[Yes, I've read the whole interview, and even a few of the links.]
The thrust of half those questions was: "TCPA seems to provide benefit only to those who wish to tell me what I can and cannot do with my computer. Is this true? If not, what's in it for me? If it is true, how can you sleep at night?"
I think Michael's questions were most on-point, and what I most wondered myself (there, I said something nice about him:). Brian totally fucking dodged every single one of them.
a) Isn't the goal of "trusted computing" to allow entities other than the owner of the computer to control what the owner does with his/her hardware?
Brian mumbles something about his reading of the TCPA spec and DRM, neither of which were the point of the question. The answer is obvious: "Yes, of course that's the goal. Shut up and eat your BIOS."
b) However, isn't it true that without AMI's trusted BIOS, Palladium wouldn't work?
The reason we keep saying "we're not a part of Palladium" is because Palladium doesn't exist in the marketplace...
This is splitting hairs at best, and another artful dodge. If Palladium were in the marketplace, would AMI be part of it? Of course they would. And right now they're laying the groundwork.
c) In what way does AMI benefit... from introducing a BIOS designed to make the computer it is installed in less useful to the purchaser of the computer?
Here Brian reinforces that you and I are consumers, not customers - mobo manufacturers are customers, and they get the features they want. This is the way the market works, and I've got no special beef with it, but it's a bit of a wake-up call for those who still believe companies like AMI give a rat's ass about the average geek buying a motherboard.
If I sound harsh it's because I'm pissed. The goal of TCPA is transparent, and Brian The AMI Guy is either trying to pull the wool over our eyes or incompetent. Given that he used to hack this stuff for a living, and now has "Sales" in his title, I'd suggest the former.
Big Media nad Big Software are chortling in glee as they see their plans for "Trusted Computing" coming to fruition. The MPAA wants to turn your computer into a TV, and AMI is only to happy to help.
Yeah, Blonde was one of the great bands of the last 15 years, IMHO. I remember being blown away by "God is a Bullet." I still listen in slack-jawed amazement to "Mexican Moon." Johnette's album ("Pretty & Twisted") was a pale shadow; "Still in Hollywood" was interesting from an archaelogical perspective. I bought their reunion album, whatever it was called, and listened to it once *gag*. It was proof positive that they broke up at the right time. *Sigh*
My brother used to run a motorcycle courier service in LA, and the only bill higher than his liability insurance (think about it - what type of guy wants to be a motorcycle courier? how safe is he going to be?) was his SCO license. These folks have been squeezing blood out of the turnip for years, and now that people have abadonded their turnip (to further torture the analogy) SCO is looking for other vegetables.
They're toast, though, no matter what half-assed "intellectual property" scheme they come up with. I mean, really - who're you going to stay friends with? A girlfriend who gave you your toothbrush back and said, "Bye, and thanks for all the fish," or one who boiled your fucking cat alive? SCO is kicking its customers in the nuts while they walk out the door; they might squeeze a little cash out of them on the way, but they're only hastening the exit.
Chris Sontag, hired in October as senior vice-president of SCO's Operating Systems division, leads the intellectual property organization, sources said. Earlier in his career, Mr. Sontag led marketing and product development for Novell...
Did I mention that SCO is toast? That quote alone should get them on FC
Our Unix IP is a significant asset. And for several months, we have been holding internal discussions, exploring a wide range of possible strategies concerning this asset," the company said in a statement Monday. SCO hasn't decided how exactly to collect more Unix revenue, the company added.
Translation: "We're desperate and rudderless, checking under sofa cushions for spare change. Got any?"
Have you been reading the news? You're asking why a convicted child molester shouldn't be allowed to run a daycare center: "All sorts of other people can - what's so special about Mr. Child Molester?" It's special becuase the drastic anti-social behavior for which they've been publically tried and convicted is directly tied to this remedy.
this is my opinion in regards to fair competition
The point appears to elude you. Microsoft has been convicted in federal court specifically for trying to crush Java by illegally extending their monopoly power - this is a remedy. Any company can have a monopoly in any market; what's illegal is using your power in one market (operating systems) to take over another market (e.g. web browsers, office suites).
It is like telling AOL to ship MSN8 with their latest distro
Not at all. If AOL had 95% of the country dialing into their servers, they used their position to try to kill MSN8, were successful in damaging it, were tried and convicted by the federal government, then were ordered to include MSN8 as part of the remedy for their illegal actions... then you'd have a valid analogy.
If MS has to include Java, wh [sic] don't the [sic] have to include Perl, Python, PHP
Because Perl, Python and PHP weren't the targets of Microsoft's illegal monopoly behavior.
Have people already forgotten that Microsoft has been convicted of the most anti-competitive and anti-free-market behavior possible? That the U.S government has been trying for a decade to rein in their behavior and bring some semblence of competition to the PC market?
FWIW, I have two of these pieces of hardware, albiet slightly older versions. My Antec case is the same, but without the whiz-bang pretty features (panels, lights, whatnot). It's sweet - big, easy to work with, tons of drive bays.
I've also got 2 of the ViewSonic P95f monitors. The ones reviewed are P95f+ models, which are capable of a higher resolution, but with a slightly lower refresh rate for all other resolutions (stupid, IMHO). These are great screens, especially for the price. Perfectly flat, exceptionally clear and crisp.
I hope he has plans for retirement. Or a good explanation of how a U.S. law will affect spam coming from China.
