memepool at this link the other day. Brilliant idea actually. Goto charges per hit, the spam software makers are paying top dollar for hits. So hit em! Right where it hurts.
My friend, the 'surrounding cellular chemistry' is made up of 2 things. The direct product of the genetic material and the environment.
Well, the genetic material itself is a product of the genetic material, but that doesn't make it simple to understand.
Maybe a scientist will step in here, but it's my understanding the the soup around the genes plays a huge role in how the genes work. This is, again if my non-scientist memory serves me today, why stem cell research is interesting. The soup around the cell hasn't yet told the DNA which genes to use. You have in every cell the needed genes to make any cell, yet a skin cell is different from a liver cell. This is because of the soup allowing certain parts of the sequence to work and masking others. That seems like an important to understand piece to understand, but we are a long way from even understanding the sequence, much less the context.
But wouldn't you agree that the acceleration of research is greatly increasing? It seems as if the pace of innovation has sped up dramatically.
Ok, I understand the tools to make tools arguement and the pace of change and all that. But in some ways that makes my point even more appropriate. Despite that effect we still have no strong AI and are still looking at estimates of (at least) yet another decade before we do. You would be correct if you detect in my tone a bit of skeptisism on this yet latest estimate.
Genetics are at least as complicated as the brain and we have essentially no experience with them. That approximation may offend some scientists in the field, and I don't mean for that, but look at were we are. What are there, a couple tests for genetic diseases, a kind of corn that keeps leaking into the mainstream supply and an identity test that couldn't convict OJ?
We had a similar level of cognitive understanding a couple hundred years ago. Certainly Turing understood at least that much more recently. Yet we still stumble.
Couple that with the fact that it isn't 'simply' genetics, but also the surrounding cellular chemistry that makes the genes work that needs to be studied.
There is an awful lot to understand and we don't even come close to having the capability to do so yet.
So, I'm just saying that it's easy to get hyped over this stuff, but be a little cautious about when you promise your deliverables. Ask Minsky why if you still don't believe me.:-)
I don't remember first hand, being only in my 30's, but I've certainly read about the early AI labs and how optimistic they were that we were just around the corner from strong AI being in the labs and then the world.
They were, obviously, wrong. Today we can't even do speech recognition with sufficient reliability to use it every day, much less get in a car, tell it were we want to go and then read the important news of the day (pre-selected by a Chevy Agent) on the drive.
So too will genetics be. We're at the beginning of an interesting period in research. But for the genetic possiblities to be realized will require something like the kind of AI imagined in the 60's to be available and well understood. There is just that much data available to process.
So, while I'm as excited as the next guy at the possibilities, I'll consider myself lucky indeed if I live to see them realized.
I don't care *why* management chose to go down a certain path. Even if it looks like to wrong choice to me sometimes, I trust them, because they know a lot more about that stuff than I do.
I'm not saying that you should not trust them. I'm saying that you will be better at *your* job if you understand them.
Nor am I saying, as you mention, that you shouldn't focus on the specs. Just that you shouldn't focus on them to the exclusion of other, admittedly less interesting, subjects.
How many times have things needed to be re-worked in projects that you have worked on because of miscommunication? In many cases that can be eliminated because you better understand the business perspective and can ask better questions. And, frankly, that seems a lot more likely than that we'll convince the business types to learn enough about what we do to give better instructions.
I've been a pro for better than a decade and an amateur for another decade before that. Let me tell you that the biggest problem in corporate development today isn't whether or not people understand J2EE, but whether they understand distributed idioms and business.
I can't tell you the number of times that I've had to help folks who had memorized the spec and read books like this, but didn't understand why the spec contained the features it does, nor why going distributed was the way to go (hint, $).
So, read this book. Learn everything it contains. But don't skip the more academic architectural tomes nor the business aisle the next time you're at Borders...
I just hope they make them cheap enough that you can attach them to a stick and use them as a hoe. 'Cause I'm thinking that's what the rural poor could probably use more than a shirt pocket machine that will run Mathmatica...
You could have a) gone to the store and bought a $15 modem and a month of MSN. you do have phone lines, do you not?
And why should I have to do that? Have I not a right to expect my software to not have stupid and onerous requirements? Have I not an obligation to tell people about such software? Without such feedback capitalism, which relies on an educated consumer, fails. As witnessed by the fact that QuickBooks has a monopoly.
b) read the damn box and understood that an internet connection is required and also understood that this might mean under certain circumstances there might be trouble.
The box did not specify this. Nor did experience lead me to think this would be the case. Previous versions operated fine without a net connection. There was no business reason to make me think that had changed.
My advice, show your displeasure with your feet, Quickbooks is not the only accounting software package.
