The Prisoner's Dilemma is a generalized model for decision-making in a non-zero-sum game (net cooperation must yield more than net defection.) A story involving prisoner's and jail time is only the most popular canonical representation for the game. While I've nothing to say in defense of the researchers' intelligence: to levy criticism that the researchers have perhaps overlooked subjects' aversion to actual prison time is to suggest that the researchers are, perhaps, extremely stupid, and have no idea what they are doing at all.
I'm hoping some day to find enough interesting artifacts from my work there (like a graph I built of the model schema) to make a really bitchin TDWTF submission, but to directly answer your question: It would seem from my research (which was quite painstaking given that that company's idea of revision control was a stack of CD-R'd ZIP archives of their Java Servlets project directory) that the original hacker to build their web-based business coordination platform understood relational databases and data access abstractions.
He or she wrote Hibernate XML model schema (a technology I thoroughly enjoyed learning to use) with logical relationships between different models, and when I ran the graphing program I wrote (produced a GraphViz DOT graph, which was transformed into SVG and then fed into ZVTM) that model schema formed very cogent, logical constellations showing at most two or three individual constellations -- everything else was well connected and sane.
The later person(s) to work on their platform, however, had no understanding whatsoever of databases, SQL, or Hibernate (I didn't know about Hibernate either, but I learned.) The "holes" I mentioned were in fact new unformalized relationships in the model schema: the programmer(s) had actually added fields like "employeeName" to, say, the Project model, and employeeName was actually a numeric key corresponding to the model called Resource, which due to the lack of documentation, evaded me for some hours as actually meaning freelancers who we may call on or have called upon in the past. Now you might even think that it was a good thing that one of the clueless hackers in between the first hacker and myself thought "employee" was a more intuitive term for this role, but in fact Employee was another model altogether! Extremely confusing!!!
The reason their system was even ailing to begin with was because some hacker(s) had actually written database queries without any SQL -- they simply pulled (often many copies of) every instance of a certain type of model in the database into the servlet task, and then filtered them down to whatever subset it was that they wanted in Java-land. A similar sort of reach-around was employed to bridge relational connections between different models without taking advantage of the programming abstractions for those either.
The first couple of weeks I spent setting up a second server, revision control, bugzilla, documentation wiki, and familiarizing myself with the code (I didn't get any documentation for months.) I spent an entire month mired in a protracted software upgrade side-quest to avoid only a few critical shortcomings in only a few software components: because the system had not been properly maintained in so long, every single software component was out of date by years and had a slew of dependencies that needed upgrading.
The very first change I committed to the new Subversion repository removed 4000 lines of code and replaced it with 14.
One day (long after it was very relevant anymore, unfortunately) they finally got the previous hacker (who was too busy with better paying work to work there anymore) to come in and help answer my questions about the code. I pleaded with him t
I wrote about this one year ago on March 3, 2008. This is just the tip of the ice berg, and it will change the internet and the web dramatically. (If you like the article, please come back and mod me up!)
Get with the program people, these machines were built to fail. Don't even question it slightly. Don't say "oh you're being paranoid." Think about it. Is it even slightly possible that what nabsltd has said is off the mark? When is the last time you saw calibration drift at an ATM? Don't dismiss this.
My point is: unless Slashdot is being paid to run this story, what interest do they have in running it? It's mainstream garbage. There are probably other more even-handed reviews that they could have looked for which is more what I come to Slashdot for!
...to say that you enjoy Trek movies for something other than the awesome special effects, thematic elements and the glimpse at a whole other reality seems disingenuous.
This was my error then: I've only seen Wrath of Kahn and First Contact, and I didn't really like the latter. I don't have any expectations for Trek movies that don't apply to film in general.
This 11th film is easily the best looking, most expensive, best produced iteration in the franchise. This film is going to be absolutely massive. It's epic in scale, and it's easy to see where the $150 million went.
Is anyone else actually excited by this kind of thing? Who here can say they enjoyed Reloaded or Revolutions more than The Matrix? I was really hoping for reviews to tell me how compelling the acting and story were, but it really seems to be all about the expense. Am I missing something?
