http://codingexperiments.com Linux, PHP, and the blogosphere Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:09:56 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en This is the first in a series describing the past, present, and future of artificial intelligence. Check back to find more posts. When asked about the meaning of life, digital physics pioneer Edward Fredkin responded, "I think our mission is to create artificial intelligence. It's the next step in evolution" (Wright ... http://codingexperiments.com/from-frankenstein-to-the-singularity-the-story-of-artificial-intelligence-part-one/ Your common, non-technical Windows user has most likely not heard anything more than a cursory mention about Linux. They have questions about Linux that are not always answered easily. Many experienced Linux users are not able to answer questions that interested Windows users have in a manner that the latter ... http://codingexperiments.com/why-is-it-special-and-seven-more-questions-the-non-technical-windows-user-has-about-linux/ Again, apologies for the much delayed posting.  Finals together with the sluggishness of my backup computer made me unable to write this until now. For those who don't remember, we are in the middle of a series on what interesting developments and capabilities are ongoing within the Free Desktop to improve ... http://codingexperiments.com/state-of-the-gnulinux-desktop-2009-part-34-infrastructural-enhancements/ Apologies for the late posting; a mixture of hardware woes and scheduling issues  made getting this post out difficult. As mentioned in part one of this series, despite the legendary pace of development in the Open Source community, it can be difficult to keep tabs on what is being worked on.  ... http://codingexperiments.com/state-of-the-gnulinux-desktop-2009-part-24-hardware-support/ Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 contained over 283 million lines of code, and the Linux kernel development mailing list is of such high message density that even Linus Torvalds himself reads only a fraction of the messages that daily flood the development process.[0][1] Unless one wants to spend their entire lives trawling ... http://codingexperiments.com/state-of-the-gnulinux-desktop-2009-part-14-multimedia/ In this post, cloud computing is defined as the use of web applications such as Google Docs. I've written a post about why cloud computing is dangerous. I've written another post about why cloud computing is dangerous. And now I've written EVEN another post about why cloud computing is dangerous, and that post ... http://codingexperiments.com/they-just-never-learn-google-docs-gives-yet-another-example-of-why-cloud-computing-is-dangerous/ So, a few days ago, I got a spankin' new T-Mobile G1. This has resulted in a lot of hands-on experience with the user interface of Google's Android platform. I can't help but compare the Android OS to Openmoko Linux. After all, both use Linux kernels. No offense to the Openmoko ... http://codingexperiments.com/does-the-linux-desktop-need-to-be-revolutionized-android-style/ Note: This post was originally published without the word "new" in the title. As the brackets denote, this error has been corrected. If I had a penny for every seasoned Linux user whose eyes are currently bulging in anger at this title, I would have... still not much money, considering the ... http://codingexperiments.com/why-linux-users-should-try-ubuntu-first/ Recently the database at PHPBB.com was hacked, exposing the passwords of all 20,000 users on the popular site. Of course, PHPBB.com is mainly used as a trouble-shooting forum for the software itself. This basically means that most people registered there will probably be fairly tech-literate. However, you wouldn't think so ... http://codingexperiments.com/safe-passwords/ Many Linux users, including myself, are quite desperate to get people to switch to Linux, or at least use more open-source software. Nothing wrong with that. The problem comes in when Linux users say the wrong things in an attempt to convert other users to Linux. The latest example of such ... http://codingexperiments.com/the-dangers-of-telling-a-user-switching-to-linux-that-linux-is-just-like-windows/