I tried, but found out this morning that my accountant only deals with Quickbooks. He said he'd be happy to consider other things, but at some point the trouble becomes larger than the value of the statement I'm trying to make. And thus a monopoly is maintained.
Oh, and too the moron that marked my initial post offtopic. Next time read the note and sit on your hands. My beef was that I couldn't get support for the product. That actually seems quite on topic.
Businesses bigger than yours operated for years
without personal computers. I'd seriously consider paper-based options, using the computer
only for recordkeeping.
Yes, they sure did. However, my accountant no longer accepts paper records. Hasn't for years. I understand why.
I run a small consulting company and needed to do payroll last night. We use QuickBooks, which forces you to buy their tax table service or compute tax withholding manually. They charge 50-60 a year IIRC for this service which is nothing but a set of tax tables. They are making more money on this deal than Best Buy does on extended warrantees. No way could they get away with this except that they have a monopoly on small business accounting software. But I digress.
The problem was that we don't have internet service right now thanks to the twin horrors of Northpoint going out of business and Ameritech being predatory (that too is another story though). QuickBooks, which I remind you is accounting software, requires an internet connection to run. I cannot tell it to just use the old tax tables for this cycle, I cannot tell it to use a disk. It requires an internet connection.
Worse still is that I called to find out what the deal is and, at 5:30 PST, no one could help me. I was told that I must call the tax table people during business hours the next day.
So, my $350 ripping cool accounting package had me resorting to looking up peoples last checks, writing down the deductions (fortunately salaried staff, not hourly) and manually entering them into the forms (oh, another thing. I had to write them down because QB makes the paycheck detail a modal window so I can't open two of them and just copy from one to the other. I had to open one, copy the info, then open another and type it in).
Thanks for the great service guys! I appreciate it.
Thanks to the Felten fiasco, the EFF and 2600 Magazine have a new weapon in their legal arguments against the loathed copyright law: The RIAA has now, in effect, used the DMCA to stifle academic research. As Roger Parloff and Charles Mann pointed out in Inside.com, even the authors of the DMCA didn't intend for this to happen.
The point of the DMCA, in the eyes of those who authored it, is not just to stifle hackers, but also to prevent academic research. Academic research is, after all, absolutely as dangerous to their property as Captain Crunch doing the same work. They aren't going to care one whit whether the research that millions of script kiddies are benefitting from was done at Princeton or the food court at the local mall. The fact is, they are still owned. And by their logic the monetary losses start at that moment.
Combine this with stereoscopic imagers and eye tracking. Now the box can map in a virtual environment everything you are seeing in 3d. The next steps are obvious. My favorite is new 'skins' for the things (read, people) around you. Imagine if you could make your boss look like Devin during those hard to stay awake during meetings about the marketing strategy for the new site.
Add wireless networking and instead of having to look for a band on someones sleeve during a firefight at the local paintball field your box could show everyone who isn't on your team (cause remember it knows where everyone *on* your team is) with their entire body covered in a big bulls eye (hmmm, have to make it smart enough to not do that for the ref I suppose).
Any serious researcher would have done this to limit his liability, right? So I would expect that the researchers in question did not in fact agree to SDMI's terms.
Apparently not in this case. The researchers were registered with the game.
This isn't an interesting use of something the hackers owned. They agreed to a specific and narrow license as part of a contract. The paragraph from the RIAA covers this:
As you are aware, the Agreement covering the Public challenge narrowly authorizes participants to attack the limited number of music samples and files that were provided by SDMI. The specific purpose of providing these encoded files and for setting up the Challenge was to assist SDMI in determining which of the proposed technologies are best suited to protect content in Phase II products. The limited waiver of rights (including possible DMCA claims) that was contained in the Agreement specifically prohibits participants from attacking content protected by SDMI technologies outside the Public Challenge. If your research is released to the public this is exactly what could occur. In short, you would be facilitating and encouraging the attack of copyrighted content outside the limited boundaries of the Public Challenge and thus places you and your researchers in direct violation of the Agreement.
I say, just re-attack when the stuff is released and publish the results. There is little moral or ethical in agreeing to the terms that these people must have as part of the challenge and then turning around a violating those terms.
The reason it's unpopular is because it would require a performance hit for no significant gain.
The header climits tells you what the range available is in a platform independent manner. If you think you will not be able to control that your program be compiled on a 32 bit platform then check out INT_MAX and make sure its big enough for what you want to do.
I can't comment on the C99 standard and what they think the gains would be from such a scheme. Though I wonder if those are really fixed bit width types? Can you talk more about that?
YOU ARE BORING. You are mere bytes in a database somewhere and the only interesting aspect of your existence is the question of where to store the backup tapes.
YES!
