While Solaris might be the most famous book from Lem, I much prefer "The Cyberiad". The book is a mixture of Douglas Adams and Monthy Python, but at a higher level. Science fiction meets Guildernstein and Rosencratz.
Here are a few quotes:
"Everyone knows that dragons don't exist. But while this simplistic formulation may satisfy the layman, it does not suffice for the scientific mind. The School of Higher Neantical Nillity is in fact wholly unconcerned with what does exist. Indeed, the banality of existence has been so amply demonstrated, there is no need for us to discuss it any further here. The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the problem analytically, discovered three distinct kinds of dragon: the mythical, the chimerical, and the purely hypothetical. They were all, one might say, nonexistent, but each nonexisted in an entirely different way... "
Pastoral poem on love and tensor algebra (with a little topology and higher calculus):
"Come let us hasten to a higher plane Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn Their indices bedecked from one to n Commingled in an endless Markov chain."
"One day Trurl the constructor put together a machine that could create anything starting with n. When it was ready, he tried it out, ordering it to make needles, then nankeens and negligees, which it did, then nail the lot to narghiles filled with nepenthe and numerous other narcotics. The machine carried out his instructions to the letter. Still not completely sure of its ability, he had it produce, one after the other, nimbuses, noodles, nuclei, neutrons, naphtha, noses, nymphs, naiads and natrium. This last it could not do..."
Actually, academic journals used to make small profits until the mid-1980s, when a wave of consolidations changed this entirely. In fact, last time I looked into this (a few years back) the profits of academic journal publishing divisions had been rising steadily and well above inflation.
A typical journal article is paid for by the investigators to cover costs of printing.
Wrong again. Depends very much on the area. Math and computer science are not this way. Physics is about half and half, with some journals being free, others charging above a certain number of pages, and lastly others charging a per-page fee.
Google understands both the idea of context around a keyword that you searched for and the context in your head when you issued the query (assuming you are using Google toolbar). For sure, the way google understands context leaves room for improvement, but this is not an easy task.
I think that rather than having the station sit empty out there, we should send up harmless monkeys up there to conduct experiments. We could even give them funny names from the movie "Gladiator", like Maximus, Lucius and Cornelius.
This promotes a "rich get richer" attiude, as the top rated sites for any given keywords on Google get a lot of free traffic as a result.
While this intuitively would seem to be the case, data from the field shows that this is not happening. Good new pages pretty quikly rise up to their level of popularity even though they start "poor".
This was in a recent paper by Barabasi (I think) in which he analyzed the behaviour of the late time arrival under the power-law distribution, which is accepted as the best current model for linking. Surprisingly, bad "old money" still lost to quality "noveau rich".
As an aside this shows the value of science testing even the most obvious assertions at least once as every so often what you just know to be the case is not actually so.
I believe the network traffing doubling every two years was stated by WorldCom as justification for their laying so much fiber.
This is incorrect, WorldCom was using doubling every 3-4 months. The guy who debunked that myth actually observed sustained growth of doubling every year. Read the report. I do agree that traffic growth seems to have tapered lately, hence the doubling every two years figure I used.
A network guy at AT&T did a study in 2000 or 2001 that showed the internet traffic level did grow at that rate for a few months in 1995 or 1996 when it was easier to grow that fast, but it was never sustained.
The same network guy determined that the more correct figure was doubling every 12 months or so. However I have reason to believe the growth in traffic has slowed down somewhat since, hence the doubling ever 2 years or so figure I used.
Yes, I know that is the number Andrew Odlyzko claimed back then, however I have reason to believe that traffic growth has slowed a bit further since then.
I don't understand the logic behind the content of your sig...
The piece of code is made up. The point is the dangerous overloading of the "/" operator. As I said elsewhere:
If you see nothing wrong with the overloading of "/" in C, I'll give you a 1/2 million dollars, no questions asked.
Are there alternatives? Yes, several other computer languages use a special operator for integer division.
Would that make more sense? Yes, non-standard meanings lead to bugs that are often missed. They are considered a no-no.
Is this a mistake in the design of C? Yes it is. In fact C used to evaluate sqrt(2) to whatever random junk that came out to be. In ANSI C, assuming you have the proper forward declaration that comes out to be sqrt(2.0) as it is to be expected. Which of the two choices do you think leads to less bugs?
If you were burying water mains and other city services into a new house subdivision nobody would be surprised about the city buring enough capacity for a 100 houses, even though only one has been built just yet.
Most of "dark fiber" articles out there fail to see the same rationale behind the large amount of dark fiber out there. This is proper planning. Network traffic has been doubling every two years or so, this means that 90-95% dark fiber would last you about 6-8 years.
