I think that Wikipedia is cool, so assume my comments are made in a kind way: there needs to be some trust mechanism, perhaps having registered users assign a numeric score to rate articles. I am not sure how credit would be spread between original authors and editors.
My friend Tom Munnecke [www.munnecke.com/blog/] does a lot of work on ideas for online charities. A huge issue is implementing a good trust mechanism.
It seems like Wikipedia needs more basic research in a trust mechanism for rating authors and editors.
I like the original idea for the web: I publish some material on my web site (mostly dealing with Lisp, AI, and Java), and a few hundred people link to what I write. Since it is on my web site I am responsible for quality and content (althouh many people help me by reporting typos and providing great ideas - my online Lisp book is the best example: many smart people in the Lisp community contributed good ideas, but I am responsible for the quality of the material).
Anyway, I like the idea behind Wikipedia, but I have 2 suggestions:
1. Break the system into smaller parts (perhaps many), each with an "editor in chief". Actually, some form of hierarchy of editor might be a good idea. 2. implement a trust/rating system
I think that there could be a lot of variability in pricing for download with DRM movies: obviously new releases would cost more and may not be available for a while in a higher resolution. Perhaps deals could be made for much lower costs for older movies (like Turner Classics).
Sometimes old movies come up in conversation and it would be great to have an online library of 10s of thousands of movies.
My older brother owns about 1200 movie DVDs (to keep this anonymous I won't mention Ron's name:-) and that is fine for people who want to own movies forever. For myself, I would be happy to pay a reasonable fee to get movies on demand loaded on to my laptop for viewing on my deck, etc. Being able to pause movies, watch them several times within the DRM timeout period, etc. would be great.
Netflix is a good idea, but there is not the immediacy of deciding to watch a move and then have it available in a short while. (I am assuming that after buffering up data for 20 minutes or so that a Quicktime movie would then play OK with most broadband services.)
On my blog the other day, I wrote an open letter to Steve Jobs asking for an online movie rental store that:
Would works with Macs!
Would have DRM that allows watching a downloaded movie for a whole week
Would support two pricing structures: 99 cents for a low resolution movie (perhaps 450x250 pixels) and $2.50 for a higher resolution movie (perhaps 800x500 pixels). Support full screen mode with interpolation.
I really enjoy Apple's music store. The current online movie rental (via download with DRM) stores look fairly lame - I bet that Apple could create someting that I would enjoy using.
My wife and I moved from the beach in San Diego to the mountains of Northern Arizona almost 7 years ago. We find the cost of living to be very much lower here (and with wilderness surrounding us for hiking and picnicking, the standard of living much better).
We both work fewer hours per week and for usually lower pay, and much less stress. Anyway, it works for us.
The internet and cheap flat rate long distance makes telecommuting possible, but still not as effective as being on site. I try to spend time on consulting, writing and developing a few (very much niche) software products.
Actually, the long hours were only when there was a real crunch. Same thing as when I worked at SAIC: sometimes long hours are necessary - but, they should not be the norm.
In my consulting business, I almost never accept "flat rate" jobs - obviously it is best to be paid precisely for hours worked.
In the case of EA: *if* everyone was paid straight overtime pay, the management would probably try to avoid continued long working hours because people's productivity decreases dramatically if workers are tired.
Not to go too political here, but: it is an obvious goal of corporitism to get better control over workers - promoting temporary cheap credit to get people in debt, outsourcing (which I am not against), etc. are all useful tools for eliminating most of the middle class and making things more "business friendly". Get used to it - read some William Gibson for a sneak preview of your future:-)
I was hired about 8 years ago at Angel Studios to do 'game AI' for Nintendo and PC games, and also for some VR stuff for Disney. We worked really long hours to make deliveries but the owners of the company jumped through hoops to make it OK: really good food, lunch time barbecues, lunch time head shavings, etc. Then there was having the use of a $200K SGI Reality Engine:-)
This story amused me a little because: twice in recent years the human resources people at EA contacted me re: employment. I would have jumped at the opportunity except both times it was to work on sports games. I *hate* playing sports games so I hardly would want to work on them. (I like driving games, and shooter/tactical games are OK also).
