Re:If there were intelligent life on other planets
on
Rare Earth
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· Score: 2
Agreed. It's not a proof, but I find it more convincing than these Drake-type probabilistic calculations. (How do you know you've got all the factors? How do you know they are independent so that you can multiply the probabilities?)
The Fermi argument is really that if there are lots of planets supporting intelligent life, it is likely that some of them are more advanced than us, and so should have explored further, or at least worked out how to signal us. (The fact that Fermi was mentioned at the beginning of the article was a bonus.)
If there were intelligent life on other planets...
on
Rare Earth
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· Score: 2
It was mentioned that "organized religion" is presented in a bad light. More accurately, Mr. Pullman appears to be some sort of rabid pagan with a massive chip on his shoulder.
Right. In the first book, this is barely apparent, but by the third book it dominates the story. And he uses a straw man argument: he paints a particularly abhorrent church, and uses this to argue that all religion is authoritarian and evil.
But actually I didn't think that this was the biggest flaw, because the church is so unrealistic as to be almost laughable, and his bias is so transparent that it is easily disregarded.
Instead, I found the resolution of the story rather unsatisfying. The very ending of the series is rather moving, but the resolution before that of the problems facing the worlds (I'm trying to avoid spoilers here) is endearing but... well, it doesn't really make sense. There's no attempt to explain why the thing that worked would have any effect at all.
Despite these things, I too did enjoy the trilogy overall.
Proves strength of Google
on
Google Juice
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Really this proves how good the Google search algorithm is, because Googlebombing needs a coordinated effort from several popular sites. (The Google algorithm ensures that simply setting up several sites yourself doesn't help, unless other people point to them).
Of course, as I'm all of the top three Stephen Turners already, I don't need to do this.:-)
I'll probably get shot down in flames for saying this, but I honestly believe that software should be patentable, provided that it's genuinely novel and non-obvious. Software can be inventions just as much as physical objects were in the 1770's, and should be protected in the same way.
No, the problem with the US patent system is not the patentability of software; it's the patenting of stuff without a proper search of the prior art, the patenting of stuff that is obvious but happens to have no prior art because it's a new field, and the patenting of the trivial last step when the bulk of the work has been done by someone else.
In fact, these problems are true in other areas of endeavour too. It's not just software people who complain about the US patent system.
Not that I trust the EU patent office to avoid these mistakes, mind you.
Having closed-circuit cameras all over hell is possibly the greatest threat to our (American citizens) freedom I can imagine. [...] It sounds like they want to setup a system similar to the ones in Britain. Have you seen how ubiquitious cameras are over there? You can barely fart without it being noticed. Yet people think they're being protected.
The greatest threat to your freedom you can imagine? Maybe you should use more imagination!
You're right, in Britain we have cameras everywhere, and almost everyone likes them.
But I don't see the problem. You should have no expectation of privacy in a public place. When you're in public, you can be watched. That's why it's called a 'public' place. Why is this a difficult concept?
All of those examples are cases where prior are should have invalidated the patent.
In the software/internet field, I think that the main problem is not that prior art is not found -- in a new field it may not exist -- but that the obviousness criterion is not tested.
IANAL, but AIUI, in order to be patentable, an invention must be both novel and non-obvious. But read this interview in which the Director of the US Patent Office demonstrated quite clearly that he did not understand the difference between these two concepts.
It appears that the US Patent Office believes that obviousness can be ascertained by determining whether there is any prior art. Of course obviousness is much harder to prove conclusively. But until they understand that an invention has to satisfy both of these criteria separately, we will continue to get more ridiculous software and e-businness patents.
Maybe it's too obvious to be worth pointing out, but a web server can't hope to locate the user, only the computer that the user is using to access the server. Will this really be enough to satisfy the law enforcement agencies or media rights holders?
We seem to have an article about a replacement for the desktop about once every week or two. The feeling I get is that there are developers all over the world developing these things, presumably hoping to strike a gold mine.
