I feel your assumption is wrong. It would be foolish to assume that the eigenvectors and eigenvalues they derive from one Pagerank will generally hold in a space as dynamic as the worldwide web. Sure, slashdot.org will probably maintain the same sort of authority and hub value... but what as terms change? A flurry of "blog" articles one month may make/. an authority... but what when the infatuation ends?
We have already seen the effects of Google-bombing and Google-washing. The strength of Page Rank is that is objective in terms of the current state of the WWW. It makes no assumptions about the shape of the data. As a term takes on new meaning (see "second superpower") Page Rank stays cocurrent temporally. A new definition may bubble up to the top for a term for a month but then disappear as the linkage structure of the web phases it out (i.e. blogs talk about it less, less interconnectivity, less appearance at "hub" nodes).
Numerically, PageRank is a recursive search for eigenvalues and vectors like updating a Markov Chain. It is a nice application of linear algebra. Because it is a matrix operation, it is highly parallelizable. Also there are many redundant calculation and ordering speedups one can do for matrix multiplications (as anyone who as taken a CS algorithms course knows).
But to assume a stability from one calculation to the next could lead, over time, to the very inaccuracies Google was built to overcome. There is a lot of research in mining web data. There have been several academic improvements to it along with improvements to related algorithms such as Kleinbergs and LSI. It is well within reason that these were just applied to the Google app.
Rodney Brooks (head of MIT's AI lab) has to say about this since he is the genesis of the "cheap, fast, and out of control" school of AI that Minsky is deriding here. But since rantage like this from Minsky isn't new, I bet Brooks takes it in stride.
About 20 years ago AI was going down the craperroo until folks like Brooks decided that the AI field would be better served by moving it from the more theoretical GOFAI method to a more applicable style. Revitalized everything.
I'd have to say on handhelds and small devices (like portable DVD players... anything less than a laptop) fullscreen is superior. Of course the assumption would then be you are watching it on a portable device because you have no other option (i.e. travel) and are just looking for something to save you from crushing boredom.
Of course I don't watch movies that way and I don't know many people who do. And if I did I wouldn't feel the desire to duplicate my DVD collection for road trips.
So... eh. I guess this is only good for the idle rich.
I'm also wondering if/how many of the copies of Windows that precipitated in Slammer were legal. Asia is notorious for its pirated software problems. Not that I'm insinuating anything but Microsoft might be able to say "Well a lot of the machines were illegal anyway therefore in breach of our support. I'm sorry but we can't be held accountable for criminal use blah blah blah-"
I have several theme movie channels (Westerns, Mystery, Love Stories, Action, True Stories) and they are generally not as good as expected. Why? Because they can't get the rights to all "good" movies (since they are in high demand and thus expensive). Mystery shows The Avengers on weekdays but other than that is about two Columbo movies away from being Lifetime. I saw Predator on Action... quickly followed by The Fast and the Furious.
Everyone seems to think "Yeah a channel that was purely __________ would rock! I'd so watch it all the time!" Sorry but it wouldn't be Akira followed by Princess Mononoke. More likely "What the hell is this?" then "God... this really sucks." Unless someone feels like throwing millions of dollars into a moneypit, I fear this will disappoint.
The only pure channel I could see enjoying would be a kung-fu movie channel. Why? Because the unintentional comedy runs high in those films. The cheaper/worse the movie usually the more people like it. Of course there is a fine artistry to The Five Deadly Venoms and Shaolin Master Killer but anybody can enjoy the endless kick-to-the-genitals jokes and bad dubbing.
iWarp has been around for a few years and I think is getting deprecated by a newer system. Just a way of getting *that* much more speed by avoiding unnecessary context switches. Datacenter stuff mostly but is general enough that it could be dropped on a lot of current stuff (AFAIK).
Why does this just sound like a hat-switch that you find on joysticks? Of course it's a neat idea to plop it onto a mouse. Personally I'd rather have one under my thumb. I think a lot of people are used to using hat controllers that way. Hell, how many FPSes on the PS2 are best played by using the analog sticks with your thumb? Same thing here.
