You know what makes a good proprietary conversion of an open source or free product? Succeeding.
There is no certain way to succeed in *anything*.
There are always going to be thousands of failures for every success in the software world, and thousands of moderate or short term successes for every 'killer app' class of success.
I don't want to hear about also rans being analysed to prove a point that was arrived at before the article was even begun.
anti virus programs won't stop trojans. What you need is a specific trojan killer. I use prevX myself.
My son just had his PC hit with a driveby download on a hacked WoW site, and it started the old familier popups and fake windows security centre icon thing. I installed prevx and ten minutes later the trojan, which got past his AV software, was history.
The only issue, if its an issue at all, is its subscription based, and you can't get it to work without paying, because it uses their online database to work out what the malicious software is.
I'm happy to pay though, its saved me from re-installing three machines now.
manpower working on Linux? That's what I always assumed kept the serious development going, companies with a stake in it, one way or other.
Linux in this case means the kernel, not what most people seem to think of as Linux, which is the software you see (KDE, Gnome, applications, stuff like that). 160 is low, but its not easy to get in, you have to be contributing a lot of good stuff, plus have the time to spend on it. That difficulty probably means its easy for the number of developers to drop.
There are plenty of people and companies working in the Linux application space.
My kid has a pay as you go phone, an strict instruction (which he obeys) to only use it to call me if something bad happens. So yes, I am able to control the IT costs of having a child in the modern age.
It would create an infinate loop, and you would have to reboot the computer to recover from it.
Three years ago whilst I was doing my ph.d. I was stupid enough to enter a command of this ilk 'to see what it did'. After having to walk two miles to reboot my servers I decided I'd learned my lesson...
My kid has been told many times just to copy and paste from Wikipedia, I mean told by his teachers. Its most distressing.
I have brought the issue up at his school in meetings, but it seems that the tickbox teaching that the UK now relies upon is more interested in achieving teaching goals then actually educating the pupils.
Given that his IT class seems to really be 'how to use Microsoft products', I wouldn't be surprised if this service became part of the UK education provision system. Angry and disgusted yes, surprised no.
Lastly, dude, having a sig that would nuke a Linux system if applied isn't exactly friendly. On the other hand, I guess it would conform to the natural selection approach to weeding out morons, so perhaps its ok...
Cheddar, a class of cheese we all know, is in reality a particular type of cheese, from a particular location (not too far from where I live). Alas they didn't defend their mark, and now Cheddar is a generic term used to describe mostly low quality cheap cheese sold in vast amounts. Barely anyone has eaten 'real' Cheddar.
They tried to retrieve their mark from this widespread use by other manufacturers, but failed because they left it too long.
Thats what this is about, they want to retain their mark, its not about 'evil', if it were, then the real Cheddar makers are also evil, since this is a similar case. It may or may not be too late, but if they do nothing, they lose it anyway.
Ok, you've got my interest, but please state your affiliation. Are you involved with fairsoftware in any way? I read your previous comment, and that made me look the company up, but I didn't do anything at that point.
I've tried twice to start the same company (MMO games programming software house) in the last two years, but each time I've failed because the people who stated interest weren't really keen on the amount of work involved.
Skeptical I may be, interested I am, but I have a good memory, so be honest, are you affiliated? Or just a satisfied customer?
If Jack the Ripper writes a document and signs it Joe the Plumber, and you proceed to extract that Joe the Plumber wrote the document, you aren't any better off than if Jack the Ripper explicitly marked the author as Joe the Plumber.
Semantic processing of documents doesn't involve just taking the content and using it as is (where your scenario would indeed occur), instead you process the text to remove all but the most prominent points. Trivial things like the author would be lost in such an analysis, and your left with what the document was essentially about.
I guess what I am getting at is that semantic information mathematically extracted from the source data might be more reliably associated with the data than externally added semantic information, but it isn't necessarily more trustworthy.
Ok, yes, but its not about trust, I would shy away from words like trust, and try to use words like 'robustness' instead. No matter what type of web you have, there will always be shite pages, that can't be helped. Its about trying to give the best possible search results, and linking the web together in a meaningful way. Anyone thinking the internet would then be a wonderful index of easy to find and accurate information that you can 'trust' is, to be honest, fooling themselves.