This is perfectly sensible. In fact, if we had to rebury fiber within 6 years of paying billions to rip open downtown Manhattan I would fire my provisioning manager.
Most *nix systems have used for enterprise class systems for well over 20 years
Not true. I worked for large manufacturer which sold unix boxen and big iron and in the late 80s and we wouldn't even dream of selling a unix machine to anybody save the engineering department of a corporation.
Adam Smith identified a wide range of economic systems. I don't recall him confusing ownership with method
Here's a few quotes. There are thousands more like it. Perhaps you need to reread your notes on Adam Smith's role in defining capitalism and the forces of free market.
"Adam Smith who was the founding father of capitalism"
It's as ridiculous to assert that capitalism and free markets are synonymous as it is to argue the same of socialism and democracy.
You might find it absurd, but it is a well established definition. You choose to define capitalism as only some parts of the equation (those having to do with profits) while others including (including Adam Smith) prefer to identify with an entire mechanism driven by the market and profits.
When it comes to definitions, you can choose your own. So there, hypnotic ads do not go against your own private definition of capitalism.
They do seem to go against the definition of Laisez Faire capitalism, which was the point of my message. What else can I tell you?
Marx, who invented the word, defined it in the terms I describe above, as far as I'm aware.
First off, Marx neither invented the word nor defined the concept. Adam Smith is credited as the first person who identified capitalism as a "concept" or economic system. He also studied and described its main characteristics (Adam Smith if sometimes referred to as the father of capitalism). Marx did push forward our understanding of capitalism, but this does not mean that everything he said is correct (although there are some hard line communists out there who like to think so).
For example, Newton might have invented the word gravitation but this does not mean he got it 100% right (in fact we know he missed relativistic effects).
Reading Marx gives the impression of an idiot-savant: in one paragraph he makes an incisive, novel comment about the inner-workings of capitalism, in the next he's unable to understand the concept of risk and the value that we attach to it (an error that goes to the core of his entire theory of value).
Hypnotism has nothing to do with it. People still use their free will to make decisions.
Clearly you did not read the original story. Here's the relevant quote:
"What it really does is give unprecedented insight into Adam Koval "Unprecedented insight into the consumer mind." Adam Koval, Brighthouse Institute for Thought Sciences the consumer mind. And it will actually result in higher product sales or in brand preference or in getting customers to behave the way they want them to behave," company executive Adam Koval told Marketplace.
My comment was not directed at traditional informational advertising but rather to this type of "hypnotic" advertisement (which is not here yet, but a work in progress).
Capitalism is merely the use of investments to fund enterprises with an expectation of a return overall.
There are several competing definitions of capitalism.
Marxists and other people in the left tend to define it in terms of what they term "exploitation" of labor or by private ownership of the means of production. The new left defines it as "waged labor" without ever explaining how to achieve unwaged labor (something not even the old communists in the USSR ever proposed).
The right tends to have more encompassing definitions of capitalism, which in practice are a lot more sensible. If we envision a kingdom in which the king owned everything, well technically, this is private property of the means of production, but hardly anybody would call such a system "capitalist". Sometimes to avoid that confussion people write explicitly "laissez faire capitalism" to imply not the marxist definition, but the Adam Smith "invisible hand" definition.
Under the laissez faire capitalism anything that impedes the proper functioning of free market policies is deemed anti-capitalist, including such things as monopolies, centrally planned economies, and violation of property rights.
It is in this context that I question the presence of ads that go beyond a merely informative role.
When I went to school I was told that capitalism is based on free markets and competition. No need for central planning, simply let market forces select the best product.... but now we have adds that can effectively hipnotize you into buying some shit... "must buy beer, swedish bikini good" style adds....
This seems to have more in common with communist propaganda than with core values of capitalism...
Slashdot Mirror
rouge Linux machines
In Soviet Russia rouge linux is the standard Linux distro...
While Solaris might be the most famous book from Lem, I much prefer "The Cyberiad". The book is a mixture of Douglas Adams and Monthy Python, but at a higher level. Science fiction meets Guildernstein and Rosencratz.
Here are a few quotes:
"Everyone knows that dragons don't exist. But while this simplistic formulation may satisfy the layman, it does not suffice for the scientific mind. The School of Higher Neantical Nillity is in fact wholly unconcerned with what does exist. Indeed, the banality of existence has been so amply demonstrated, there is no need for us to discuss it any further here. The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the problem analytically, discovered three distinct kinds of dragon: the mythical, the chimerical, and the purely hypothetical. They were all, one might say, nonexistent, but each nonexisted in an entirely different way
Pastoral poem on love and tensor algebra (with a little topology and higher calculus):
"Come let us hasten to a higher plane
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn
Their indices bedecked from one to n
Commingled in an endless Markov chain."
