Though I haven't used ExpLab yet, these folks have been associated with other very high quality work (CGAL) so I expect good things. Here are three goals they list for the project:
to provide a simple way to set up and run computational experiments;
to provide a means of automatically documenting the environment in which an experiment is run so the experiment can be easily rerun (provided the same
environment is still available) and the results can be more accurately compared to the results of other computational experiments;
to eliminate some of the tedium involved in collecting and analyzing output by providing basic text output processing tools.
Yes, profiling customers is a bad thing (for the customer).
You think that if you buy mountain dew frequently that they're going to give you a discount? Dream on. You'll more likely find out that mountain dew is the one beverage that you NEVER get a discount on.
(But their competitors might start offering discounts on stuff you'd never drink in a million years)
Determining the best path is probably an nP problem - that is, it's likely no
computer algorithm could solve it in polynomial time.
So what problem are they really solving? It sounded like finding the shortest path in a weighted graph to me. But last I checked, this
problem polynomial-time solvable.
... about 15 years ago, I reckon, in Winnipeg. I only met him once or twice. I think we were going to build a "Star-Trek"-inspired starship simulator, and sell it as a multi-person video game.
It never got off the ground.
The question I have is for timothy and the other slashdot operators. Why did you pick McKinstry to answer questions about telescopes? I gather that he happens to work at an observatory as a night assistant. Perhaps he has a good deal of knowledge about giant telescopes, but none of the supplied links demonstrate that.
As for hacking consciousness, his idea of minimal intelligence appears to be anything that responds in a non-random fashion. I propose the sequence "11111111111111..."
And we're supposed to ask him serious quesitons? Might as well ask Lars.
I guess I do have a question for Chris. He says that he entered a program in Loebner's Turing Test but withdrew because "Hugh Loebner stated that to win, a program must respond to audio/visual input and not just text." But that is only to win the $100,000 grand prize. Why wouldn't Chris leave his program to compete for the $2,000 (text-only interface) prize?
I agree! Jon K's misuse of character set is a crime.
But don't lay the blame on UNIX boxes. On this unix box, the apostrophe's are superscript `1's, which is a refreshing change from the usual question marks, at least. It is most likely a faulty translation to HTML by a Microsoft product.
Jon knows about this problem. I have personally mailed him twice about it. I even sent him the URL for the de-moronizer.
Jon has known about this problem since at least fall 1998. I first mailed him about it last June. Yet he refuses to fix it.
Why Jon? Does the demoronizer not work for you? Too much trouble to use?
I think I've seen no less than three self-confessed patent attourneys posting here.
I have a question for legal-history minded folk. In exchange for publishing one's ideas, one gets the right to sue for infringement. It's apparent how the patentee gains in this bargain. But does the patentee actually give up anything? What does the public gain? Has this system been as one-sided as it seems to now be from the beginning? Or was there some justification for it, once upon a time?
This leads me in to a question for the rest of us to ponder. Namely, hasn't the patent system become obsolete? What function do patents serve for society at large? Given that the test of obviousness is paper-thin, patents certainly do not serve to disseminate information (if they ever did).
The last paragraph of the item noted that you can use the technique of fast access to your site / slow access to your competitor's in order to "encourage" adoption of your own service.
Hmm. This makes me think of all the times that I've pulled up a banner-infested page only to spend 15 seconds reading the ads while the rest of the page loads.
Well, maybe it is a coincidence.
Filtering is a response to idiots, not business
on
ShutUp Software
·
· Score: 1
JK,
I think you're wide of the mark to link the rise of filtering tools to the increasing use of the net for marketing.
Ten years ago, I could read many USENET groups -- both technical and local political/general groups -- and a good fraction of the posts were useful or at least droll. Two years ago I stopped reading USENET altogether, save for one or two very specific groups -- and I have a very active KILL file. Most of the stuff I read nowadays is mailing list traffic. Lists are generally a better-kept secret; the membership is smaller and more focused, so the signal/noise ratio is higher.
The reason that USENET is USELESS these days is *not* because the net has been taken over by marketroids, although they are a big nuisance too, but because the net has been inundated by the "general public", too many of whom can't put two coherent sentences together, but don't know enough not to try in public.
Inevitably, the useful content is drowned out by the mediocre.
Ten years ago, when the average online IQ was higher, a few messages, be they public or private, polite or flaming generally served to convince an individual to behave. If not, there was always the kill-file. Yes, filtering has been around just about forever; it is not a new phenomenon. Today, civil discussion hasn't got a chance in an open forum. The online world is starting to have the same distribution of people as the offline world.
Everyone relies on filtering, offline as well as online. Life is too short to wade through all the drivel if one didn't filter.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm in precisely the same situation as Alea, so I read the suggestions here with considerable interest.
