So it's not all games now, it's just MMOGs? ok sure... does anybody else feel like it's just some more panic inspiring journalism? here's an example:
"The Korea Game Promotion and Development Institute said about 10 percent of teenagers who play online games show signs of addiction, including a tendency to shun contact with families and friends, become easily frustrated and, in extreme cases, confuse reality with their gaming experiences."
Don't 95% of teenagers act this way anyhow? From what I remember, life in high school seemed more like an alternate reality and I _still_ dont realy want to talk to my parents. I just dont see the problem... sure there are some extreme cases but there are extreme cases everywhere. I'm sure more than one person worked himself to death but I still don't see any work-is-bad-rest-more articles all over the net.
Games are an art form. Playing them is fun and develops important abilities. MMOGs are great (well some are...) and can be a wonderful social experience. Didn't they always complain that people playing games become loners and have no social interaction? Well now we have social interaction INSIDE the games. Give us a break!!
Apparently this guy isn't the only one interested in pancake flipping. Take a look at this paper entitled "Bounds for sorting by prefix reversal" (AKA Pancake flipping problem) co-published by one William H. Gates...
as i mentioned in a previous post, Google ranks pages in a recursive way. An important page is one that is pointed to by a lot of other important pages. so the flaws in your argument are: 1. Your page is probably not all that important. unless you actually have important information on your page which most web pages dont. 2. If you dont put any links on it then it becomes even less important, because now it is not even a hub. and to a lesser extent 3. what you are suggesting is against the nature of the web in general. web page authors dont supply links only because it is hard to find links otherwise. they supply links as part of the text, for example when quoting or they supply links because they think those specific links are important and not others etc.
in short the scenario you describe is both unlikely and not as catastrophic as you think it is.
I was using an icredibly simplistic example on purpose. of course this process cannot be totally automated (if it were we'd have inteligent agents retrieving information for us) but it can be brought to a point where the amount of information can be handled by a human without wasting to much time and with high precision.
Google works on the recursive principle that an important document is one linked to by a lot of important documents. search for "child pornography" and (i'm generalizing here) you're likely to find two kinds of sites: sites offering child pornography and sites opposing it. those will probably create two seperate cliques (if you look at the web as a graph) or clusters. It will be quite easy to offer them as two seperate lists both satisfying the search query. i believe northern light (http://www.northernlight.com/) does exactly this.
Now how about a similar principle for people? A suspicious person is one who communicates with suspicious people. If you have access to Email messages sent on the internet this is quite easy to achieve. Filter the messages to those mentioning "child pornography" and now do the same analysis as google does. voila! you are left with lists of child pornographers and of internet vigilantes. easy. automatic. you can start worrying again.
btw, if you are looking for an interesting technical description of the best search engine around, the original google article (http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/brin98anatomy.html) by Brin and Page does the job a lot better than Doctrow's.
I hate to have to say this again (I hate to have to say this at all) but it is sad to see how Mr. Diffie, who in 1975 stood up against such institutions as the NSA to publish revolutionary crypto articles, is now reduced to being a mouthpiece for sun.
The article says nothing that hasn't been said before and offers no alternatives. How can this service be offered in a secure way, in a way that will not concentrate all the power in one place yet still offer the same benefits? This is the question to be answered. We all know of Microsoft's track record, we also know of Sun's. We are aware of the obvious risks involved in such a service but we can also see that this is the way the world is heading right now.
Several companies have tried to offer similar or partial services to what Microsoft is now suggesting, all of them failed. Now, Microsoft has never been a great innovator but once it puts its weight behind an idea it tends to lift off (eventualy). What are the checks and balances that we must demand of Microsoft (or any other would be service provider) to install in the system so that we can feel relatively free and safe to use it? Why should we choose Sun's alternative service when it is here? Simply because Sun's security is seems to have improved lately? I don't think so. When someone tries to answer me those question I'll respect their opinion, until then I can only stay disapointed.
This brings us to the present -- a world in which Javascript-based technologies like Tibet promise to not only salvage the object oriented aspect of the Internet from the birth defects of Jobs's spawn, but actually provide an advance over Smalltalk in the same lineage as CLOS and Self. But it is also a world in which there is growing confusion over the proper role of "metadata" in the form of XML -- particularly when it comes to speech acts and distributed inference.
Where is this confusion you refer to in the role of metadata? From my basic knowledge of XML and its place in life it seems like XML is quite clear about data, metadata and their relatives. OTH from my brief encounter with the CLOS examples you linked to, it seems like CLOS does mix representation, data and actions on the data (as a programming language would do) something XML does not do. After all one of the design goals of XML was to seperate layers of metadata, data and presentation.
I fail to see the relation that XML has with speech acts, or the confusion inherent in MetaLog. Actually Metalog seems like a pretty good idea and seems to compliment the idea of the semantic web quite nicely. In general I think that whether the semantic-web is the next big thing or not, it is still a big move towards a more data and user-friendly web. Search engines have tried their best (despite what is claimed in the original article most of the web is NOT indexed in SEs) but are not enough both in their indexing and retrieval capabilities. If the semantic web does indeed solve at least in part the polysemy problem by giving agents (or indexing robots) some kind of context, it would be a great help.
