"Richard Dawkins perhaps provided the best visual for our link to chimps," Fouts told Discovery News. "Imagine taking the hand of your grandmother, who was holding the hand of her grandmother and so on down the line. 155 miles out, one of the women would be holding the hand of a chimpanzee."
Hrm. Now to me, this sounds likely to perpetuate the "we came from chimpanzees" style of (mis)interpretation not the idea that "we share a common ancestor with chimpanzees". So, to correct that...is the chain 155 miles long, with the common ancestor at 77.5 miles, and than it starts going daughter daughter daughter instead of mother mother mother, or is the 155 to the common ancestor, and then chimps are like 310 miles away instead?
I guess it would be useful to know what the assumptions are for generation length and armspan...
Dang, wonder how this will effect the great service provides.
why all the facelift ads
on
Spam, Milord
·
· Score: 1
Any idea why all the text-based ads are for facelifting and other cosmetic procedures? I can't see any obvious keywords for those...
Re:These spam laws are a waste of time
on
Spam, Milord
·
· Score: 1
The difference between a war on spam and a war on drugs is that some people like drugs, nobody likes spam. That's not true. And anyone who likes spam but doesn't want to admit it to themselves will redefine the terms: what it means to be in a business relationship with someone, what unsolicited means.
And NO ONE (except maybe mailing lists) has a usable "click to remove" feature, since no one trusts 'em, because maybe it'll just act as an address confirmation.
It's frustrating. There are legitimate uses for bulk e-mail, mailing lists of varying types, but too many proposed solutions would really do a number on those.
Lordy!! We don't need MORE taxes...we need less govt....and to especially have the state governments be more fiscally responsible. Cut spending....
Most people who are through and through libertarian agree with that general sentiment but when you ask them about specific things that should be cut don't have a good answer. Or they have a small subset of things that they'd like less of, like welfare or what not, but rarely any comprehensive cutting plan, never mind a comprehensive cutting plan that's politically viable.
I suspect Welfare fraud would be a tiny, tiny part of the $35 billion they're talking about.
First off, I had heard about some of the semi-positive results of some of the Nasa experiments that were ignored, don't have a reference.
But I remember a letter sent my some professional gadfly comic...I want to say Joe Bob Briggs but I don't think that's it...who wrote to NASA saying something along the lines of "So you burnt up this soil sample to check for signs of life on Mars? That could only prove that there WAS life on Mars...you just killed it!"
(Sorry for the lack of references, the book I got that from is at home)
Apple II was friendlier than the other systems for this kind of play I think. A real hacker's machine. I suspect I missed out by having an Atari 800XL and C=64...though the games were a bit better.
I certainly do not expect any or all content on the web to be free. As i am fully aware of the cost of operating a resource to provide to others - what I am saying is that my machine and bandwidth are not resources that I am supplying to marketers for ads and popups. This marketeers (for the most part) don't decend into your machine from outerspace. They were "invited" to be there by the people providing the content you're after. And your "my machine and bandwidth" argument is rather weak; you can't micromanage the content a website provides. "Oh, I went to your website, but I wasn't expecting it to be 5 pages worth of text...I was expecting it to be only 2! You're abusing my machine resources and bandwidth!"
Sorry your pricey DSL and (free?) webmail have joined up to create such a negative synergy. I'm sure the obvious answer of "so get different, less obtrusive providers and let the free market do its thing" is better in theory than in practice, given the pain the ass factor and availabilty issues of DSL, and that after 8 years (wow, that is a while) of one address, losing that as a contact point is not to be taken lightly.
I was going to say that really, popups aren't that bad. Especially compared to email spam; email just arrives, popups are generally helping fund sites I want to visit. Also, even in IE, they're pretty quick to clean out, every once in a while just kill all IE windows.
It's easier to kill popups and unders because they look different; their windows are much smaller and differently shaped than most people's browsing windows. My patent-pending (kidding) idea is that when those pages look like other pages with content I was actually interested in, they're going to be a lot more annoying to get rid of.
I OWN MY COMPUTER - its fully 100% a resource of MINE and nobody else. I also PAY for my internet access, by the month.
Welcome to the world of client/server. You (most likely deliberately) came to a site that is doing work and using resources to serve you information. The web is, esentially, not peer to peer.
I'm not saying I want "unstoppable audio popups" either, and hopefully some limits will be set, but expecting all the interesting stuff on the web to be free because you paid for your computer and ISP connection is a little silly.
It's not really that strange, mostly just not my experience. It would make sense for a lot of applications. Though I wonder how lightweight an EJB-client can be.
My perspective is tinted by the way I've been making and using Java backends behind Servlet/JSP/Struts "frontends". Actually, Swing doesn't seem all that J2EE-ish to me.