I think his idea is great, and will (if implemented) have the intended effect on spam originating from inside the U.S. It will have a converse effect on spam from outside the U.S, though - we'll continue to get the same amount of spam, it'll just all come from China. Actually, we might get more spam, since I bet it's cheaper to send the shit from China.
The problem here is not that there aren't ways to stop spam (although that's part of the problem), but that spam makes money. As long as that's true, people will find a way to send it. C'mon - it's a freaking felony to carry a gram of cocaine, but hundreds of people do it every day, and few of them are caught.
Unless Lessig can get laws passed in literally every country with as much as a ISDN link to the U.S, this approach won't help much.
This article, no offense, really has nothing to do with micropayments at all. It's simply a half-assed configuration guide for Apache. So what?
You can't solve the micropayment problem technically. The solution involves technology, but is primarily social and business.
You need a robust system capable of tracking a user's activity and billing them at some sort of interval. The problem here is that all of the electronic payment apparatus in place in the world assumes that large amounts are being billed. How'd you like [CC Processor X] to charge you 3% (rounded up to $2 or so, as some do) for one user's $0.72 of activity?
No, we need something centralized. Dare I say it... Microsoft Passport? Don't get me wrong - this could be a nightmare from nearly any perspective (privacy, security, vendor lock-in, monopoly gouging, lack of standards, etc.), but the idea itself is sound. Joe Webmaster, using an API provided by [Vendor X], sends them traffic information on a [daily|weekly|other] basis and gets a check back. The users are billed monthly.
Problematically, the only company with a real shot at implementing this in the short term is Microsoft, and as in all their products (not a flame, just an observation) the first 2 versions will suck, and once they have their monopoly it'll start to suck more.
Content on the Internet needs micropayments to survive in the long term, period. I see no other way, now that advertising has crashed so badly (and looks to stay crashed). This'll be the hardest thing on the 'net since building it.
And that's just the technology. Getting the average user to start paying for each page click will be a hard sell, to say the least.
...recently, I'd say outsource it. If you're not a programmer, you don't want to learn how to do it from scratch. The programming's the smallest part, though: dealing with the banks, cert vendors, hosts, etc. is a royal pain. Securing your system is the most important thing, and this is an area where you cannot skimp. Period.
Run the numbers, though. You should be able to hire someone with e-commerce experience specifically to implement this. You want someone who knows the space, how can pick a good off-the-shelf system and customize it for your clients, and who is security-conscious. As someone else in this thread said, HTTPS and certs are blue smoke and mirrors compared with unpatched or poorly-maintained servers.
Bring this up to your boss and see how much he *really* likes the idea. With the prospect of paying a new hire (or a contractor) to work on this, he'll either get more serious or less serious, both of which are good news for you.
What do you mean "how do we know it isn't a plant"? Of course it's a plant.
I don't mind the dupes. I don't mind the mistakes. But blithely posting underhanded ad pitches on the front page cross the line.
Amen, I agree, etc. It's pretty clear that most Slashdot editors don't read the stories they approve. I bet over 50% of the people who clicked through to that link thought, "Bullshit - this is a press release - the editors got taken for a ride. Again."
This is an expensive tech product marketing guy's wet dream - create a fake diary and get it posted to Slashdot. The bare fact that the site hasn't melted yet is proof that it's not a personal diary.
With friends like Phyllis Schlafly, who needs enemies?
Just as well say, "With enemies like Phyllis Schlafly, who needs friends?" It's bloody stupid to cast people who don't agree with you on some issues as "enemies." This is a big, complicated issue in a big, complicated world, and there are plenty of opinions to go around.
Orrin Hatch, for instance, is a fairly conservative and very Christian man. We disagree on many important issues, but we do agree that citizens have fair-use rights to copyrighted material. Orrin's a musician, so he sees this issue from a very different side than most conservatives.
If Phyllis writes an editorial with which you agree, send her mail and say, "You and I disagree about many issues, but we're on the same wavelength here. Thanks!" Take help where you can find it, folks.
Off-topic rant: one of the most insidious and dangerous intellectual crutches many people use is this false dichotomy of "good" or "bad" people or ideas. No person, and precious few ideas, are wholly good or bad - most are some sort of compromise. Hitler instigated some of the most horrible acts ever seen on this planet, but word has it he was good to his dog.
Using this crutch is easy and tempting, but it immediately requires you to build up all sorts of mental walls. Instead, see both sides of an issue. See the ideas with which you disagree are formed, how they propogate, and why people espouse them - then attack the root, not the manifestation.
Mr. Senator from Disney doesn't kiss the Mouse's ass because he's evil, but because the ass is gold-plated and some of it rubs off on him. And our political system requires those at the highest level (e.g. U.S. Congress) to gather and spend truly stunning amounts of money to stay in power.
You can call people "evil" or "enemies" and thus shut yourself out of the system, you can work within the system to defeat those people (or more to the point, their ideas), or you can change the system. The latter two options require the ability to see both sides of an issue, and the causes of a person's behavior.
People's actions have good or evil consequences (often both); ideas have good or evil implementations. Get beyond the juvenile labels and to the root causes and you'll be a lot better off.
Low refresh rates hurt my eyes badly - 60 is awful after just a couple minutes. I can see a little difference between 85 and 100, but only retroactively (i.e. 85 doesn't bother me). I used to run the network for a large architecture firm, and many of these people - although they drafted in AutoCAD all day long - saw nothing wrong with 60Hz. Some of them noticed that 85 or 100 was better, but I think many of them just acclimated to 60, not realizing anything better was possible.
