusion about linking and the rampant continued use of paid linking schemes.

Links are a big theme here and I’m now off to Danny Sullivan’s session on “Search Engine Q&A On Links”

The Mind of the Machine … is you?

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I think I like Kurzweil’s optimistic AI scenarios more than this version of reality
that posits we are all computer simulations run by a more advanced intellect which itself may be a computer simulation.

This sounds fanciful, but I’d suggest that this type of philosophical speculation is a lot more pragmatic and reasonable than the Jean Paul Sartre silliness I studied in Philosophy classes back in the 1980’s.

Kurzweil’s very reasonable suggestion is that we’ll soon have conscious, very intelligent computers. He also suggests that these machines will quickly lead to a sort of cosmic explosion of intellect that would easily be capable of massive “simulations” of intelligent life. What if this already has happened? One thing that bugs me about Kurzweil’s ideas is that it seems totally unreasonable to suggest that our feeble earth / human technologies will be the first to make this jump to massive cosmic intelligence. The idea that we’d be the first to do this seems very unreasonable to me given the age of the universe. Our universe has been around for about 15 billion years and we are not all that amazing. I’d think many intelligent creatures would have come around by now. If Kurzweil is right it seems at least a few of these would have made the leap to the singularity-style intellects.

How to reconcile these things? My gut feeling is that we really are physical, evolutionarily designed, meat and potato biological beings who have a capacity to think and reflect that is a product of the massive processing power of the bunches of neocortical columns and synaptic firing that goes on in our brains. Kurzweil is right about the rise of intelligent machines – coming soon to a virtual theater near all of us – but he’s wrong about the exploding cosmic intellect. There will be limitations – probably based on physical laws of our universe relating to speed of light and other constraints – that will prevent us from becoming “too big”. This explains why we’ve (probably) had no contact with other intelligent beings – we are just too far away and unfortunately we live at the edge of our galaxy where presumably a lot fewer intelligences exist than nearer the center.

David Berlind’s dumb and dumber hypothesis is right on

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David Berlind is a very insightful writer over at ZDNET and I loved yesterday’s post. David observes that those who think we should not complain about computer problems are *dumb*. He also notes that even dumber are those that think their ability to solve computer problems means that others are idiots.

I’ve fixed my share of problems and as any regular computer user *must* note, many times the fixes are counter intuitive or lucky. Generally the problems that are easiest are those you spent many hours suffering with at some previous time. There’s nothing more annoying than wannabe pseudo-expert PC-hardware-hack jerks who make others feel bad after they stumble on a solution rather than noting that computers still suck in many respects. They’ve come a long way and it’s not reasonable to suggest it’s easy to redesign things to work seamlessly, but it’s downright ridiculous to suggest we should not try. Things are improving but they have a long way to go, so I agree with David and say:

Keep on complaining!

(just keep it polite – that will work better anyway)

Waiting for OnRebate ‘s “no wait” rebate?

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Update:  OnRebate replied to this post, and I think that is nice of them.

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My son just assembled a new and very fast PC from parts we bought at TigerDirect, but suffering through the rebate submission process is sure diminishing the educational value of this for me. Even though he’s doing much of the paperwork himself I just spent close to an hour figuring out the silly details and going offline, online, and printing the various forms required.

I suppose it’s teaching him something, though so far it is mostly “why is dad cursing at the rebate people?”.

Onrebate.com is processing 2 of the 5 rebates we are due. From a technical point of view the system seemed to work OK but the “no wait” rebate option that offers what they say is an “almost instantaneous” rebate is a lesson is how OnRebate is using deceptive doublespeak marketing BS. This “instantaneous” rebate will come to me after they process all the paperwork rather than after they simply match my input to the existing sales records (that would be neat, and it’s clearly what they implied they were going to do).

