Last day of high school, a friend and I dressed in gorilla suits (something that I'm sure would not be allowed these days). I worked at the supermarket across the street, so that morning we wandered over there in costume to buy some poptarts. As we were shopping a voice came over the loudspeaker, "Could we please see the gorillas at the courtesy booth?" So I sauntered up to the booth and stood there. The lady in the booth paused and said, "That's Duane!" She said she recognized my walk.
My wife is a physical therapist. As a computer geek, I tend to recognize very bizarre techie things because they catch my eye and I feel obliged to mention them. She does the same thing with gaits. Whenever we're at the mall she will point out people and tell me the name of whatever condition they have that caused them to walk like they do.
...three things stay with me (although honestly I think only two of them are explicitly mentioned and I am extracting a third from that).
The throwaway technology example of those little plastic/metal strips that set off the security alarm if you steal clothes. You have to be able to make such things for less than a penny and assume that they will all be thrown away. Years ago when I started talking to people about smart cards, they cost a few dollars a piece and the first question was always "Wait...I have to buy these and then give them to people?" Once you can make smart devices (and by smart I believe he defines it as needing enough memory to having a unique id, or something like that, and maybe transmit it?) then you are well on your way to a level of ubiquitous computing that you can't imagine *without* that. Imagine the audience of people that own a PDA. Now imagine the audience of people that, say, wear clothes. The numbers are staggeringly different. Will everybody eventually own a PDA? Unlikely. Could we potentially imbed PDA-like technology in clothes? Sure.
Power. Batteries are a huge problem in their clunkiness, weight, and generally short lives. If I recall this book talked about things like a power source in your shoe that would recharge throughout the day as you walked. "Ubiquitous recharging", anyone? If we combine this with the first point about throwaway technology, people will no longer think "Damn, time to recharge my coat" they will expect to just buy a new one. Therefore if the batteries die out too often, this is no good. The batteries need to last as long as the coat lasts, without explicit recharging.
Thinking. (Here's the one I'm not sure was specifically mentioned in the book). A famous quote is attributed to Minsky where he says "My thermostat has opinions. It has three of them. It is too cold in here, it is too hot in here, it is just right in here." By that logic, one could argue that the penny-costing strip "thinks" that is is still in the store, or thinks that it has just been removed from the store. Much like the emergent behavior found in cellular automata and artificial life, there is no rule that says "thinking" must come from higher level processes. Didn't Minsky's "society of the mind" deal with a similar concept, that higher level thought is really just a collection of lower level ones?
"Tech support."
"The printer doesn't work."
"Is there an error? What does it say?"
"It's all the way in the next room."
"Ma'am, I need to know the error."
"It says printer error."
"Could you read me exactly what is says?"
"I remembered. That's what it says. Printer error."
"Ok, ma'am? You're talking to the guy that wrote the software. I know for a fact that it doesn't say printer error, because I never wrote an error message that says printer error. Now please put down the phone, go into the other room, and read me the real message."
*click*
The only problem I have with this site is that most of the talks seem to be over a year old. That's one thing if you're trying to learn Japanese, but if you're listening to a tutorial on how to get the most performance out of Java I/O, then it would be horribly out of date.
The fun part is to look at all the talks from 2000 in the business section, about dotcoms and VC, and laugh til your sides hurt.
I love this feature of my phone. I can attach sound bytes to known numbers, so that when the phone rings and we're at dinner the phone might say "It's my parents!" and we know whether or not to get it. MUCH better than standard caller id where you have to get up anyway and go look at the box to see who it is. If the phone doesn't tell me who it is (top 10 most important callers), then we just don't answer it. Not to mention if it's my wife's parents then I don't have to get up.:) Who was it that asked for a mother-in-law screener?
Plus, the machine also has a feature to send caller-id-blocked numbers right to voice mail (after a special message). The neat thing is listening to the different kinds of response -- some hang up during the "Your number is being sent to voice mail..." which tells me that it's a human calling. Some wait through the message, and then there's a pause, and then a click and a dial tone, which suggests to me that it's a machine that waited a certain amount of time and then gave up.
People don't like to talk about academic skills as nature vs. nurture. They hope that by tweaking the system appropriately, everybody will like every subject (well, more specifically, they want girls to like math. I'm not sure anybody's fighting the war to get more boys to take home ec.) I just don't think it's a guaranteed win. I honestly think that people have a natural affinity for certain things that, if nurtured, will grow accordingly. BUT, if said affinity is just not there in the first place, then manipulating the system all you want won't make it appear.