That these gender traits are statistics: that means there is a mean and a standard deviation (with probable overlap between men and women). There is no solid demarkation line in biology or psychology that says "No Men/Women Beyond this Point".
What this does say is that there is generally significant difference between the two groups... so why not use it?
In the future the key is to ask "Would you like a larger desktop?" instead of "Are you a woman?" Allow personalization without mandating bias.
Otherwise its like only making jeans in 32"I 32"W and saying to everyone "You better fit into these because this is all you're going to get."
If you thought the T-shirts at ThinkGeek were cool-
Well I guess I'm out.;)
They tried this with medium bombers as well
on
Nuke-Lobbing
·
· Score: 1
(with less success of course). But I was watching Discovery Wings (yes, I have that Digital) and they showed them trying to do something similar with a B-47 Stratojet (if I remember correctly). Needless to say they had some trouble trying to flip a 133000 lbs. bomber.
I think one thing the miniature gaming market has going for it is investment. Take any pen n' paper game. The entrance cost is very low (say 30 bucks for your average rulebook) and as you add books content expands astoundingly. And if you want to start a new game? No sweat: no gaming system rules are so opaque as to not be transferable. GURPS supplements using White Wolf's system in the Traveller univers, etc. It's only numbers and letters.
Miniatures on the otherhand are somewhat... specialized. Just to play as one army requires a huge investement and any variation you need to do is more money. Switch up style of play, new figures. Switch to a new army, new figures. "We've just released the latest version of the game that just blows away anything else and... oh its uncompatible with the old", new figures. And if you want to get out, new figures. Sure, if your buddies are good, you don't care. But it is still there: the pressure to commit by buying more pewter and plastic.
I got out of GW games about eight years ago, right before the latest incarnation of their big series. They were putting more and more into larger units and special characters that were the 40+ dollar minis. They biased the game towards these characters making it necessary to augment your Space Marines with an Evesor Assassin (they explode when you cook 'em) or a Leman Russ. Besides, their writing began to suck/contradict earlier writing, I had to get out. I must have spent a half a grand on my various things... and I got less than 100.
But I think PBS has some of the best fun educational websites... for children AND adults. They have a spectacular design, loads of content.
Heck, I probably spend as much time on their Frontline as I do on/. I just heard a biopic was being made on pornographer Seymour Butts. If you look for the old show Frontline did called "American Porn" you can see the interesting story on how Mr... Butts is a test case for the State of CA against fisting. Mr Butts on the topic: "You stick four fingers in a person, its fine. You add your thumb in there, it's suddenly a crime." Frontline has tons of interviews, background and expert data.
Fascinating, fascinating stuff. You find out that Ashcroft was planning a big assault on the US porn industry pre-9-11 and all these other bits.
Ok... this post has suddently gone OT. But if adults can get such great mind-piquing webbrowsing, kids will too at PBS.
You can get a good bio on the Captain on the Rotten Library. Most interesting:
His "handle" came from the inclusion of a plastic whistle in Captain Crunch cereal in the 1960's which could, with proper manipulation, send out a control tone that would affect telephone systems of the time. Of course, Draper didn't actually discover that fact (the honor goes to a blind phone phreak named Joe Engressia) but he was quite happy to not go out of his way to correct people when they claimed he had.
The guy who came up with the 007 method gets whatever rewards were for booting Linux first on an Xbox. Yeah, this seems more like what "people want". But that wasn't the challenge. It was to boot Linux.
I'm sorry but the fuss around the backdoor-ness of the 007 method was blown way out of proportion.
Am I the only one who saw no collelation between the stats in the article and the "its just not geeks" results?
The first was that it was overwhelmingly male. Um, isn't that a classic "geek" stereotype? Maybe if the numbers were more 50/50 (like I assume The Sims are) I'd be a little more swayed.
Secondly is the predominance of "19 and older". Well gee, what do a lot of people do when they turn 18? Go to college and live with a fat broadband connection. I'd be more impressed if it said the mean age was 32 or something. But then age has nothing to do with geekiness.
