Of course, as computer scientists we can say with utter certainty that the scare tactics at the end of the film were utterly unnecessary: the claim that countries other than France had Minitel ('video terminals in the home') fell apart rapidly, and expert systems and knowledge inference, the messiahs of 80s AI research, utterly failed to amount to anything. Even the Japanese Fifth Generation Computer System flopped due to a lack of market. In retrospect it's obvious that the end of the video was corporate propaganda meant for government consumption; perhaps even amusingly so. (And a little sad that TFA calls it 'preaching'.)
The US was so far ahead in educated population at that point in time that the risk was always close to nil, no matter what national posturing was made, and the proof is in the import/export business: of the manufacturers who sold and supported machines in the US, the only non-American company was Bull—and they inherited their product line from Honeywell, who had bought it from GE, who had co-developed some of their most important offerings with MIT. So much for 18% of the US computing market, Japan. (Unless they meant Nintendo? Or the razor-thin manufacturing margins? Or components?)
Still, it's cute to think of the US and Canada as competing...
Xfire is a chat service closely comparable to Steam, although it has no store functionality; its primary selling point is that you can chat while in-game. If it represents any particular demographic, it would be a bias toward more veteran gamers, since it has mostly been displaced. That graph says that Diablo 3 players who use Xfire are now playing half of the hours per day that they were a month ago.
Here is a direct source for Inferno being unbeatable by Blizzard's playtesters.
Just to wrap up the Blizzard talk and defend my position: no, it's not a contradiction; the available statistics suggest that a lot of people bought the game, and then have failed to continue playing it. It sold very quickly at first, but now no one wants it. The hype sold it, but the game itself hasn't succeeded in holding onto that player base. Many of the patch changes nevertheless appear to correspond to the agenda put forth by Activision's new management in the aforementioned conspiracy theory, even if Activision doesn't actually have direct influence in Blizzard's management: continued nerfing despite promises not to do so, removing drops from destructible objects, and only slightly modifying the difficulty of Elite monsters all appear to imply that the company wants to force players to participate in the real money auction house in order to finish the game.
Even if you dismiss all of the above as circumstantial, and want to completely ignore the prospect that Blizzard is prioritizing profitability over not alienating their fan base, it's still very apparent that Diablo 3 doesn't have the same class flexibility as Diablo 2, and that a very vocal group of fans considers the game broken. I've heard that Blizzard's testers couldn't actually complete the game on the hardest difficulty, and that they knowingly shipped the game in that state. While a tiny number of people were able to complete Inferno difficulty, Blizzard still decided to patch it to be easier, which they rolled out just last Tuesday. To me, that sounds very much like bad planning (if not another attempt to force people to gear up in the auction house), and the sort of thing we should attribute to managerial failure.
At this point, with Microsoft, I really, truly believe that people are so conditioned to hate their products that they can't rightly succeed any more with their current brands. This is the fate of all greedy computer companies, I think.
It'smanagementalright. It's been management for years. Microsoft consistently hires the best people in the field (well, those that Google doesn't snag—prior to that, though, they were nearly unchallenged, and consequentially MS has had a huge number of very respectable older researchers and engineers, including a large contingent of ex-DEC people) and then squashes them with bad managers, who spend so much time politicking and infighting that they can't recognize genius like the Courier.
Unfortunately this is an increasing trend in the whole software industry; the very recent example of Diablo 3's utter failure to live up to hype, even though it's now the fastest-selling game in history, can largely be attributed to management changes in Activision. The underlying problem seems to be hiring management and leadership from non-computing sectors instead of promoting from within, although in MS's case it's more like a long-term family feud.
Doctor Frankenstein's monster could walk and talk, but that didn't qualify him to vote in the doctor's place.
Wrong metaphor, dear author. It did qualify him to vote in the doctor's place. What it didn't do, and what you are arguing against, is that it didn't grant him his own vote. Ignoring for the moment the fact that the author clearly has never read Mary Shelley's book, and pretending that Frankenstein's monster was an automaton like the computers being discussed, then that automaton is an extension of its creator, and its actions are nothing more than a by-product of its creator's. If Victor wants to send a freakish abomination of yellowed flesh to the poll booth on his behalf, that's his own problem (especially since we may have trouble verifying that Victor was, in fact, the person who sent the monster.) The question at stake is "do our non-sentient creations deserve rights," and the answer is "um, you really screwed that example up, dude."
...that being said, Frankenstein's monster was a lovely gentleman who very much deserved the right to vote. I'm not sure if he was eligible at the time, however.
