I'm pretty certain you can remove the Quicktime Player and all the codecs if you really want to without losing OS functionality (besides uhh.. playing movies).
Right, but QuickTime is a software architecture for playing time-based media. It is much, much more than the Player and the codecs. The QuickTime infrastructure is tightly bound into OS X and used by several other vital system components. For example the Finder won't work without QuickTime present. Yes, you can still use the command line but for most users an OS X without a Finder is seriously compromised.
I don't think the OS will even boot into the GUI if you remove QuickTime fully, although its been a few versions since I tried.
But try and remove QuickTime and OS X doesn't work. Apple has tightly integrated QuickTime into the core of its OS. Originally QuickTime was a separate and modular software technology that you could replace. Now its an integral part of the OS. This is what Microsoft have done with IE on Windows.
It doesn't come back and say "No, you can't use Kodak's software - you must use iPhoto!" You don't have to fear something coming back and making iMovie your default application over Adobe Studio (or whatever it is).
That's the big difference. If you try and remove IE from Windows, Microsoft gets pissed off because that's a big bad no-no, so you have no choice but to have that software whether you want it or not. It was put on to keep their monopoly - not because they thought they had a better browser. (Whether it became a better browser is not for debate here - that happened after Netscape basically was dried up.)
But I can still run Mozilla on Windows. Just because IE is there doesn't mean I can't run an alternative browser. I don't have to remove IE in order to run Netscape/Opera/MyFavoriteBrowser.
So this is really no different to the iPhoto/Kodak situation you describe, except I can't remove IE just like I can't remove QuickTime from OS X.
The big difference is that Microsoft are a monopoly and Apple aren't. The law says that what you can do as a non-monopoly player is different from what you can do when you have an effective monopoly. This is what Microsoft have done wrong and this is what they should be punished for, not for integrating software components into the core OS (IMHO, of course).
Re:Several cool Features
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· Score: 3, Interesting
There are several really cool features which push the DVR market forward and have been long overdue
- What's on next? button
Easy to get this information now - its one button push on TiVO. Not to mention that most DVR users don't watch live TV anyway. The only live TV I've watched in the last six months was the Superbowl and the Oscars. Once you start to use a DVR you don't care what's on next.
- The ability to create an edited version of a recording
This would be cool but is probably beyond what most consumers want. I could see this growing in the future though. It will be interesting to see if this takes off
- Directories to hold recordings
Actually until I have much larger disc capacity on a DVR I don't see a pressing need for this. Until I have more than 100 hours (approx. 100 gigs) of shows, having them in a single directory isn't a big deal.
- How much space is left on my hard drive indicator
Why should I care? I haven't ever needed this. Its not a computer, its a bunch of TV shows. My TiVO actually does a reasonable job of space management: I tell it to keep shows I want to keep and it fills the rest of the disk with "nice to have" shows. This is far simpler than a disk management (space free and directories) and UI arrangement and it does what I want.
- And I don't even want to get into network functionality.
Yeah this would be nice. Of course the Series 2 TiVO has this.
Re:Congrats
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· Score: 3, Informative
Now I just need to find a way to buy a personal data feed from Tribune Media Services, and there's a networkable, build-your-own TiVo! I wonder if they'd be willing to sell feeds to individuals...
In a former life I worked for a company that worked closely with TMS using their data feeds. I doubt they'd have the slightest interest in selling feeds to individuals. They don't have the infrastructure to support that kind of program and I can't imagine a model that would make sense for them. They sell the feeds for a great deal on money and its a primary business for them.
I think a better model is an open source database a la freedb where users contribute schedule information. However because of the time sensitive nature of schedules this might not work too well.
Big difference between adding an IP stack and a browser component and debugging/stabilizing/refactoring/etc your entire product line.
Well if you think that's all Microsoft have done to become Internet-centric then you are vastly missing the point. Have you looked at their.NET initiative? If (and its still an "if") they follow through on that vision they will have completely changed their software architecture to a completely Internet-centric model.
Aside from conducting interviews with the researchers themselves, we really don't have any way of knowing.
Well let's start the survey then. I have a PhD in AI (actually machine learning) and I published several papers before I went off into the commercial software development world. I would have been absolutely delighted for my research to have been used in a game.
I know that most of the PhD students I worked with were heavily into games, particularly LPMUDs and other virtual environments (this was back in the late 80's and early 90's). Several of the ideas that went on to be granted PhDs at my school were initially prototyped in our own MUD.
I quickly learned, adaptive systems research is serious stuff.