-Mark
Re:Has anyone here compared seaside and zope
on
Zope X3 3.0.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I have played with Seaside, which is a continuation based Smalltalk framework. There is also a Scheme based system that sort-of uses continuations. Anyway, try Avi's Seaside tutorial with a new version of Squeak (www.squeak.org). Very nice tchnology.
Zope (and Plone which sits on top of Zope) is great - but it is targeted at non-technical users (once it is set up).
"Honinbo Warrior" was written on my Apple II (serial number 71) using UCSD - a very civilized programming environment indeed.
The Apple II also had a fairly good interpreted Lisp (Pegasis Lisp) that I used a lot way back then. The Lisa editor/macro asembler was also great (as long as I am getting nostalgic, what about Bill Budge's great 3D library for the Apple II).
I own Microsoft Office for both Mac OS X and Windows, but I prefer the relative simplicity and "not in your face" style of OOo. The OOo technical drawing program is also very nice to use.
I especially like how simple it is to parse OOo document files (just open a gzip input stream, run through a SAX parser, and grab what you need).
For Mac OS X, I also like the NeoOfficeJ package: OOo that uses Java to provide a native OOo application on OS X - really cool.
I have not looked too much at the developer's classes yet (just a few minutes in the Squeak Smalltalk class browser), but I have had time to just play with in the 3D environment.
In brief, Croquet is component based and allows you to construct 3D environments quickly (?learning curve?) with moving objects, portals into other 3D spaces, access to the external world with web browsers, your own Squeak applications, etc.
I have been waiting for the new version of Croquet with some anticipation (several web blogs recently on Croquet) - now I need to get some time to experiment with writing some code.
Re:Hibernate is good, but I am using Prevayler mor
on
Hibernate in Action
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I sometimes do the same thing myself (i.e., just write a little code using the JDBC APIs to grab what I need).
Also: with Hibernate, you do have control over how much of a row of data you actually retrieve since you specify the mapping that you want in an XML configuration file.
Do try Prevayler however: for some applications it really is a great tool. I especially like it for web applications where most data access is read only: caching objects in memory really speeds things up.
Hibernate is good, but I am using Prevayler more
on
Hibernate in Action
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Hibernate is a very solid Java object relational mapping tool (I have a section on Hibernate in my last book). When you need OO to relational database mappings, Hibernate is my recommended tool, for sure.
However, for my Java consulting business, Prevalyer is definitely my new "secret weapon". With a little care, it is easy to set up your POJO classes so that you can add class attributes without breaking your persistent Prevayler object store. Using Prevayler reduces development time. Good stuff.
I have had RDF on my web site for years, but last year as an experiment, I started a web spider running that specifically looked for RDF - I found very little.
I even cheated and specified the 'seed' starting web sites as sites that I knew to use RDF.
I am a big fan of all things Google (I **love** their SOAP API - free use of the Google backend; the limit of 1000 hits a day is no problem for me because I just use it for a NLP question answering prototype) and one of my best friends works for Overture.
That said, I think that Clusty will do very well. I use Firefox and Safari for my browsers; after breakfast I am going to configure one of them to use Clusty by default.
One thing that make Clusty so interesting to me is that I have been working (for the last year and a half) on version 2 of my KBtextmaster product that uses similar technology: I cluster documents based on what categories I automatically assign to them (for this, I use the Reuter's categories and trained with their excellent 2+ gigabyte tagged news corpus). I also identify people's names, places, etc. and I am planning on using this information to improve clustering also.
Earlier this year, I built a system that used the Lucene open source search engine and had to process most types of documents - just getting the text, no formatting information.
It was so easy to handle OOo documents! Open a gzip input stream, pass it through a SAX XML parser, and grab the text as it flies by.
Easy! Now, don't even ask about getting text from Microsoft Office documents (did it, more or less, but that was a hassle).