Well, yeah—that's how it goes with any underutilized feature. But it was still there. Windows was happy to draw UI widgets at any size; checkboxes and close buttons were/are still defined by a font (Marlett.ttf). It would've been relatively painless to dust off the GDI ecosystem and force everyone to develop in a resolution-independent manner if sufficient devices came about to create demand.
The difference between US Customs & Border Protection and the Canadian Border Safety Agency is that the primary purpose of the CBP is to inconvenience Americans. The CBSA's purpose, on the other hand, is to inconvenience Americans.
A lot of things from Longhorn never happened—most notably WinFS, Microsoft's fabled tag-centric filesystem. It's too bad they couldn't keep their act together when the market was eager.
The irony is that Microsoft has traditionally had really good support for vector graphics in the UI (Windows 95 was nearly resolution-independent, except for the icons.) It's only now, in the devices that are making headway into high DPI, that they screw that up!
I think the weight of "people are inventing entire operating systems built in the manner of AmigaOS" outweighs your "I never turn on my video toasters any more."
I would argue that the examples you gave are primarily of people working in comparatively shallow fields—TFA suggests that DIY biologists may come up with the "novel, visionary approaches" necessary to develop "the next-generation vaccines and anti-microbials, and autologous replacement organs." That's a lot of background knowledge for a hobbyist!
Pretty sure it was a Friday. Genesis is fairly clear that He couldn't get a date because of His unsightly beard, and so in His divine anger, bequeathed unto His children a wide variety of ills both minor and major, including not only ebola, HIV, and influenza, but also the bubonic plague, insurance salespeople, and stubbed toes.
Honestly, statements like that severely devalue the amount of work that went into ebola, HIV, and influenza in the first place. Millions of years of evolution ain't free, y'know!
A 120 Hz display showing a 48 Hz film wouldn't be that bad. It'd be 2.5 TV frames to one in the film, which is the same ratio we've always had for movies that have been converted for TV display. It may not be perfect, but it's certainly watchable.
Ha, thanks. I will keep that in mind. And good luck with your own endeavours! My point, though, was more about fundamental research that no one can see the application for (yet)—it can very well be on the forefront of discovery, and yet have no apparent use whatsoever; as someone who got caused heads to turn for choosing evolutionary genomics over medical bioinformatics several times, there's a great deal of very important material that's no more economically justifiable than philosophy or history. At a certain point it's necessary, I think, that one accepts that funding and research value may very well always be perpendicular questions. (That's what we have science fiction for, I guess.)
I think that speaks volumes about how little we appreciate the educability of animals. They have culture just as much as we do; we've just taken it for granted for most of human history that their behaviours are all instinctual. If you're interested in similar peculiar anecdotes, try Googling "avian intelligence" sometime. It's amazing what we've been able to learn about parrots, pigeons and corvids through controlled experiments.
Personally I'm a little sceptical about the testing methodology:
For a proxy, I used the Cotendo CDN (recently acquired by Akamai). Cotendo was one of the early adopters of SPDY, has production-grade SPDY support and high performance servers. Cotendo was used in three modes – HTTP, HTTPS and SPDY (meaning HTTPS+SPDY).
Surely that means that the proxy would have to download at least some of the pages from non-SPDY servers on demand, rendering this entire thing suspect? He said that he ran 5 replicates, but no attempt is offered at explaining why SPDY should be slower than plain ol' HTTP, only why it might not be faster. I could be wrong, but it looks like the protocol is more concise on average even for a single-page request. Maybe Cotendo just has a bad implementation?
Well, where's the money to come from, then? Certainly in some areas that's apparent (cancer research, for example), but most academic work is too tangential and takes too long to come to fruition for the bean-counters to understand its utility. Money is the currency of the living present, not the unborn future; it may not be capital-R Right that this is so, but it's probably the best you can squeeze out of the human species without rewiring the whole survival instinct.
Personally, I find the smugness that comes from implying bean-counters are mindless, instinctual animals to be more than enough job satisfaction to make up the monetary constraint. But at any rate, one should not walk into academia expecting this situation to have changed; surely people have complained for millennia that thinking ahead will always be undervalued.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, as computer scientists we can say with utter certainty that the scare tactics at the end of the film were utterly unnecessary: the claim that countries other than France had Minitel ('video terminals in the home') fell apart rapidly, and expert systems and knowledge inference, the messiahs of 80s AI research, utterly failed to amount to anything. Even the Japanese Fifth Generation Computer System flopped due to a lack of market. In retrospect it's obvious that the end of the video was corporate propaganda meant for government consumption; perhaps even amusingly so. (And a little sad that TFA calls it 'preaching'.)