You ain't kidding. After six years of full-time research I had just begun to get into the field seriously. Fascinating stuff which I am still working on, even if in a non-academic context.
The creatures in these games are following a predefined set of rules, certainly they are a complex set of rules, but the way they "learn" is entirely predetermined (that is, what they learn depends on what they are exposed to, but the formula for converting exposure into knowledge is set by the game designers). I think the fact that the graphics are rendered so realistically makes it easier to make the leap to thinking they are really acting "intelligent."
Who knows what really sets human intelligence apart, is it ability to make rules or nondeterministic memory or whatever, but it seems evident (to me, in my ever-so-humble opinion) that these creatures don't have it.
An insightful post. But you fail to ask the more important question which is: do humans think in a non-deterministic way? People tend to assume that they do, but there isn't enough evidence for us to draw that conclusion. One of the interesting results fom computer science (not just AI) research is emergent behavior - a system made up of many simple, deterministic rules can behave unpredictably. Just because each rule can be understood does not mean that the behavior of the system of rules is predictable.
For a non-computer example of this phenomenon look at fluid dynamics and chaotic systems where immensly complex behavior is observed in systems that can be described with relatively simple, and completely deterministic mathematics.
This result at least points to the possibility that the human brain is a deterministic information system that displays complex, essentially non-deterministic behavior. If (and its still an "if") this is true, then modelling intelligent behavior with deterministic, rules-based computer systems may be a very good approach.
As the submitter of the story, let me defend it a little. I think one of the major reasons it is intersting are the reasons you think it is weak. The fact that Gosling and Sun are beng so defensive about J2EE/NET tells us how much they fear it. They clearly see.NET as a serious competitor to J2EE. As a long-time Java programmer and enthusiast, I think it is useful to know this and somewhat worrying.
There are many reasons why an article can be "news for nerds" and/or "stuff that matters". It can be as much for what isn't said as for what is.
I remember a story somebody told me once. There use to be this neighborhood with a thousand little shops in a city in England. You could get almost anything you wanted there. Enter the bureaucrats. They see squalor and poverty. Enter the bulldozers, the high rise complexes, etc, Now the place really is poor, whereas before most were gainfully employed somehow, etc.
This is a great example of a content-free post masquerading as information. You should no more believe that than you should believe:
"Somone once told me that bureaucrats fixed all of the problems of a town. It was somewhere you've heard of but hopefully don't know anything about. I have no evidence, I don't know any corroborating details and I can't even point to an article on the web that might give the slightest credence to my claims."
What you say might be true, although obviously the details are all wrong: in the UK people don't say neighborhoods, that's an American term; the "thousand little shops" is patronizing and almost certainly untrue; the "before most were gainfully employed somehow" is vague and unlikely given the UK's social history. If you want your post to be actually useful and informative you'll need to provide at least some evidence.
Sorry for the rant, and its not like Slashdot isn't filled with these sorts of posts, but this is a particularly egregious example and its a sham it got modded up.
It makes you wonder how much of this is based on theoretical linguistics [stanford.edu] and formal semantics [mit.edu], and how much is based on good old fashioned statistics [nec.com] and optimization.
I can't speak to the work discussed in the original post, but I do know that in the real world a formal linguistics/semantics approach is impractical. These systems require complete or near-complete knowledge structures to work at all. They are brittle, meaning as the world changes they fail to adapt to the changing lexicon. Formal systems are often computationally expensive, and scale poorly to large data sets. The practical problems of constructing and maintaining the formal knowledge structures quickly overwhelms the advantages they have over looser approaches.
So in most cases it is a hybrid of machine learning and statistical techniques that are used in these systems.
Unstructured data is a great way to make money, and a great way to get 80% of the story, the trouble is the other 20% gets destroyed in the process.
Nothing is destroyed. The original data is still there. These technologies are best used to summarize and search large information archives (e.g. the web). Does Google destroy any data? No it merely indexes it in a certain way. In fact search services often make data more easily accessible, the opposite of what you are arguing.
And Apple was trying things on their own, it was called Rhapsody (and Pink before that), and never went anywhere. Whithout Steve Jobs (or someone with equal vision) to hold the whip the project was going no-where, as was Apple in general. In buying NeXT apple got a injection of new talent, code, and vision
A small correction. The Apple-developed OS project that preceeded Mac OS X was Copland not Rhapsody. Rhapsody was the code name for Mac OS X, and started after Apple's acquisition of NeXT.