In truth I can't think of a statistic off of the top of my head that could prove the geekiness of a gaming community. Probably the only one would be if the statistics were more normal (more ethnic, gender, income diversity, instead of being primarily white, primarily male, primarily middle class like most things geeky). It wasn't like this guy bugged a High School football lockerroom and heard them talk on and on about their 40th level elf sorcerers.
If it wasn't for the floundering of AOL-Time Warner, the Vivendi-Universal merger would be the one everybody talks about. The CEO selling shares, then forced to step down, now revealing that they "fixed" their annual reports last year. Just a big cluster.
And remember that Universal Music is the number 1 music company in the world... by a lot. So with the downturn (whatever the root: music piracy, crappy music, overpriced cds) there is a desire to dump those assets right quick. I'd call it a disaster if mainstream music didn't suck.
I think one of the big holes in this article is the idea that information == knowledge. That anyone can comprehend (and diagnose and modify extensively) any and all information.
Of course this is not the case. How many people use Linux and know each and every last piece of code (and I'm not talking about/. folks here, but people in general)? What about Windows? Hell, how many of us use Aspirin or airplanes and have little more than the basic understanding of how they work?
The problem is this: the more advanced a society becomes, the more specialized its population becomes. That means the slight fraction one has knowledge of shrinks as time progresses even though they might know more than people a hundred years ago.
So what has society done? Attempted to make any and all technology novice-usable. So I don't have to know how an ATM or automobile or cd players works to use it.
So let's take the author's example of the Ebola-AIDS virus. Assuming that the above traits hold (that we become more specialized while technology grows more advanced yet usable) then anybody might be able to unleash Ebola-AIDS while only a handful of people would have the slightest idea how to stop it.
Basically it's the Script-Kiddie Syndrome to the Nth degree. All I need is a Genome Rootkit and I can cause havoc. And who cares if I can't hack any and all persons? What if I just need to hit a 3rd world country that hasn't gotten the latest service pack? I could wipe out Zambia or Cambodia. We see this time and time again: the problem and the cure exist side by side. Yet for some reason the former gets out more than the latter. How often are sites hacked on year old exploits?
Of course this is all hypotheticals. But it seems that the failing is something intrinsically human, not political or technological. So neither a police state or open utopia would solve any of this. Besides, the author's example is a wacky level of technology. Who knows. We might all be Wesley Crushers by then.
You are in luck as the class I TA for does a section on engineering ethics. The main resource we use is Introduction to Engineering Ethics by Schinzinger & Martin. It covers such topics as the Challenger Disaster and the Yuca Dam and shows some nice ethics tidbits. Like how various groups involved denied responsibility because lack of authority ("We were just doing our little part") and how little things can have big effects. It also then parlays such large, obvious disasters into standard workplace ethical uses. Overall a nice little book.
The book description:
Introduction to Engineering Ethics provides the background for discussion of the basic issues in engineering ethics. Emphasis is given to the moral problems engineers face in the corporate setting. It places those issues within a philosophical framework, and it seems to exhibit both their social importance and their intellectual challenge. The primary goal is to stimulate critical and responsible reflection on moral issues surrounding engineering practice and to provide the conceptual tools necessary for pursuing those issues.
As per new ABET 2000 guidelines, more and more introductory engineering courses cover engineering ethics as part of their instruction. Students preparing to function within the engineering profession need to be introduced to the basic issues in engineering ethics. This book places those issues within a wider philosophical framework than has been customary in the past and aims to stimulate critical and responsible reflection on the moral issues surrounding engineering practice and to provide the conceptual tools necessary for pursuing those issues.
Well then I wonder if it can come down to user computer savvy then. Assuming that the sources of bootleg mp3s are average end users then you can assume that the initial copy would still have the watermark.
Then if it goes wild it doesn't matter what a stronger later user would do, as long as you could find one copy, you could determine the source.
Of course then someone could just build in de-watermarking code into any mp3 ripping app... but then that breaks the DMCA... and then we are in the same loopy mess we're in right now.
