I know of state laws (e.g. "lowest legal price" NY cigarettes) and manufacturer brand's requirements (don't advertise lower than XX% MSRP) which try to restrict cheap prices in the US. Unions restrict the lowest labor rates allowed, and restrict free work. International trade agreements restrict commodity "dumping" as anti-competitive.
Also, Amazon has been known to sell at a loss, specifically with discount & free shipping offers, such as Amazon Prime. It's a common business practice, and not just for Amazon.
Devices which directionally scan for broadcasted frequencies certainly exist. I dunno what kind of range you would get, but on the ocean or wilderness there shouldn't be too many competing signals.
Obviously it doesn't help if it's wet or the battery's dead.
To Moore and logicians, it's an empiric law. To many business plans (Intel's and AMD's not the least), and arguably to the technology sector as a whole, it has been made axiomatic.
Moore himself has argued against this usage but he does not control what assumptions people stake their business plans on, even when they are based on his empiric laws.
I'm not an expert but TFA uses the phrase "design patent" but the patent in question appears to be a utility patent.
While I find many, if not all, software patents distasteful and often harmful, AFAIK it's perfectly legit to patent improvements or combinations to existing, even patented, ideas. This patent seems to describe coordinating a spreadsheet's capability with external music devices. (The patent specifically includes several parallel claims substituting player pianos for "music device".)
One famous example is the intermittent windshield wiper patent, which described the combination of a timer and the windshield wiper (which itself, I suppose, was a combination of a motor and a squeegee). Drug companies are allowed to patent improvements for their rival's patented drugs but are often kept in check by the old patent's remaining claims, e.g. needing to use the rival's patented manufacturing processes.
I'm not saying I agree with this patent, but the way US Patents work this one may not have been trivially absurd.
Good points. And though I updated my hardware this year, I enjoy using fvwm2 on both of my new machines. Unlike pre-win2k, Fvwm and Linux are actively supported. I am sure there are applications somewhere for a Win3.11 machine but it'd be far less useable, unsupported and unpatched (insecure). A Linux machine has the option of gracefully stripping itself down where WinXP does not, and has drivers for peripherals added since the initial CPU purchase.
Oh, and DOS? That'd be far more exotic than Linux. Imagine selling DOS to management, or trying to interview candidates to admin that box.
I don't get this whole "it saves the ship" argument. In a war, with two fleets trying to sink each other, at best this countermeasure gets used so that it can fire its own torpedoes at the other fleet.
"you'd choose option A, killing all the men, spilling all the oil..." It's a war. Ships will be sunk -- a countermeasure is used to postpone it in the hope of switching which side's ship sinks, whose men die, which oil spills.
As for B, there's plenty of measurements and proof that noise travels long distances and that whales and some other species have exceptional hearing ranges. Even knowing they can hear it, it is less easy to prove the exact impact noise pollution has on marine life.
Roland got a job blogging for ZDnet. His blog entry today shares its first paragraph with the slashdot post. Since I didn't find any links from this post to his blogs (using a couple of whois(1) and other queries) he might just be a slashdot fan now.
"RG: Well, I was asking this (and I haven't been having any secret about this with you in the past), because I saw you were getting lots and lots of traffic from Slashdot, on a repetitive almost systematic basis.... I don't whether [sic] this played a significant role in getting you to ZDNet but it certainly provided you with lots of prominence and exposure....
Roland Piquepaille:... in the last two years I have been Slashdotted between two and eight times per month (!!!), and yes, I do acknowledge that this is a good thing... "
"The inherent worth and dignity of every person" is the first one listed on that page. I've had a few discussions about whether that worth or dignity is mutable... personally I tend to believe not.
As for the broader topic of geek respect, I think American culture encourages us to crave and expect rockstar deference and worship, a kind of "respect" that goes beyond genuine or sustainable. So we had a respect bubble, now it's over, and for some of us at least there's still work to do. I can go out to redneck bars and call myself a computer geek and chicks don't fall all over me or ask what exactly I do. (Since the bubble began I've said, "Computer junk.") Before the bubble everyone would've shied away from a self-described computer geek.
This may not be as I want it. But I think it's as it should be.
The comment didn't say "product" reviews it said "anything and everything" and used the word "culture". I was imagining plays, operas, opera companies, orchestras, bands, and maybe even websites, companies, consultants, ISPs, stock brokers, beaches, schools, scientific theories, etc. Not everything is a product.
As for comparisons with epinions, it seems to be the difference between push and pull, a search engine (for reviews or anything) vs an encyclopedia. Users register with epinions and push data into it -- google would troll the web for things that looked like reviews.
Not sure how technically feasible it is, yet, to decide what is and is not a review (let alone a reputable review) -- I'm sure that limiting the search to movie reviews is partly how Google intends to keep the noise level low.