On another note, Windows users should check out RefreshForce, which automatically sets the highest possible refresh rate every time you (or a game, or other app) switches resolutions or color depths in Windows. I run it on a couple machines wit no trouble.
Warning: Can't create a new thread (errno 11). If you are not out of available memory, you can consult the manual for a possible OS-dependent bug in/data/users/penny-arcade/www/php_admin_header.php3 on line 11
Most geeks are arrogant. We're used to having complete control over our own domain (whether that's our personal box or a huge network) and we brook little interference. We each believe that we're the best, or that with a little more experience with X, we'll become the best. After all, we got where we are largely by teaching ourselves, right? What's so hard about learning a few more things?
There's something to be said for this attitude - most people have trouble with computers just because they're afraid of them - but there's much to be said against it.
Stastically speaking, most geeks are not high-end, in-demand, uber-geeks. Nor will we become such. We forget that other people learn at least as fast and well as we do, that the entire geek population is filled with people who basically get high on learning new ways to control their digital environment. It's like the Prarie Home Companion: "All the children are above average." It ain't so.
All the replies to this thread so far have echoed a common perception of unions: they exist to enforce mediocrity and prop up the lowest common denominator. Question for those who hold such a view: where did you get it? From the newspaper? From TV? From a series of reports on-line?
Hmmm... imagine that... the mainstream media, controlled by the same few large corporations, presents a largely negative view of unions to the U.S. public. It's occured to me that perhaps they have a bias.
My older sister is pretty high up in the USPS union, and she talks about it a fair amount, so I am informed. Being in the union is a little like being arrested by the cops - everyone, theoretically, has the same right to a defence. This [supposed] sniper guy - he's getting a public defender. Yeah he looks guilty, but that's not the point; the point is that it has to be proven - he has to be granted due process.
There's a large part of unionization for you: due process. Management knows that it can't capriciously fire someone for (e.g.) having the wrong political viewpoint because the union will take it to task.
Another part of unionization is collective bargaining. Those with valuable skills in a certain domain will band together and say to management, "If you want our skills, here's how we define 'fair treatment.'" There's nothing anti-capitalist about the idea of unions (implementation is another thing) - it's simply one group of people selling their services to another group.
People are stronger acting together. Unions, implemented correctly, start and end with that sentiment. This "rugged individualism" (rugged geekdom?) plays well on TV, but doesn't scale to real life. We've all seen that typical geek skills are becoming more common and less valuable.
Once upon a time being an auto worker was an arcane skill - only a handful of people could build cars, and no one thought it was possible to automate the process. In hindsight that was incorrect. Put down your cyberpunk novel for a minute and realize that the assembly-line was created by Henry Ford specifically to commoditize auto labor, to take as much skill as possible out of the profession. And it worked, while everyone else thought it was impossible. Who'll be the Henry Ford of geekdom? Want to bet your future that one will never appear?
Ask yourself why organized labor scares management so much. Is it because companies care about their workers, their products, or the people who buy them? If you believe that you haven't been reading the news for the last... 250 years.
Having said all that, there are some very real problems with unions. But no more so than with any other group of people, with human faults and foibles. You're a cog in a machine. Maybe you're an especially large and influential cog, but you won't stay that way. Whether you organize with the other cogs is up to you.
In the begining two-thirds of a game of Go most of the stone placements are "random". Yes some players attempt to mark out a territory but that can be self-defeating,
100% pure bullshit. Strong players make no random moves, period, especially in the opening. Professional games are sometimes decided by 1/2 stone (black moves first, and in an even game - i.e. no handicap - the territory advantage of this move - 5.5 points - is added to white's score at the end of the game; this also prevents ties); a botched or "random" opening move is suicide.
In Go there are only a few "true" patterns to worry about.
Incorrect. If this were even remotely true the game would be trivial.
The Line (easy to deal with if you know the rules). The Box (a way to control an area).
Lines of stones are tremendously strong, if inflexible. Boxes are a very inefficient way to surround territory, open to many attacks, and very limited in possibilities.
And The Spiral, when a contested area "spirals" out of control. The Go game becomes a miniture Mandlebrodt set that can loop off into infinity,
Is this a concept of your own invention? I've yet to encounter it myself.
One method of playing Go is to work your opponent into a corner that he cannot leave
Yeah, this is the time-honored "shooting yourself in the fucking forehead" technique. The corners are by far the easiest territory to surround and control, because you don't need to defend at the edges. If one player in a more-or-less evenly-contested go game captures all 4 corners his victory is assured.
You need to learn more about the game, I think, before you try to explain it to others.
My bet is that [go] will prove to be even easier than chess.
Yowza. I believe you're sincere, but you should do much more research before spouting off. You're flat-out wrong.
Go pieces, once placed on the board, cannot move anymore. Chess pieces can still move from one place to the other. This means that as more and more Go pieces are placed on the board, there are less and less positions the computer has to consider.
Chess has at most 40 legal moves possible for the first move; go has 361. The average chess game has 40 moves; the average go game has 6 to 8 times that.
So yes, after each move there are fewer go positions, but after 80 stones have been placed (the average number of chess moves), there are still 281 moves possible. You have to play more than 200 moves into a go game before you have as few move possibilities as you do for your first move in chess.