The US was so far ahead in educated population at that point in time that the risk was always close to nil, no matter what national posturing was made, and the proof is in the import/export business: of the manufacturers who sold and supported machines in the US, the only non-American company was Bull—and they inherited their product line from Honeywell, who had bought it from GE, who had co-developed some of their most important offerings with MIT. So much for 18% of the US computing market, Japan. (Unless they meant Nintendo? Or the razor-thin manufacturing margins? Or components?)
Still, it's cute to think of the US and Canada as competing...
Xfire is a chat service closely comparable to Steam, although it has no store functionality; its primary selling point is that you can chat while in-game. If it represents any particular demographic, it would be a bias toward more veteran gamers, since it has mostly been displaced. That graph says that Diablo 3 players who use Xfire are now playing half of the hours per day that they were a month ago.
Here is a direct source for Inferno being unbeatable by Blizzard's playtesters.
I am intrigued by your ideas. Let us start a newsletter.
Just to wrap up the Blizzard talk and defend my position: no, it's not a contradiction; the available statistics suggest that a lot of people bought the game, and then have failed to continue playing it. It sold very quickly at first, but now no one wants it. The hype sold it, but the game itself hasn't succeeded in holding onto that player base. Many of the patch changes nevertheless appear to correspond to the agenda put forth by Activision's new management in the aforementioned conspiracy theory, even if Activision doesn't actually have direct influence in Blizzard's management: continued nerfing despite promises not to do so, removing drops from destructible objects, and only slightly modifying the difficulty of Elite monsters all appear to imply that the company wants to force players to participate in the real money auction house in order to finish the game.
Even if you dismiss all of the above as circumstantial, and want to completely ignore the prospect that Blizzard is prioritizing profitability over not alienating their fan base, it's still very apparent that Diablo 3 doesn't have the same class flexibility as Diablo 2, and that a very vocal group of fans considers the game broken. I've heard that Blizzard's testers couldn't actually complete the game on the hardest difficulty, and that they knowingly shipped the game in that state. While a tiny number of people were able to complete Inferno difficulty, Blizzard still decided to patch it to be easier, which they rolled out just last Tuesday. To me, that sounds very much like bad planning (if not another attempt to force people to gear up in the auction house), and the sort of thing we should attribute to managerial failure.
At this point, with Microsoft, I really, truly believe that people are so conditioned to hate their products that they can't rightly succeed any more with their current brands. This is the fate of all greedy computer companies, I think.
It's management alright. It's been management for years. Microsoft consistently hires the best people in the field (well, those that Google doesn't snag—prior to that, though, they were nearly unchallenged, and consequentially MS has had a huge number of very respectable older researchers and engineers, including a large contingent of ex-DEC people) and then squashes them with bad managers, who spend so much time politicking and infighting that they can't recognize genius like the Courier.
Unfortunately this is an increasing trend in the whole software industry; the very recent example of Diablo 3's utter failure to live up to hype, even though it's now the fastest-selling game in history, can largely be attributed to management changes in Activision. The underlying problem seems to be hiring management and leadership from non-computing sectors instead of promoting from within, although in MS's case it's more like a long-term family feud.
Completely agree. The video clearly depicts a beaker smouldering much moreso than any Erlenmeyer flask. How do you mess that up?!
Nurse, get this man some cynicism, stat!
You honestly have a good point. This article is about the risk of a headless government, not the threat!
I have another question: if there's such a thing as "the Rob Beckstom," are there other Rob Beckstoms elsewhere?
Doctor Frankenstein's monster could walk and talk, but that didn't qualify him to vote in the doctor's place.
Wrong metaphor, dear author. It did qualify him to vote in the doctor's place. What it didn't do, and what you are arguing against, is that it didn't grant him his own vote. Ignoring for the moment the fact that the author clearly has never read Mary Shelley's book, and pretending that Frankenstein's monster was an automaton like the computers being discussed, then that automaton is an extension of its creator, and its actions are nothing more than a by-product of its creator's. If Victor wants to send a freakish abomination of yellowed flesh to the poll booth on his behalf, that's his own problem (especially since we may have trouble verifying that Victor was, in fact, the person who sent the monster.) The question at stake is "do our non-sentient creations deserve rights," and the answer is "um, you really screwed that example up, dude."