Neither am I sure how great a "cultural phenomenon" it would be, mostly because of the technical difficulties. If I'm searching a whitelist of sites which review things I'll inevitably miss out getting reviews on "anything and everything". If I search the entire google index then we get into something like a natural language definition of "a review". If I'm searching for reviews of Ocean City's beaches, do I want to include that beach's local surf shop's glowing praise? Likely not, besides, there'd be too many of them.
When we get to this level of concept query -- what is and is not a review -- I think it will be used for a lot more than searching for reviews.
Quoting further from the original, I believe he said just that: "A computer needs to be programmed to play to its strength, i.e open positions." Move 5 is also very well discussed in the original article.
It's not a matter of adding heuristics, it's tuning the heuristic (if I may call it that) of the opening library. That library was "tuned" (actually, generated from games played) for grandmasters. Its own opening library therefore played to the strengths of a grandmasters playing against grandmasters. If the move hadn't been in the library, I very much doubt its own program would've put itself in that position -- how would it have chosen that move, without calculating some future advantage for itself? The library gifted that move with human calculated "advantage" which it wouldn't've earned using the computer algorithms.
The other faulty heuristic in this case was the one which caused Fritz to keep his 3 pawns immobile to guard his king. Fritz wasted 20 moves while, yes, he wasn't able to forsee his own doomed defense but his heuristic was also blocking his only feasible offense. There are heuristics but, as the definition tells us, they're imperfect. Some kind of "I'm stuck in a rut, insert random heuristic-breaking noise" or heuristic hierarchy (where useless moves are worse than everything else, including protecting a king which isn't in danger) might be appropriate.
The problem with too transparent a weighting (favoring trades) is introducing predictability. The thing which probably bothered the designers most (besides those two heuristics which lost them the game) was that during the entire game the computer never foresaw any trouble. The "I'm in trouble" clue should've come the instant it exited its library (which should be trusted or it's purposeless) and could neither find any moves it liked or a way to create them. So yeah, maybe adding that constitutes a heuristic.. but it got INTO the trouble because of other, mistuned heuristics.
"Kasparov used anti-computer strategy..." yeah, he's good at finding and using those tough positions. As the Fritz team pointed out, though, it's hard to force a good program playing white into closed positions -- other stragegies are required when playing black.
Slashdot Mirror
I know of state laws (e.g. "lowest legal price" NY cigarettes) and manufacturer brand's requirements (don't advertise lower than XX% MSRP) which try to restrict cheap prices in the US. Unions restrict the lowest labor rates allowed, and restrict free work. International trade agreements restrict commodity "dumping" as anti-competitive.
Also, Amazon has been known to sell at a loss, specifically with discount & free shipping offers, such as Amazon Prime. It's a common business practice, and not just for Amazon.
Are you certain you want to remove all dumb people? Even if they're nice to you, or part of your family?
Are you also certain you want your natural selection to promote those who on the weak?
Devices which directionally scan for broadcasted frequencies certainly exist. I dunno what kind of range you would get, but on the ocean or wilderness there shouldn't be too many competing signals.
Obviously it doesn't help if it's wet or the battery's dead.
To Moore and logicians, it's an empiric law. To many business plans (Intel's and AMD's not the least), and arguably to the technology sector as a whole, it has been made axiomatic.
Moore himself has argued against this usage but he does not control what assumptions people stake their business plans on, even when they are based on his empiric laws.
I'm not an expert but TFA uses the phrase "design patent" but the patent in question appears to be a utility patent. While I find many, if not all, software patents distasteful and often harmful, AFAIK it's perfectly legit to patent improvements or combinations to existing, even patented, ideas. This patent seems to describe coordinating a spreadsheet's capability with external music devices. (The patent specifically includes several parallel claims substituting player pianos for "music device".) One famous example is the intermittent windshield wiper patent, which described the combination of a timer and the windshield wiper (which itself, I suppose, was a combination of a motor and a squeegee). Drug companies are allowed to patent improvements for their rival's patented drugs but are often kept in check by the old patent's remaining claims, e.g. needing to use the rival's patented manufacturing processes. I'm not saying I agree with this patent, but the way US Patents work this one may not have been trivially absurd.
Good points. And though I updated my hardware this year, I enjoy using fvwm2 on both of my new machines. Unlike pre-win2k, Fvwm and Linux are actively supported. I am sure there are applications somewhere for a Win3.11 machine but it'd be far less useable, unsupported and unpatched (insecure). A Linux machine has the option of gracefully stripping itself down where WinXP does not, and has drivers for peripherals added since the initial CPU purchase.
Oh, and DOS? That'd be far more exotic than Linux. Imagine selling DOS to management, or trying to interview candidates to admin that box.
I don't get this whole "it saves the ship" argument. In a war, with two fleets trying to sink each other, at best this countermeasure gets used so that it can fire its own torpedoes at the other fleet.