Orson Scott Card called this 'the significance problem' in his book Pastwatch. You've summed it up perfectly, the problem with privacy is that many people are so arrogant that they believe they matter. They think they have some clever ideas no one else has thought of. That they are important enough that Time/Warner or the government (choose your poison) is going to give a rip about them. That they are something more than just another one in six billion.
After working with large scale databases for a while it becomes very clear that privacy doesn't matter much. The Man isn't out to get you (and if he were, he sure as hell wouldn't be using a 250 million person database of lung cancer data to find you). You don't matter to anyone you haven't already met. Get over it.
Actually, I have read in a Forbes magazine article about a year ago, that Samsung (for one) really is aiming to be 'low end crap' (although they obviously didn't word it like that)
Actually, if I remember correctly, the very first email was about how Toyota was aiming to be low end crap, so just give them that market. The big strong US auto makers would always dominate the mainstream market anyway...:-)
Check out Emagin for what that watch could look like one day. Emagin is the supplier for the current watch face and has a partnership with IBM that will hopefully make this stockholder some money some day.
Slashdot Mirror
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Poliglut
Well, the genetic material itself is a product of the genetic material, but that doesn't make it simple to understand.
Maybe a scientist will step in here, but it's my understanding the the soup around the genes plays a huge role in how the genes work. This is, again if my non-scientist memory serves me today, why stem cell research is interesting. The soup around the cell hasn't yet told the DNA which genes to use. You have in every cell the needed genes to make any cell, yet a skin cell is different from a liver cell. This is because of the soup allowing certain parts of the sequence to work and masking others. That seems like an important to understand piece to understand, but we are a long way from even understanding the sequence, much less the context.
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Poliglut
Ok, I understand the tools to make tools arguement and the pace of change and all that. But in some ways that makes my point even more appropriate. Despite that effect we still have no strong AI and are still looking at estimates of (at least) yet another decade before we do. You would be correct if you detect in my tone a bit of skeptisism on this yet latest estimate.
Genetics are at least as complicated as the brain and we have essentially no experience with them. That approximation may offend some scientists in the field, and I don't mean for that, but look at were we are. What are there, a couple tests for genetic diseases, a kind of corn that keeps leaking into the mainstream supply and an identity test that couldn't convict OJ?
We had a similar level of cognitive understanding a couple hundred years ago. Certainly Turing understood at least that much more recently. Yet we still stumble.
Couple that with the fact that it isn't 'simply' genetics, but also the surrounding cellular chemistry that makes the genes work that needs to be studied.
There is an awful lot to understand and we don't even come close to having the capability to do so yet.
So, I'm just saying that it's easy to get hyped over this stuff, but be a little cautious about when you promise your deliverables. Ask Minsky why if you still don't believe me.
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Poliglut
They were, obviously, wrong. Today we can't even do speech recognition with sufficient reliability to use it every day, much less get in a car, tell it were we want to go and then read the important news of the day (pre-selected by a Chevy Agent) on the drive.
So too will genetics be. We're at the beginning of an interesting period in research. But for the genetic possiblities to be realized will require something like the kind of AI imagined in the 60's to be available and well understood. There is just that much data available to process.
So, while I'm as excited as the next guy at the possibilities, I'll consider myself lucky indeed if I live to see them realized.
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Poliglut
I'm not saying that you should not trust them. I'm saying that you will be better at *your* job if you understand them.
Nor am I saying, as you mention, that you shouldn't focus on the specs. Just that you shouldn't focus on them to the exclusion of other, admittedly less interesting, subjects.
How many times have things needed to be re-worked in projects that you have worked on because of miscommunication? In many cases that can be eliminated because you better understand the business perspective and can ask better questions. And, frankly, that seems a lot more likely than that we'll convince the business types to learn enough about what we do to give better instructions.
--
Poliglut
I can't tell you the number of times that I've had to help folks who had memorized the spec and read books like this, but didn't understand why the spec contained the features it does, nor why going distributed was the way to go (hint, $).
So, read this book. Learn everything it contains. But don't skip the more academic architectural tomes nor the business aisle the next time you're at Borders...
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Poliglut
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Poliglut
Yes, that would be the difference. The little underdog competitor, in shaky economic times, is exploiting the weaknesses in the overlord.
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Poliglut
Thank god I own AMD...
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Poliglut
And why should I have to do that? Have I not a right to expect my software to not have stupid and onerous requirements? Have I not an obligation to tell people about such software? Without such feedback capitalism, which relies on an educated consumer, fails. As witnessed by the fact that QuickBooks has a monopoly.
b) read the damn box and understood that an internet connection is required and also understood that this might mean under certain circumstances there might be trouble.
The box did not specify this. Nor did experience lead me to think this would be the case. Previous versions operated fine without a net connection. There was no business reason to make me think that had changed.
Thanks for playing.