It's actually interesting to see the USA behind in something technological for a change. Yeah we're used to all the funky gadgets coming from Japan, but usually you know something is big when it becomes big in the USA. In this case, Europe is far ahead of the states (not to mention Japan which is light years ahead of the rest of the world).
The Wireless Internet is definitly going to take the world by storm. There is no doubt about it. Conversion of the PDA and the Cellphone, Location Based Services, Bluetooth enabled devices and what have you. All of those are gonna be here very soon, in color, in 3D and in your face (or rather palm).
The interesting thing to watch is if things will develop differently now that European companies are such a big driving force. Seems like they did a better job with Wireless standards then the American companies did. Let's see if they can make a better job with solving the many problems and questions they will face very soon.
I for one, both as a developer and as a consumer (a geeky one, but still a consumer) hope to see some real standards this time, some real security (transferring sensitive information over the air, what fun!) and as a result market acceptance, lots of applications, and definitly lots of COOL games. once we break a few more obstacles, we're on our way to some really amazing never before seen stuff that is gonna blow the hell out of everybody's shorts and will completely redfine gaming as we know it.
It seems to me that this goes beyond bloated software, bloated software we can live with eventually, because it somewhat keeps pace with the advance in computer power. This case is somewhat different. Correct me if I'm wrong but looking from a complexity point of view, the algorithm suggested by the author (".... If you need to approximate some ratio, just have the computer try all pairs of gears with no more than 100 teeth. There are only 10,000 combinations; you can churn them out in an instant. For a two-stage compound train, running through the 100 million possibilities is a labor of minutes...") has a complexity of O(a^n), n being the number of cogs in a train, a being somewhat constant, in this case 10,000. According to this, computing the ratio for 3 cogs would take 10,000 * "[the] labor of minutes", 4 cogs would take 10^8 minutes at least and so on. Not a very easy task anymore. You cant realy just throw calculation power at this, sorry. Now, I Dont know if using the 'old' method improves the performance by much, it seems to do that. Anyone wants to calculate an average complexity for it? So maybe this nice, deterministic algorithm (can someone just prove it will definitly end in a, hopefully, linear number of steps) is not that horrifyingly futile? and maybe, just maybe, it is worth the bother of being clever.
Slashdot Mirror
So it's not all games now, it's just MMOGs? ok sure... does anybody else feel like it's just some more panic inspiring journalism? here's an example:
"The Korea Game Promotion and Development Institute said about 10 percent of teenagers who play online games show signs of addiction, including a tendency to shun contact with families and friends, become easily frustrated and, in extreme cases, confuse reality with their gaming experiences."
Don't 95% of teenagers act this way anyhow? From what I remember, life in high school seemed more like an alternate reality and I _still_ dont realy want to talk to my parents. I just dont see the problem... sure there are some extreme cases but there are extreme cases everywhere. I'm sure more than one person worked himself to death but I still don't see any work-is-bad-rest-more articles all over the net.
Games are an art form. Playing them is fun and develops important abilities. MMOGs are great (well some are...) and can be a wonderful social experience. Didn't they always complain that people playing games become loners and have no social interaction? Well now we have social interaction INSIDE the games. Give us a break!!
Apparently this guy isn't the only one interested in pancake flipping. Take a look at this paper entitled "Bounds for sorting by prefix reversal" (AKA Pancake flipping problem) co-published by one William H. Gates...
Ding 15!! woot!
Vampire markings, safe houses, blood banks etc. Will we be seeing people going around with their WiFi card make and model on the back of their necks?
limbo.
as i mentioned in a previous post, Google ranks pages in a recursive way. An important page is one that is pointed to by a lot of other important pages. so the flaws in your argument are:
1. Your page is probably not all that important. unless you actually have important information on your page which most web pages dont.
2. If you dont put any links on it then it becomes even less important, because now it is not even a hub.
and to a lesser extent
3. what you are suggesting is against the nature of the web in general. web page authors dont supply links only because it is hard to find links otherwise. they supply links as part of the text, for example when quoting or they supply links because they think those specific links are important and not others etc.
in short the scenario you describe is both unlikely and not as catastrophic as you think it is.
limbo.
I was using an icredibly simplistic example on purpose. of course this process cannot be totally automated (if it were we'd have inteligent agents retrieving information for us) but it can be brought to a point where the amount of information can be handled by a human without wasting to much time and with high precision.
Google works on the recursive principle that an important document is one linked to by a lot of important documents. search for "child pornography" and (i'm generalizing here) you're likely to find two kinds of sites: sites offering child pornography and sites opposing it. those will probably create two seperate cliques (if you look at the web as a graph) or clusters. It will be quite easy to offer them as two seperate lists both satisfying the search query. i believe northern light (http://www.northernlight.com/) does exactly this.