I applaud your efforts. I hope yuo get some good answers, because my first child, a daughter, is now 10 weeks old and I expect to be addressing the same issues you have in a few years. I'll admit that deep down I was heartbroken at the thought my daughter wouldn't simply follow in my geeky footsteps. However, I'm quite happy to imagine her following in the footsteps of my wife, who is in the medical field, and really has a whole different set of skills than I do.
In short, please don't try to force her, or naturally assume that if she doesn't like math, there's something you can do to change it. The opposite is actually true, I think -- if she *does* like math, then there's *nothing* you can do to *stop* it. (I *like* emphasizing things with *stars*.)
To anybody who's about to flame me for wanting to force my child in either my footsteps or my wife's, don't be ridiculous. There's nothing wrong with a parent having dreams for their children, and it is an honor to think that your children will want to be like you. I never said I'd force her to do anything.
Say what we want about java's failure to do true "write once, run anywhere", but MS has its own version of that. I tried to run Terrarium on my NT box and couldn't do it because I can't get the most recent DirectX. So there. That never happens with Java.
Don't ask why my office machine is NT. I don't want to talk about it.
This is really going to sound like flamebait, but hear me out. A popular question today is, "How have you changed?" or "How do you think the country has changed?" and I want to be honest in my answer.
Let's say that I've changed for the bad. I'm more paranoid now, and I look at every Middle Eastern person I see and wonder if I should call the authorities. Is this the kind of person I want to be? Would this really be a change to be proud of? Or, as we've heard said so many times, would this mean that "the terrorists win"? Would I find it funny now to send white powder to my enemies? Or spraypaint graffiti on a mosque? So no, I'd prefer to think that I have not changed for the worse.
Ok, then, maybe I've changed for the better. Maybe I'm one of these people like I read about in the paper this morning that says stuff like "After 9/11 I decided to not let the small stuff bother me anymore. I wouldn't shove my way off the subway, or flip off the guy that runs the red light when I'm trying to cross the street." My response to this? What in God's name made the tragic death of 3000 people the reason that you suddenly decided to become a nice person? Shouldn't you have ALWAYS been like this? Couldn't I have gotten up any morning of the year and said "I'm going to be a nice person today"?? And perhaps more importantly, does it make you feel better to really *do* it, or just to say it? This morning somebody ran a red light while I was trying to cross the street. I flipped him off. I'm no hypocrite - I never claimed I wouldn't do that, because I never expected it would be a promise I could keep. Meanwhile there really is a column in today's paper from a woman apologizing for "giving a guy a nasty look" on the subway. Well, at least she recognized her own hypocrisy and tried to make amends.
Maybe you really have changed. Maybe you are a model citizen these days. You said it, you meant it, you're proving it every day. So now you're in a position where you've got the terrorists to thank. Isn't that special. Don't try to debate it -- you've just admitted that it took a terrorist act to smack you upside the head and make you wake up to your influence on the world around you. So sorry that 3000 people died, but at least you got something out of it. How long is it going to last? Are you a good person forever, or has your attention already gone on to other things? What did you promise yourself on 9/12? Have you checked up on that list lately?
Maybe you were a good person all along. You regularly do charity work, and donate your time and money, and think about your fellow man. Then I expect that 9/11 didn't change you at all. It just gave you an opportunity to feel that your good deeds actually make a difference in the world.
"September 11 changed me" is not something to be proud of. It should be an admission that you needed a wakeup call, and it took a tragedy of such magnitude to make it happen. The best possible outcome you can hope for? Now that you're awake -- STAY THAT WAY. Ask yourself every day if you're really awake to the world around you and your place (and influence) in it. Because if you're not, then who knows what the next tragedy is going to be to make you *really* wake up.
My dream AI always plays just outside my reach
on
Keep Playing With AI
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· Score: 3, Interesting
What I want is AI that will suck at the game when I suck, and get better as I get better. That way it's not always a case of either I win all the time or lose all the time. Throughout the years I've noticed that chess programs tend to have that problem -- you can beat it all the time at level 1, but almost never win at level 2.
I thought this would be a great way for children to practice the game. Seemed very "Diamond Agey" to me.
It seems like the way to get caught is to win or bet "big". So in theory, it seems like if you were content to say under threshold X, the casinos probably would never notice you. After all, if I think I can count cards but I never leave the $5 table, they don't really care about me, right?
So a magic question, then, is what's X? Can you win $5000 a week at one casino and not be noticed? $10k?