I wrote the first commercial Go Playing Program
on
Hikarunix: The Go Distro
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
In the late 1970s, I wrote a Go playing program on very limited hardware: my Apple II (serial number 79 - an old one, but with extra memory).
Anyway, my old boss (who once joked that he almost did not get his PhD from MIT because he spent too much time playing Go) convinced me to sell this beast - even though it did not play a strong game it did know about liberties, ladders, some Joseki, etc.
Anyway, I sold it as "Honinbo Warrior". I am fairly sure that it was the first commercially available Go playing program. I did not make too much money from it because advertising costs in Apple magazines ate up most of the revenue.
I have to agree with you - and, this situation is probably permanent.
The republican agenda is to push many in the middle class down into poverty - making people nervous about their livelihood (not to mention up-and-down terror alerts to generally make people scared) is the ideal formula for maximizing the profits for the rich.
No conspiracy or anything - just people with wealth and power consolidating their position.
In the U.S., the economy is might get really bad in the next year or two. Sure, too many people are still sucking the equity from their homes and otherwise increasing their debt for the good life of crass materialism, but most people are starting to see the light:
Dependence on Chinese and Japanese foreign banks to prop up the dollar - how long can ths go on?
reliance on non-sustainable consumer debt spending - how long can ths go on?
realization that our great material life style will naturally slide a bit as third world countries out-compete us in some areas
That said, I am an independent consultant, and it seems to me that business has really picked up in the last year - so I don't think that it is all doom and gloom on the economy - it is just that things might not be as great as they once were.
Very well said - it is not often that I see such a great summary of the fallacies of republic 'economic theories'.
Really, if it was not for the Chinese and Japanese Central Banks propping up the dollar in recent years, we would already be screwed.
It is impossible predict when chaotic events will occur, but we can agree that they should occur sometime: in this case, it is so obvious that the U.S. economy is going to tank badly, but it is likely not to happen for a year or so.
Strong AI requires grounding symbols in real world things, events, and processes.
I think that simply defining the "meaning" of words in ontologies is likely good enough for useful web-based software agents. It will take time, but with well defined ontologies, and common use of RDF using standard schemas will make a lot of cool things possible. I think that dealing with ungrounded symbols, but symbols defined and related to other symbols in a structured way, is OK.
One of the classic complaints of AI systems can be summed up with a trivial example:
Define a relation in Prolog:
father(ken, mark).
A human reader assigns their own meaning to "father", "ken", and "mark". To a prolog system, this could just as easily be:
aaa1(aaa2, aaa3).
Somewhere, on the edge of symbol-slamming systems, there has to be some connection with the real world, with our experiences.
For semantic web applications, this "edge connection" can simply be tying into symbols defined in OWL ontologies, RDF Schema, etc.
The problem is getting people to use RDF (I added RDF to my main web site years ago, but it only contains limited information).
Another problem with RDF is that there are several kluges to get it into XHTML, but that will hopefully change soon.
After speeches at the Democratic National Convention, the major news media would allow Republican pundits to dis all over the speakers.
I don't think that you will see this during the Republican National Convention (i.e., immediately letting Democratic pundits dis thge Republican speakers) - let's wait and see.
All news organizations are owned my mega-large international corporations.
All news reflects the business interests of the parent companies.
For example, in the US, that is why the Bush vs. Kerry news coverages is so incredibly biased towards Bush. For people who own millions in stock equity, etc., and for multinational corporations, 4 nore years of Bush is a big deal, money-wise.
I am not surprised that MSN routes people to MSNBC. BTW, I think that MSNBC is actually more fair-minded than CNN, CBS, ABC, etc. This is just a casual observation, but MSNBC tends to cover topics like Israel's nuclear/chemical/biological weapons programs that other news media in the US stay away from (although the NY Times also has fairly broad news coverage).
I am no fan of Microsoft, but as a news service, MSNBC is pretty good.