During the Wi-Fi standardisation, CSIRO's patented IP was knowingly included in the standard. CSIRO stated that they would be happy for this to happen, provided they could collect a small royalty on Wi-Fi hardware.
Will the IEEE really ratify a standard that might get you sued? Some earlier poster linked to an article on 802.11n that says no.
your corporations expect everyone else to acknowledge their IP and now they would blatantly disregard someone else's? Hypocrisy and greed, not that I've come to expect anything else from American companies.
Although I believe you would not have began your comment had you fully understood the poster to whom you were replying, I feel that where your comment ended up going is more interesting, and here is a follow-up:
I think some technologies simply work better for society when they are not encumbered by intellectual property. Why then don't governments ever purchase patents from private sector researchers on behalf of the public? In such a scenario, would it make sense to export those patents to members of other countries who did not fund the research? I like freedom, so I'm inclined to say yes to anything that makes people more free to do whatever they want, but I can understand why you might disagree.
Having said that, I'll ask: are CSIRO patents automatically licensed to the Austrialian public?
I think this may be what the poster you were replying to was originally getting at: are Australian tax-payers being duped into funding some kind of exotic publicly-funded-yet-private R&D outfit?
Are we really to believe that a paragraph on Slashdot or Google News is as bad for Guardian Media Group as would be simply reading their articles straight from their RSS feed? Make no mistake: a ruling against aggregators is a ruling against RSS!!!
I've had an inclination for some time to write up a specification for servers to set up command-line interfaces which you could use to access their site in a manner that is sort of like a mix of ReST and Bash. A naive design for such a system would be when you type a domain name into your browser bar, the browser fetches a CLI description in Javascript/AJAX or something.
Imagine tab-completing the titles/slugs of news stories! To me that's much more exciting than this new Firefox feature.
Did that really happen? "Defective by Design" is a slogan used to describe "Digital Restrictions/Rights Management" technologies, and products which embed those technologies. How does that describe IE?
Is it always bigotry if someone is intolerant of a religion? What if there's an article about suicide cults, and I tag it 'heavensgate'? Bigotry? What if there's an article about female circumcision, and I tag it 'islam'? I'm just curious as to where the line is drawn. Personally, I think religion has unfairly worked itself into a position where to criticize it is seen as bigotry tantamount to racism, which is absurd.
Does this summary read like shameless propaganda to anyone else? I'm such a big Firefox fan I have been running bleeding edge nightlies of Tracemonkey for months, but this Slashdot story summary has left a bad taste in my mouth.
Think of all that's happening right now: Safari keeps gaining in popularity. Chrome was released not terribly long ago. The Gnome crowd is moving away from Gecko into the open arms of WebKit.
Yet this summary would lead any reader to believe that this was the greatest and most triumphant moment in Firefox's history!
Reading this even manages to make the fixing of eight "critical vulnerabilities" sound like such a great achievement that we should consider creating a new one for every one we excise, just so we have something more to celebrate about in the future!
I love Firefox, but damn! Shame on nandemoari. Shame on CmdrTaco. Shame on Slashdot!
I think now is a good time to have some public discussion of what it will mean if big companies can essentially make money by making their code open. Would Sun have open sourced Java sooner if we were going to pay them to do it? Will it mean a healthier open source community? Will it encourage hardware vendors to go further for the Linux community than just giving us BLOBs?
Slashdot Mirror
..fear of prison..
The Prisoner's Dilemma is a generalized model for decision-making in a non-zero-sum game (net cooperation must yield more than net defection.) A story involving prisoner's and jail time is only the most popular canonical representation for the game. While I've nothing to say in defense of the researchers' intelligence: to levy criticism that the researchers have perhaps overlooked subjects' aversion to actual prison time is to suggest that the researchers are, perhaps, extremely stupid, and have no idea what they are doing at all.