The problem with that system is that anybody who is that good of a gambler will, of course, get greedy, and eventually get caught.
Neither is that basement room...
on
MIT vs. Las Vegas
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· Score: 3, Insightful
True, card counting is not illegal. But did you notice that every time he was caught, the guy *ran* out of there, rather than go into the basement to have a "talk" with the bouncers?
There are some people that believe when you have a question or a problem, you open randomly to a page in the Bible, and the answer will be on that page. This, of course, just demonstrates the power of the human mind to interpret phenomena as they feel fit.
True story - last last week, just before lunch, a coworker and I were discussing a Java design problem and how I hated our reliance on needing a database guy to write up some stored procedures for us. We discussed the possibility of going to JDO, and whether an XML database would do anything for us. I sat back down at my desk, reloaded slashdot, and got
this. Coincidence my ass. Slashdot is the center of the universe.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Aunt Ginnie have to actually hold the Shift key, or press Caps Lock, in order to get anything beyond "letter.txt"? Therefore, can't it be assumed in the case of Letter.txt that she did it on purpose? Sure, I'll agree that the case of LETTER.TXT is probably a user who put capslock on and forgot about it. But why deny her the ability to express herself the way she intended, if that's what she intended?
My solution is for the OS to ignore the caps lock key. Not only would it solve the case problem, but it would shut up a whole lot of AOL users.
The concept still exists. It's called Sourceforge.
"Hey, I have an idea, but I have no skills, so I'm looking for people to do all the work and I just want all the credit! What, no takers? Open source sucks!"
Speaking of which has anybody seen the television commercial that apparently *bought* the sock puppet? Some sort of car insurance company or something. There's the pets.com puppet, back from the dead.
Remember this argument in AI circles? A computer that has a big stack of rules that says "When I get sentence X in English, respond with sentence Y in Chinese"? Done. Next.
But can it beat Kramnik in chess? Ah, now *there* is the question!
According to the spec, the Zaurus weighs 7.3oz (6.3 without the cover). A Palm i705 (which would be the compatible model, since you can do wireless with a Zaurus) weighs 5.9oz. An m515 weighs 4.9oz.
An iPaq 3765 weighs 6.7oz. The 3975 weighs 6.5oz.
A jornada 728 weighs 1.1 pounds.
I'm not sure I'd consider roughly 1.5oz (take the cover off the Z) difference between the Z and a Palm as "FAR heavier". The other comparable models are indeed heavier than the Z.
Re:Can there ever be a fair match?
on
Men vs. Machines
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· Score: 2
I'm pretty certain he did not freak out;
Fair enough, my word choice was poor. I just remembered there being some sort of controversy and a bunch of people saying that getting a copy of the program was a horrible thing to ask for, because weaknesses could be discovered and exploited.
He was absolutely delighted to have the opportunity to play.
Was he ever given a copy to play with? How was the question resolved?
Can there ever be a fair match?
on
Men vs. Machines
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· Score: 2
When Kasparov asked for records of Deep Blue's games to study, he was told no -- something that would not have happened if he was playing another person. So, yes, he was playing a machine trained to beat just him, but he wasn't even allowed to study its strategy to have a fair fight.
When Kramnik offered to play Fritz, he said "Fine, give me a copy of the program and let me play with it before hand." The creators of Fritz freaked out and everybody said "But then you'll be able to find the weaknesses and just exploit those!" Well, that's not Kramnik's fault -- if he found a human player that always made the same mistake, he'd certainly take advantage of it every time, right?
The list of fairness questions goes on and on...since a computer can memorize openings, can't a human player be allowed to have his books with him? Since a computer doesn't need rest breaks, can't they be as short as possible? Are the programmers allowed to tweak the computer between every match, every move? Why?
So what I'm wondering is, what has to happen in these matches in order for both sides to consider them fair fights?
I've noticed that theKompany's got the best Zaurus software, but they don't offer demos on anything. Does anybody know why? Particularly on a device like the Z, where there is effectively no commercial competition, I'd like to be able to evaluate their software before I buy it. After all, it could stink, who would know? Not saying it does, just saying that unlike in the Palm world, for instance, theKompany doesn't have 10 competitors breathing down its neck and making sure the quality stays high.
Ummm...let's not forget that it has a builtin compact flash and SD slot in that footprint, shall we? How big do the other guys get when you add the special sleeves and adapters to do that? Not to mention the integrated keyboard.