I ended up buying two copies of Richard Linklater's film "Waking Life" (one also for my step-son David). An awesome movie - I could not tell you how many times I that watched it.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that Wikipedia is cool, so assume my comments are made in a kind way: there needs to be some trust mechanism, perhaps having registered users assign a numeric score to rate articles. I am not sure how credit would be spread between original authors and editors.
My friend Tom Munnecke [www.munnecke.com/blog/] does a lot of work on ideas for online charities. A huge issue is implementing a good trust mechanism.
It seems like Wikipedia needs more basic research in a trust mechanism for rating authors and editors.
I like the original idea for the web: I publish some material on my web site (mostly dealing with Lisp, AI, and Java), and a few hundred people link to what I write. Since it is on my web site I am responsible for quality and content (althouh many people help me by reporting typos and providing great ideas - my online Lisp book is the best example: many smart people in the Lisp community contributed good ideas, but I am responsible for the quality of the material).
Anyway, I like the idea behind Wikipedia, but I have 2 suggestions:
1. Break the system into smaller parts (perhaps many), each with an "editor in chief". Actually, some form of hierarchy of editor might be a good idea.
2. implement a trust/rating system
-Mark
One more thing:
:-) and that is fine for people who want to own movies forever. For myself, I would be happy to pay a reasonable fee to get movies on demand loaded on to my laptop for viewing on my deck, etc. Being able to pause movies, watch them several times within the DRM timeout period, etc. would be great.
I think that there could be a lot of variability in pricing for download with DRM movies: obviously new releases would cost more and may not be available for a while in a higher resolution. Perhaps deals could be made for much lower costs for older movies (like Turner Classics).
Sometimes old movies come up in conversation and it would be great to have an online library of 10s of thousands of movies.
My older brother owns about 1200 movie DVDs (to keep this anonymous I won't mention Ron's name
Netflix is a good idea, but there is not the immediacy of deciding to watch a move and then have it available in a short while. (I am assuming that after buffering up data for 20 minutes or so that a Quicktime movie would then play OK with most broadband services.)
- Would works with Macs!
- Would have DRM that allows watching a downloaded movie for a whole week
- Would support two pricing structures: 99 cents for a low resolution movie (perhaps 450x250 pixels) and $2.50 for a higher resolution movie (perhaps 800x500 pixels). Support full screen mode with interpolation.
I really enjoy Apple's music store. The current online movie rental (via download with DRM) stores look fairly lame - I bet that Apple could create someting that I would enjoy using.-Mark
My wife and I moved from the beach in San Diego to the mountains of Northern Arizona almost 7 years ago. We find the cost of living to be very much lower here (and with wilderness surrounding us for hiking and picnicking, the standard of living much better).
We both work fewer hours per week and for usually lower pay, and much less stress. Anyway, it works for us.
The internet and cheap flat rate long distance makes telecommuting possible, but still not as effective as being on site. I try to spend time on consulting, writing and developing a few (very much niche) software products.
Actually, the long hours were only when there was a real crunch. Same thing as when I worked at SAIC: sometimes long hours are necessary - but, they should not be the norm.
:-)
In my consulting business, I almost never accept "flat rate" jobs - obviously it is best to be paid precisely for hours worked.
In the case of EA: *if* everyone was paid straight overtime pay, the management would probably try to avoid continued long working hours because people's productivity decreases dramatically if workers are tired.
Not to go too political here, but: it is an obvious goal of corporitism to get better control over workers - promoting temporary cheap credit to get people in debt, outsourcing (which I am not against), etc. are all useful tools for eliminating most of the middle class and making things more "business friendly". Get used to it - read some William Gibson for a sneak preview of your future
I was hired about 8 years ago at Angel Studios to do 'game AI' for Nintendo and PC games, and also for some VR stuff for Disney. We worked really long hours to make deliveries but the owners of the company jumped through hoops to make it OK: really good food, lunch time barbecues, lunch time head shavings, etc. Then there was having the use of a $200K SGI Reality Engine :-)
This story amused me a little because: twice in recent years the human resources people at EA contacted me re: employment. I would have jumped at the opportunity except both times it was to work on sports games. I *hate* playing sports games so I hardly would want to work on them. (I like driving games, and shooter/tactical games are OK also).