No, actually, Verio doesn't. It's bound by the terms under which it (indirectly) acquired The Little Garden (tlg.net), which very clearly specified [toad.com] that there was to be no blocking of service on grounds of content.
I'm not party to the acquisition agreement that TLG signed when it was bought by Verio. However it is very common for Terms of Service of the acquired entity (TLG) to be replaced by the Terms of Service of the acquirer (Verio).
Basically Verio bought the TLG business under a contract. If that contract says words to the effect: "Verio pays the owners of TLG x dollars and agrees to be bound by the TLG terms of service" then you are right. However I suspect it says something more like: "Verio pays the owners of TLG x dollars and has the right to alter the Terms of Service to the standard Verio ToS". I doubt any business would acquire another and bind itself to keep the previous business' terms forever.
If John Gilmore doesn't like Verio's terms of service he should find an ISP that will let him do what he wants. He doesn't have some magic right to do whatever he likes. Verio are quite within their rights to impose terms of service that disallows running an open mail relay.
Please remind me, I don't believe I tried to blame anyone. I simply noted, without comment, the hipocrisy in allowed abortion but not stem-cell research. You should allow both or neither, regardless of where my own opinions lie.
Sorry, perhaps blame was not the right choice of words. I was reacting to the term "hypocracy" that you used. When people throw that term around they are usually looking to find someone to blame; if you were not I apologise.
And when i said 'morality', I was referring to the morality of society in general. Surely such ideas exist. To give some examples, genocide? murder? human sacrifice? I guess in each own persons mind what they are doing is moral, but as a society we uphold a number of things as moral. Try and sacrifice a live virgin in your front yard and claim its moral. We'll see how society reacts
Just because most people would agree on some questions does not mean we have a common morality. The most obvious example is exactly what we are talking about: abortion. There are clearly many Americans who believe this is morally wrong, equally there are many Americans who do not believe this is morally wrong.
And even the "easy" examples you cite are usually not nearly as clear cut as you might like to think. Is it always wrong to kill people? Clearly not (war, self-defense, provocation...). When you say "murder" you mean killing that contravenes current laws. But these laws (and therefore the distinction between murder and lawful killing) are changing all the time. Indeed they even differ from state to state. So there is much less of a common morality than you seem to imply.
I always thought that it was interesting how the United States can allow abortion (the killing of an unborn embryo) but not embryo cloning/harvesting (the killing of an unborn embryo), especially since embryo cloning can bring some good. While I remain pro-life myself, I could never quite understand this hypocrisy.
Actually its the "pro-life" lobby that has been working hardest for the current US anti-stem cell research policy. In fact the pro-lifers would love to ban stem cell research entirely: a URL courtesy of Google here. Don't blame the US for the policies forced on us by a group you aligned yourself with.
I find it also interesting how the one main country with whom the United States has mixed in civil rights with trade agreements is the country that may end up further along in this line of research. Of course, one could say that Hitler had learned a lot through research as well. How far can we allow our morality to stretch to further the advancement of the human race?
I assume you mean to say your morality. Please don't presume to speak for anyone but yourself. There are plenty of people with different viewpoints than your own. These people are just as "moral" as you.
I agree that bad parenting is often at least partly to blame - I can't talk about Columbine specifically because I don't know the full facts of the case.
However this is a complex issue because of the age of the people involved. At some age people need to take responsibility for their own actions and not blame (parents/society/computer games/whatever). Clearly very young children are not full individuals with full accountability, as adults are.
But where do you draw the line? When is it reasonable to demand that a person accepts full responsibility for his/her actions? Legally the answer varies somewhere between 13 and 21 (in the US) depending on the state and the act being considered. But even if there was a single age, this would be an arbitrary cut-off point. Some people mature earlier and should be held responsible at a younger age. Some people mature later or not at all - for example if they have severe mental incapacity.
The problem with Klebold and Harris is that they at the age where they are leaving their parent's influence and becoming their own people. Clearly these two could not handle the transition, for whatever reason(s). Should their parents take at least some of the responsibilty? Probably. Should most of it lie on the shoulders of the murderers? Probably. It seems like they were old enough to act largely independently of others. Are there other factors that should be considered? Probably.
I guess it depends what you want. For example, K&R is a fantastically concise, lucid and authoratative reference to the C language. But it isn't something I would give to someone learning to program. I probably wouldn't give it to an experienced programmer who is coming to C as a second language, either. It would at least need a companion "introduction" book as well.
When I'm writing C I always like to have K&R close by, but there are much better books to give to someone learning C.
Re:And this relates to XML how?