Read this post full screen with diagrams and photos
As I tend toward fleeting obsession, and writing up this account of my poor work experience at UnnamedCompanyXXX hits the spot in the exact way that I only wish editing my resumé did (as Joey Cameau puts it, resumé writing seems largely an exercise in "listing the store-bought parts of yourself that you respect the least") what follows is a rather long explanation. For the short answer, just scroll to the image at the bottom. (The forum may crop the image, so use your browser to view the full image if you must.)
I'm hoping some day to find enough interesting artifacts from my work there (like a graph I built of the model schema) to make a really bitchin TDWTF submission, but to directly answer your question: It would seem from my research (which was quite painstaking given that that company's idea of revision control was a stack of CD-R'd ZIP archives of their Java Servlets project directory) that the original hacker to build their web-based business coordination platform understood relational databases and data access abstractions.
He or she wrote Hibernate XML model schema (a technology I thoroughly enjoyed learning to use) with logical relationships between different models, and when I ran the graphing program I wrote (produced a GraphViz DOT graph, which was transformed into SVG and then fed into ZVTM) that model schema formed very cogent, logical constellations showing at most two or three individual constellations -- everything else was well connected and sane.
The later person(s) to work on their platform, however, had no understanding whatsoever of databases, SQL, or Hibernate (I didn't know about Hibernate either, but I learned.) The "holes" I mentioned were in fact new unformalized relationships in the model schema: the programmer(s) had actually added fields like "employeeName" to, say, the Project model, and employeeName was actually a numeric key corresponding to the model called Resource, which due to the lack of documentation, evaded me for some hours as actually meaning freelancers who we may call on or have called upon in the past. Now you might even think that it was a good thing that one of the clueless hackers in between the first hacker and myself thought "employee" was a more intuitive term for this role, but in fact Employee was another model altogether! Extremely confusing!!!
The reason their system was even ailing to begin with was because some hacker(s) had actually written database queries without any SQL -- they simply pulled (often many copies of) every instance of a certain type of model in the database into the servlet task, and then filtered them down to whatever subset it was that they wanted in Java-land. A similar sort of reach-around was employed to bridge relational connections between different models without taking advantage of the programming abstractions for those either.
The first couple of weeks I spent setting up a second server, revision control, bugzilla, documentation wiki, and familiarizing myself with the code (I didn't get any documentation for months.) I spent an entire month mired in a protracted software upgrade side-quest to avoid only a few critical shortcomings in only a few software components: because the system had not been properly maintained in so long, every single software component was out of date by years and had a slew of dependencies that needed upgrading.
The very first change I committed to the new Subversion repository removed 4000 lines of code and replaced it with 14.
One day (long after it was very relevant anymore, unfortunately) they finally got the previous hacker (who was too busy with better paying work to work there anymore) to come in and help answer my questions about the code. I pleaded with him t
There's no way they brought you back to be a janitor. This is bogus.
I wrote about this one year ago on March 3, 2008. This is just the tip of the ice berg, and it will change the internet and the web dramatically. (If you like the article, please come back and mod me up!)
Get with the program people, these machines were built to fail. Don't even question it slightly. Don't say "oh you're being paranoid." Think about it. Is it even slightly possible that what nabsltd has said is off the mark? When is the last time you saw calibration drift at an ATM? Don't dismiss this.
Did no one detect the sarcasm? You're all a bunch of tools.
Please kill yourself immediately.
My point is: unless Slashdot is being paid to run this story, what interest do they have in running it? It's mainstream garbage. There are probably other more even-handed reviews that they could have looked for which is more what I come to Slashdot for!
I didn't realize Slashdot was primarily about marketing.
...to say that you enjoy Trek movies for something other than the awesome special effects, thematic elements and the glimpse at a whole other reality seems disingenuous.
This was my error then: I've only seen Wrath of Kahn and First Contact, and I didn't really like the latter. I don't have any expectations for Trek movies that don't apply to film in general.
Yeah, but I come to Slashdot to be treated like a smart person, not a "swing voter."
Then why is it on Slashdot?
Quote from one of the reviewers:
This 11th film is easily the best looking, most expensive, best produced iteration in the franchise. This film is going to be absolutely massive. It's epic in scale, and it's easy to see where the $150 million went.
