All these pop-AI things come down to one thing: keyword search counts. Create a bag of keywords, count the number of times they show up in some arbitrary (usually Web these days) search, and make an arbitrary determination of what each bag of keywords means. Then pass it off as some sort of special intelligent sensor or machine intelligence, add in some buzzword references to biological brain structures or psychological processes, and pretend you are some genius.
But guess what? It's just a set of arbitrary keyword search counts and essentially arbitrarily meaningless. In most cases, just the data sampling side of things is rife with egregious statistical errors. In this case, it's even worse because they are essentially taking a search-space soft pitch ("mood labels") and just aggregating the counts.
There's a difference between computers and services in a distributed environment (network). DHCP operates at a lower level to get individual computers into the environment with an addressable endpoint (IP address). Computer names provide a poor form of 'fixed' DNS for addressing of packets inside the environment from one machine to the other, commonly used for such things as file sharing when you know you need to connect to the named file server and a particular share on it.
Services, on the other hand, could exist on any of the computers and Bonjour (formerly Rendezvous) and other service discovery protocols (such as used in Jini) work at this level, looking for particular services without a care of what computer on which they run, or if they changed from one computer to another because that computer got taken offline and replaced by another one. Services could include an iTunes broadcast stream, an iChat presence, or a service that, when called via a program, can return the expected weight of x pairs of jeans, for a totally inane example.
In the iChat example, if you had a coworker moving between machines, you wouldn't know which one to message just by computer name (such as that Messaging Service that Windows NT has where you can send a message to another machine by machine name and it comes up in a dialog window). With Bonjour, wherever your coworker logged in, your iChat would find his identity as a service and know to route your iChats messages to him at his current machine.
For reference, the parent post is referencing an epic and long running legal case over inheritance featured in the Charles Dickens book Bleak House set and written in the mid-19th century.
""Science" and "Nature" are hack journals nowadays. The only reason that one publishes in those is for publicity. Pure and simple. I haven't seen an article pertaining to atmospheric science come through there that I haven't been able to poke significant holes in for years now."
If YOU have significant holes to poke, publish them! Don't worry about an academic journal, get a blog. If you are worried about it affecting your own chances for funding and positions, then create an anonymous blog. Get the word out, make them responsible for their holes. If you don't, you are just as culpable as they in letting incorrect findings stand for future generations of research to assume and thus come to incorrect or irreconcilable findings.
You might think that's someone else's job because you are "just" a Ph.D. student, but because of your specialist knowledge, there probably isn't hardly anyone else. The number of people with your knowledge of climatology is probably a few thousand worldwide or less. If you don't do it, no one will, and the rest of us will just be taken for fools because we don't have the knowledge to rebut.
Google Is (Almost) Pure Marketing
on
Google's DNA
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Others have pointed out that this article is very hyperbolic, but Google itself is built entirely on hyperbole. It is perhaps the greatest con job ever perpetrated on Wall Street and the business community, and on its own terms. Look at what Google has become. Google is just Yahoo more than five years ago, just with a better interface and a stronger marketing brand.
Let's look at the main services Google has rolled out: Search, News, Mail, Maps are the principle ones. All available on Yahoo fairly quickly after the Web took off. Image Search and Froogle - I'm not necessarily sure that Yahoo had these linked off their main site, but such search engines for images and pricing did exist back when Yahoo had reached critical mind share and Google was relatively unknown. It's arguable as to whether the improved interfaces are because of good design, or more capable Web browsers (I suspect the truth lies somewhere in between).
This is not to impugn Google's business acumen. In fact, they have proven themselves most capable in this respect. Heck, they were even dictating to Wall Street how their IPO would go. But the bottom line is that Google has offered absolutely nothing truly new that wasn't available years and years ago when you look at the big picture of service offerings. They are simply another Web portal, which were in vogue around 1997 or so. I know people will come out of the wood work saying well they have this beta lab app that Yahoo didn't have, but, you know what? That's a beta lab app. Until they roll it out and no one else has it, big deal, and, from a business perspective, is there actually a revenue stream there or is it just a technical novelty? The only actual significant thing that Google does that makes money is sell text ads.
The question now becomes how long can Google keep this marketing charade up before people realize it's just another Web portal and move on? So far, so good, but keep your fingers crossed.
Let's just say that writing client-side applications in JavaScript is a really bad idea. Why would anyone choose to write their application this way? It's an attempt to take something that was originally intended for linking together scientific documents, force fitting a layout language on top of it, which is still really beholden to the underlying document structure, then overlaying that with a scripting language, which is to say, various scripting language interpreters (one for every browser) to try and change the layout and the document on the fly.