Go requires the ability to look at patterns rather than combinations.
If by "combinations" you mean "tacics," you're incorrect. Tactics are crucial in go, and it's only by a solid understanding of tactics that strategic thinking is possible. It's true that the rules of chess tactics are more complex than go, but it's precisely this lack of rules and formulae that make go so hard for computers.
Go's not nearly as easily quantifiable. You can tell a chess computer that the king is worth 10,000,000 pawns, the queen 9, bishops and knights 3 or 3.5. In go, however, the only thing giving value to a stone is its position on the board and its relation to other stones... sometimes all the other stones.
Sure, the Go board is larger and the possible positions are greater but then there are only three possible ``cells'' to consider: the first player's stone, the second player's stone and an empty cell. That should be easier to manage than the job we are asking computer's nowadays to do: recognize people from their faces. I believe computers can match fingerprints easily today. Go should be a walk in the park.
Um... this is a sad series of non-sequiturs. Computers are stunningly bad at facial recognition, even in best-case scenarios. Humans, on the other hand, can recognize someone they haven't seen for 20 years based on a casual glance. Being social animals, there's literally nothing humans do better than pattern recognition, and go is all about pattern recognition.
I think I realize what you're trying to say, though - that there are only three states for one position on a go board, while there are many more for a chess board. This is immaterial to the game. The problem computer programmers have with go is that there's no algorithm that will reliably determine if a group of stones is alive or dead without brute-forcing the entire game. Many groups can be correctly evaluated, and computers are good at scoring finished games, but computers will happily slog ahead (and lose horribly) in games that professionals would resign in disgust.
Read a few of these pages and then reconsider your viewpoint:
Note that I'm not saying go is better than chess. I think such arguments are foolish. But, to quote myself, from a computer's perspective go makes chess look like tic-tac-toe.
Again, it's algorithm work. More work has gone into chess algorithms and "thinking" than has gone into Go. Chess is more popular than Go, hence a much more attractive target for most people to try to write algorithms for.
This is correct to a degree, but also shows some misunderstanding on your part of the differences between these two games. I'm not slamming chess, and I know you're not slamming go, but go is fundamentally a harder problem than chess. Search space aside, we don't have an algorithm that will tell with certainty whether a particular group of stones is alive or not. Read that again - could you imagine a chess position in which you literally couldn't tell if a particular piece was inexorably and unquestionably dead? I don't mean a position with 15 moves forward and wierd play, either, I'm talking about positions which anyone above a strong amateur instantly recognizes as dead or alive but which computers can make no reliable determination.
It is algorithm work in the sense that no algorithm has been found, yes. But not through lack of trying - there's a fantastic amount of effort being exerted world-wide on this problem. Computer go is generations away from a machine like deep blue.
Except that the sun will burn out by the time a computer can calculate a full move tree. I'm not sure how that's like tic-tac-toe.
The point about the numbers and search space is that even if we created some computing process that could brute-force chess, it would still barely be a drop in the bucket of the power needed to brute force go. So yes, I think the tic-tac-toe analogy is valid.
For such a big tree size, about mid-game in chess I always feel like I'm in a freakin' straight jacket, my options become so limited.
Yes! This is exactly my experience with chess since I started playing go. Both games have a clearly-defined opening, mid-game, and endgame - but they're very different. Go is much more open and, to my mind, beautiful and elegant than chess, which feels constricted and regimented.
One of the highest praises in go is, "Good shape." Good shape is a construct of stones (I hate to say "group," because "group" is a technical term in go and not all good shape is composed only of stones in one group) that accomplishes its goals with the maximum efficiency and elegance. Good shape is very, very strong. Three stones in good shape can accomplish what 15 poorly-placed stones can not.
After playing go for some time, people start to recognize good shape instinctively without being able to precisely define it. Masters and good teachers can give you very good reasons why shape is good, but it's often defined circularly by terms that refer to shape (e.g. mojo meaning "thickness"), or by the outcome of best expected play. In other words, largely justification after the fact for pure aesthetic pattern recognition, which is one of the most important, and the most human, aspects of the game.
What it boils down to is that successful go play is much, much more dependent than chess upon those things that humans do extremely well and computers so far do very poorly: learning and applying pattern recognition.
The point about the numbers and search space is that even if we created some computing process that could brute-force chess, it would still barely be a drop in the bucket of the power needed to brute force go. So yes, I think the tic-tac-toe analogy is valid.
Arguing about whether go or chess is better is bloody stupid. By any reasonable measure, go and chess are two of the best games that humans have invented. Different people like different games, and these two are no exception. I prefer go, so keep that bias in mind, but I started playing chess at 5 and still play.
Blockquothe the poster:
Who wins at 9Dan perfect play with Go?
No one's yet found perfect play in go. There's no reason to think it's not possible, but it's a staggering challenge given that there are still many openings (called fuseki on a larger scale, and joseki for primarily corner plays) that haven't been fully explored. The most comprehensive book of joseki available lists over 60,000. Joseki are roughly equivalent in complexity and importance to opening libraries in chess.
Go is a two-dimensional game, X + Y, many configurations yes, but depth? Hell no.
I see what you mean by "two-dimensional" (compared with chess, where different pieces have different weights due to their abilities), but I think you're wrong. In go, position is much more important than in chess, but so is relation to other stones. The associations between chess pieces are more linear (physically and metaphorically) than those between go stones. A stone is strong in relation to other stones near it, and those stones in turn, and to enemy stones. It's fantastically difficult to determine what a stone is "worth," but relatively easy for masters of the game to determine the strength or life of a shape or position.