I think Swing is more at risk of having spoiled the whole "Java on the desktop" barrel (after AWT already made it smell kinda funny...)
Well, I've heard the official recommendation is to use stateless session beans whenever possible. And if you're in a Serverside situation (actually, getting a Swing frontend to access EJBs seems a little strange to me, but it might just be I've been in Servlet/JSP land for so long), why not just use static methods and classes to provide your service???
JDO vs EJB Entity Beans?
on
Java Data Objects
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I've heard that JDO is much better, tighter solution to O/R mapping than EJB Entity Beans, that the latter are designed to be SO flexible that you can use them as a wrapper to your legacy mainframes, but the former is a lot closer to the problem most Java folks need to solve. Anyone know if that's a reasonable viewpoint?
(For the record, at this point I hate, hate EJBs. I think they're speficially responsible for the failure of multitudinous Java server projects, way to much overhead for 95% of all things you'd want to do in Java on the server, and the bad apple that risks spoiling the whole J2EE barrel.)
They say it's a "chunking" problem... one thing about the article, it seems even a medium-good chess playing human has a way of describing and thinking about the arrangement of pieces on a board that I (and most computer programs) just don't...they're able to turn the vocabulary of chess pieces into a grammar. Most chess programs just play at the words level, with some grammar thrown in to help weed out the parse tree.
Douglas R. Hofstadter points out one crucial you missed, and he thinks it might be crucial for AI: slippery thinking, the power of analogy, the ability to realize this situation is "like" this other situation. It's a crucial variation of "pattern recognition" that lets us apply past experience to novel situations, and it's something that machines aren't particularly good at yet.
Well, swap "electrochemical" for "chemical" and I think it may well cover the neural paths you're talking about. And yeah, those neural paths have to be established, but there's nothing mystical about it, it's just very diffucult to understand.
Hofstedder (but spelled correctly) of "Godel Escher Bach" fame thinks "slipperiness" is the crucial thing really missing from AI, our abilities to utilize loose analogies and metaphors, which lets us utilize our past experience and knowledge in novel situations.
I don't even want to know what I said in Russian, now I'm afraid to ask my Russian cow-orkers.
Yeah, legacy systems are a whole different kettle of fish, I was thinking more or less in terms of "from scratch" system, preferably with well defined interfaces to the other subsystems.
The problem that the software industry is facing is that, the larger a functional piece is, the less likely it is to fit a specific purpose
Bingo.
On the other hand, the networking and gaming and finanical and manufacturing (etc, etc) industries will continue to create specific purpose software as they can justify it. This, however, is not a job for the typical "armchair programmer". If your programming habits involve months of deep philosophy about the practicality of the latest technology, then there is probably no place for you in the industry any more.
Well, at the risk of seeming like some kind of armchair philosophizer... it's interesting how, in Java, things like EJBs are trying to scale up what constitutes "reusable constructs". Frankly, I think they add way more complexity than they'll ever be worth in functionality, and I blame them for the failure of many, many promising software projects. When what you're really looking for is O/R mapping, or transactions, or clustering, there are better ways to go.
I've been developing professionally for coming on 7 years now. Frankly, there is little out there that's convincing me where heading towards "Lego" like software construction. (And if we are, it might be in some place like.Net, which I'm only on the outskirts of right now.)
See, the thing is, it's really hard to make a useful core engine that is reusable in a lot of different scenarios. 9 times out of 10, it's easier and cheaper to start from sractch, making use of good toolkits/API and directly solving the problem at hand, hopefully in a reasonably flexible way, than to wrangle some existing infrastructure into what the client wants.
Actually, that toolkit/API level software work IS a bit like using legos (few people should writ a Java hashmap function from scratch)...I think my Lego-like, you're thinking something more on the scale of...I dunno, Capsela.
But what can I do? I switched to Comp Sci in 1994 or so. I read Wired, but I had no idea something like the boom was coming. I added a Comp Sci major to my English because Comp Sci is what came naturally to me and felt personally rewarding... I'd be trying to do it even if there was no boom. I guess if the situation gets ugly enough, I'll rethink my life... though it's gonna be hard to a lateral switch that's likely to knock me so far down the payscale.
That's why Smash Brothers and its sequel, that put all these characters and their accoutrements in a very cool 2D "brawler" (where the layout of the board is more important than any other "fighting" game I've seen, I'm not a huge fan of fighters but this is great) is a dream come true. Seriously, the first one felt like the game I woulda designed in middle school or high school on paper, "wouldn't it be cool if there was a game where guy X fought guy Y and Z...and A and B and...."
Slashdot Mirror
"Richard Dawkins perhaps provided the best visual for our link to chimps," Fouts told Discovery News. "Imagine taking the hand of your grandmother, who was holding the hand of her grandmother and so on down the line. 155 miles out, one of the women would be holding the hand of a chimpanzee."