I'd like to mention ExpLab.
Though I haven't used ExpLab yet, these folks have been associated with other very high quality work (CGAL) so I expect good things. Here are three goals they list for the project:
Yes, profiling customers is a bad thing (for the customer).
You think that if you buy mountain dew frequently that they're going to give you a discount? Dream on. You'll more likely find out that mountain dew is the one beverage that you NEVER get a discount on.
(But their competitors might start offering discounts on stuff you'd never drink in a million years)
In a similar vein, I have taken to simply putting the phone down (quietly) and let them blather on until they realise that noone is listening.
As they say in the article: marketers value THEIR time, but not yours. I like to return the favour of wasting their time without wasting MINE.
How do these things compare with Kerberos?
It's been some time since the court proceedings and sentencing.
Have you considered what you will occupy your time with in prison? What are your plans for after release?
After reading that post about OpenSSH, I
really do not understand how anyone could find
this guy difficult to work with.
... is on the debian-devel mailing list mailing list, starting here.
Okay, let's guess my birthday:
2001-03-18 05:58
(i just made up the time -- i don't remember
at what hour i was born)
It never got off the ground.
The question I have is for timothy and the other slashdot operators. Why did you pick McKinstry to answer questions about telescopes? I gather that he happens to work at an observatory as a night assistant. Perhaps he has a good deal of knowledge about giant telescopes, but none of the supplied links demonstrate that.
As for hacking consciousness, his idea of minimal intelligence appears to be anything that responds in a non-random fashion. I propose the sequence "11111111111111..."
And we're supposed to ask him serious quesitons? Might as well ask Lars.
I guess I do have a question for Chris. He says that he entered a program in Loebner's Turing Test but withdrew because "Hugh Loebner stated that to win, a program must respond to audio/visual input and not just text." But that is only to win the $100,000 grand prize. Why wouldn't Chris leave his program to compete for the $2,000 (text-only interface) prize?
Steve Robbins
But don't lay the blame on UNIX boxes. On this unix box, the apostrophe's are superscript `1's, which is a refreshing change from the usual question marks, at least. It is most likely a faulty translation to HTML by a Microsoft product.
Jon knows about this problem. I have personally mailed him twice about it. I even sent him the URL for the de-moronizer.
Jon has known about this problem since at least fall 1998. I first mailed him about it last June. Yet he refuses to fix it.
Why Jon? Does the demoronizer not work for you? Too much trouble to use?
Amazing (and amusing)!
The administration should have hired the students to rotate it back!
... pour cold water on the machine until the
price goes back down.
I wonder if we could drag the machine outside on a winter day and get the coke for free?
I think I've seen no less than three self-confessed patent attourneys posting here.
I have a question for legal-history minded folk. In exchange for publishing one's ideas, one gets the right to sue for infringement. It's apparent how the patentee gains in this bargain. But does the patentee actually give up anything? What does the public gain? Has this system been as one-sided as it seems to now be from the beginning? Or was there some justification for it, once upon a time?
This leads me in to a question for the rest of us to ponder. Namely, hasn't the patent system become obsolete? What function do patents serve for society at large? Given that the test of obviousness is paper-thin, patents certainly do not serve to disseminate information (if they ever did).
Is the patent system worth having?
The last paragraph of the item noted that you can use the technique of fast access to your site / slow access to your competitor's in order to "encourage" adoption of your own service.
Hmm. This makes me think of all the times that I've pulled up a banner-infested page only to spend 15 seconds reading the ads while the rest of the page loads.
Well, maybe it is a coincidence.
JK,
I think you're wide of the mark to link the rise of filtering tools to the increasing use of the net for marketing.
Ten years ago, I could read many USENET groups -- both technical and local political/general groups -- and a good fraction of the posts were useful or at least droll. Two years ago I stopped reading USENET altogether, save for one or two very specific groups -- and I have a very active KILL file. Most of the stuff I read nowadays is mailing list traffic. Lists are generally a better-kept secret; the membership is smaller and more focused, so the signal/noise ratio is higher.
The reason that USENET is USELESS these days is *not* because the net has been taken over by marketroids, although they are a big nuisance too, but because the net has been inundated by the "general public", too many of whom can't put two coherent sentences together, but don't know enough not to try in public.
Inevitably, the useful content is drowned out by the mediocre.
Ten years ago, when the average online IQ was higher, a few messages, be they public or private, polite or flaming generally served to convince an individual to behave. If not, there was always the kill-file. Yes, filtering has been around just about forever; it is not a new phenomenon. Today, civil discussion hasn't got a chance in an open forum. The online world is starting to have the same distribution of people as the offline world.
Everyone relies on filtering, offline as well as online. Life is too short to wade through all the drivel if one didn't filter.