Go is two-dimensional in the same way as a large, perfect expanse of grass - like a 500-year-old British lawn. From a distance it all looks the same, but once you get close enough you see that the variation is infinite.
I've never met one decent Go player who could come close to beating me at chess (I'm well under a Master) -- if chess is so easy, why can't you beat me?
I hope that after you hit "post" on this you realized how ignorant that sounds. Are you saying that go masters and chess masters should be able to play competitively against each other? That there's one omni "board-playing" skill that transfers easily between games? That's like a poker player dissing a bridge player for not beating him, or a 100-yard sprinter ragging on a marathoner - pointless.
Some people are more blind about their game loyalties, and make silly comparisons. No reasonable person would say that chess is "easy." Chess is as easy as your opponent, just like go. From a game theory and programming perspective, however, chess is much easier than go. The world champion is in a serious match with a computer. Many people don't think that will happen for go this century.
If it's so boring, why are their over 10^80 possible moves to be made?
Number of moves has precious little to do with how interesting a game is. If you're whipping out your move numbers, though, check this: AI-Depot says:
The search space for Go's game tree is both wider and deeper than that of chess. It has been estimated to be as big as ~10^170 compared to ~10^50 for chess, making the normal brute-force game tree search algorithms much less effective.
That's a great page to read, by the way. You're free to prefer any game you want, and I agree that there are snobs on both sides. But there's no question that, for computers, go makes chess look like tic-tac-toe.
Yea because opening a single 2MB html is likely....
It's not just likely, it's certain. I do it every day with multiple files. If you don't do it, bully for you, but find me a better test of raw HTML parsing speed.
I just loaded foxnews.com on IE it took about 6.25 seconds to load. On Moz it took about 4.5.
If you think this is a good test then you need to buy a better brand of crack. You're not measuring rendering speed but download speed. Tell me, how did you account for network congestion? Do you know if your ISP proxies or caches requests?
I just saved all three pages you mentioned, and all their graphics, to disk and had my local Apache serve them to IE and Moz. All three pages loaded basically instantaneously in IE, with maybe a 1/2 second lag in Moz. I don't consider this significant, and in real-world use it's not noticeable.
The point is your example is a red herring.
Actually, no. A red herring would be, "IE starts faster than Mozilla in Windows therefore IE is faster." My example was a well-controlled test with few variables. Perhaps it didn't test what you'd like, but I think it was fair.
The point seems to be that either you have a wretchedly slow computer, or you don't understand how to test rendering speed.
Mozilla has rendered faster than any version of IE
You're 100% ass-backwards on that one, pal. I timed it and the difference in rendering speed alone
is incredible - IE kicks Moz's ass. Now, I've used Moz as my primary browser
for over a year, and I don't intend to go back, but let's call a spade a
spade shall we?
In the most recent versions of both browsers I just opened the
most recent MySQL manual - over 2MB of HTML in one file. My machine's a Duron
750 with 512MB, running Win2k. I timed rendering speed only - the file is
served locally, and the browsers already started - I navigated to the file
from a link on an otherwise blank (local) page. I timed from when I clicked
the link:
IE: 1.5 seconds
Mozilla: 8 seconds
In short, Mozilla has a long way to go before it renders pages faster than IE.
The computer techs shouldn't need to know the business.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. IT is a business problem: how do I get functionality X with resources Y? There are many aspects of any business which are not obvious to an outsider or quantifiable by an insider.
You're correct that the techs shouldn't guess at requirements based on their knowledge of the business. But to imply, as I think you have, that a technical person's knowledge of a business is of no value is silly.
Say you're building an accounting application. Would you as a designer want to know that there are several Asian people on staff, and sometimes they have trouble reading English? Would you like to know that the accounts receivable employee is a woman in her 50's who won't retire for 10 years, was raised on old DOS applications, and is terrified of GUIs? What are the chances of either of these people or groups communicating that to you clearly? Do you think management knows or cares?
There's no substitute for a person on the ground, so to speak. If you plan for the techs to have 0 knowledge of the business then you have to assume that the business is 100% cognizant of itself (for the particular problem domain) and can clearly communicate that knowledge. You must know that never happens.
If I knew her name I would have Googled for it. The AC was right - I gave all the information I had so perhaps someone else would have better luck finding a link.
Slashdot Mirror
The thrust of half those questions was: "TCPA seems to provide benefit only to those who wish to tell me what I can and cannot do with my computer. Is this true? If not, what's in it for me? If it is true, how can you sleep at night?"
I think Michael's questions were most on-point, and what I most wondered myself (there, I said something nice about him
If I sound harsh it's because I'm pissed. The goal of TCPA is transparent, and Brian The AMI Guy is either trying to pull the wool over our eyes or incompetent. Given that he used to hack this stuff for a living, and now has "Sales" in his title, I'd suggest the former.
Big Media nad Big Software are chortling in glee as they see their plans for "Trusted Computing" coming to fruition. The MPAA wants to turn your computer into a TV, and AMI is only to happy to help.