Hrm. Now to me, this sounds likely to perpetuate the "we came from chimpanzees" style of (mis)interpretation not the idea that "we share a common ancestor with chimpanzees". So, to correct that...is the chain 155 miles long, with the common ancestor at 77.5 miles, and than it starts going daughter daughter daughter instead of mother mother mother, or is the 155 to the common ancestor, and then chimps are like 310 miles away instead?
I guess it would be useful to know what the assumptions are for generation length and armspan...
Dang, wonder how this will effect the great service provides.
Any idea why all the text-based ads are for facelifting and other cosmetic procedures? I can't see any obvious keywords for those...
The difference between a war on spam and a war on drugs is that some people like drugs, nobody likes spam.
That's not true. And anyone who likes spam but doesn't want to admit it to themselves will redefine the terms: what it means to be in a business relationship with someone, what unsolicited means.
And NO ONE (except maybe mailing lists) has a usable "click to remove" feature, since no one trusts 'em, because maybe it'll just act as an address confirmation.
It's frustrating. There are legitimate uses for bulk e-mail, mailing lists of varying types, but too many proposed solutions would really do a number on those.
Lordy!! We don't need MORE taxes...we need less govt....and to especially have the state governments be more fiscally responsible. Cut spending....
Most people who are through and through libertarian agree with that general sentiment but when you ask them about specific things that should be cut don't have a good answer. Or they have a small subset of things that they'd like less of, like welfare or what not, but rarely any comprehensive cutting plan, never mind a comprehensive cutting plan that's politically viable.
I suspect Welfare fraud would be a tiny, tiny part of the $35 billion they're talking about.
You're right, though as a developer I've never really "trusted" x++ vs ++x ; usually, I'd just write
x=0
PRINT x
x++
or
x=0
x++
PRINT x
explicitly, using ++ as an instantly readable incrementor rather than capitalizing on its "in place increment" functionality.
First off, I had heard about some of the semi-positive results of some of the Nasa experiments that were ignored, don't have a reference.
But I remember a letter sent my some professional gadfly comic...I want to say Joe Bob Briggs but I don't think that's it...who wrote to NASA saying something along the lines of "So you burnt up this soil sample to check for signs of life on Mars? That could only prove that there WAS life on Mars...you just killed it!"
(Sorry for the lack of references, the book I got that from is at home)
Apple II was friendlier than the other systems for this kind of play I think. A real hacker's machine. I suspect I missed out by having an Atari 800XL and C=64...though the games were a bit better.
I certainly do not expect any or all content on the web to be free. As i am fully aware of the cost of operating a resource to provide to others - what I am saying is that my machine and bandwidth are not resources that I am supplying to marketers for ads and popups.
This marketeers (for the most part) don't decend into your machine from outerspace. They were "invited" to be there by the people providing the content you're after. And your "my machine and bandwidth" argument is rather weak; you can't micromanage the content a website provides. "Oh, I went to your website, but I wasn't expecting it to be 5 pages worth of text...I was expecting it to be only 2! You're abusing my machine resources and bandwidth!"
Sorry your pricey DSL and (free?) webmail have joined up to create such a negative synergy. I'm sure the obvious answer of "so get different, less obtrusive providers and let the free market do its thing" is better in theory than in practice, given the pain the ass factor and availabilty issues of DSL, and that after 8 years (wow, that is a while) of one address, losing that as a contact point is not to be taken lightly.
I was going to say that really, popups aren't that bad. Especially compared to email spam; email just arrives, popups are generally helping fund sites I want to visit. Also, even in IE, they're pretty quick to clean out, every once in a while just kill all IE windows.
It's easier to kill popups and unders because they look different; their windows are much smaller and differently shaped than most people's browsing windows. My patent-pending (kidding) idea is that when those pages look like other pages with content I was actually interested in, they're going to be a lot more annoying to get rid of.
I OWN MY COMPUTER - its fully 100% a resource of MINE and nobody else. I also PAY for my internet access, by the month.
Welcome to the world of client/server. You (most likely deliberately) came to a site that is doing work and using resources to serve you information. The web is, esentially, not peer to peer.
I'm not saying I want "unstoppable audio popups" either, and hopefully some limits will be set, but expecting all the interesting stuff on the web to be free because you paid for your computer and ISP connection is a little silly.
It's not really that strange, mostly just not my experience. It would make sense for a lot of applications. Though I wonder how lightweight an EJB-client can be.
My perspective is tinted by the way I've been making and using Java backends behind Servlet/JSP/Struts "frontends". Actually, Swing doesn't seem all that J2EE-ish to me.
I think Swing is more at risk of having spoiled the whole "Java on the desktop" barrel (after AWT already made it smell kinda funny...)