Nor is gaming the system for a semantic web as useful as it is in the current system. Load your page with misleading content (font size zero comment spam being a favorite), and semantic analysis can find it and remove it as being 'so abnormally prominent that its likely to be spam'.
Either that or, as is often seen, pages are so heavily loaded with lots of different information to try and catch all search result categories and show up in a search that no one subject is prominent, and it all gets cleaned away by semantic analysis. Even if it can't, the semantic web would be providing such high quality results around your 'junk' that your site would, as it were, sink into the void.
I find the subject fascinating, and I spend a lot of time working on this very thing.
Semantic information is not more or less trustworthy than the document itself.
Well, no. Its possible using some admittedly complex math, to strip out all but the core meaning of a document. Its very hard to hide the meaningful content of a page from properly done semantic analysis. I know this because I've done that kind of thing before (deliberately vague mode active here, sorry).
It offers a useful perspective though. If the costs of storing data in a way that preserves more information are low, why not do it.
True, true, but if that additional data conveys less meaning then correct raw document analysis, it becomes potentially less useful. I would be against the cost of storing it, but then that's me.
I think tags are good for, say, you and me for our own stuff, but my tags almost certainly wouldn't hold for you.
It describes the ability to add metadata to web content (tags, etc), and you haven't heard of it because web 2.0 is the more popular term.;)
Personally I think that metadata/tag based systems are the wrong road for semantic analysis of web pages. As soon as the semantics of a thing is decided by additional information added to describe that thing, its open to abuse.
The only advantage is its faster than what should be done, which is using good old maths to extract the true 'meaning' of a document or object.
Its not hard. Well, ok, its a little hard. Oh ok, its really rather difficult, but there are plenty of places you can get example code or libraries to make things easier.
The thing is that governments now realise that if they let industry sectors fail, that makes lots of people unemployed, which strains the state and cripples the economy.
If people aren't earning, they aren't spending, and also, tens of thousands/hundreds of thousands of unemployed people who could have had their jobs saved may well feel unhappy in a 'get rid of this useless government' kind of way.
So, its either bail out the companies, or sink into a very real and long term recession mixed with political unrest.
If it's a proof, I'll bet you 10-to-1 that the real business of proving it was done by a computer, not by a human.
And in fact most discoveries these days are really done by computers, not by humans.
You've not quite got that right. Some problems can only be solved in reasonable time with computers, some hypothesis confirmations can also only be done in reasonable time with computers. That doesn't mean that the algorithms aren't the result of many hours of human work.
The hypothesis in my Ph.D thesis was demonstrated as being valid through use of computers. It took me two years to come up with the underlying principles, and weeks for the computer to crunch its way to the answer. The computer found that I was correct, but only through applying my algorithm.
It may sound romantic that a lone genius comes along and changes everything, but its not a good thing in practice, nor, for the most part, is it even true.
There have been great people that came along and made breakthroughs, but always this was the result of their building work of others. The myth of the lone scientist is just that, a myth. Newton, to pick an example of the 'great man working alone' wasn't the only one working in his field, he just 'rewrote' a lot of history to make this seem the case. We don't even use his version of calculus, but everyone still credits him.
Einstein too extended the work of many others. He did a lot of thinking on his own, but everything he did was an extension of the work of others. I'm not saying he wasn't smart, he was, but how much faster would his work have arrived had he been working in a group the whole time?
This trend of working in groups can do naught but good.
Even at this early stage its possible for people to meet in groups online in games and talk.
Ever hear of IRC? It's only been around for... um... 20 years.
Yes indeed, and I showed it to my boy, he cares not a jot, and neither do his friends. It's 'old tech', and isn't integrated into their games, so they won't touch it.
What amuses me about this censorship is the fundamental lack of understanding of the Internet as it stands today.
There is a perception that it is websites that contain the kinds of material to be blocked, and for some countries, the conversations to prevent.
Whats wrong with this? Online games, that's what. Even at this early stage its possible for people to meet in groups online in games and talk.
mummorpegers are becoming more complex as time rolls on, and with them, the ways in which players can interact. My son does all his online chatting in game, or through things like steams speech comms.
Can these be censored? Not easily, if at all, about the best the can do is prevent swearing, and that assumes a list of pre-established stop words. Apply censorship more complex than swear filters to online games and you kill them, because the costs of administering the censorship would outstrip the money to be made, or dent it so much as to make it non viable.