"One day Trurl the constructor put together a machine that could create anything starting with n. When it was ready, he tried it out, ordering it to make needles, then nankeens and negligees, which it did, then nail the lot to narghiles filled with nepenthe and numerous other narcotics. The machine carried out his instructions to the letter. Still not completely sure of its ability, he had it produce, one after the other, nimbuses, noodles, nuclei, neutrons, naphtha, noses, nymphs, naiads and natrium. This last it could not do..."
Very few journals make a profit
Actually, academic journals used to make small profits until the mid-1980s, when a wave of consolidations changed this entirely. In fact, last time I looked into this (a few years back) the profits of academic journal publishing divisions had been rising steadily and well above inflation.
A typical journal article is paid for by the investigators to cover costs of printing.
Wrong again. Depends very much on the area. Math and computer science are not this way. Physics is about half and half, with some journals being free, others charging above a certain number of pages, and lastly others charging a per-page fee.
Google doesn't understand the concept of context.
Google understands both the idea of context around a keyword that you searched for and the context in your head when you issued the query (assuming you are using Google toolbar). For sure, the way google understands context leaves room for improvement, but this is not an easy task.
Is this your study?
Yes and no. The link you post is a letter by Adamic and Huberman which is what I had in mind. The letter is in reply to the Barabasi paper.
This letter says exacty what I claimed:
the results of our search suggest no correlation between the age of a site and its number of links
I think that rather than having the station sit empty out there, we should send up harmless monkeys up there to conduct experiments. We could even give them funny names from the movie "Gladiator", like Maximus, Lucius and Cornelius.
This promotes a "rich get richer" attiude, as the top rated sites for any given keywords on Google get a lot of free traffic as a result.
While this intuitively would seem to be the case, data from the field shows that this is not happening. Good new pages pretty quikly rise up to their level of popularity even though they start "poor".
This was in a recent paper by Barabasi (I think) in which he analyzed the behaviour of the late time arrival under the power-law distribution, which is accepted as the best current model for linking. Surprisingly, bad "old money" still lost to quality "noveau rich".
As an aside this shows the value of science testing even the most obvious assertions at least once as every so often what you just know to be the case is not actually so.
MSN makes every word in a page a link. Has this been patented too?
I believe the network traffing doubling every two years was stated by WorldCom as justification for their laying so much fiber.
This is incorrect, WorldCom was using doubling every 3-4 months. The guy who debunked that myth actually observed sustained growth of doubling every year. Read the report. I do agree that traffic growth seems to have tapered lately, hence the doubling every two years figure I used.
A network guy at AT&T did a study in 2000 or 2001 that showed the internet traffic level did grow at that rate for a few months in 1995 or 1996 when it was easier to grow that fast, but it was never sustained.
The same network guy determined that the more correct figure was doubling every 12 months or so. However I have reason to believe the growth in traffic has slowed down somewhat since, hence the doubling ever 2 years or so figure I used.
Double every year?
Yes, I know that is the number Andrew Odlyzko claimed back then, however I have reason to believe that traffic growth has slowed a bit further since then.
I don't understand the logic behind the content of your sig...
The piece of code is made up. The point is the dangerous overloading of the "/" operator. As I said elsewhere:
If you see nothing wrong with the overloading of "/" in C, I'll give you a 1/2 million dollars, no questions asked.
Are there alternatives? Yes, several other computer languages use a special operator for integer division.
Would that make more sense? Yes, non-standard meanings lead to bugs that are often missed. They are considered a no-no.
Is this a mistake in the design of C? Yes it is. In fact C used to evaluate sqrt(2) to whatever random junk that came out to be. In ANSI C, assuming you have the proper forward declaration that comes out to be sqrt(2.0) as it is to be expected. Which of the two choices do you think leads to less bugs?
I thought that was one of the lies that Worldcom used when cooking its books.
The lie was traffic doubling every 3-6 months. Traffic does double every two years or so.
I seem to recall that it's a mythical number that MCI came up with at the beginning of the Internet age.
The mythical number was traffic doubling every three to six months.
If you were burying water mains and other city services into a new house subdivision nobody would be surprised about the city buring enough capacity for a 100 houses, even though only one has been built just yet.
Most of "dark fiber" articles out there fail to see the same rationale behind the large amount of dark fiber out there. This is proper planning. Network traffic has been doubling every two years or so, this means that 90-95% dark fiber would last you about 6-8 years.
This is perfectly sensible. In fact, if we had to rebury fiber within 6 years of paying billions to rip open downtown Manhattan I would fire my provisioning manager.