And yet none of them have taken off. Why's that? Maybe (heretical thought!) it's because the current model actually works quite well for most people.
I don't want a system where the computer organises things for me. I can organise them better myself. (Occasionally I might lose something, but probably less often than if the computer was filing stuff for me. Anyway, we have good 'find' tools on Windows and Unix.)
I don't want a 3-D interface. It's much harder to visualise and navigate than a 2-D one. (A set of 2-D interfaces, as in Mozilla's tabbed browsing or many window managers' virtual desktops, is good. This is perhaps one of the real UI advances in recent years. Windows could do with virtual desktops.)
The article says: "Conceivably, an inference engine can be made so intelligent that [...] machines would automatically present information to you as you need it." Well, maybe when that's true I'll change my mind.
My question is, how is apt so much better than, say, Red Carpet on a RedHat box? It works out dependency issues, just like apt does.
The advantages are partly to do with technical differences, but perhaps mostly to do with packaging policy.
For technical differences, see
this article. One of the biggest ones is that debs have a higher degree of dependency granularity than rpms. As well as Depends: and Conflicts: they
have Recommends: and Suggests:.
Debian also has a carefully thought out packaging policy. And in Debian, everything is a true Debian package. There is no contrib. So a bug against the package is a bug in the system. This mindset makes a big difference to the quality of the distribution.
You might also be interested in this discussion on this theme.
Webalizer's biggest advantage is that it produces prettier pictures.
I should add that you can make analog's output prettier for your PHB[?]
if you use Report Magic with analog.
Re:What's it matter what server generates the logs
on
Web Log Analyzers?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Last I checked, both IIS and Apache generate (or can be set to generate) W3C standard format logfiles. Part of the reason for having/using that standard is so that you don't get locked into a proprietary tool.
You might think so, but IIS breaks the standard in several ways. And it's not even really a standard, just an early working draft that was never finished.
In my opinion, a good logfile analysis tool should be able to recognise and analyse all commonly-used formats, and provide a means to specify custom formats. In other words, it should work with what the server has already produced, rather than force the server administrator to reconfigure the server and ignore old logfiles. My program analog does all this, but most programs don't.
...it can be hard to dig through the [analog] documentation.
I (the author) have some sympathy with this; but the main problem is that it's so configurable that there just are a lot of commands.
I have done some work recently on presenting the documentation in different ways. As well as the main topic-based documentation, there's now a page with only the most basic commands for beginners; a comprehensive index; all the commands on a single page with a BNF-type grammar; and two sample configuration files with all the commands in, one in topic order and one in report order. There's also the beginnings of a collection of third-party HOWTO's (for which I need more volunteers, HINT HINT!).
I do take a lot of time and trouble over documentation, I suspect much more than most open source projects. My rule is that no change can be committed until it's fully documented. So you will never find the documentation lagging behind the reality, or options missed out of the documentation. I also spend a lot of time rephrasing the existing documentation.
Analog is over six years old, but it's still actively developed, and I think it's still the leading free log analyser. The main contender is the Webalizer.
To some extent it depends what you want (why not try out both?). The Webalizer's biggest advantage is that it produces prettier pictures. Some of analog's advantages are that it is more configurable; that it runs on any OS (the Webalizer is Unix only); and that it can analyse logfiles from any web server.
[Analog] will also work on compressed logs, IIRC, so you can even save some disk space (at the expense of more CPU time at analysis).
... but less elapsed time. Analog is primarily limited by disk speed, so you will get the results sooner from compressed logs than uncompressed ones. Strange but true.
I'm amazed by the number of people that don't see these technologies as threatening our freedoms.
[...]
The Fourth Amendment must be used to prevent such invasions of privacy
No invasion of privacy is involved.
You're in a public place. You cannot have an expectation of privacy in a public place.
We have lots of surveillance cameras in the UK, and I'll tell you what -- (almost) everyone likes them.