Since most illegal mp3s come from critic and radio advanced copies, why don't the labels digitally watermark these advances? Of course the problem would be you'd want a unique mark for every copy (so, I assume, you could find the source and not pick on a bunch of kids who picked it up). But just burn them onto CDR then.
Then if a copy is found online, diff it with the original, and find out who leaked it.
Or maybe I'm oversimplifying things. I guess if you could make the key seeding random enough that it wouldn't be easy to wipe...
Wasn't Duke3d originally released on Windows? Well I guess you can get it free now. So, yeah, the Linux port came out first... if you discount that commercial release to Windows 7 years ago.
Hmmm. Come to think of it, might have to break out a little Duke3d...
Slashdot Mirror
I feel your assumption is wrong. It would be foolish to assume that the eigenvectors and eigenvalues they derive from one Pagerank will generally hold in a space as dynamic as the worldwide web. Sure, slashdot.org will probably maintain the same sort of authority and hub value... but what as terms change? A flurry of "blog" articles one month may make /. an authority... but what when the infatuation ends?
We have already seen the effects of Google-bombing and Google-washing. The strength of Page Rank is that is objective in terms of the current state of the WWW. It makes no assumptions about the shape of the data. As a term takes on new meaning (see "second superpower") Page Rank stays cocurrent temporally. A new definition may bubble up to the top for a term for a month but then disappear as the linkage structure of the web phases it out (i.e. blogs talk about it less, less interconnectivity, less appearance at "hub" nodes).
Numerically, PageRank is a recursive search for eigenvalues and vectors like updating a Markov Chain. It is a nice application of linear algebra. Because it is a matrix operation, it is highly parallelizable. Also there are many redundant calculation and ordering speedups one can do for matrix multiplications (as anyone who as taken a CS algorithms course knows).
But to assume a stability from one calculation to the next could lead, over time, to the very inaccuracies Google was built to overcome. There is a lot of research in mining web data. There have been several academic improvements to it along with improvements to related algorithms such as Kleinbergs and LSI. It is well within reason that these were just applied to the Google app.
Rodney Brooks (head of MIT's AI lab) has to say about this since he is the genesis of the "cheap, fast, and out of control" school of AI that Minsky is deriding here. But since rantage like this from Minsky isn't new, I bet Brooks takes it in stride.
About 20 years ago AI was going down the craperroo until folks like Brooks decided that the AI field would be better served by moving it from the more theoretical GOFAI method to a more applicable style. Revitalized everything.
I'd have to say on handhelds and small devices (like portable DVD players... anything less than a laptop) fullscreen is superior. Of course the assumption would then be you are watching it on a portable device because you have no other option (i.e. travel) and are just looking for something to save you from crushing boredom.
Of course I don't watch movies that way and I don't know many people who do. And if I did I wouldn't feel the desire to duplicate my DVD collection for road trips.
So... eh. I guess this is only good for the idle rich.
I'm also wondering if/how many of the copies of Windows that precipitated in Slammer were legal. Asia is notorious for its pirated software problems. Not that I'm insinuating anything but Microsoft might be able to say "Well a lot of the machines were illegal anyway therefore in breach of our support. I'm sorry but we can't be held accountable for criminal use blah blah blah-"
Possible?
I have several theme movie channels (Westerns, Mystery, Love Stories, Action, True Stories) and they are generally not as good as expected. Why? Because they can't get the rights to all "good" movies (since they are in high demand and thus expensive). Mystery shows The Avengers on weekdays but other than that is about two Columbo movies away from being Lifetime. I saw Predator on Action... quickly followed by The Fast and the Furious.
Everyone seems to think "Yeah a channel that was purely __________ would rock! I'd so watch it all the time!" Sorry but it wouldn't be Akira followed by Princess Mononoke. More likely "What the hell is this?" then "God... this really sucks." Unless someone feels like throwing millions of dollars into a moneypit, I fear this will disappoint.