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Whoa, that's a bad idea...its a security risk to think that 'obfuscating' that data is safe...What you really need to do is encrypt the data somehow
Ooops, you are absolutely right. I wrote that before I had my morning coffee. I was using "obfuscating" in a very loose sense to encompass "encryption". Sorry, must remember to engage brain before posting...
However it's pretty asymmetric. It can only deal with client requests, an issue pretty much covered the other day. [slashdot.org]. The server can't delay a response or let the client know when it's finished a lengthy request.
The way I deal with this is having the "client" also include an XML-RPC server so it can register with the "server" and receive callbacks that way. Of course, the server has to be coded to do this too, but its relatively straightforward. There is also asynchronous XML-RPC although that is mostly a polling routine that's pre-wrapped for you.
There's also the issue of tunnelling through port 80. Some people like it (hey I can get through the firewall by using port 80!) and some people hate it (if only I could stop all that goddam non http traffic on port 80, it's killing my load balancing)
Absolutely no reason you have to use port 80. You can specify any port for the XML-RPC server to listen on.
Re:And this relates to XML how?
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Java RMI
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· Score: 2
XML-RPC was the first succesful open standard for an XML-based RPC and SOAP was based on XML-RPC. There are a number of reasons they are interesting technologies. Perhaps the biggest right now is that SOAP is one of open standard technologies at the core of Web Services and Microsoft's.NET.
Love it or hate it, there is a good chance that there will be a lot of.NET software out there Real Soon Now [tm] and it will be using SOAP as its fundamental RPC protocol. If you are a developer, then now is a good time to learn this technology.
One of the disadvantages of XML-RPC and SOAP in commercial software development is that they are very human-readable: they pass XML documents between systems. Many times this is a good thing, of course, especially when you are debugging your system. But if you are passing confidential information (say your customer's bank records) then you will need to work at obfuscating (and de-obfuscating) the XML that is actually sent.
There are also some overhead concerns with (particularly) SOAP, but careful design and use can overcome these.
I think that most of corba/dcom/rni etc. are particularly over complicated. They place a burden on the programmer in the wrong place.
Most but not all. Check out XML-RPC which is an extremely simple yet useful remote procedure call protocol. As its name suggests it passes XML documents between server and client, in this case over HTTP.
There are good XML-RPC implementations for several languages, including Java, C, C++, Python, PHP and TCL (see here for a full list). I implemented the RPC part of a fairly a simple client-server Java application in under a day, without any previous knowledge of XML-RPC.
You can say the opposite until you're blue in the face but that doesn't make it true. The Bush government could have done a great deal more to help Enron but chose not to. That doesn't mean they didn't help them at all, clearly theydid but the government clearly refused to bail out Enron. The government has bailed out companies in as much or worse trouble than Enron was in, such as LTCM previously mentioned. They chose not to do that for Enron.
I very much doubt Kenneth lay would agree with your assesment that he had "an extremely helpful government".
We don't want "The Network Is The Computer". Remember mainframes? Remember how we joyfully fled from them?
And remember what happened when the Internet came along? Everyone suddenly wanted to be part of a network of machines. Of course the Internet is a diverse set of services running on a diverse and redundant network of machines rather than dumb terminals attached to controlled and homogenous hardware, so its a great step forward from the days of mainframes. Nevertheless the Internet is very much a distributed computer system.
When I use Slashdot I am consuming resources on a remote computer. These days I probably use more CPU power and storage that lives out on the Net than lives on my machine. I don't know about you, but I love it. Much better than the days of standalone machines.
What has happened is we've moved from the days of monolithic, tightly controlled mainframes and terminals, through the personal computer revolution and on to a mixed peer-to-peer and client-server world that gives you the advantages of both approaches.
Of course there are issues, and security and control are amongst the biggest. But these can be solved ultimately, and I no more want to go back to standalone PCs than I want to go back to mainframes.
What we want is to really own our computer power.
Then disconnect your machine from the Net, and you will be happy. However don't presume to speak for the vast majority of computer users who seem extremely happy to be part of a large, distributed network of machines and systems.
The latest attack signature libraries can be automatically updated from a centralized source of the computer security community.
I am certainly not a security expert, but this seems like a potential weak point. If they can automatically change the rules the firewall uses, then in theory someone else could as well, if they cracked the update protocol.
Does anyone know how they protect these updates so that they can't be intercepted and broken?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty certain you can remove the Quicktime Player and all the codecs if you really want to without losing OS functionality (besides uhh.. playing movies).