Notice the other parent poster said technically speaking?
I would consider capacity a technical characteristic, as was the decision to sacrifice recording quality in exchange for capacity in minutes.
Still, technically speaking, VHS was inferior to the other two.
This is a myth. VHS was able to record a movie in a single tape. In at lest this aspect VHS was superior to betamax.
Most *nix systems have used for enterprise class systems for well over 20 years
Not true. I worked for large manufacturer which sold unix boxen and big iron and in the late 80s and we wouldn't even dream of selling a unix machine to anybody save the engineering department of a corporation.
They're retiring a mature, stable, established and best-of-breed architecture (Alpha)
That nobody uses or cares about...
for an unproven, late, incompatible, expensive, clumsy one (itanium).
Late? yes.
Incompatible? With what? IBM 360s?
Expensive? Not any more than the alpha when it came out.
Clumsy? On the contrary, the Itanium design is top notch.
Adam Smith identified a wide range of economic systems. I don't recall him confusing ownership with method
/ isbnInquiry.asp?btob=Y&isbn=0895263351&pwb =1
Here's a few quotes. There are thousands more like it. Perhaps you need to reread your notes on Adam Smith's role in defining capitalism and the forces of free market.
"Adam Smith who was the founding father of capitalism"
http://btobsearch.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch
"Adam Smith, the intellectual father of capitalism."
http://www.ru.org/93Kortenbook.html
"Smith is called the father of capitalism."
http://www.iusb.edu/~mfox1/w100/2.htm
It's as ridiculous to assert that capitalism and free markets are synonymous as it is to argue the same of socialism and democracy.
You might find it absurd, but it is a well established definition. You choose to define capitalism as only some parts of the equation (those having to do with profits) while others including (including Adam Smith) prefer to identify with an entire mechanism driven by the market and profits.
When it comes to definitions, you can choose your own. So there, hypnotic ads do not go against your own private definition of capitalism.
They do seem to go against the definition of Laisez Faire capitalism, which was the point of my message. What else can I tell you?
Marx, who invented the word, defined it in the terms I describe above, as far as I'm aware.
First off, Marx neither invented the word nor defined the concept. Adam Smith is credited as the first person who identified capitalism as a "concept" or economic system. He also studied and described its main characteristics (Adam Smith if sometimes referred to as the father of capitalism). Marx did push forward our understanding of capitalism, but this does not mean that everything he said is correct (although there are some hard line communists out there who like to think so).
For example, Newton might have invented the word gravitation but this does not mean he got it 100% right (in fact we know he missed relativistic effects).
Reading Marx gives the impression of an idiot-savant: in one paragraph he makes an incisive, novel comment about the inner-workings of capitalism, in the next he's unable to understand the concept of risk and the value that we attach to it (an error that goes to the core of his entire theory of value).
Hypnotism has nothing to do with it. People still use their free will to make decisions.
Clearly you did not read the original story. Here's the relevant quote:
"What it really does is give unprecedented insight into Adam Koval "Unprecedented insight into the consumer mind." Adam Koval, Brighthouse Institute for Thought Sciences the consumer mind. And it will actually result in higher product sales or in brand preference or in getting customers to behave the way they want them to behave," company executive Adam Koval told Marketplace.
My comment was not directed at traditional informational advertising but rather to this type of "hypnotic" advertisement (which is not here yet, but a work in progress).
You should read the entire article first...
Capitalism is merely the use of investments to fund enterprises with an expectation of a return overall.
There are several competing definitions of capitalism.
Marxists and other people in the left tend to define it in terms of what they term "exploitation" of labor or by private ownership of the means of production. The new left defines it as "waged labor" without ever explaining how to achieve unwaged labor (something not even the old communists in the USSR ever proposed).
The right tends to have more encompassing definitions of capitalism, which in practice are a lot more sensible. If we envision a kingdom in which the king owned everything, well technically, this is private property of the means of production, but hardly anybody would call such a system "capitalist". Sometimes to avoid that confussion people write explicitly "laissez faire capitalism" to imply not the marxist definition, but the Adam Smith "invisible hand" definition.
Under the laissez faire capitalism anything that impedes the proper functioning of free market policies is deemed anti-capitalist, including such things as monopolies, centrally planned economies, and violation of property rights.
It is in this context that I question the presence of ads that go beyond a merely informative role.
When I went to school I was told that capitalism is based on free markets and competition. No need for central planning, simply let market forces select the best product.... but now we have adds that can effectively hipnotize you into buying some shit... "must buy beer, swedish bikini good" style adds....
This seems to have more in common with communist propaganda than with core values of capitalism...
2c worth.