"you'd choose option A, killing all the men, spilling all the oil..." It's a war. Ships will be sunk -- a countermeasure is used to postpone it in the hope of switching which side's ship sinks, whose men die, which oil spills.
As for B, there's plenty of measurements and proof that noise travels long distances and that whales and some other species have exceptional hearing ranges. Even knowing they can hear it, it is less easy to prove the exact impact noise pollution has on marine life.
Nice link, AC.
... in the last two years I have been Slashdotted between two and eight times per month (!!!), and yes, I do acknowledge that this is a good thing... "
Roland got a job blogging for ZDnet. His blog entry today shares its first paragraph with the slashdot post. Since I didn't find any links from this post to his blogs (using a couple of whois(1) and other queries) he might just be a slashdot fan now.
quote from parent's link:
"RG: Well, I was asking this (and I haven't been having any secret about this with you in the past), because I saw you were getting lots and lots of traffic from Slashdot, on a repetitive almost systematic basis.... I don't whether [sic] this played a significant role in getting you to ZDNet but it certainly provided you with lots of prominence and exposure....
Roland Piquepaille:
It is codified; it's been one of the UU's seven principles for at least 20 years:
http://www.uua.org/aboutuua/principles.html
"The inherent worth and dignity of every person" is the first one listed on that page. I've had a few discussions about whether that worth or dignity is mutable... personally I tend to believe not.
As for the broader topic of geek respect, I think American culture encourages us to crave and expect rockstar deference and worship, a kind of "respect" that goes beyond genuine or sustainable. So we had a respect bubble, now it's over, and for some of us at least there's still work to do. I can go out to redneck bars and call myself a computer geek and chicks don't fall all over me or ask what exactly I do. (Since the bubble began I've said, "Computer junk.") Before the bubble everyone would've shied away from a self-described computer geek.
This may not be as I want it. But I think it's as it should be.
The comment didn't say "product" reviews it said "anything and everything" and used the word "culture". I was imagining plays, operas, opera companies, orchestras, bands, and maybe even websites, companies, consultants, ISPs, stock brokers, beaches, schools, scientific theories, etc. Not everything is a product.
As for comparisons with epinions, it seems to be the difference between push and pull, a search engine (for reviews or anything) vs an encyclopedia. Users register with epinions and push data into it -- google would troll the web for things that looked like reviews.
Not sure how technically feasible it is, yet, to decide what is and is not a review (let alone a reputable review) -- I'm sure that limiting the search to movie reviews is partly how Google intends to keep the noise level low.
Neither am I sure how great a "cultural phenomenon" it would be, mostly because of the technical difficulties. If I'm searching a whitelist of sites which review things I'll inevitably miss out getting reviews on "anything and everything". If I search the entire google index then we get into something like a natural language definition of "a review". If I'm searching for reviews of Ocean City's beaches, do I want to include that beach's local surf shop's glowing praise? Likely not, besides, there'd be too many of them.
When we get to this level of concept query -- what is and is not a review -- I think it will be used for a lot more than searching for reviews.
Quoting further from the original, I believe he said just that: "A computer needs to be programmed to play to its strength, i.e open positions." Move 5 is also very well discussed in the original article.
It's not a matter of adding heuristics, it's tuning the heuristic (if I may call it that) of the opening library. That library was "tuned" (actually, generated from games played) for grandmasters. Its own opening library therefore played to the strengths of a grandmasters playing against grandmasters. If the move hadn't been in the library, I very much doubt its own program would've put itself in that position -- how would it have chosen that move, without calculating some future advantage for itself? The library gifted that move with human calculated "advantage" which it wouldn't've earned using the computer algorithms.
The other faulty heuristic in this case was the one which caused Fritz to keep his 3 pawns immobile to guard his king. Fritz wasted 20 moves while, yes, he wasn't able to forsee his own doomed defense but his heuristic was also blocking his only feasible offense. There are heuristics but, as the definition tells us, they're imperfect. Some kind of "I'm stuck in a rut, insert random heuristic-breaking noise" or heuristic hierarchy (where useless moves are worse than everything else, including protecting a king which isn't in danger) might be appropriate.
The problem with too transparent a weighting (favoring trades) is introducing predictability. The thing which probably bothered the designers most (besides those two heuristics which lost them the game) was that during the entire game the computer never foresaw any trouble. The "I'm in trouble" clue should've come the instant it exited its library (which should be trusted or it's purposeless) and could neither find any moves it liked or a way to create them. So yeah, maybe adding that constitutes a heuristic.. but it got INTO the trouble because of other, mistuned heuristics.
"Kasparov used anti-computer strategy..." yeah, he's good at finding and using those tough positions. As the Fritz team pointed out, though, it's hard to force a good program playing white into closed positions -- other stragegies are required when playing black.