Right, but QuickTime is a software architecture for playing time-based media. It is much, much more than the Player and the codecs. The QuickTime infrastructure is tightly bound into OS X and used by several other vital system components. For example the Finder won't work without QuickTime present. Yes, you can still use the command line but for most users an OS X without a Finder is seriously compromised.
I don't think the OS will even boot into the GUI if you remove QuickTime fully, although its been a few versions since I tried.
Remove iTunes.
OS X still works.
Remove iPhoto.
OS X still works.
Remove IE.
OS X still works.
But try and remove QuickTime and OS X doesn't work. Apple has tightly integrated QuickTime into the core of its OS. Originally QuickTime was a separate and modular software technology that you could replace. Now its an integral part of the OS. This is what Microsoft have done with IE on Windows.
It doesn't come back and say "No, you can't use Kodak's software - you must use iPhoto!" You don't have to fear something coming back and making iMovie your default application over Adobe Studio (or whatever it is).
That's the big difference. If you try and remove IE from Windows, Microsoft gets pissed off because that's a big bad no-no, so you have no choice but to have that software whether you want it or not. It was put on to keep their monopoly - not because they thought they had a better browser. (Whether it became a better browser is not for debate here - that happened after Netscape basically was dried up.)
But I can still run Mozilla on Windows. Just because IE is there doesn't mean I can't run an alternative browser. I don't have to remove IE in order to run Netscape/Opera/MyFavoriteBrowser.
So this is really no different to the iPhoto/Kodak situation you describe, except I can't remove IE just like I can't remove QuickTime from OS X.
The big difference is that Microsoft are a monopoly and Apple aren't. The law says that what you can do as a non-monopoly player is different from what you can do when you have an effective monopoly. This is what Microsoft have done wrong and this is what they should be punished for, not for integrating software components into the core OS (IMHO, of course).
There are several really cool features which push the DVR market forward and have been long overdue
- What's on next? button
Easy to get this information now - its one button push on TiVO. Not to mention that most DVR users don't watch live TV anyway. The only live TV I've watched in the last six months was the Superbowl and the Oscars. Once you start to use a DVR you don't care what's on next.
- The ability to create an edited version of a recording
This would be cool but is probably beyond what most consumers want. I could see this growing in the future though. It will be interesting to see if this takes off
- Directories to hold recordings
Actually until I have much larger disc capacity on a DVR I don't see a pressing need for this. Until I have more than 100 hours (approx. 100 gigs) of shows, having them in a single directory isn't a big deal.
- How much space is left on my hard drive indicator
Why should I care? I haven't ever needed this. Its not a computer, its a bunch of TV shows. My TiVO actually does a reasonable job of space management: I tell it to keep shows I want to keep and it fills the rest of the disk with "nice to have" shows. This is far simpler than a disk management (space free and directories) and UI arrangement and it does what I want.
- And I don't even want to get into network functionality.
Yeah this would be nice. Of course the Series 2 TiVO has this.
Now I just need to find a way to buy a personal data feed from Tribune Media Services, and there's a networkable, build-your-own TiVo! I wonder if they'd be willing to sell feeds to individuals...
In a former life I worked for a company that worked closely with TMS using their data feeds. I doubt they'd have the slightest interest in selling feeds to individuals. They don't have the infrastructure to support that kind of program and I can't imagine a model that would make sense for them. They sell the feeds for a great deal on money and its a primary business for them.
I think a better model is an open source database a la freedb where users contribute schedule information. However because of the time sensitive nature of schedules this might not work too well.
Big difference between adding an IP stack and a browser component and debugging/stabilizing/refactoring/etc your entire product line.
.NET initiative? If (and its still an "if") they follow through on that vision they will have completely changed their software architecture to a completely Internet-centric model.
Well if you think that's all Microsoft have done to become Internet-centric then you are vastly missing the point. Have you looked at their
Aside from conducting interviews with the researchers themselves, we really don't have any way of knowing.
Well let's start the survey then. I have a PhD in AI (actually machine learning) and I published several papers before I went off into the commercial software development world. I would have been absolutely delighted for my research to have been used in a game.
I know that most of the PhD students I worked with were heavily into games, particularly LPMUDs and other virtual environments (this was back in the late 80's and early 90's). Several of the ideas that went on to be granted PhDs at my school were initially prototyped in our own MUD.
I quickly learned, adaptive systems research is serious stuff.
You ain't kidding. After six years of full-time research I had just begun to get into the field seriously. Fascinating stuff which I am still working on, even if in a non-academic context.