That's what AJAX is - scientific papers posing as layouts posing as interactive applications. It's bad software practice, a misuse of technology, and an excuse for people to attempt to use limited skills to try to hack a simulated client side application, but one that is fundamentally asynchronous, difficult to debug, never provably functional (what browser are you using?) and just plain, well, bad.
Alright, enough ranting. Mod me down if you want, but when AJAX and "Web 2.0" crashes and burns, you heard it here, well, not first because I'm not the only one to say it, but, well, you heard it, okay? You are, of course, free to do whatever you wish with your time, but please just stop architecting applications like this. I want real applications, not browser-junior app... let... things.
MTBF exhibits Gaussian characteristics, but you only get the full deviation if you consider the full set. In this case, the deviation is narrowed considerably by them getting built one after another. However, you have a good point regarding the pop, pop, pop sequence - even with decreased deviation form sequential assembly, they should not fail that closely together and thus the MTBF hypothesis does not fit well.
Pointy Hair Roach: "So, let's see, I wonder if the technical department can create a turn-key solution for feeding tonight?" Long Hair Roach: "Sure, what do you have in mind?" Pointy Hair Roach: "Well, let's see, we need a diversion, why don't we have a volunteer climb up into the light fixture and drop onto her sholder, which will cause her to scream, flail about, and run out of the room." Long Hair Roach: "Um, how do we get into to the light fixture?" Pointy Hair Roach: "I dunno, go license some tech from the ants for hanging from ceilings and stuff." Long Hair Roach: "Uh... ok." Pointy Hair Roach: "Right, so while the volunteer is running back and forth avoiding the fly swatter, huge feet, and general mayhem, we'll monitor progress from the counter top." Long Hair Roach: "So, who's going to volunteer?"
Pointy Hair Roach: "Well, since you brought it up..." Long Hair Roach: "So, you want me to outsource the tech to the ants, then use it untested to scale a vertical wall, hang from a ceiling, get into a light fixture without being electrocuted - you didn't think of that, did you? And then dropping onto a human and avoiding getting crushed. Wait, what are you going to do to contribute?" Pointy Hair Roach: "We'll be eating the toast."
This is all semantic diversion, to put it politely. Some proponents of Web 2.0 are apparently hoping that by changing the definition of Web 2.0. they can make it look like Web 2.0 has actually proceeded in a meaningful direction. Web 2.0 has absolutely nothing to do with AJAX (AJAZ is just a fancy name for doing more on the client side with JavaScript and CSS, which is why they call it AJAX, because if they said 'client-side user interface development in JavaScript across an asynchronous network connection' everyone would rightly turn around and flee), social networking, or uploading your photos to Flickr.
If you read the original articles and specifications, such that exist, you will see that Web 2.0 is an envisioning of logical markup to enable machine intelligence in agents that work for the user. Web 2.0 envisions intelligent spiders that can follow logical paths (x is contained by y, y is a type of z, etc.), as well as a whole host of software serving the user living on top of this content and process. Look at the New Scientist article by Tim Berners-Lee awhile back (someone will have to find the link). Now, whether or not that's feasible anytime soon is debatable, but let's not be fooled by marketing chicanery into thinking that Web 2.0 has come about just because JavaScript development has been given a pretty name, social networking sites are all the rage (sixdegress.com was around from before the last bubble, it's just the new fad), and some Web services actually exist.
"As in, about every month or so all three lightbulbs on our cieling fan would all blow out at the same time."
This is perfectly normal. So your three lights blow out and you go and get a package of lightbulbs and install them. Three lightbulbs in the same package that came off the same assembly line in the same conditions within seconds of each other. This means that, unless one of them is exposed to something the others are not before they go into your fan, there will be very little deviation around their mean time before failure for these three bulbs, which you will experience as 'they all went out at about the same time'.
Maybe he should talk less and get his game finished. Spore's been getting hyped for quite awhile now, with multiple talks and demonstrations. Although a neat idea, it's not as revolutionary as people think. The central wow factor in the magnitudes of scale, zooming out from the very small (spore) to the very big (galaxy), is very old news and comes from an original short by Charles and Ray Eames called "The Power of 10" (it may precede them, but that's as far as I have traced it back), and a similar short plays or has played at the Smithsonian in Washington at the Air & Space Museum). The other wow factor, the procedurally generated mechanics of the critters, is impressive, but other than that it's nothing more than a Civ/Sim game with multiple levels of zoom. So, although interesting, chill folks. Sliced bread reigns supreme. My speculation is that the above makes for good demonstrations, but lousy game play, and that's what is taking time to figure out, as well as the very nebulous MMOG elements mentioned in one of the demonstrations.
Now, if there was just a way to be able to download NES/SNES/Genesis games to the Revolution and flash them onto a DS Lite cartridge or however it's done, well, I'd buy a Revolution and DS Lite upon release. I know that NES and SNES emulators exist for the DS, so it's technically feasible, but it would be nice to have a seamless experience.