Then there's the fact that not all online games are run by conveniently visible corporations, a trend also likely to continue.
I have copies of important files stored on two different drives on my PC, then a current archive external HD, and then I fill external HDs and put them away safely.
I just change my archive drives as technology improves such that I can fit more on one drive. Next in the purchase queue is a 1Tb mirrored raid external drive.
If you move your data to whatever the latest technology is, your storage media won't go out of date.
So, I suppose, the moral of the story is: don't buy Ubisoft games when they come out. Wait a year, until the game's down to fifteen bucks and they're stripped of DRM.
Wait, that's not standard procedure for games? I almost always wait for pricedrops.
Me too. I always wait to see if the bargain shelf version has no DRM. I'm till waiting to play Bioshock. It doesn't reduce my gaming fun to wait, the steady stream of good games making it to SoldOut and other cheap game sellers is sufficient to keep me entertained.
Also with an event so heinous, I really doubt that everyone involved would have absolutely no moral qualms with it, it doesn't gibe with human nature.
There you go, being all sensible. That'll never work...
What I find really bizarre is that people reject the ideas put forward by the people who were given the job of finding the answer completely, yet they believe crackpot theories with not one shred of proof.
Much like the moon landing thing I guess. Ok, the investigators got it wrong a few times, that's not good, but hell, its a very difficult question to answer.
I imagine we may never know the fully accurate reason why the towers fell, simply because the task of finding out may be too complex. Possibly there will be some plausible answers emerging over time as more people tackle the problem in a scientific fashion.
In the meantime conspiracy capitalists, you know, the guys who make a mint peddling misinformation and books for cashy money, will muddy the waters as much as they can to maintain their revenue stream.
Slashdot Mirror
You know what makes a good proprietary conversion of an open source or free product? Succeeding.
There is no certain way to succeed in *anything*.
There are always going to be thousands of failures for every success in the software world, and thousands of moderate or short term successes for every 'killer app' class of success.
I don't want to hear about also rans being analysed to prove a point that was arrived at before the article was even begun.
anti virus programs won't stop trojans. What you need is a specific trojan killer. I use prevX myself.
My son just had his PC hit with a driveby download on a hacked WoW site, and it started the old familier popups and fake windows security centre icon thing. I installed prevx and ten minutes later the trojan, which got past his AV software, was history.
The only issue, if its an issue at all, is its subscription based, and you can't get it to work without paying, because it uses their online database to work out what the malicious software is.
I'm happy to pay though, its saved me from re-installing three machines now.
manpower working on Linux? That's what I always assumed kept the serious development going, companies with a stake in it, one way or other.
Linux in this case means the kernel, not what most people seem to think of as Linux, which is the software you see (KDE, Gnome, applications, stuff like that). 160 is low, but its not easy to get in, you have to be contributing a lot of good stuff, plus have the time to spend on it. That difficulty probably means its easy for the number of developers to drop.
There are plenty of people and companies working in the Linux application space.
My kid has a pay as you go phone, an strict instruction (which he obeys) to only use it to call me if something bad happens. So yes, I am able to control the IT costs of having a child in the modern age.
It would create an infinate loop, and you would have to reboot the computer to recover from it.
Three years ago whilst I was doing my ph.d. I was stupid enough to enter a command of this ilk 'to see what it did'. After having to walk two miles to reboot my servers I decided I'd learned my lesson...
My kid has been told many times just to copy and paste from Wikipedia, I mean told by his teachers. Its most distressing.
I have brought the issue up at his school in meetings, but it seems that the tickbox teaching that the UK now relies upon is more interested in achieving teaching goals then actually educating the pupils.
Given that his IT class seems to really be 'how to use Microsoft products', I wouldn't be surprised if this service became part of the UK education provision system. Angry and disgusted yes, surprised no.
Lastly, dude, having a sig that would nuke a Linux system if applied isn't exactly friendly. On the other hand, I guess it would conform to the natural selection approach to weeding out morons, so perhaps its ok...
Consonant vowel consonant consonant off...
I will never let my kid use any such service.