Yeah, Blonde was one of the great bands of the last 15 years, IMHO. I remember being blown away by "God is a Bullet." I still listen in slack-jawed amazement to "Mexican Moon." Johnette's album ("Pretty & Twisted") was a pale shadow; "Still in Hollywood" was interesting from an archaelogical perspective. I bought their reunion album, whatever it was called, and listened to it once *gag*. It was proof positive that they broke up at the right time. *Sigh*
They're toast, though, no matter what half-assed "intellectual property" scheme they come up with. I mean, really - who're you going to stay friends with? A girlfriend who gave you your toothbrush back and said, "Bye, and thanks for all the fish," or one who boiled your fucking cat alive? SCO is kicking its customers in the nuts while they walk out the door; they might squeeze a little cash out of them on the way, but they're only hastening the exit. Did I mention that SCO is toast? That quote alone should get them on FC Translation: "We're desperate and rudderless, checking under sofa cushions for spare change. Got any?"
Have people already forgotten that Microsoft has been convicted of the most anti-competitive and anti-free-market behavior possible? That the U.S government has been trying for a decade to rein in their behavior and bring some semblence of competition to the PC market?
FWIW, I have two of these pieces of hardware, albiet slightly older versions. My Antec case is the same, but without the whiz-bang pretty features (panels, lights, whatnot). It's sweet - big, easy to work with, tons of drive bays.
I've also got 2 of the ViewSonic P95f monitors. The ones reviewed are P95f+ models, which are capable of a higher resolution, but with a slightly lower refresh rate for all other resolutions (stupid, IMHO). These are great screens, especially for the price. Perfectly flat, exceptionally clear and crisp.
I hope he has plans for retirement. Or a good explanation of how a U.S. law will affect spam coming from China.
I think his idea is great, and will (if implemented) have the intended effect on spam originating from inside the U.S. It will have a converse effect on spam from outside the U.S, though - we'll continue to get the same amount of spam, it'll just all come from China. Actually, we might get more spam, since I bet it's cheaper to send the shit from China.
The problem here is not that there aren't ways to stop spam (although that's part of the problem), but that spam makes money. As long as that's true, people will find a way to send it. C'mon - it's a freaking felony to carry a gram of cocaine, but hundreds of people do it every day, and few of them are caught.
Unless Lessig can get laws passed in literally every country with as much as a ISDN link to the U.S, this approach won't help much.
This article, no offense, really has nothing to do with micropayments at all. It's simply a half-assed configuration guide for Apache. So what?
... Microsoft Passport? Don't get me wrong - this could be a nightmare from nearly any perspective (privacy, security, vendor lock-in, monopoly gouging, lack of standards, etc.), but the idea itself is sound. Joe Webmaster, using an API provided by [Vendor X], sends them traffic information on a [daily|weekly|other] basis and gets a check back. The users are billed monthly.
You can't solve the micropayment problem technically. The solution involves technology, but is primarily social and business.
You need a robust system capable of tracking a user's activity and billing them at some sort of interval. The problem here is that all of the electronic payment apparatus in place in the world assumes that large amounts are being billed. How'd you like [CC Processor X] to charge you 3% (rounded up to $2 or so, as some do) for one user's $0.72 of activity?
No, we need something centralized. Dare I say it
Problematically, the only company with a real shot at implementing this in the short term is Microsoft, and as in all their products (not a flame, just an observation) the first 2 versions will suck, and once they have their monopoly it'll start to suck more.
Content on the Internet needs micropayments to survive in the long term, period. I see no other way, now that advertising has crashed so badly (and looks to stay crashed). This'll be the hardest thing on the 'net since building it.
And that's just the technology. Getting the average user to start paying for each page click will be a hard sell, to say the least.
...recently, I'd say outsource it. If you're not a programmer, you don't want to learn how to do it from scratch. The programming's the smallest part, though: dealing with the banks, cert vendors, hosts, etc. is a royal pain. Securing your system is the most important thing, and this is an area where you cannot skimp. Period.
Run the numbers, though. You should be able to hire someone with e-commerce experience specifically to implement this. You want someone who knows the space, how can pick a good off-the-shelf system and customize it for your clients, and who is security-conscious. As someone else in this thread said, HTTPS and certs are blue smoke and mirrors compared with unpatched or poorly-maintained servers.
Bring this up to your boss and see how much he *really* likes the idea. With the prospect of paying a new hire (or a contractor) to work on this, he'll either get more serious or less serious, both of which are good news for you.
This is an expensive tech product marketing guy's wet dream - create a fake diary and get it posted to Slashdot. The bare fact that the site hasn't melted yet is proof that it's not a personal diary.
Orrin Hatch, for instance, is a fairly conservative and very Christian man. We disagree on many important issues, but we do agree that citizens have fair-use rights to copyrighted material. Orrin's a musician, so he sees this issue from a very different side than most conservatives.
If Phyllis writes an editorial with which you agree, send her mail and say, "You and I disagree about many issues, but we're on the same wavelength here. Thanks!" Take help where you can find it, folks.
Off-topic rant: one of the most insidious and dangerous intellectual crutches many people use is this false dichotomy of "good" or "bad" people or ideas. No person, and precious few ideas, are wholly good or bad - most are some sort of compromise. Hitler instigated some of the most horrible acts ever seen on this planet, but word has it he was good to his dog.
Using this crutch is easy and tempting, but it immediately requires you to build up all sorts of mental walls. Instead, see both sides of an issue. See the ideas with which you disagree are formed, how they propogate, and why people espouse them - then attack the root, not the manifestation.