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Poliglut
I tried, but found out this morning that my accountant only deals with Quickbooks. He said he'd be happy to consider other things, but at some point the trouble becomes larger than the value of the statement I'm trying to make. And thus a monopoly is maintained.
Oh, and too the moron that marked my initial post offtopic. Next time read the note and sit on your hands. My beef was that I couldn't get support for the product. That actually seems quite on topic.
--
Poliglut
without personal computers. I'd seriously consider paper-based options, using the computer
only for recordkeeping.
Yes, they sure did. However, my accountant no longer accepts paper records. Hasn't for years. I understand why.
--
Poliglut
The problem was that we don't have internet service right now thanks to the twin horrors of Northpoint going out of business and Ameritech being predatory (that too is another story though). QuickBooks, which I remind you is accounting software, requires an internet connection to run. I cannot tell it to just use the old tax tables for this cycle, I cannot tell it to use a disk. It requires an internet connection.
Worse still is that I called to find out what the deal is and, at 5:30 PST, no one could help me. I was told that I must call the tax table people during business hours the next day.
So, my $350 ripping cool accounting package had me resorting to looking up peoples last checks, writing down the deductions (fortunately salaried staff, not hourly) and manually entering them into the forms (oh, another thing. I had to write them down because QB makes the paycheck detail a modal window so I can't open two of them and just copy from one to the other. I had to open one, copy the info, then open another and type it in).
Thanks for the great service guys! I appreciate it.
--
Poliglut
Thanks to the Felten fiasco, the EFF and 2600 Magazine have a new weapon in their legal arguments against the loathed copyright law: The RIAA has now, in effect, used the DMCA to stifle academic research. As Roger Parloff and Charles Mann pointed out in Inside.com, even the authors of the DMCA didn't intend for this to happen.
The point of the DMCA, in the eyes of those who authored it, is not just to stifle hackers, but also to prevent academic research. Academic research is, after all, absolutely as dangerous to their property as Captain Crunch doing the same work. They aren't going to care one whit whether the research that millions of script kiddies are benefitting from was done at Princeton or the food court at the local mall. The fact is, they are still owned. And by their logic the monetary losses start at that moment.
I'm sure they'll explain that in detail in court.
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Poliglut
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Poliglut
Add wireless networking and instead of having to look for a band on someones sleeve during a firefight at the local paintball field your box could show everyone who isn't on your team (cause remember it knows where everyone *on* your team is) with their entire body covered in a big bulls eye (hmmm, have to make it smart enough to not do that for the ref I suppose).
--
Poliglut
Apparently not in this case. The researchers were registered with the game.
--
Poliglut
As you are aware, the Agreement covering the Public challenge narrowly authorizes participants to attack the limited number of music samples and files that were provided by SDMI. The specific purpose of providing these encoded files and for setting up the Challenge was to assist SDMI in determining which of the proposed technologies are best suited to protect content in Phase II products. The limited waiver of rights (including possible DMCA claims) that was contained in the Agreement specifically prohibits participants from attacking content protected by SDMI technologies outside the Public Challenge. If your research is released to the public this is exactly what could occur. In short, you would be facilitating and encouraging the attack of copyrighted content outside the limited boundaries of the Public Challenge and thus places you and your researchers in direct violation of the Agreement.
I say, just re-attack when the stuff is released and publish the results. There is little moral or ethical in agreeing to the terms that these people must have as part of the challenge and then turning around a violating those terms.
--
Poliglut
The header climits tells you what the range available is in a platform independent manner. If you think you will not be able to control that your program be compiled on a 32 bit platform then check out INT_MAX and make sure its big enough for what you want to do.
I can't comment on the C99 standard and what they think the gains would be from such a scheme. Though I wonder if those are really fixed bit width types? Can you talk more about that?
--
Poliglut
YES!
Orson Scott Card called this 'the significance problem' in his book Pastwatch. You've summed it up perfectly, the problem with privacy is that many people are so arrogant that they believe they matter. They think they have some clever ideas no one else has thought of. That they are important enough that Time/Warner or the government (choose your poison) is going to give a rip about them. That they are something more than just another one in six billion.
After working with large scale databases for a while it becomes very clear that privacy doesn't matter much. The Man isn't out to get you (and if he were, he sure as hell wouldn't be using a 250 million person database of lung cancer data to find you). You don't matter to anyone you haven't already met. Get over it.
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Actually, if I remember correctly, the very first email was about how Toyota was aiming to be low end crap, so just give them that market. The big strong US auto makers would always dominate the mainstream market anyway...
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"two weeks ago I'm washing lettuce, next I'm went to fries. Two days after I put poliglut in my
(With apoligies to Louie Anderson)
(Apologies to the humorless too. I haven't made dick off my website, it's a labor of love.)
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