...came from the dude who asked me, "Describe November." I kept asking him what the hell he was talking about, and he just kept repeating "Describe November" over and over again. When I finally said something about "Thanksgiving... leaves... fall... colors...." he was willing to move on to the next question. He later told me that he'd read somewhere that the question was good for determining true engineers because the engineers would respond mathematically (i.e. 11th month, 30 days...) whereas those that responded more descriptively were probably not good engineers.
I got the job but only because a friend (this guy's peer) wanted to hire me. And, last time I checked, the guy who asked the question was still looking for work.
One of my favorites to ask people is questions about languages they don't know. Stresses the concepts over the syntax. For instance, "You know OO programming, right? ok, Smalltalk is an OO language. Tell me a little bit about what it probably has." My favorite answer was from the college kid who had written Prolog on his resume because one of his courses did a week on it. I asked him to describe the language, and he couldn't, so I described it for him. Then I asked him to think about what uses the language might have, what applications it would be good for. He said, "none, I guess."
Slashdot Mirror
My wife is a physical therapist. As a computer geek, I tend to recognize very bizarre techie things because they catch my eye and I feel obliged to mention them. She does the same thing with gaits. Whenever we're at the mall she will point out people and tell me the name of whatever condition they have that caused them to walk like they do.
"The printer doesn't work."
"Is there an error? What does it say?"
"It's all the way in the next room."
"Ma'am, I need to know the error."
"It says printer error."
"Could you read me exactly what is says?"
"I remembered. That's what it says. Printer error."
"Ok, ma'am? You're talking to the guy that wrote the software. I know for a fact that it doesn't say printer error, because I never wrote an error message that says printer error. Now please put down the phone, go into the other room, and read me the real message."
*click*
True story.
The fun part is to look at all the talks from 2000 in the business section, about dotcoms and VC, and laugh til your sides hurt.
Plus, the machine also has a feature to send caller-id-blocked numbers right to voice mail (after a special message). The neat thing is listening to the different kinds of response -- some hang up during the "Your number is being sent to voice mail..." which tells me that it's a human calling. Some wait through the message, and then there's a pause, and then a click and a dial tone, which suggests to me that it's a machine that waited a certain amount of time and then gave up.
Last year at a Halloween party I saw a guy dressed as Hitler with a sign that said "Public Enemy #2". Duane
I applaud your efforts. I hope yuo get some good answers, because my first child, a daughter, is now 10 weeks old and I expect to be addressing the same issues you have in a few years. I'll admit that deep down I was heartbroken at the thought my daughter wouldn't simply follow in my geeky footsteps. However, I'm quite happy to imagine her following in the footsteps of my wife, who is in the medical field, and really has a whole different set of skills than I do.
In short, please don't try to force her, or naturally assume that if she doesn't like math, there's something you can do to change it. The opposite is actually true, I think -- if she *does* like math, then there's *nothing* you can do to *stop* it. (I *like* emphasizing things with *stars*.)
To anybody who's about to flame me for wanting to force my child in either my footsteps or my wife's, don't be ridiculous. There's nothing wrong with a parent having dreams for their children, and it is an honor to think that your children will want to be like you. I never said I'd force her to do anything.
- No more than 5,000 square feet of lawn.
- Yard is flat, with slopes no greater than 15 degrees.
- Yard is free of excessive obstacles.
I dunno about your yard, but that's not even close to mine. I break all those rules, and I think most of the yards in my neighborhood do, too.Say what we want about java's failure to do true "write once, run anywhere", but MS has its own version of that. I tried to run Terrarium on my NT box and couldn't do it because I can't get the most recent DirectX. So there. That never happens with Java. Don't ask why my office machine is NT. I don't want to talk about it.
Let's say that I've changed for the bad. I'm more paranoid now, and I look at every Middle Eastern person I see and wonder if I should call the authorities. Is this the kind of person I want to be? Would this really be a change to be proud of? Or, as we've heard said so many times, would this mean that "the terrorists win"? Would I find it funny now to send white powder to my enemies? Or spraypaint graffiti on a mosque? So no, I'd prefer to think that I have not changed for the worse.