It's in the nature of the open source movement that there's no-one who can actually appoint leaders. But don't we already have de facto leaders? People like ESR, RMS, Perens, O'Reilly etc. who speak up for open source when there is some controversy? In fact, Jay Greenspan seems to acknowledge this in his article.
Can someone explain to me how this spreads? I too have got lots of emails from strangers. (Although the first one I received was from someone many Slashdotters will have heard of, which confused me for a while.) I thought the normal thing with mail worms was that they would spread to people in your address book -- but I don't suppose I'm in many of these people's address books.
In the UK, Tesco has made an enormous success out of grocery home delivery. In fact, so successful that it's about to expand into the US under the Safeway mark.
The key to Tesco's success is twofold. First, it's already a well-known brand -- it's our largest supermarket chain. And secondly, it distributes the goods from existing stores, so no extra warehouses etc. to build. (Our second largest supermarket chain, Sainsbury's, tried and failed to make the warehouse model work.)
Slashdot Mirror
The Fermi argument is really that if there are lots of planets supporting intelligent life, it is likely that some of them are more advanced than us, and so should have explored further, or at least worked out how to signal us. (The fact that Fermi was mentioned at the beginning of the article was a bonus.)
... they would be here. (Fermi)
But actually I didn't think that this was the biggest flaw, because the church is so unrealistic as to be almost laughable, and his bias is so transparent that it is easily disregarded.
Instead, I found the resolution of the story rather unsatisfying. The very ending of the series is rather moving, but the resolution before that of the problems facing the worlds (I'm trying to avoid spoilers here) is endearing but ... well, it doesn't really make sense. There's no attempt to explain why the thing that worked would have any effect at all.
Despite these things, I too did enjoy the trilogy overall.
Of course, as I'm all of the top three Stephen Turners already, I don't need to do this. :-)
No, the problem with the US patent system is not the patentability of software; it's the patenting of stuff without a proper search of the prior art, the patenting of stuff that is obvious but happens to have no prior art because it's a new field, and the patenting of the trivial last step when the bulk of the work has been done by someone else.
In fact, these problems are true in other areas of endeavour too. It's not just software people who complain about the US patent system.
Not that I trust the EU patent office to avoid these mistakes, mind you.
You're right, in Britain we have cameras everywhere, and almost everyone likes them.
But I don't see the problem. You should have no expectation of privacy in a public place. When you're in public, you can be watched. That's why it's called a 'public' place. Why is this a difficult concept?
Does anyone else think this computer is eminently steal-able? Just put a cloth over the top and take it for a walk.
I doctored one of those "I am 10" badges by adding a 9 in the upper-right hand corner, to read "I am 10^9".
You can see the invitation on my web site (PDF, 55kb) for a while.
In the software/internet field, I think that the main problem is not that prior art is not found -- in a new field it may not exist -- but that the obviousness criterion is not tested.
IANAL, but AIUI, in order to be patentable, an invention must be both novel and non-obvious. But read this interview in which the Director of the US Patent Office demonstrated quite clearly that he did not understand the difference between these two concepts.
It appears that the US Patent Office believes that obviousness can be ascertained by determining whether there is any prior art. Of course obviousness is much harder to prove conclusively. But until they understand that an invention has to satisfy both of these criteria separately, we will continue to get more ridiculous software and e-businness patents.
Maybe it's too obvious to be worth pointing out, but a web server can't hope to locate the user, only the computer that the user is using to access the server. Will this really be enough to satisfy the law enforcement agencies or media rights holders?
Even if they're not violating Ford's trademark, I'm sure BT can still get them for violating their patent on hyperlinks.
Realistic physics in games will never catch on. Lara Croft would keep falling over forwards.
And yet none of them have taken off. Why's that? Maybe (heretical thought!) it's because the current model actually works quite well for most people.