Sure the stakes here are low with $40 and $20 rebates but I resent how companies like this effectively prey on the inexperience of their customers and the complexity of the rebate process to lower the response rates as well as tag on extra charges. Good rebate systems (Staples comes to mind – Kudos to them) are still an inconvenience but I respect the fact that fraud is a big issue now. Bad rebate sytems are usually immoral attempts at marketing ripoff schemes or reduce response rates (a multi-billion dollar scam that is perfectly legal). I’m not putting OnRebate in this category yet but they are sure on my list for potentially seeking to reduce response rates. Incredibly they also wanted to charge a sneaky $4 “no wait” fee for the rebate that would still require weeks of waiting, just not their normal wait time of several months.

Summary: Beware rebates in general and beware sneaky marketing doublespeak from OnRebate.

Update: Here’s an interesting thread about OnRebate problems. Note that the helpful OnRebate rep no longer works there though it looks like she was great in dealing with complaints. http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/0/149/ripoff0149417.htm#217843

Chinook’s Perfect Checkers Game

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The best checkers player in the world is now a computer program, which will never again lose a game.   Chinook was designed just to play checkers but wound up solving the game with a database of every possible move combination.

Many would suggest that checkers and chess programs (which now are the best chess players in the world) are not a reasonable metaphor for human intellect but I disagree.   This type of program, *factually speaking*, is a vastly superior form of intellect in these limited game realms.

Our human abilities have evolved over millions of years to branch out in far more than a single direction and that is impressive.  It’s also fairly clear that these chess and checker programs are not “conscious” despite the fact that they are better than we are at the games.   However I don’t think it’s reasonable at all to assume that there is something “extra” that makes human intellect and consciousness unattainable for a mechanism.  On the contrary we are *defective* thinkers compared to machines doing comparable things.   Even a simple Wal Mart calculator can “outthink” the best mathematician in the world in most forms of mathematical problem solving.

As we start blending the power of our organic computing devices (aka brains) with mechanical computing devices I expect a more rational, resource optimized world where economic and environmental balances are met.  A world filled with happy, glowing faces and prosperity for all.   Yes, really I do!

Bravo to Intel for joining the One Laptop Project

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Good for Intel, and good for the One Laptop project. Intel will cooperate rather than compete to bring laptops to kids all over the world. It was never clear to me that Intel did anything wrong in the first place because the goal is to get the computers to kids, not get *certain types* of computers to kids, but the One Laptop folks seemed to think the Intel “Classmate” computer would impede their progress in spreading the silicon gospel to poor kids all over the globe, so all is swell now.

Outlook Express Spell Check Disabled in Office 2007 – Le Miserable Microsoft, avez vous un fricking clue?

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I installed a new PC yesterday for a State Welcome center that came with the new office 2007 programs. After a day the staff asked me why their Outlook spell checking was working for French only. “Sacre bleu”, I said after throwing in some Francais and noting that only the English words were listed as “wrong”.   Noting the CDs boldly proclaimed “made in Canada” I first thought “ha – it’s those pesky Quebecois poking fun at Les Americains, oui? NON! After the typical 5 minutes of surfing anywere but Microsoft.com to find answers about Microsoft product defects, to my amazement I read this note from MS which states:

NO more OE spelling in English!

At first I thought it was an odd joke site, but indeed it’s true. The staff at this center uses that simple utility *daily* so why is Outlook Express spelling reserved only for the French?  I love France, especially Paris, France and their superior Freedom Fries, but I think we need some spelling help here in the USA as well.

This utility fixed the problem by adding a new English dictionary. I can’t vouch for the program yet since I just put it on, but it appears legitimate and good.

Yet another case where MS is absolutely *clueless* to the needs of users, and arrogantly provides downgrades as you upgrade to newer, potentially even more frustrating versions of Office. This one is pure insanity since the fix is cheap and easy for MS.  Why in the world would they disable English spell checking?  Google would have created a superior dictionary with the upgrade, where MS creates….nothing, and makes it hard to even find out what to do.

Travel and History Blog

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