Mario Kart: Double Dash for the GameCube offers a fun cooperative style of play where one drives and one shoots and you can switch during the race. Best for the better player to drive most laps to start, then let the other player get more and more laps in until it's even since driving takes a lot of coordination and reflex decision making. Btw, tip : The better player drives the latter half of the race, this way you can have a final come form behind kick that makes everyone happy if the initial laps were poor. If I remember correctly there are nine or twelve different combinations of difficulty level and sets of tracks where you compete over 4 races for a medal and best time, from the ridiculously easy to the ridiculously hard so even though there are not that many tracks, you can have a lot of fun going from the starter tournament at 50cc up to the advanced tournament at 150cc.
"Eve and Ultima Online continue to please their players with updates and releases."
This sounds like uninformed marketroid speak to me. CCP, creators of Eve, released a patch in late December, which was pretty disastrous. Many basic elements like buddy lists, some basic agent services, and other things were broken and some still remain broken. Furthermore, lag remains very bad in central areas, often to the point of not being playable or characters getting 'stuck'. It is true that CCP has announced an upgrade to better hardware in February, but so far that is a future promise, not current reality, and the lag problems have been going on for months.
Most concerning is that significant gameplay problems continue to be ignored, making the player versus player experience very difficult (especially in the finding and pursuing) and exposing most non-expert characters to totally arbitrary destruction at blind gate ambushes (transitions between solar systems - you must 'jump' blindly through a gate and if there is a fleet on the other side in the next solar system, you just die unless a pro with properly designed ship), an issue that has never been satisfactorily dealt with. Also, there is a serious problem with the use of instant bookmarks, allowing people to jump directly to gates and avoid any fleet defending the gate, which feeds into this blind ambush problem as defenders must then go to the other side and hope for a blind ambush. The side effect of the need for bookmarks is that everyone wants to carry thousands of them for safe and shorter travel (travel times have soared with one of the patches), and this is apparently saturating servers and performance.
Finally, a most pressing problem that has the player community in an uproar is the advent of ISK (the currency of Eve) farmers, some using bots, that are mining continuously in the safe areas and in NPC corporations not subject to player attack. Many of the ISK farmers are suspected of selling their ISK for real life currencies in violation of the EULA, and many are thought to operate from Asian 'sweatshop' outfits. These players are routinely reported to CCP, who apparently does little about them since the same players are seen doing the same thing week after week, nor does CCP seem to be taking the problem seriously. In fact, groups of vigilante players started taking it upon themselves to engage in 'suicide' attacks to destroy farming ships.
CCP has furthermore somewhat legitamized the transfer of real life currency into ISK by allowing the sale of time cards, bought from CCP, for ISK. The buyer lengthens their subscription, the seller gets ISK. Since it is allowed by the EULA to sell characters for ISK, this means that anyone who wants to get a quick edge up in Eve can simply sell time cards, buy a well-trained character, and buy all the ships and equipment they want. Now, people have different opinions of whether this is a good thing or not, but it underscores the fact that CCP is exercising an inconsistent principle, on one hand claiming that ISK sales are not allowed on the principle of fairness of in-game competition, but on the other allowing out of game actions to affect in game rewards when there is a profit motive.
Eve has its good points as well, but I cannot let that uninformed platitude fly. As for what's the worst problem of all, well, all of them, but buddy lists not working and not being fixed for over a month is pretty much up there as it was broken in the December patch and its dysfunction compromises the social fabric of the game (are your friends online or not?) and player versus player fighting (are your enemies on or not?).
You have a point, but, Antarctica, for example, is a continent. Much of its ice sits on land, not on the water. High mountains and extreme latitude regions, such as Greenland, also support large ice deposits.
Of course, I'm not arguing that increased ocean weight will lead to more earthquakes or making any statement about "global warming" have anything to do with it, but not all ice floats or, to be specific, I should say, is floating.
"Another problem is the lack of consideration of the need to recoup R&D and other non-manufacturing costs. A huge amount of R&D went into Mindstorms. And a fair bit of advertising. Those things are not free, they add to the cost of every set"
See TFA's mention of 'sunk cost'. It's hard to take your agreement with the parent seriously with that statement.
Even if if something cost $100 billion to research and develop and it would only make $1 billion in sales from right now, returning $500 million in profit from expenses starting from right now, it would still make for a good investment if other projects that would require the same capital do not yield better anticipated returns, regardless of the fact that you would never recover the full $100 billion in research and development. Good business planning focuses on marginal return, not past costs.
As for advertising, you do have to factor in *continued* advertising, but you seem to identify the advertising costs as those that they originally expended to build the Mindstorm brand, which represent further sunk costs.