Mr. Senator from Disney doesn't kiss the Mouse's ass because he's evil, but because the ass is gold-plated and some of it rubs off on him. And our political system requires those at the highest level (e.g. U.S. Congress) to gather and spend truly stunning amounts of money to stay in power.
You can call people "evil" or "enemies" and thus shut yourself out of the system, you can work within the system to defeat those people (or more to the point, their ideas), or you can change the system. The latter two options require the ability to see both sides of an issue, and the causes of a person's behavior.
People's actions have good or evil consequences (often both); ideas have good or evil implementations. Get beyond the juvenile labels and to the root causes and you'll be a lot better off.
Low refresh rates hurt my eyes badly - 60 is awful after just a couple minutes. I can see a little difference between 85 and 100, but only retroactively (i.e. 85 doesn't bother me). I used to run the network for a large architecture firm, and many of these people - although they drafted in AutoCAD all day long - saw nothing wrong with 60Hz. Some of them noticed that 85 or 100 was better, but I think many of them just acclimated to 60, not realizing anything better was possible.
On another note, Windows users should check out RefreshForce, which automatically sets the highest possible refresh rate every time you (or a game, or other app) switches resolutions or color depths in Windows. I run it on a couple machines wit no trouble.
"John Romero's Shampoo Budget"
Most geeks are arrogant. We're used to having complete control over our own domain (whether that's our personal box or a huge network) and we brook little interference. We each believe that we're the best, or that with a little more experience with X, we'll become the best. After all, we got where we are largely by teaching ourselves, right? What's so hard about learning a few more things?
... imagine that ... the mainstream media, controlled by the same few large corporations, presents a largely negative view of unions to the U.S. public. It's occured to me that perhaps they have a bias.
... 250 years.
There's something to be said for this attitude - most people have trouble with computers just because they're afraid of them - but there's much to be said against it.
Stastically speaking, most geeks are not high-end, in-demand, uber-geeks. Nor will we become such. We forget that other people learn at least as fast and well as we do, that the entire geek population is filled with people who basically get high on learning new ways to control their digital environment. It's like the Prarie Home Companion: "All the children are above average." It ain't so.
All the replies to this thread so far have echoed a common perception of unions: they exist to enforce mediocrity and prop up the lowest common denominator. Question for those who hold such a view: where did you get it? From the newspaper? From TV? From a series of reports on-line?
Hmmm
My older sister is pretty high up in the USPS union, and she talks about it a fair amount, so I am informed. Being in the union is a little like being arrested by the cops - everyone, theoretically, has the same right to a defence. This [supposed] sniper guy - he's getting a public defender. Yeah he looks guilty, but that's not the point; the point is that it has to be proven - he has to be granted due process.
There's a large part of unionization for you: due process. Management knows that it can't capriciously fire someone for (e.g.) having the wrong political viewpoint because the union will take it to task.
Another part of unionization is collective bargaining. Those with valuable skills in a certain domain will band together and say to management, "If you want our skills, here's how we define 'fair treatment.'" There's nothing anti-capitalist about the idea of unions (implementation is another thing) - it's simply one group of people selling their services to another group.
People are stronger acting together. Unions, implemented correctly, start and end with that sentiment. This "rugged individualism" (rugged geekdom?) plays well on TV, but doesn't scale to real life. We've all seen that typical geek skills are becoming more common and less valuable.
Once upon a time being an auto worker was an arcane skill - only a handful of people could build cars, and no one thought it was possible to automate the process. In hindsight that was incorrect. Put down your cyberpunk novel for a minute and realize that the assembly-line was created by Henry Ford specifically to commoditize auto labor, to take as much skill as possible out of the profession. And it worked, while everyone else thought it was impossible. Who'll be the Henry Ford of geekdom? Want to bet your future that one will never appear?
Ask yourself why organized labor scares management so much. Is it because companies care about their workers, their products, or the people who buy them? If you believe that you haven't been reading the news for the last
Having said all that, there are some very real problems with unions. But no more so than with any other group of people, with human faults and foibles. You're a cog in a machine. Maybe you're an especially large and influential cog, but you won't stay that way. Whether you organize with the other cogs is up to you.
You need to learn more about the game, I think, before you try to explain it to others.
So yes, after each move there are fewer go positions, but after 80 stones have been placed (the average number of chess moves), there are still 281 moves possible. You have to play more than 200 moves into a go game before you have as few move possibilities as you do for your first move in chess. If by "combinations" you mean "tacics," you're incorrect. Tactics are crucial in go, and it's only by a solid understanding of tactics that strategic thinking is possible. It's true that the rules of chess tactics are more complex than go, but it's precisely this lack of rules and formulae that make go so hard for computers.
Go's not nearly as easily quantifiable. You can tell a chess computer that the king is worth 10,000,000 pawns, the queen 9, bishops and knights 3 or 3.5. In go, however, the only thing giving value to a stone is its position on the board and its relation to other stones
I think I realize what you're trying to say, though - that there are only three states for one position on a go board, while there are many more for a chess board. This is immaterial to the game. The problem computer programmers have with go is that there's no algorithm that will reliably determine if a group of stones is alive or dead without brute-forcing the entire game. Many groups can be correctly evaluated, and computers are good at scoring finished games, but computers will happily slog ahead (and lose horribly) in games that professionals would resign in disgust.
Read a few of these pages and then reconsider your viewpoint:
- NYT article (archived offsite - no pwd) from 1997
- AI-Depot article comparing chess and go.