I don't want a system where the computer organises things for me. I can organise them better myself. (Occasionally I might lose something, but probably less often than if the computer was filing stuff for me. Anyway, we have good 'find' tools on Windows and Unix.)
I don't want a 3-D interface. It's much harder to visualise and navigate than a 2-D one. (A set of 2-D interfaces, as in Mozilla's tabbed browsing or many window managers' virtual desktops, is good. This is perhaps one of the real UI advances in recent years. Windows could do with virtual desktops.)
The article says: "Conceivably, an inference engine can be made so intelligent that [...] machines would automatically present information to you as you need it." Well, maybe when that's true I'll change my mind.
For technical differences, see this article. One of the biggest ones is that debs have a higher degree of dependency granularity than rpms. As well as Depends: and Conflicts: they have Recommends: and Suggests:.
Debian also has a carefully thought out packaging policy. And in Debian, everything is a true Debian package. There is no contrib. So a bug against the package is a bug in the system. This mindset makes a big difference to the quality of the distribution.
You might also be interested in this discussion on this theme.
In my opinion, a good logfile analysis tool should be able to recognise and analyse all commonly-used formats, and provide a means to specify custom formats. In other words, it should work with what the server has already produced, rather than force the server administrator to reconfigure the server and ignore old logfiles. My program analog does all this, but most programs don't.
I have done some work recently on presenting the documentation in different ways. As well as the main topic-based documentation, there's now a page with only the most basic commands for beginners; a comprehensive index; all the commands on a single page with a BNF-type grammar; and two sample configuration files with all the commands in, one in topic order and one in report order. There's also the beginnings of a collection of third-party HOWTO's (for which I need more volunteers, HINT HINT!).
I do take a lot of time and trouble over documentation, I suspect much more than most open source projects. My rule is that no change can be committed until it's fully documented. So you will never find the documentation lagging behind the reality, or options missed out of the documentation. I also spend a lot of time rephrasing the existing documentation.
First, as others have commented, the commercial programs suck, especially Webtrends.
Analog is over six years old, but it's still actively developed, and I think it's still the leading free log analyser. The main contender is the Webalizer. To some extent it depends what you want (why not try out both?). The Webalizer's biggest advantage is that it produces prettier pictures. Some of analog's advantages are that it is more configurable; that it runs on any OS (the Webalizer is Unix only); and that it can analyse logfiles from any web server.
Besides, analog's author reads Slashdot.
We have lots of surveillance cameras in the UK, and I'll tell you what -- (almost) everyone likes them.
It's in the nature of the open source movement that there's no-one who can actually appoint leaders. But don't we already have de facto leaders? People like ESR, RMS, Perens, O'Reilly etc. who speak up for open source when there is some controversy? In fact, Jay Greenspan seems to acknowledge this in his article.
Can someone explain to me how this spreads? I too have got lots of emails from strangers. (Although the first one I received was from someone many Slashdotters will have heard of, which confused me for a while.) I thought the normal thing with mail worms was that they would spread to people in your address book -- but I don't suppose I'm in many of these people's address books.
The key to Tesco's success is twofold. First, it's already a well-known brand -- it's our largest supermarket chain. And secondly, it distributes the goods from existing stores, so no extra warehouses etc. to build. (Our second largest supermarket chain, Sainsbury's, tried and failed to make the warehouse model work.)
Gates: I noticed that your web server is running on Linux.
PHB: Hey, Bill, cut me some slack, we don't have to use your software for everything!
Gates: Sure, but do you understand the GPL?
PHB: Well, I guess I've never studied it myself, but it just means it's free, doesn't it?
Gates: No, unfortunately if you use any open source product anywhere in your company, it makes it illegal for you to sell any software at all.
PHB: You're kidding, right?
Gates: No, seriously, believe me, I have to know about these things.
PHB: Yeah, I guess so. Well, thanks for the warning, Bill. I'll make sure my techies take the Linux off our web server first thing on Monday morning!