Is anyone else actually excited by this kind of thing? Who here can say they enjoyed Reloaded or Revolutions more than The Matrix? I was really hoping for reviews to tell me how compelling the acting and story were, but it really seems to be all about the expense. Am I missing something?
There seems to be a disproportionate amount of Anonymous Cowards posting on this article... are you posting from work CSIRO employees?
During the Wi-Fi standardisation, CSIRO's patented IP was knowingly included in the standard. CSIRO stated that they would be happy for this to happen, provided they could collect a small royalty on Wi-Fi hardware.
Will the IEEE really ratify a standard that might get you sued? Some earlier poster linked to an article on 802.11n that says no.
your corporations expect everyone else to acknowledge their IP and now they would blatantly disregard someone else's? Hypocrisy and greed, not that I've come to expect anything else from American companies.
Although I believe you would not have began your comment had you fully understood the poster to whom you were replying, I feel that where your comment ended up going is more interesting, and here is a follow-up:
I think some technologies simply work better for society when they are not encumbered by intellectual property. Why then don't governments ever purchase patents from private sector researchers on behalf of the public? In such a scenario, would it make sense to export those patents to members of other countries who did not fund the research? I like freedom, so I'm inclined to say yes to anything that makes people more free to do whatever they want, but I can understand why you might disagree.
Having said that, I'll ask: are CSIRO patents automatically licensed to the Austrialian public?
I think this may be what the poster you were replying to was originally getting at: are Australian tax-payers being duped into funding some kind of exotic publicly-funded-yet-private R&D outfit?
Are we really to believe that a paragraph on Slashdot or Google News is as bad for Guardian Media Group as would be simply reading their articles straight from their RSS feed? Make no mistake: a ruling against aggregators is a ruling against RSS!!!
I've had an inclination for some time to write up a specification for servers to set up command-line interfaces which you could use to access their site in a manner that is sort of like a mix of ReST and Bash. A naive design for such a system would be when you type a domain name into your browser bar, the browser fetches a CLI description in Javascript/AJAX or something.
Imagine tab-completing the titles/slugs of news stories! To me that's much more exciting than this new Firefox feature.
Did that really happen? "Defective by Design" is a slogan used to describe "Digital Restrictions/Rights Management" technologies, and products which embed those technologies. How does that describe IE?
Anonymous Coward has a point. Mod him up!
Is it always bigotry if someone is intolerant of a religion? What if there's an article about suicide cults, and I tag it 'heavensgate'? Bigotry? What if there's an article about female circumcision, and I tag it 'islam'? I'm just curious as to where the line is drawn. Personally, I think religion has unfairly worked itself into a position where to criticize it is seen as bigotry tantamount to racism, which is absurd.
Does this summary read like shameless propaganda to anyone else? I'm such a big Firefox fan I have been running bleeding edge nightlies of Tracemonkey for months, but this Slashdot story summary has left a bad taste in my mouth.
Think of all that's happening right now: Safari keeps gaining in popularity. Chrome was released not terribly long ago. The Gnome crowd is moving away from Gecko into the open arms of WebKit.
Yet this summary would lead any reader to believe that this was the greatest and most triumphant moment in Firefox's history!
Reading this even manages to make the fixing of eight "critical vulnerabilities" sound like such a great achievement that we should consider creating a new one for every one we excise, just so we have something more to celebrate about in the future!
I love Firefox, but damn! Shame on nandemoari. Shame on CmdrTaco. Shame on Slashdot!
houstonbofh + FredFredrickson need their posts modded up. Do it.
I think now is a good time to have some public discussion of what it will mean if big companies can essentially make money by making their code open. Would Sun have open sourced Java sooner if we were going to pay them to do it? Will it mean a healthier open source community? Will it encourage hardware vendors to go further for the Linux community than just giving us BLOBs?
Didn't Al Gore propose a similar tax program?
But as you said before:
They want you to transfer copyright as an employee or contractor would in USA. This would allow them to add additional licenses or what if they wish
If I did not own the copyright to any part of my submission, I would not be able to transfer the copyright to a third party.