- Google cache of chess vs. go article (slightly fluffy and biased towards go)
- The Sciences article
Note that I'm not saying go is better than chess. I think such arguments are foolish. But, to quote myself, from a computer's perspective go makes chess look like tic-tac-toe.It is algorithm work in the sense that no algorithm has been found, yes. But not through lack of trying - there's a fantastic amount of effort being exerted world-wide on this problem. Computer go is generations away from a machine like deep blue. The point about the numbers and search space is that even if we created some computing process that could brute-force chess, it would still barely be a drop in the bucket of the power needed to brute force go. So yes, I think the tic-tac-toe analogy is valid.
One of the highest praises in go is, "Good shape." Good shape is a construct of stones (I hate to say "group," because "group" is a technical term in go and not all good shape is composed only of stones in one group) that accomplishes its goals with the maximum efficiency and elegance. Good shape is very, very strong. Three stones in good shape can accomplish what 15 poorly-placed stones can not.
After playing go for some time, people start to recognize good shape instinctively without being able to precisely define it. Masters and good teachers can give you very good reasons why shape is good, but it's often defined circularly by terms that refer to shape (e.g. mojo meaning "thickness"), or by the outcome of best expected play. In other words, largely justification after the fact for pure aesthetic pattern recognition, which is one of the most important, and the most human, aspects of the game.
What it boils down to is that successful go play is much, much more dependent than chess upon those things that humans do extremely well and computers so far do very poorly: learning and applying pattern recognition.
The point about the numbers and search space is that even if we created some computing process that could brute-force chess, it would still barely be a drop in the bucket of the power needed to brute force go. So yes, I think the tic-tac-toe analogy is valid.
Blockquothe the poster: No one's yet found perfect play in go. There's no reason to think it's not possible, but it's a staggering challenge given that there are still many openings (called fuseki on a larger scale, and joseki for primarily corner plays) that haven't been fully explored. The most comprehensive book of joseki available lists over 60,000. Joseki are roughly equivalent in complexity and importance to opening libraries in chess. I see what you mean by "two-dimensional" (compared with chess, where different pieces have different weights due to their abilities), but I think you're wrong. In go, position is much more important than in chess, but so is relation to other stones. The associations between chess pieces are more linear (physically and metaphorically) than those between go stones. A stone is strong in relation to other stones near it, and those stones in turn, and to enemy stones. It's fantastically difficult to determine what a stone is "worth," but relatively easy for masters of the game to determine the strength or life of a shape or position.
Go is two-dimensional in the same way as a large, perfect expanse of grass - like a 500-year-old British lawn. From a distance it all looks the same, but once you get close enough you see that the variation is infinite. I hope that after you hit "post" on this you realized how ignorant that sounds. Are you saying that go masters and chess masters should be able to play competitively against each other? That there's one omni "board-playing" skill that transfers easily between games? That's like a poker player dissing a bridge player for not beating him, or a 100-yard sprinter ragging on a marathoner - pointless.
Some people are more blind about their game loyalties, and make silly comparisons. No reasonable person would say that chess is "easy." Chess is as easy as your opponent, just like go. From a game theory and programming perspective, however, chess is much easier than go. The world champion is in a serious match with a computer. Many people don't think that will happen for go this century. Number of moves has precious little to do with how interesting a game is. If you're whipping out your move numbers, though, check this: AI-Depot says: That's a great page to read, by the way. You're free to prefer any game you want, and I agree that there are snobs on both sides. But there's no question that, for computers, go makes chess look like tic-tac-toe.
I just saved all three pages you mentioned, and all their graphics, to disk and had my local Apache serve them to IE and Moz. All three pages loaded basically instantaneously in IE, with maybe a 1/2 second lag in Moz. I don't consider this significant, and in real-world use it's not noticeable. Actually, no. A red herring would be, "IE starts faster than Mozilla in Windows therefore IE is faster." My example was a well-controlled test with few variables. Perhaps it didn't test what you'd like, but I think it was fair.
The point seems to be that either you have a wretchedly slow computer, or you don't understand how to test rendering speed.
In the most recent versions of both browsers I just opened the most recent MySQL manual - over 2MB of HTML in one file. My machine's a Duron 750 with 512MB, running Win2k. I timed rendering speed only - the file is served locally, and the browsers already started - I navigated to the file from a link on an otherwise blank (local) page. I timed from when I clicked the link:
- IE: 1.5 seconds
- Mozilla: 8 seconds
In short, Mozilla has a long way to go before it renders pages faster than IE.(This is a repost of an earlier comment of mine).
You're correct that the techs shouldn't guess at requirements based on their knowledge of the business. But to imply, as I think you have, that a technical person's knowledge of a business is of no value is silly.
Say you're building an accounting application. Would you as a designer want to know that there are several Asian people on staff, and sometimes they have trouble reading English? Would you like to know that the accounts receivable employee is a woman in her 50's who won't retire for 10 years, was raised on old DOS applications, and is terrified of GUIs? What are the chances of either of these people or groups communicating that to you clearly? Do you think management knows or cares?
There's no substitute for a person on the ground, so to speak. If you plan for the techs to have 0 knowledge of the business then you have to assume that the business is 100% cognizant of itself (for the particular problem domain) and can clearly communicate that knowledge. You must know that never happens.
If I knew her name I would have Googled for it. The AC was right - I gave all the information I had so perhaps someone else would have better luck finding a link.