-Mark
I have played with Seaside, which is a continuation based Smalltalk framework. There is also a Scheme based system that sort-of uses continuations. Anyway, try Avi's Seaside tutorial with a new version of Squeak (www.squeak.org). Very nice tchnology.
Zope (and Plone which sits on top of Zope) is great - but it is targeted at non-technical users (once it is set up).
Seaside is a new paradigm.
-Mark
"Honinbo Warrior" was written on my Apple II (serial number 71) using UCSD - a very civilized programming environment indeed.
The Apple II also had a fairly good interpreted Lisp (Pegasis Lisp) that I used a lot way back then. The Lisa editor/macro asembler was also great (as long as I am getting nostalgic, what about Bill Budge's great 3D library for the Apple II).
I own Microsoft Office for both Mac OS X and Windows, but I prefer the relative simplicity and "not in your face" style of OOo. The OOo technical drawing program is also very nice to use.
I especially like how simple it is to parse OOo document files (just open a gzip input stream, run through a SAX parser, and grab what you need).
For Mac OS X, I also like the NeoOfficeJ package: OOo that uses Java to provide a native OOo application on OS X - really cool.
MOD THE PARENT UP
Very interesting - thanks!
I have not looked too much at the developer's classes yet (just a few minutes in the Squeak Smalltalk class browser), but I have had time to just play with in the 3D environment.
In brief, Croquet is component based and allows you to construct 3D environments quickly (?learning curve?) with moving objects, portals into other 3D spaces, access to the external world with web browsers, your own Squeak applications, etc.
I have been waiting for the new version of Croquet with some anticipation (several web blogs recently on Croquet) - now I need to get some time to experiment with writing some code.
I sometimes do the same thing myself (i.e., just write a little code using the JDBC APIs to grab what I need).
Also: with Hibernate, you do have control over how much of a row of data you actually retrieve since you specify the mapping that you want in an XML configuration file.
Do try Prevayler however: for some applications it really is a great tool. I especially like it for web applications where most data access is read only: caching objects in memory really speeds things up.
However, for my Java consulting business, Prevalyer is definitely my new "secret weapon". With a little care, it is easy to set up your POJO classes so that you can add class attributes without breaking your persistent Prevayler object store. Using Prevayler reduces development time. Good stuff.
I have had RDF on my web site for years, but last year as an experiment, I started a web spider running that specifically looked for RDF - I found very little.
I even cheated and specified the 'seed' starting web sites as sites that I knew to use RDF.
I am a big fan of all things Google (I **love** their SOAP API - free use of the Google backend; the limit of 1000 hits a day is no problem for me because I just use it for a NLP question answering prototype) and one of my best friends works for Overture.
That said, I think that Clusty will do very well. I use Firefox and Safari for my browsers; after breakfast I am going to configure one of them to use Clusty by default.
One thing that make Clusty so interesting to me is that I have been working (for the last year and a half) on version 2 of my KBtextmaster product that uses similar technology: I cluster documents based on what categories I automatically assign to them (for this, I use the Reuter's categories and trained with their excellent 2+ gigabyte tagged news corpus). I also identify people's names, places, etc. and I am planning on using this information to improve clustering also.
Earlier this year, I built a system that used the Lucene open source search engine and had to process most types of documents - just getting the text, no formatting information.
It was so easy to handle OOo documents! Open a gzip input stream, pass it through a SAX XML parser, and grab the text as it flies by.
Easy! Now, don't even ask about getting text from Microsoft Office documents (did it, more or less, but that was a hassle).
In the late 1970s, I wrote a Go playing program on very limited hardware: my Apple II (serial number 79 - an old one, but with extra memory).
Anyway, my old boss (who once joked that he almost did not get his PhD from MIT because he spent too much time playing Go) convinced me to sell this beast - even though it did not play a strong game it did know about liberties, ladders, some Joseki, etc.