The only pure channel I could see enjoying would be a kung-fu movie channel. Why? Because the unintentional comedy runs high in those films. The cheaper/worse the movie usually the more people like it. Of course there is a fine artistry to The Five Deadly Venoms and Shaolin Master Killer but anybody can enjoy the endless kick-to-the-genitals jokes and bad dubbing.
iWarp has been around for a few years and I think is getting deprecated by a newer system. Just a way of getting *that* much more speed by avoiding unnecessary context switches. Datacenter stuff mostly but is general enough that it could be dropped on a lot of current stuff (AFAIK).
Why does this just sound like a hat-switch that you find on joysticks? Of course it's a neat idea to plop it onto a mouse. Personally I'd rather have one under my thumb. I think a lot of people are used to using hat controllers that way. Hell, how many FPSes on the PS2 are best played by using the analog sticks with your thumb? Same thing here.
Film at 11.
But what the hell happened to Team Fortress 2?
Is this the first time vaporware has been deprecated?
That these gender traits are statistics: that means there is a mean and a standard deviation (with probable overlap between men and women). There is no solid demarkation line in biology or psychology that says "No Men/Women Beyond this Point".
What this does say is that there is generally significant difference between the two groups... so why not use it?
In the future the key is to ask "Would you like a larger desktop?" instead of "Are you a woman?" Allow personalization without mandating bias.
Otherwise its like only making jeans in 32"I 32"W and saying to everyone "You better fit into these because this is all you're going to get."
If you thought the T-shirts at ThinkGeek were cool-
;)
Well I guess I'm out.
(with less success of course). But I was watching Discovery Wings (yes, I have that Digital) and they showed them trying to do something similar with a B-47 Stratojet (if I remember correctly). Needless to say they had some trouble trying to flip a 133000 lbs. bomber.
Sure, most people might not be smart enough. But I'd have fun with it.
Guy: "What's your password."
Me: "My favorite tool. Dickfore."
Guy: "What's a dick-"
Me: "Nahahaha!" *scamper off*
I think one thing the miniature gaming market has going for it is investment. Take any pen n' paper game. The entrance cost is very low (say 30 bucks for your average rulebook) and as you add books content expands astoundingly. And if you want to start a new game? No sweat: no gaming system rules are so opaque as to not be transferable. GURPS supplements using White Wolf's system in the Traveller univers, etc. It's only numbers and letters.
Miniatures on the otherhand are somewhat... specialized. Just to play as one army requires a huge investement and any variation you need to do is more money. Switch up style of play, new figures. Switch to a new army, new figures. "We've just released the latest version of the game that just blows away anything else and... oh its uncompatible with the old", new figures. And if you want to get out, new figures. Sure, if your buddies are good, you don't care. But it is still there: the pressure to commit by buying more pewter and plastic.
I got out of GW games about eight years ago, right before the latest incarnation of their big series. They were putting more and more into larger units and special characters that were the 40+ dollar minis. They biased the game towards these characters making it necessary to augment your Space Marines with an Evesor Assassin (they explode when you cook 'em) or a Leman Russ. Besides, their writing began to suck/contradict earlier writing, I had to get out. I must have spent a half a grand on my various things... and I got less than 100.
But I think PBS has some of the best fun educational websites... for children AND adults. They have a spectacular design, loads of content.
/. I just heard a biopic was being made on pornographer Seymour Butts. If you look for the old show Frontline did called "American Porn" you can see the interesting story on how Mr... Butts is a test case for the State of CA against fisting. Mr Butts on the topic: "You stick four fingers in a person, its fine. You add your thumb in there, it's suddenly a crime." Frontline has tons of interviews, background and expert data.
:p
Heck, I probably spend as much time on their Frontline as I do on
Fascinating, fascinating stuff. You find out that Ashcroft was planning a big assault on the US porn industry pre-9-11 and all these other bits.
Ok... this post has suddently gone OT. But if adults can get such great mind-piquing webbrowsing, kids will too at PBS.
PS: Donate to your local station.
The guy who came up with the 007 method gets whatever rewards were for booting Linux first on an Xbox. Yeah, this seems more like what "people want". But that wasn't the challenge. It was to boot Linux.
I'm sorry but the fuss around the backdoor-ness of the 007 method was blown way out of proportion.