The creatures in these games are following a predefined set of rules, certainly they are a complex set of rules, but the way they "learn" is entirely predetermined (that is, what they learn depends on what they are exposed to, but the formula for converting exposure into knowledge is set by the game designers). I think the fact that the graphics are rendered so realistically makes it easier to make the leap to thinking they are really acting "intelligent."
Who knows what really sets human intelligence apart, is it ability to make rules or nondeterministic memory or whatever, but it seems evident (to me, in my ever-so-humble opinion) that these creatures don't have it.
An insightful post. But you fail to ask the more important question which is: do humans think in a non-deterministic way? People tend to assume that they do, but there isn't enough evidence for us to draw that conclusion. One of the interesting results fom computer science (not just AI) research is emergent behavior - a system made up of many simple, deterministic rules can behave unpredictably. Just because each rule can be understood does not mean that the behavior of the system of rules is predictable.
For a non-computer example of this phenomenon look at fluid dynamics and chaotic systems where immensly complex behavior is observed in systems that can be described with relatively simple, and completely deterministic mathematics.
This result at least points to the possibility that the human brain is a deterministic information system that displays complex, essentially non-deterministic behavior. If (and its still an "if") this is true, then modelling intelligent behavior with deterministic, rules-based computer systems may be a very good approach.
As the submitter of the story, let me defend it a little. I think one of the major reasons it is intersting are the reasons you think it is weak. The fact that Gosling and Sun are beng so defensive about J2EE/NET tells us how much they fear it. They clearly see .NET as a serious competitor to J2EE. As a long-time Java programmer and enthusiast, I think it is useful to know this and somewhat worrying.
There are many reasons why an article can be "news for nerds" and/or "stuff that matters". It can be as much for what isn't said as for what is.
Then it's not an Office killer. Don't get your hopes up.
Virtually the first line of the Ars Technica review is: "This is great software, but it isn't an Office killer, nor is it designed to be."
The Slashdot title is misleading.
I remember a story somebody told me once. There use to be this neighborhood with a thousand little shops in a city in England. You could get almost anything you wanted there. Enter the bureaucrats. They see squalor and poverty. Enter the bulldozers, the high rise complexes, etc, Now the place really is poor, whereas before most were gainfully employed somehow, etc.
This is a great example of a content-free post masquerading as information. You should no more believe that than you should believe:
"Somone once told me that bureaucrats fixed all of the problems of a town. It was somewhere you've heard of but hopefully don't know anything about. I have no evidence, I don't know any corroborating details and I can't even point to an article on the web that might give the slightest credence to my claims."
What you say might be true, although obviously the details are all wrong: in the UK people don't say neighborhoods, that's an American term; the "thousand little shops" is patronizing and almost certainly untrue; the "before most were gainfully employed somehow" is vague and unlikely given the UK's social history. If you want your post to be actually useful and informative you'll need to provide at least some evidence.
Sorry for the rant, and its not like Slashdot isn't filled with these sorts of posts, but this is a particularly egregious example and its a sham it got modded up.
It makes you wonder how much of this is based on theoretical linguistics [stanford.edu] and formal semantics [mit.edu], and how much is based on good old fashioned statistics [nec.com] and optimization.
I can't speak to the work discussed in the original post, but I do know that in the real world a formal linguistics/semantics approach is impractical. These systems require complete or near-complete knowledge structures to work at all. They are brittle, meaning as the world changes they fail to adapt to the changing lexicon. Formal systems are often computationally expensive, and scale poorly to large data sets. The practical problems of constructing and maintaining the formal knowledge structures quickly overwhelms the advantages they have over looser approaches.
So in most cases it is a hybrid of machine learning and statistical techniques that are used in these systems.
Unstructured data is a great way to make money, and a great way to get 80% of the story, the trouble is the other 20% gets destroyed in the process.
Nothing is destroyed. The original data is still there. These technologies are best used to summarize and search large information archives (e.g. the web). Does Google destroy any data? No it merely indexes it in a certain way. In fact search services often make data more easily accessible, the opposite of what you are arguing.
And Apple was trying things on their own, it was called Rhapsody (and Pink before that), and never went anywhere. Whithout Steve Jobs (or someone with equal vision) to hold the whip the project was going no-where, as was Apple in general. In buying NeXT apple got a injection of new talent, code, and vision
A small correction. The Apple-developed OS project that preceeded Mac OS X was Copland not Rhapsody. Rhapsody was the code name for Mac OS X, and started after Apple's acquisition of NeXT.