The general conclusion of replies here seem at odds with yard sales and other venues when people selling property do not know the actual value of items, which could happen easily with computer equipment, or have a serious need for the cash quickly (such as to pay rent). Therefore, I think the prosecution will have to prove more than 'the defendant knew the item had a very low price compared to market value' as many people make a living off of spotting such opportunities. Arbitrage rests on this very concept. I expect that the prosecution must establish some evidence of knowledge of theft aside from just an unusually low price to get a judge or jury to agree.
From a purely technical standpoint, open standards seem quite attractive. However, until the patent system gets reworked so software patents get invalidated or have a high level of specificity required in comparing claims, even 'open' standards can become proprietary in a legal sense.
Some 'licensing' companies (e.g. Via Licensing and MPEG LA) will, if a standard looks like it will get some significant use in the market, make a 'call for patents', which means they ask anyone with a patent who thinks their patent would have some 'essentiality' to any implementation that used the standard to submit their patent for review. If one of these 'licensing' companies thinks the patent would apply generally to any system or application implementation that would make use of the standard, they add that patent with others of like merits to a 'patent pool' and then go after anyone using the standard to demand license fees for the pool. In this fashion, any open standard becomes a candidate for such companies to essentially leech off the standard and thereby prevent open, as in fee-less, use of the standard.
Open standards, then, face two hurdles beyond the technical ones. First, the well-known business interest some companies have in keeping their formats proprietary so you will not stop using their systems or software. Second, the less well-known, but growing legal problems with those who want to profit from the patent system without adding any real value in terms of standard creation or implementations. Open standards remain a good technical goal and we should pursue them, but this underscores some of the challenges to keep in mind.
Can you supply a source for the assertion that 'the Earth receives 5000 times as much solar energy as we currently use in oil equivalents'? I have a genuine interest on how you or someone else derived that number.
"But that's exactly what was predicted in advance, and even at a slow walk, thousands of the able-bodied people that I'm seeing trash stores and mill around shouting at the people trying to help - they could have strolled all the way out of town before the weather and water even hit."
I agree that you do benefit in the sense that you could cut out a fair amount of these simple attacks by blocking the IP range, but that does not seem to me to represent a good way to fix the underlying problem, which stems from, as you formulated itin the US context, the US machines basically not being protected. China does not hold a monopoly on attackers, either humans or viruses, conducting simple attacks. Therefore, who will you block next, and the next after that? The end game has you blocking the entire world and still with a continuing vulnerability to a virus-infected or human operated PC in your own country.
Overall, I do not see a true gain in better security at far too high a price.
Even if *you* block a range of IP addresses, someone operating a computer on one of those IP addresses could still connect with your server simply by going through a proxy not blocking them, but which you have not also blocked. Given that blocking a national range of IP addresses provides no real security from a marginally determined and capable attacker and that it promotes a balkanization of the Internet, decreasing the network affect and therefore overall utility of the network by blocking many potentially legitimate connections, this seems like a very inappropriate and heavy-handed technical response to unwanted requests from a particular country. It also saves no bandwidth since the filtering happens at the receiving server after the packets have travelled through the network.
From a political science and ideological perspective, industrialized and democratic companies benefit little form blocking the access of citizens of 'pariah' nations to non-classified information. Any opportunity to make available memes that offer alternatives to the totalitarian state line further create the opportunity for the expansion of democracy and free access and speech in those countries. Blocking national IP ranges in this manner would also decrease this opportunity.
The President of Creative explicitly stated in a later press conference that they do not intend to focus on going after Apple. Creative will focus on competing with products. However, Creative certainly will keep the patent option open and they refuse to comment on whether they have involved Apple in private discussions on the matter.
This raises a rather interesting question of whether institutions with assumed automatic compliance, like the military (for practical reasons), may become especially vulnerable to certain types of viruses that engage in a form of social engineering attack?
In the article's example, no colonel of the name given existed. However, in many virus variants, compromised computers use address books to form fake mailings to one person on the list from another person on the list. Given that an email list generally represents a network of people who mostly know each other, this leads to the recipients using a much lower level of caution when receiving an email with an attachment from someone they know. To make this even more severe, where institutionalized automatic compliance exists, many of these emails would appear to come from superiors and make virus transmission almost a certainty.
Of course, this could also occur in any private organization with strict command and control or possessing a culture of fear leading to blind obedience to any orders coming down from the top. Therefore, one could hold that you can lessen security exposure to these types of attacks (viruses serve as just a starting point as other social engineering attacks could also work in this context, with much more disastrous results) by creating a more permissive and questioning command and control structure. However, obviously, this would not work for the military and perhaps some other institutions, except in certain contexts, so what do you do?