Anyway, I sold it as "Honinbo Warrior". I am fairly sure that it was the first commercially available Go playing program. I did not make too much money from it because advertising costs in Apple magazines ate up most of the revenue.
-Mark
I have to agree with you - and, this situation is probably permanent.
The republican agenda is to push many in the middle class down into poverty - making people nervous about their livelihood (not to mention up-and-down terror alerts to generally make people scared) is the ideal formula for maximizing the profits for the rich.
No conspiracy or anything - just people with wealth and power consolidating their position.
-Mark
Hey Bill,
You have this right: the economy is chaotic and can not be predicted. Yeah for Chaos Theory...
We can say what ought to probably happen based on history and common sense, but in the end, we just do not know what will happen.
Best regards,
Mark
- Dependence on Chinese and Japanese foreign banks to prop up the dollar - how long can ths go on?
- reliance on non-sustainable consumer debt spending - how long can ths go on?
- realization that our great material life style will naturally slide a bit as third world countries out-compete us in some areas
That said, I am an independent consultant, and it seems to me that business has really picked up in the last year - so I don't think that it is all doom and gloom on the economy - it is just that things might not be as great as they once were.-Mark
Very well said - it is not often that I see such a great summary of the fallacies of republic 'economic theories'.
Really, if it was not for the Chinese and Japanese Central Banks propping up the dollar in recent years, we would already be screwed.
It is impossible predict when chaotic events will occur, but we can agree that they should occur sometime: in this case, it is so obvious that the U.S. economy is going to tank badly, but it is likely not to happen for a year or so.
-Mark
Strong AI requires grounding symbols in real world things, events, and processes.
I think that simply defining the "meaning" of words in ontologies is likely good enough for useful web-based software agents. It will take time, but with well defined ontologies, and common use of RDF using standard schemas will make a lot of cool things possible. I think that dealing with ungrounded symbols, but symbols defined and related to other symbols in a structured way, is OK.
One of the classic complaints of AI systems can be summed up with a trivial example:
Define a relation in Prolog:
father(ken, mark).
A human reader assigns their own meaning to "father", "ken", and "mark". To a prolog system, this could just as easily be:
aaa1(aaa2, aaa3).
Somewhere, on the edge of symbol-slamming systems, there has to be some connection with the real world, with our experiences.
For semantic web applications, this "edge connection" can simply be tying into symbols defined in OWL ontologies, RDF Schema, etc.
The problem is getting people to use RDF (I added RDF to my main web site years ago, but it only contains limited information).
Another problem with RDF is that there are several kluges to get it into XHTML, but that will hopefully change soon.
A good toolkit for experimenting with the semantic web is the Swi-Prolog semweb library (http://www.swi-prolog.org/packages/semweb.html/)
-Mark
You have to be kjidding, right?
After speeches at the Democratic National Convention, the major news media would allow Republican pundits to dis all over the speakers.
I don't think that you will see this during the Republican National Convention (i.e., immediately letting Democratic pundits dis thge Republican speakers) - let's wait and see.
Best regards,
Mark
All news organizations are owned my mega-large international corporations.
All news reflects the business interests of the parent companies.
For example, in the US, that is why the Bush vs. Kerry news coverages is so incredibly biased towards Bush. For people who own millions in stock equity, etc., and for multinational corporations, 4 nore years of Bush is a big deal, money-wise.
I am not surprised that MSN routes people to MSNBC. BTW, I think that MSNBC is actually more fair-minded than CNN, CBS, ABC, etc. This is just a casual observation, but MSNBC tends to cover topics like Israel's nuclear/chemical/biological weapons programs that other news media in the US stay away from (although the NY Times also has fairly broad news coverage).
I am no fan of Microsoft, but as a news service, MSNBC is pretty good.
-Mark
I ended up buying two copies of Richard Linklater's film "Waking Life" (one also for my step-son David). An awesome movie - I could not tell you how many times I that watched it.
-Mark