No, actually, Verio doesn't. It's bound by the terms under which it (indirectly) acquired The Little Garden (tlg.net), which very clearly specified [toad.com] that there was to be no blocking of service on grounds of content.
I'm not party to the acquisition agreement that TLG signed when it was bought by Verio. However it is very common for Terms of Service of the acquired entity (TLG) to be replaced by the Terms of Service of the acquirer (Verio).
Basically Verio bought the TLG business under a contract. If that contract says words to the effect: "Verio pays the owners of TLG x dollars and agrees to be bound by the TLG terms of service" then you are right. However I suspect it says something more like: "Verio pays the owners of TLG x dollars and has the right to alter the Terms of Service to the standard Verio ToS". I doubt any business would acquire another and bind itself to keep the previous business' terms forever.
If John Gilmore doesn't like Verio's terms of service he should find an ISP that will let him do what he wants. He doesn't have some magic right to do whatever he likes. Verio are quite within their rights to impose terms of service that disallows running an open mail relay.
Please remind me, I don't believe I tried to blame anyone. I simply noted, without comment, the hipocrisy in allowed abortion but not stem-cell research. You should allow both or neither, regardless of where my own opinions lie.
Sorry, perhaps blame was not the right choice of words. I was reacting to the term "hypocracy" that you used. When people throw that term around they are usually looking to find someone to blame; if you were not I apologise.
And when i said 'morality', I was referring to the morality of society in general. Surely such ideas exist. To give some examples, genocide? murder? human sacrifice? I guess in each own persons mind what they are doing is moral, but as a society we uphold a number of things as moral. Try and sacrifice a live virgin in your front yard and claim its moral. We'll see how society reacts
Just because most people would agree on some questions does not mean we have a common morality. The most obvious example is exactly what we are talking about: abortion. There are clearly many Americans who believe this is morally wrong, equally there are many Americans who do not believe this is morally wrong.
And even the "easy" examples you cite are usually not nearly as clear cut as you might like to think. Is it always wrong to kill people? Clearly not (war, self-defense, provocation...). When you say "murder" you mean killing that contravenes current laws. But these laws (and therefore the distinction between murder and lawful killing) are changing all the time. Indeed they even differ from state to state. So there is much less of a common morality than you seem to imply.
I always thought that it was interesting how the United States can allow abortion (the killing of an unborn embryo) but not embryo cloning/harvesting (the killing of an unborn embryo), especially since embryo cloning can bring some good. While I remain pro-life myself, I could never quite understand this hypocrisy.
Actually its the "pro-life" lobby that has been working hardest for the current US anti-stem cell research policy. In fact the pro-lifers would love to ban stem cell research entirely: a URL courtesy of Google here. Don't blame the US for the policies forced on us by a group you aligned yourself with.
I find it also interesting how the one main country with whom the United States has mixed in civil rights with trade agreements is the country that may end up further along in this line of research. Of course, one could say that Hitler had learned a lot through research as well. How far can we allow our morality to stretch to further the advancement of the human race?
I assume you mean to say your morality. Please don't presume to speak for anyone but yourself. There are plenty of people with different viewpoints than your own. These people are just as "moral" as you.
One more scapegoat for bad parenting taken away.
I agree that bad parenting is often at least partly to blame - I can't talk about Columbine specifically because I don't know the full facts of the case.
However this is a complex issue because of the age of the people involved. At some age people need to take responsibility for their own actions and not blame (parents/society/computer games/whatever). Clearly very young children are not full individuals with full accountability, as adults are.
But where do you draw the line? When is it reasonable to demand that a person accepts full responsibility for his/her actions? Legally the answer varies somewhere between 13 and 21 (in the US) depending on the state and the act being considered. But even if there was a single age, this would be an arbitrary cut-off point. Some people mature earlier and should be held responsible at a younger age. Some people mature later or not at all - for example if they have severe mental incapacity.
The problem with Klebold and Harris is that they at the age where they are leaving their parent's influence and becoming their own people. Clearly these two could not handle the transition, for whatever reason(s). Should their parents take at least some of the responsibilty? Probably. Should most of it lie on the shoulders of the murderers? Probably. It seems like they were old enough to act largely independently of others. Are there other factors that should be considered? Probably.
There aren't simple answers to this.
I guess it depends what you want. For example, K&R is a fantastically concise, lucid and authoratative reference to the C language. But it isn't something I would give to someone learning to program. I probably wouldn't give it to an experienced programmer who is coming to C as a second language, either. It would at least need a companion "introduction" book as well.