Slashdot Mirror
All these pop-AI things come down to one thing: keyword search counts. Create a bag of keywords, count the number of times they show up in some arbitrary (usually Web these days) search, and make an arbitrary determination of what each bag of keywords means. Then pass it off as some sort of special intelligent sensor or machine intelligence, add in some buzzword references to biological brain structures or psychological processes, and pretend you are some genius.
But guess what? It's just a set of arbitrary keyword search counts and essentially arbitrarily meaningless. In most cases, just the data sampling side of things is rife with egregious statistical errors. In this case, it's even worse because they are essentially taking a search-space soft pitch ("mood labels") and just aggregating the counts.
There's a difference between computers and services in a distributed environment (network). DHCP operates at a lower level to get individual computers into the environment with an addressable endpoint (IP address). Computer names provide a poor form of 'fixed' DNS for addressing of packets inside the environment from one machine to the other, commonly used for such things as file sharing when you know you need to connect to the named file server and a particular share on it.
Services, on the other hand, could exist on any of the computers and Bonjour (formerly Rendezvous) and other service discovery protocols (such as used in Jini) work at this level, looking for particular services without a care of what computer on which they run, or if they changed from one computer to another because that computer got taken offline and replaced by another one. Services could include an iTunes broadcast stream, an iChat presence, or a service that, when called via a program, can return the expected weight of x pairs of jeans, for a totally inane example.
In the iChat example, if you had a coworker moving between machines, you wouldn't know which one to message just by computer name (such as that Messaging Service that Windows NT has where you can send a message to another machine by machine name and it comes up in a dialog window). With Bonjour, wherever your coworker logged in, your iChat would find his identity as a service and know to route your iChats messages to him at his current machine.
See Gametab.
For reference, the parent post is referencing an epic and long running legal case over inheritance featured in the Charles Dickens book Bleak House set and written in the mid-19th century.
""Science" and "Nature" are hack journals nowadays. The only reason that one publishes in those is for publicity. Pure and simple. I haven't seen an article pertaining to atmospheric science come through there that I haven't been able to poke significant holes in for years now."
If YOU have significant holes to poke, publish them! Don't worry about an academic journal, get a blog. If you are worried about it affecting your own chances for funding and positions, then create an anonymous blog. Get the word out, make them responsible for their holes. If you don't, you are just as culpable as they in letting incorrect findings stand for future generations of research to assume and thus come to incorrect or irreconcilable findings.
You might think that's someone else's job because you are "just" a Ph.D. student, but because of your specialist knowledge, there probably isn't hardly anyone else. The number of people with your knowledge of climatology is probably a few thousand worldwide or less. If you don't do it, no one will, and the rest of us will just be taken for fools because we don't have the knowledge to rebut.
Others have pointed out that this article is very hyperbolic, but Google itself is built entirely on hyperbole. It is perhaps the greatest con job ever perpetrated on Wall Street and the business community, and on its own terms. Look at what Google has become. Google is just Yahoo more than five years ago, just with a better interface and a stronger marketing brand.
Let's look at the main services Google has rolled out: Search, News, Mail, Maps are the principle ones. All available on Yahoo fairly quickly after the Web took off. Image Search and Froogle - I'm not necessarily sure that Yahoo had these linked off their main site, but such search engines for images and pricing did exist back when Yahoo had reached critical mind share and Google was relatively unknown. It's arguable as to whether the improved interfaces are because of good design, or more capable Web browsers (I suspect the truth lies somewhere in between).
This is not to impugn Google's business acumen. In fact, they have proven themselves most capable in this respect. Heck, they were even dictating to Wall Street how their IPO would go. But the bottom line is that Google has offered absolutely nothing truly new that wasn't available years and years ago when you look at the big picture of service offerings. They are simply another Web portal, which were in vogue around 1997 or so. I know people will come out of the wood work saying well they have this beta lab app that Yahoo didn't have, but, you know what? That's a beta lab app. Until they roll it out and no one else has it, big deal, and, from a business perspective, is there actually a revenue stream there or is it just a technical novelty? The only actual significant thing that Google does that makes money is sell text ads.
The question now becomes how long can Google keep this marketing charade up before people realize it's just another Web portal and move on? So far, so good, but keep your fingers crossed.
Let's just say that writing client-side applications in JavaScript is a really bad idea. Why would anyone choose to write their application this way? It's an attempt to take something that was originally intended for linking together scientific documents, force fitting a layout language on top of it, which is still really beholden to the underlying document structure, then overlaying that with a scripting language, which is to say, various scripting language interpreters (one for every browser) to try and change the layout and the document on the fly.