Am I the only one who saw no collelation between the stats in the article and the "its just not geeks" results?
The first was that it was overwhelmingly male. Um, isn't that a classic "geek" stereotype? Maybe if the numbers were more 50/50 (like I assume The Sims are) I'd be a little more swayed.
Secondly is the predominance of "19 and older". Well gee, what do a lot of people do when they turn 18? Go to college and live with a fat broadband connection. I'd be more impressed if it said the mean age was 32 or something. But then age has nothing to do with geekiness.
In truth I can't think of a statistic off of the top of my head that could prove the geekiness of a gaming community. Probably the only one would be if the statistics were more normal (more ethnic, gender, income diversity, instead of being primarily white, primarily male, primarily middle class like most things geeky). It wasn't like this guy bugged a High School football lockerroom and heard them talk on and on about their 40th level elf sorcerers.
If it wasn't for the floundering of AOL-Time Warner, the Vivendi-Universal merger would be the one everybody talks about. The CEO selling shares, then forced to step down, now revealing that they "fixed" their annual reports last year. Just a big cluster.
And remember that Universal Music is the number 1 music company in the world... by a lot. So with the downturn (whatever the root: music piracy, crappy music, overpriced cds) there is a desire to dump those assets right quick. I'd call it a disaster if mainstream music didn't suck.
I think one of the big holes in this article is the idea that information == knowledge. That anyone can comprehend (and diagnose and modify extensively) any and all information.
/. folks here, but people in general)? What about Windows? Hell, how many of us use Aspirin or airplanes and have little more than the basic understanding of how they work?
Of course this is not the case. How many people use Linux and know each and every last piece of code (and I'm not talking about
The problem is this: the more advanced a society becomes, the more specialized its population becomes. That means the slight fraction one has knowledge of shrinks as time progresses even though they might know more than people a hundred years ago.
So what has society done? Attempted to make any and all technology novice-usable. So I don't have to know how an ATM or automobile or cd players works to use it.
So let's take the author's example of the Ebola-AIDS virus. Assuming that the above traits hold (that we become more specialized while technology grows more advanced yet usable) then anybody might be able to unleash Ebola-AIDS while only a handful of people would have the slightest idea how to stop it.
Basically it's the Script-Kiddie Syndrome to the Nth degree. All I need is a Genome Rootkit and I can cause havoc. And who cares if I can't hack any and all persons? What if I just need to hit a 3rd world country that hasn't gotten the latest service pack? I could wipe out Zambia or Cambodia. We see this time and time again: the problem and the cure exist side by side. Yet for some reason the former gets out more than the latter. How often are sites hacked on year old exploits?
Of course this is all hypotheticals. But it seems that the failing is something intrinsically human, not political or technological. So neither a police state or open utopia would solve any of this. Besides, the author's example is a wacky level of technology. Who knows. We might all be Wesley Crushers by then.
The book description:
Well then I wonder if it can come down to user computer savvy then. Assuming that the sources of bootleg mp3s are average end users then you can assume that the initial copy would still have the watermark.
Then if it goes wild it doesn't matter what a stronger later user would do, as long as you could find one copy, you could determine the source.
Of course then someone could just build in de-watermarking code into any mp3 ripping app... but then that breaks the DMCA... and then we are in the same loopy mess we're in right now.
Since most illegal mp3s come from critic and radio advanced copies, why don't the labels digitally watermark these advances? Of course the problem would be you'd want a unique mark for every copy (so, I assume, you could find the source and not pick on a bunch of kids who picked it up). But just burn them onto CDR then.
Then if a copy is found online, diff it with the original, and find out who leaked it.
Or maybe I'm oversimplifying things. I guess if you could make the key seeding random enough that it wouldn't be easy to wipe...
Wasn't Duke3d originally released on Windows? Well I guess you can get it free now. So, yeah, the Linux port came out first... if you discount that commercial release to Windows 7 years ago.
Hmmm. Come to think of it, might have to break out a little Duke3d...
The plethora of Free Software applications available today, none working perfectly
Two letters: vi.
Yeah... I said it. Game on.