Now how about a similar principle for people? A suspicious person is one who communicates with suspicious people. If you have access to Email messages sent on the internet this is quite easy to achieve. Filter the messages to those mentioning "child pornography" and now do the same analysis as google does. voila! you are left with lists of child pornographers and of internet vigilantes. easy. automatic. you can start worrying again.
btw, if you are looking for an interesting technical description of the best search engine around, the original google article (http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/brin98anatomy.html) by Brin and Page does the job a lot better than Doctrow's.
I hate to have to say this again (I hate to have to say this at all) but it is sad to see how Mr. Diffie, who in 1975 stood up against such institutions as the NSA to publish revolutionary crypto articles, is now reduced to being a mouthpiece for sun.
The article says nothing that hasn't been said before and offers no alternatives. How can this service be offered in a secure way, in a way that will not concentrate all the power in one place yet still offer the same benefits? This is the question to be answered. We all know of Microsoft's track record, we also know of Sun's. We are aware of the obvious risks involved in such a service but we can also see that this is the way the world is heading right now.
Several companies have tried to offer similar or partial services to what Microsoft is now suggesting, all of them failed. Now, Microsoft has never been a great innovator but once it puts its weight behind an idea it tends to lift off (eventualy). What are the checks and balances that we must demand of Microsoft (or any other would be service provider) to install in the system so that we can feel relatively free and safe to use it? Why should we choose Sun's alternative service when it is here? Simply because Sun's security is seems to have improved lately? I don't think so. When someone tries to answer me those question I'll respect their opinion, until then I can only stay disapointed.
limbo.
This brings us to the present -- a world in which Javascript-based technologies like Tibet promise to not only salvage the object oriented aspect of the Internet from the birth defects of Jobs's spawn, but actually provide an advance over Smalltalk in the same lineage as CLOS and Self. But it is also a world in which there is growing confusion over the proper role of "metadata" in the form of XML -- particularly when it comes to speech acts and distributed inference.
Where is this confusion you refer to in the role of metadata? From my basic knowledge of XML and its place in life it seems like XML is quite clear about data, metadata and their relatives. OTH from my brief encounter with the CLOS examples you linked to, it seems like CLOS does mix representation, data and actions on the data (as a programming language would do) something XML does not do. After all one of the design goals of XML was to seperate layers of metadata, data and presentation.
I fail to see the relation that XML has with speech acts, or the confusion inherent in MetaLog. Actually Metalog seems like a pretty good idea and seems to compliment the idea of the semantic web quite nicely. In general I think that whether the semantic-web is the next big thing or not, it is still a big move towards a more data and user-friendly web. Search engines have tried their best (despite what is claimed in the original article most of the web is NOT indexed in SEs) but are not enough both in their indexing and retrieval capabilities. If the semantic web does indeed solve at least in part the polysemy problem by giving agents (or indexing robots) some kind of context, it would be a great help.
limbo.
It's actually interesting to see the USA behind in something technological for a change. Yeah we're used to all the funky gadgets coming from Japan, but usually you know something is big when it becomes big in the USA. In this case, Europe is far ahead of the states (not to mention Japan which is light years ahead of the rest of the world).
The Wireless Internet is definitly going to take the world by storm. There is no doubt about it. Conversion of the PDA and the Cellphone, Location Based Services, Bluetooth enabled devices and what have you. All of those are gonna be here very soon, in color, in 3D and in your face (or rather palm).
The interesting thing to watch is if things will develop differently now that European companies are such a big driving force. Seems like they did a better job with Wireless standards then the American companies did. Let's see if they can make a better job with solving the many problems and questions they will face very soon.
I for one, both as a developer and as a consumer (a geeky one, but still a consumer) hope to see some real standards this time, some real security (transferring sensitive information over the air, what fun!) and as a result market acceptance, lots of applications, and definitly lots of COOL games. once we break a few more obstacles, we're on our way to some really amazing never before seen stuff that is gonna blow the hell out of everybody's shorts and will completely redfine gaming as we know it.
It seems to me that this goes beyond bloated software, bloated software we can live with eventually, because it somewhat keeps pace with the advance in computer power. This case is somewhat different.
Correct me if I'm wrong but looking from a complexity point of view, the algorithm suggested by the author (".... If you need to approximate some ratio, just have the computer try all pairs of gears with no more than 100 teeth. There are only 10,000 combinations; you can churn them out in an instant. For a two-stage compound train, running through the 100 million possibilities is a labor of minutes...") has a complexity of O(a^n), n being the number of cogs in a train, a being somewhat constant, in this case 10,000. According to this, computing the ratio for 3 cogs would take 10,000 * "[the] labor of minutes", 4 cogs would take 10^8 minutes at least and so on. Not a very easy task anymore. You cant realy just throw calculation power at this, sorry.
Now, I Dont know if using the 'old' method improves the performance by much, it seems to do that. Anyone wants to calculate an average complexity for it?
So maybe this nice, deterministic algorithm (can someone just prove it will definitly end in a, hopefully, linear number of steps) is not that horrifyingly futile? and maybe, just maybe, it is worth the bother of being clever.
just my 2 agorot.