That's what AJAX is - scientific papers posing as layouts posing as interactive applications. It's bad software practice, a misuse of technology, and an excuse for people to attempt to use limited skills to try to hack a simulated client side application, but one that is fundamentally asynchronous, difficult to debug, never provably functional (what browser are you using?) and just plain, well, bad.
Alright, enough ranting. Mod me down if you want, but when AJAX and "Web 2.0" crashes and burns, you heard it here, well, not first because I'm not the only one to say it, but, well, you heard it, okay? You are, of course, free to do whatever you wish with your time, but please just stop architecting applications like this. I want real applications, not browser-junior app... let... things.
MTBF exhibits Gaussian characteristics, but you only get the full deviation if you consider the full set. In this case, the deviation is narrowed considerably by them getting built one after another. However, you have a good point regarding the pop, pop, pop sequence - even with decreased deviation form sequential assembly, they should not fail that closely together and thus the MTBF hypothesis does not fit well.
Pointy Hair Roach: "So, let's see, I wonder if the technical department can create a turn-key solution for feeding tonight?"
Long Hair Roach: "Sure, what do you have in mind?"
Pointy Hair Roach: "Well, let's see, we need a diversion, why don't we have a volunteer climb up into the light fixture and drop onto her sholder, which will cause her to scream, flail about, and run out of the room."
Long Hair Roach: "Um, how do we get into to the light fixture?"
Pointy Hair Roach: "I dunno, go license some tech from the ants for hanging from ceilings and stuff."
Long Hair Roach: "Uh... ok."
Pointy Hair Roach: "Right, so while the volunteer is running back and forth avoiding the fly swatter, huge feet, and general mayhem, we'll monitor progress from the counter top."
Long Hair Roach: "So, who's going to volunteer?"
Pointy Hair Roach: "Well, since you brought it up..."
Long Hair Roach: "So, you want me to outsource the tech to the ants, then use it untested to scale a vertical wall, hang from a ceiling, get into a light fixture without being electrocuted - you didn't think of that, did you? And then dropping onto a human and avoiding getting crushed. Wait, what are you going to do to contribute?"
Pointy Hair Roach: "We'll be eating the toast."
This is all semantic diversion, to put it politely. Some proponents of Web 2.0 are apparently hoping that by changing the definition of Web 2.0. they can make it look like Web 2.0 has actually proceeded in a meaningful direction. Web 2.0 has absolutely nothing to do with AJAX (AJAZ is just a fancy name for doing more on the client side with JavaScript and CSS, which is why they call it AJAX, because if they said 'client-side user interface development in JavaScript across an asynchronous network connection' everyone would rightly turn around and flee), social networking, or uploading your photos to Flickr.
If you read the original articles and specifications, such that exist, you will see that Web 2.0 is an envisioning of logical markup to enable machine intelligence in agents that work for the user. Web 2.0 envisions intelligent spiders that can follow logical paths (x is contained by y, y is a type of z, etc.), as well as a whole host of software serving the user living on top of this content and process. Look at the New Scientist article by Tim Berners-Lee awhile back (someone will have to find the link). Now, whether or not that's feasible anytime soon is debatable, but let's not be fooled by marketing chicanery into thinking that Web 2.0 has come about just because JavaScript development has been given a pretty name, social networking sites are all the rage (sixdegress.com was around from before the last bubble, it's just the new fad), and some Web services actually exist.
"As in, about every month or so all three lightbulbs on our cieling fan would all blow out at the same time."
This is perfectly normal. So your three lights blow out and you go and get a package of lightbulbs and install them. Three lightbulbs in the same package that came off the same assembly line in the same conditions within seconds of each other. This means that, unless one of them is exposed to something the others are not before they go into your fan, there will be very little deviation around their mean time before failure for these three bulbs, which you will experience as 'they all went out at about the same time'.
Maybe he should talk less and get his game finished. Spore's been getting hyped for quite awhile now, with multiple talks and demonstrations. Although a neat idea, it's not as revolutionary as people think. The central wow factor in the magnitudes of scale, zooming out from the very small (spore) to the very big (galaxy), is very old news and comes from an original short by Charles and Ray Eames called "The Power of 10" (it may precede them, but that's as far as I have traced it back), and a similar short plays or has played at the Smithsonian in Washington at the Air & Space Museum). The other wow factor, the procedurally generated mechanics of the critters, is impressive, but other than that it's nothing more than a Civ/Sim game with multiple levels of zoom. So, although interesting, chill folks. Sliced bread reigns supreme. My speculation is that the above makes for good demonstrations, but lousy game play, and that's what is taking time to figure out, as well as the very nebulous MMOG elements mentioned in one of the demonstrations.
Now, if there was just a way to be able to download NES/SNES/Genesis games to the Revolution and flash them onto a DS Lite cartridge or however it's done, well, I'd buy a Revolution and DS Lite upon release. I know that NES and SNES emulators exist for the DS, so it's technically feasible, but it would be nice to have a seamless experience.