...that being said, Frankenstein's monster was a lovely gentleman who very much deserved the right to vote. I'm not sure if he was eligible at the time, however.
Well, yeah—that's how it goes with any underutilized feature. But it was still there. Windows was happy to draw UI widgets at any size; checkboxes and close buttons were/are still defined by a font (Marlett.ttf). It would've been relatively painless to dust off the GDI ecosystem and force everyone to develop in a resolution-independent manner if sufficient devices came about to create demand.
The difference between US Customs & Border Protection and the Canadian Border Safety Agency is that the primary purpose of the CBP is to inconvenience Americans. The CBSA's purpose, on the other hand, is to inconvenience Americans.
A lot of things from Longhorn never happened—most notably WinFS, Microsoft's fabled tag-centric filesystem. It's too bad they couldn't keep their act together when the market was eager.
The irony is that Microsoft has traditionally had really good support for vector graphics in the UI (Windows 95 was nearly resolution-independent, except for the icons.) It's only now, in the devices that are making headway into high DPI, that they screw that up!
I think the weight of "people are inventing entire operating systems built in the manner of AmigaOS" outweighs your "I never turn on my video toasters any more."
I would argue that the examples you gave are primarily of people working in comparatively shallow fields—TFA suggests that DIY biologists may come up with the "novel, visionary approaches" necessary to develop "the next-generation vaccines and anti-microbials, and autologous replacement organs." That's a lot of background knowledge for a hobbyist!
Pretty sure it was a Friday. Genesis is fairly clear that He couldn't get a date because of His unsightly beard, and so in His divine anger, bequeathed unto His children a wide variety of ills both minor and major, including not only ebola, HIV, and influenza, but also the bubonic plague, insurance salespeople, and stubbed toes.
Honestly, statements like that severely devalue the amount of work that went into ebola, HIV, and influenza in the first place. Millions of years of evolution ain't free, y'know!
A 120 Hz display showing a 48 Hz film wouldn't be that bad. It'd be 2.5 TV frames to one in the film, which is the same ratio we've always had for movies that have been converted for TV display. It may not be perfect, but it's certainly watchable.
Ha, thanks. I will keep that in mind. And good luck with your own endeavours! My point, though, was more about fundamental research that no one can see the application for (yet)—it can very well be on the forefront of discovery, and yet have no apparent use whatsoever; as someone who got caused heads to turn for choosing evolutionary genomics over medical bioinformatics several times, there's a great deal of very important material that's no more economically justifiable than philosophy or history. At a certain point it's necessary, I think, that one accepts that funding and research value may very well always be perpendicular questions. (That's what we have science fiction for, I guess.)
I think that speaks volumes about how little we appreciate the educability of animals. They have culture just as much as we do; we've just taken it for granted for most of human history that their behaviours are all instinctual. If you're interested in similar peculiar anecdotes, try Googling "avian intelligence" sometime. It's amazing what we've been able to learn about parrots, pigeons and corvids through controlled experiments.
Ah, that explains it. In retrospect it seems rather silly to complain that an encrypted protocol is not more efficient than an unencrypted one.
Yes, but that shouldn't slow things down beyond 100% of HTTP's speed... should it?
Personally I'm a little sceptical about the testing methodology:
For a proxy, I used the Cotendo CDN (recently acquired by Akamai). Cotendo was one of the early adopters of SPDY, has production-grade SPDY support and high performance servers. Cotendo was used in three modes – HTTP, HTTPS and SPDY (meaning HTTPS+SPDY).
Surely that means that the proxy would have to download at least some of the pages from non-SPDY servers on demand, rendering this entire thing suspect? He said that he ran 5 replicates, but no attempt is offered at explaining why SPDY should be slower than plain ol' HTTP, only why it might not be faster. I could be wrong, but it looks like the protocol is more concise on average even for a single-page request. Maybe Cotendo just has a bad implementation?
Well, where's the money to come from, then? Certainly in some areas that's apparent (cancer research, for example), but most academic work is too tangential and takes too long to come to fruition for the bean-counters to understand its utility. Money is the currency of the living present, not the unborn future; it may not be capital-R Right that this is so, but it's probably the best you can squeeze out of the human species without rewiring the whole survival instinct.
Personally, I find the smugness that comes from implying bean-counters are mindless, instinctual animals to be more than enough job satisfaction to make up the monetary constraint. But at any rate, one should not walk into academia expecting this situation to have changed; surely people have complained for millennia that thinking ahead will always be undervalued.