Well, I've heard the official recommendation is to use stateless session beans whenever possible. And if you're in a Serverside situation (actually, getting a Swing frontend to access EJBs seems a little strange to me, but it might just be I've been in Servlet/JSP land for so long), why not just use static methods and classes to provide your service???
I've heard that JDO is much better, tighter solution to O/R mapping than EJB Entity Beans, that the latter are designed to be SO flexible that you can use them as a wrapper to your legacy mainframes, but the former is a lot closer to the problem most Java folks need to solve. Anyone know if that's a reasonable viewpoint?
(For the record, at this point I hate, hate EJBs. I think they're speficially responsible for the failure of multitudinous Java server projects, way to much overhead for 95% of all things you'd want to do in Java on the server, and the bad apple that risks spoiling the whole J2EE barrel.)
They say it's a "chunking" problem...
one thing about the article, it seems even a medium-good chess playing human has a way of describing and thinking about the arrangement of pieces on a board that I (and most computer programs) just don't...they're able to turn the vocabulary of chess pieces into a grammar. Most chess programs just play at the words level, with some grammar thrown in to help weed out the parse tree.
Douglas R. Hofstadter points out one crucial you missed, and he thinks it might be crucial for AI: slippery thinking, the power of analogy, the ability to realize this situation is "like" this other situation. It's a crucial variation of "pattern recognition" that lets us apply past experience to novel situations, and it's something that machines aren't particularly good at yet.
Excellent point! It truly is _THE_ milestone, one that I'm not sure I want to even witness... :)
Not just the milestone...that's the Singularity, innit? (google Vernor Vinge if you don't know what I mean.)
Well, swap "electrochemical" for "chemical" and I think it may well cover the neural paths you're talking about. And yeah, those neural paths have to be established, but there's nothing mystical about it, it's just very diffucult to understand.
Hofstedder (but spelled correctly) of "Godel Escher Bach" fame thinks "slipperiness" is the crucial thing really missing from AI, our abilities to utilize loose analogies and metaphors, which lets us utilize our past experience and knowledge in novel situations.
I don't even want to know what I said in Russian, now I'm afraid to ask my Russian cow-orkers.
Yeah, legacy systems are a whole different kettle of fish, I was thinking more or less in terms of "from scratch" system, preferably with well defined interfaces to the other subsystems.
The problem that the software industry is facing is that, the larger a functional piece is, the less likely it is to fit a specific purpose
Bingo.
On the other hand, the networking and gaming and finanical and manufacturing (etc, etc) industries will continue to create specific purpose software as they can justify it. This, however, is not a job for the typical "armchair programmer". If your programming habits involve months of deep philosophy about the practicality of the latest technology, then there is probably no place for you in the industry any more.
Well, at the risk of seeming like some kind of armchair philosophizer... it's interesting how, in Java, things like EJBs are trying to scale up what constitutes "reusable constructs". Frankly, I think they add way more complexity than they'll ever be worth in functionality, and I blame them for the failure of many, many promising software projects. When what you're really looking for is O/R mapping, or transactions, or clustering, there are better ways to go.
I've been developing professionally for coming on 7 years now. Frankly, there is little out there that's convincing me where heading towards "Lego" like software construction. (And if we are, it might be in some place like .Net, which I'm only on the outskirts of right now.)
See, the thing is, it's really hard to make a useful core engine that is reusable in a lot of different scenarios. 9 times out of 10, it's easier and cheaper to start from sractch, making use of good toolkits/API and directly solving the problem at hand, hopefully in a reasonably flexible way, than to wrangle some existing infrastructure into what the client wants.
Actually, that toolkit/API level software work IS a bit like using legos (few people should writ a Java hashmap function from scratch)...I think my Lego-like, you're thinking something more on the scale of...I dunno, Capsela.
But what can I do? I switched to Comp Sci in 1994 or so. I read Wired, but I had no idea something like the boom was coming. I added a Comp Sci major to my English because Comp Sci is what came naturally to me and felt personally rewarding... I'd be trying to do it even if there was no boom. I guess if the situation gets ugly enough, I'll rethink my life... though it's gonna be hard to a lateral switch that's likely to knock me so far down the payscale.
That's why Smash Brothers and its sequel, that put all these characters and their accoutrements in a very cool 2D "brawler" (where the layout of the board is more important than any other "fighting" game I've seen, I'm not a huge fan of fighters but this is great) is a dream come true. Seriously, the first one felt like the game I woulda designed in middle school or high school on paper, "wouldn't it be cool if there was a game where guy X fought guy Y and Z...and A and B and...."
I kind of agree, though I thought the "break the 4th wall", step out of the game into a "metagame" was a litte corny.
And the very last line was a little trite...
(and of course Conker's delivery through most of it reminded me of my middle school acting...)
Still, over all, it was a cool ending. I also liked the general look and feel of the Aliens fight...