Cheddar, a class of cheese we all know, is in reality a particular type of cheese, from a particular location (not too far from where I live). Alas they didn't defend their mark, and now Cheddar is a generic term used to describe mostly low quality cheap cheese sold in vast amounts. Barely anyone has eaten 'real' Cheddar.
They tried to retrieve their mark from this widespread use by other manufacturers, but failed because they left it too long.
Thats what this is about, they want to retain their mark, its not about 'evil', if it were, then the real Cheddar makers are also evil, since this is a similar case. It may or may not be too late, but if they do nothing, they lose it anyway.
Ok, you've got my interest, but please state your affiliation. Are you involved with fairsoftware in any way? I read your previous comment, and that made me look the company up, but I didn't do anything at that point.
I've tried twice to start the same company (MMO games programming software house) in the last two years, but each time I've failed because the people who stated interest weren't really keen on the amount of work involved.
Skeptical I may be, interested I am, but I have a good memory, so be honest, are you affiliated? Or just a satisfied customer?
If Jack the Ripper writes a document and signs it Joe the Plumber, and you proceed to extract that Joe the Plumber wrote the document, you aren't any better off than if Jack the Ripper explicitly marked the author as Joe the Plumber.
Semantic processing of documents doesn't involve just taking the content and using it as is (where your scenario would indeed occur), instead you process the text to remove all but the most prominent points. Trivial things like the author would be lost in such an analysis, and your left with what the document was essentially about.
I guess what I am getting at is that semantic information mathematically extracted from the source data might be more reliably associated with the data than externally added semantic information, but it isn't necessarily more trustworthy.
Ok, yes, but its not about trust, I would shy away from words like trust, and try to use words like 'robustness' instead. No matter what type of web you have, there will always be shite pages, that can't be helped. Its about trying to give the best possible search results, and linking the web together in a meaningful way. Anyone thinking the internet would then be a wonderful index of easy to find and accurate information that you can 'trust' is, to be honest, fooling themselves.
Nor is gaming the system for a semantic web as useful as it is in the current system. Load your page with misleading content (font size zero comment spam being a favorite), and semantic analysis can find it and remove it as being 'so abnormally prominent that its likely to be spam'.
Either that or, as is often seen, pages are so heavily loaded with lots of different information to try and catch all search result categories and show up in a search that no one subject is prominent, and it all gets cleaned away by semantic analysis. Even if it can't, the semantic web would be providing such high quality results around your 'junk' that your site would, as it were, sink into the void.
I find the subject fascinating, and I spend a lot of time working on this very thing.
Semantic information is not more or less trustworthy than the document itself.
Well, no. Its possible using some admittedly complex math, to strip out all but the core meaning of a document. Its very hard to hide the meaningful content of a page from properly done semantic analysis. I know this because I've done that kind of thing before (deliberately vague mode active here, sorry).
It offers a useful perspective though. If the costs of storing data in a way that preserves more information are low, why not do it.
True, true, but if that additional data conveys less meaning then correct raw document analysis, it becomes potentially less useful. I would be against the cost of storing it, but then that's me.
I think tags are good for, say, you and me for our own stuff, but my tags almost certainly wouldn't hold for you.
It describes the ability to add metadata to web content (tags, etc), and you haven't heard of it because web 2.0 is the more popular term. ;)
Personally I think that metadata/tag based systems are the wrong road for semantic analysis of web pages. As soon as the semantics of a thing is decided by additional information added to describe that thing, its open to abuse.
The only advantage is its faster than what should be done, which is using good old maths to extract the true 'meaning' of a document or object.
Its not hard. Well, ok, its a little hard. Oh ok, its really rather difficult, but there are plenty of places you can get example code or libraries to make things easier.
The thing is that governments now realise that if they let industry sectors fail, that makes lots of people unemployed, which strains the state and cripples the economy.
If people aren't earning, they aren't spending, and also, tens of thousands/hundreds of thousands of unemployed people who could have had their jobs saved may well feel unhappy in a 'get rid of this useless government' kind of way.
So, its either bail out the companies, or sink into a very real and long term recession mixed with political unrest.
If it's a proof, I'll bet you 10-to-1 that the real business of proving it was done by a computer, not by a human.
And in fact most discoveries these days are really done by computers, not by humans.
You've not quite got that right. Some problems can only be solved in reasonable time with computers, some hypothesis confirmations can also only be done in reasonable time with computers. That doesn't mean that the algorithms aren't the result of many hours of human work.