When I'm writing C I always like to have K&R close by, but there are much better books to give to someone learning C.
Whoa, that's a bad idea...its a security risk to think that 'obfuscating' that data is safe...What you really need to do is encrypt the data somehow
Ooops, you are absolutely right. I wrote that before I had my morning coffee. I was using "obfuscating" in a very loose sense to encompass "encryption". Sorry, must remember to engage brain before posting...
However it's pretty asymmetric. It can only deal with client requests, an issue pretty much covered the other day. [slashdot.org]. The server can't delay a response or let the client know when it's finished a lengthy request.
The way I deal with this is having the "client" also include an XML-RPC server so it can register with the "server" and receive callbacks that way. Of course, the server has to be coded to do this too, but its relatively straightforward. There is also asynchronous XML-RPC although that is mostly a polling routine that's pre-wrapped for you.
There's also the issue of tunnelling through port 80. Some people like it (hey I can get through the firewall by using port 80!) and some people hate it (if only I could stop all that goddam non http traffic on port 80, it's killing my load balancing)
Absolutely no reason you have to use port 80. You can specify any port for the XML-RPC server to listen on.
XML-RPC was the first succesful open standard for an XML-based RPC and SOAP was based on XML-RPC. There are a number of reasons they are interesting technologies. Perhaps the biggest right now is that SOAP is one of open standard technologies at the core of Web Services and Microsoft's .NET.
.NET software out there Real Soon Now [tm] and it will be using SOAP as its fundamental RPC protocol. If you are a developer, then now is a good time to learn this technology.
Love it or hate it, there is a good chance that there will be a lot of
One of the disadvantages of XML-RPC and SOAP in commercial software development is that they are very human-readable: they pass XML documents between systems. Many times this is a good thing, of course, especially when you are debugging your system. But if you are passing confidential information (say your customer's bank records) then you will need to work at obfuscating (and de-obfuscating) the XML that is actually sent.
There are also some overhead concerns with (particularly) SOAP, but careful design and use can overcome these.
I think that most of corba/dcom/rni etc. are particularly over complicated. They place a burden on the programmer in the wrong place.
Most but not all. Check out XML-RPC which is an extremely simple yet useful remote procedure call protocol. As its name suggests it passes XML documents between server and client, in this case over HTTP.
There are good XML-RPC implementations for several languages, including Java, C, C++, Python, PHP and TCL (see here for a full list). I implemented the RPC part of a fairly a simple client-server Java application in under a day, without any previous knowledge of XML-RPC.
Enron fell despite the fact that the govt tried their damned best to keep it propped up
No they didn't.
You can say the opposite until you're blue in the face but that doesn't make it true. The Bush government could have done a great deal more to help Enron but chose not to. That doesn't mean they didn't help them at all, clearly they did but the government clearly refused to bail out Enron. The government has bailed out companies in as much or worse trouble than Enron was in, such as LTCM previously mentioned. They chose not to do that for Enron.
I very much doubt Kenneth lay would agree with your assesment that he had "an extremely helpful government".
We don't want "The Network Is The Computer". Remember mainframes? Remember how we joyfully fled from them?
And remember what happened when the Internet came along? Everyone suddenly wanted to be part of a network of machines. Of course the Internet is a diverse set of services running on a diverse and redundant network of machines rather than dumb terminals attached to controlled and homogenous hardware, so its a great step forward from the days of mainframes. Nevertheless the Internet is very much a distributed computer system.
When I use Slashdot I am consuming resources on a remote computer. These days I probably use more CPU power and storage that lives out on the Net than lives on my machine. I don't know about you, but I love it. Much better than the days of standalone machines.
What has happened is we've moved from the days of monolithic, tightly controlled mainframes and terminals, through the personal computer revolution and on to a mixed peer-to-peer and client-server world that gives you the advantages of both approaches.
Of course there are issues, and security and control are amongst the biggest. But these can be solved ultimately, and I no more want to go back to standalone PCs than I want to go back to mainframes.
What we want is to really own our computer power.
Then disconnect your machine from the Net, and you will be happy. However don't presume to speak for the vast majority of computer users who seem extremely happy to be part of a large, distributed network of machines and systems.
From the page at iShop.com:
The latest attack signature libraries can be automatically updated from a centralized source of the computer security community.
I am certainly not a security expert, but this seems like a potential weak point. If they can automatically change the rules the firewall uses, then in theory someone else could as well, if they cracked the update protocol.
Does anyone know how they protect these updates so that they can't be intercepted and broken?