Mario Kart: Double Dash for the GameCube offers a fun cooperative style of play where one drives and one shoots and you can switch during the race. Best for the better player to drive most laps to start, then let the other player get more and more laps in until it's even since driving takes a lot of coordination and reflex decision making. Btw, tip : The better player drives the latter half of the race, this way you can have a final come form behind kick that makes everyone happy if the initial laps were poor. If I remember correctly there are nine or twelve different combinations of difficulty level and sets of tracks where you compete over 4 races for a medal and best time, from the ridiculously easy to the ridiculously hard so even though there are not that many tracks, you can have a lot of fun going from the starter tournament at 50cc up to the advanced tournament at 150cc.
"Eve and Ultima Online continue to please their players with updates and releases."
This sounds like uninformed marketroid speak to me. CCP, creators of Eve, released a patch in late December, which was pretty disastrous. Many basic elements like buddy lists, some basic agent services, and other things were broken and some still remain broken. Furthermore, lag remains very bad in central areas, often to the point of not being playable or characters getting 'stuck'. It is true that CCP has announced an upgrade to better hardware in February, but so far that is a future promise, not current reality, and the lag problems have been going on for months.
Most concerning is that significant gameplay problems continue to be ignored, making the player versus player experience very difficult (especially in the finding and pursuing) and exposing most non-expert characters to totally arbitrary destruction at blind gate ambushes (transitions between solar systems - you must 'jump' blindly through a gate and if there is a fleet on the other side in the next solar system, you just die unless a pro with properly designed ship), an issue that has never been satisfactorily dealt with. Also, there is a serious problem with the use of instant bookmarks, allowing people to jump directly to gates and avoid any fleet defending the gate, which feeds into this blind ambush problem as defenders must then go to the other side and hope for a blind ambush. The side effect of the need for bookmarks is that everyone wants to carry thousands of them for safe and shorter travel (travel times have soared with one of the patches), and this is apparently saturating servers and performance.
Finally, a most pressing problem that has the player community in an uproar is the advent of ISK (the currency of Eve) farmers, some using bots, that are mining continuously in the safe areas and in NPC corporations not subject to player attack. Many of the ISK farmers are suspected of selling their ISK for real life currencies in violation of the EULA, and many are thought to operate from Asian 'sweatshop' outfits. These players are routinely reported to CCP, who apparently does little about them since the same players are seen doing the same thing week after week, nor does CCP seem to be taking the problem seriously. In fact, groups of vigilante players started taking it upon themselves to engage in 'suicide' attacks to destroy farming ships.
CCP has furthermore somewhat legitamized the transfer of real life currency into ISK by allowing the sale of time cards, bought from CCP, for ISK. The buyer lengthens their subscription, the seller gets ISK. Since it is allowed by the EULA to sell characters for ISK, this means that anyone who wants to get a quick edge up in Eve can simply sell time cards, buy a well-trained character, and buy all the ships and equipment they want. Now, people have different opinions of whether this is a good thing or not, but it underscores the fact that CCP is exercising an inconsistent principle, on one hand claiming that ISK sales are not allowed on the principle of fairness of in-game competition, but on the other allowing out of game actions to affect in game rewards when there is a profit motive.
Eve has its good points as well, but I cannot let that uninformed platitude fly. As for what's the worst problem of all, well, all of them, but buddy lists not working and not being fixed for over a month is pretty much up there as it was broken in the December patch and its dysfunction compromises the social fabric of the game (are your friends online or not?) and player versus player fighting (are your enemies on or not?).
You have a point, but, Antarctica, for example, is a continent. Much of its ice sits on land, not on the water. High mountains and extreme latitude regions, such as Greenland, also support large ice deposits.
Of course, I'm not arguing that increased ocean weight will lead to more earthquakes or making any statement about "global warming" have anything to do with it, but not all ice floats or, to be specific, I should say, is floating.
"Another problem is the lack of consideration of the need to recoup R&D and other non-manufacturing costs. A huge amount of R&D went into Mindstorms. And a fair bit of advertising. Those things are not free, they add to the cost of every set"
See TFA's mention of 'sunk cost'. It's hard to take your agreement with the parent seriously with that statement.
Even if if something cost $100 billion to research and develop and it would only make $1 billion in sales from right now, returning $500 million in profit from expenses starting from right now, it would still make for a good investment if other projects that would require the same capital do not yield better anticipated returns, regardless of the fact that you would never recover the full $100 billion in research and development. Good business planning focuses on marginal return, not past costs.
As for advertising, you do have to factor in *continued* advertising, but you seem to identify the advertising costs as those that they originally expended to build the Mindstorm brand, which represent further sunk costs.