The hypothesis in my Ph.D thesis was demonstrated as being valid through use of computers. It took me two years to come up with the underlying principles, and weeks for the computer to crunch its way to the answer. The computer found that I was correct, but only through applying my algorithm.
That's how things work these days.
It may sound romantic that a lone genius comes along and changes everything, but its not a good thing in practice, nor, for the most part, is it even true.
There have been great people that came along and made breakthroughs, but always this was the result of their building work of others.
The myth of the lone scientist is just that, a myth. Newton, to pick an example of the 'great man working alone' wasn't the only one working in his field, he just 'rewrote' a lot of history to make this seem the case. We don't even use his version of calculus, but everyone still credits him.
Einstein too extended the work of many others. He did a lot of thinking on his own, but everything he did was an extension of the work of others. I'm not saying he wasn't smart, he was, but how much faster would his work have arrived had he been working in a group the whole time?
This trend of working in groups can do naught but good.
Even at this early stage its possible for people to meet in groups online in games and talk.
Ever hear of IRC? It's only been around for... um... 20 years.
Yes indeed, and I showed it to my boy, he cares not a jot, and neither do his friends. It's 'old tech', and isn't integrated into their games, so they won't touch it.
yeah yeah, i read the comments about gigabit ethernet being faster, thats not the point, usb 3 is still better than usb 2, enjoy the weekend...
We're geeks, reading stuff like this *is* enjoying the weekend.....
What amuses me about this censorship is the fundamental lack of understanding of the Internet as it stands today.
There is a perception that it is websites that contain the kinds of material to be blocked, and for some countries, the conversations to prevent.
Whats wrong with this? Online games, that's what. Even at this early stage its possible for people to meet in groups online in games and talk.
mummorpegers are becoming more complex as time rolls on, and with them, the ways in which players can interact. My son does all his online chatting in game, or through things like steams speech comms.
Can these be censored? Not easily, if at all, about the best the can do is prevent swearing, and that assumes a list of pre-established stop words. Apply censorship more complex than swear filters to online games and you kill them, because the costs of administering the censorship would outstrip the money to be made, or dent it so much as to make it non viable.
Then there's the fact that not all online games are run by conveniently visible corporations, a trend also likely to continue.
I have three levels of backup
I have copies of important files stored on two different drives on my PC, then a current archive external HD, and then I fill external HDs and put them away safely.
I just change my archive drives as technology improves such that I can fit more on one drive. Next in the purchase queue is a 1Tb mirrored raid external drive.
If you move your data to whatever the latest technology is, your storage media won't go out of date.
Works for me anyway.
So, I suppose, the moral of the story is: don't buy Ubisoft games when they come out. Wait a year, until the game's down to fifteen bucks and they're stripped of DRM.
Wait, that's not standard procedure for games? I almost always wait for pricedrops.
Me too. I always wait to see if the bargain shelf version has no DRM. I'm till waiting to play Bioshock.
It doesn't reduce my gaming fun to wait, the steady stream of good games making it to SoldOut and other cheap game sellers is sufficient to keep me entertained.
Yeah, Barack Obama using "Change.gov" for the name of the website of his Presidential Transition makes him worse than the Nazis.
Whatever.
But, but, he uses a ZUNE!!!!111one
Also with an event so heinous, I really doubt that everyone involved would have absolutely no moral qualms with it, it doesn't gibe with human nature.
There you go, being all sensible. That'll never work...
What I find really bizarre is that people reject the ideas put forward by the people who were given the job of finding the answer completely, yet they believe crackpot theories with not one shred of proof.
Much like the moon landing thing I guess. Ok, the investigators got it wrong a few times, that's not good, but hell, its a very difficult question to answer.
I imagine we may never know the fully accurate reason why the towers fell, simply because the task of finding out may be too complex. Possibly there will be some plausible answers emerging over time as more people tackle the problem in a scientific fashion.
In the meantime conspiracy capitalists, you know, the guys who make a mint peddling misinformation and books for cashy money, will muddy the waters as much as they can to maintain their revenue stream.
[raises hand sheepishly]
he was trying to evolve to fit a required pattern, this is fairly standard GA stuff.
You always need a target.
Also, its damn cool.
oh for mod points :)