The general conclusion of replies here seem at odds with yard sales and other venues when people selling property do not know the actual value of items, which could happen easily with computer equipment, or have a serious need for the cash quickly (such as to pay rent). Therefore, I think the prosecution will have to prove more than 'the defendant knew the item had a very low price compared to market value' as many people make a living off of spotting such opportunities. Arbitrage rests on this very concept. I expect that the prosecution must establish some evidence of knowledge of theft aside from just an unusually low price to get a judge or jury to agree.
From a purely technical standpoint, open standards seem quite attractive. However, until the patent system gets reworked so software patents get invalidated or have a high level of specificity required in comparing claims, even 'open' standards can become proprietary in a legal sense.
Some 'licensing' companies (e.g. Via Licensing and MPEG LA) will, if a standard looks like it will get some significant use in the market, make a 'call for patents', which means they ask anyone with a patent who thinks their patent would have some 'essentiality' to any implementation that used the standard to submit their patent for review. If one of these 'licensing' companies thinks the patent would apply generally to any system or application implementation that would make use of the standard, they add that patent with others of like merits to a 'patent pool' and then go after anyone using the standard to demand license fees for the pool. In this fashion, any open standard becomes a candidate for such companies to essentially leech off the standard and thereby prevent open, as in fee-less, use of the standard.
Open standards, then, face two hurdles beyond the technical ones. First, the well-known business interest some companies have in keeping their formats proprietary so you will not stop using their systems or software. Second, the less well-known, but growing legal problems with those who want to profit from the patent system without adding any real value in terms of standard creation or implementations. Open standards remain a good technical goal and we should pursue them, but this underscores some of the challenges to keep in mind.
Can you supply a source for the assertion that 'the Earth receives 5000 times as much solar energy as we currently use in oil equivalents'? I have a genuine interest on how you or someone else derived that number.
"But that's exactly what was predicted in advance, and even at a slow walk, thousands of the able-bodied people that I'm seeing trash stores and mill around shouting at the people trying to help - they could have strolled all the way out of town before the weather and water even hit."
To where?
I agree that you do benefit in the sense that you could cut out a fair amount of these simple attacks by blocking the IP range, but that does not seem to me to represent a good way to fix the underlying problem, which stems from, as you formulated itin the US context, the US machines basically not being protected. China does not hold a monopoly on attackers, either humans or viruses, conducting simple attacks. Therefore, who will you block next, and the next after that? The end game has you blocking the entire world and still with a continuing vulnerability to a virus-infected or human operated PC in your own country.
Overall, I do not see a true gain in better security at far too high a price.
Even if *you* block a range of IP addresses, someone operating a computer on one of those IP addresses could still connect with your server simply by going through a proxy not blocking them, but which you have not also blocked. Given that blocking a national range of IP addresses provides no real security from a marginally determined and capable attacker and that it promotes a balkanization of the Internet, decreasing the network affect and therefore overall utility of the network by blocking many potentially legitimate connections, this seems like a very inappropriate and heavy-handed technical response to unwanted requests from a particular country. It also saves no bandwidth since the filtering happens at the receiving server after the packets have travelled through the network.
From a political science and ideological perspective, industrialized and democratic companies benefit little form blocking the access of citizens of 'pariah' nations to non-classified information. Any opportunity to make available memes that offer alternatives to the totalitarian state line further create the opportunity for the expansion of democracy and free access and speech in those countries. Blocking national IP ranges in this manner would also decrease this opportunity.
The President of Creative explicitly stated in a later press conference that they do not intend to focus on going after Apple. Creative will focus on competing with products. However, Creative certainly will keep the patent option open and they refuse to comment on whether they have involved Apple in private discussions on the matter.
Source
This raises a rather interesting question of whether institutions with assumed automatic compliance, like the military (for practical reasons), may become especially vulnerable to certain types of viruses that engage in a form of social engineering attack?
In the article's example, no colonel of the name given existed. However, in many virus variants, compromised computers use address books to form fake mailings to one person on the list from another person on the list. Given that an email list generally represents a network of people who mostly know each other, this leads to the recipients using a much lower level of caution when receiving an email with an attachment from someone they know. To make this even more severe, where institutionalized automatic compliance exists, many of these emails would appear to come from superiors and make virus transmission almost a certainty.
Of course, this could also occur in any private organization with strict command and control or possessing a culture of fear leading to blind obedience to any orders coming down from the top. Therefore, one could hold that you can lessen security exposure to these types of attacks (viruses serve as just a starting point as other social engineering attacks could also work in this context, with much more disastrous results) by creating a more permissive and questioning command and control structure. However, obviously, this would not work for the military and perhaps some other institutions, except in certain contexts, so what do you do?