Ok, then, maybe I've changed for the better. Maybe I'm one of these people like I read about in the paper this morning that says stuff like "After 9/11 I decided to not let the small stuff bother me anymore. I wouldn't shove my way off the subway, or flip off the guy that runs the red light when I'm trying to cross the street." My response to this? What in God's name made the tragic death of 3000 people the reason that you suddenly decided to become a nice person? Shouldn't you have ALWAYS been like this? Couldn't I have gotten up any morning of the year and said "I'm going to be a nice person today"?? And perhaps more importantly, does it make you feel better to really *do* it, or just to say it? This morning somebody ran a red light while I was trying to cross the street. I flipped him off. I'm no hypocrite - I never claimed I wouldn't do that, because I never expected it would be a promise I could keep. Meanwhile there really is a column in today's paper from a woman apologizing for "giving a guy a nasty look" on the subway. Well, at least she recognized her own hypocrisy and tried to make amends.
Maybe you really have changed. Maybe you are a model citizen these days. You said it, you meant it, you're proving it every day. So now you're in a position where you've got the terrorists to thank. Isn't that special. Don't try to debate it -- you've just admitted that it took a terrorist act to smack you upside the head and make you wake up to your influence on the world around you. So sorry that 3000 people died, but at least you got something out of it. How long is it going to last? Are you a good person forever, or has your attention already gone on to other things? What did you promise yourself on 9/12? Have you checked up on that list lately?
Maybe you were a good person all along. You regularly do charity work, and donate your time and money, and think about your fellow man. Then I expect that 9/11 didn't change you at all. It just gave you an opportunity to feel that your good deeds actually make a difference in the world.
"September 11 changed me" is not something to be proud of. It should be an admission that you needed a wakeup call, and it took a tragedy of such magnitude to make it happen. The best possible outcome you can hope for? Now that you're awake -- STAY THAT WAY. Ask yourself every day if you're really awake to the world around you and your place (and influence) in it. Because if you're not, then who knows what the next tragedy is going to be to make you *really* wake up.
I thought this would be a great way for children to practice the game. Seemed very "Diamond Agey" to me.
So a magic question, then, is what's X? Can you win $5000 a week at one casino and not be noticed? $10k?
The problem with that system is that anybody who is that good of a gambler will, of course, get greedy, and eventually get caught.
True, card counting is not illegal. But did you notice that every time he was caught, the guy *ran* out of there, rather than go into the basement to have a "talk" with the bouncers?
True story - last last week, just before lunch, a coworker and I were discussing a Java design problem and how I hated our reliance on needing a database guy to write up some stored procedures for us. We discussed the possibility of going to JDO, and whether an XML database would do anything for us. I sat back down at my desk, reloaded slashdot, and got this. Coincidence my ass. Slashdot is the center of the universe.
My solution is for the OS to ignore the caps lock key. Not only would it solve the case problem, but it would shut up a whole lot of AOL users.
:-D
"Hey, I have an idea, but I have no skills, so I'm looking for people to do all the work and I just want all the credit! What, no takers? Open source sucks!"
Speaking of which has anybody seen the television commercial that apparently *bought* the sock puppet? Some sort of car insurance company or something. There's the pets.com puppet, back from the dead.
But can it beat Kramnik in chess? Ah, now *there* is the question!
An iPaq 3765 weighs 6.7oz. The 3975 weighs 6.5oz.
A jornada 728 weighs 1.1 pounds.
I'm not sure I'd consider roughly 1.5oz (take the cover off the Z) difference between the Z and a Palm as "FAR heavier". The other comparable models are indeed heavier than the Z.
Fair enough, my word choice was poor. I just remembered there being some sort of controversy and a bunch of people saying that getting a copy of the program was a horrible thing to ask for, because weaknesses could be discovered and exploited.
He was absolutely delighted to have the opportunity to play.
Was he ever given a copy to play with? How was the question resolved?
When Kramnik offered to play Fritz, he said "Fine, give me a copy of the program and let me play with it before hand." The creators of Fritz freaked out and everybody said "But then you'll be able to find the weaknesses and just exploit those!" Well, that's not Kramnik's fault -- if he found a human player that always made the same mistake, he'd certainly take advantage of it every time, right?
The list of fairness questions goes on and on...since a computer can memorize openings, can't a human player be allowed to have his books with him? Since a computer doesn't need rest breaks, can't they be as short as possible? Are the programmers allowed to tweak the computer between every match, every move? Why?
So what I'm wondering is, what has to happen in these matches in order for both sides to consider them fair fights?
Besides, my company paid for the Zaurus, but I have to pay for the software. :D
I've noticed that theKompany's got the best Zaurus software, but they don't offer demos on anything. Does anybody know why? Particularly on a device like the Z, where there is effectively no commercial competition, I'd like to be able to evaluate their software before I buy it. After all, it could stink, who would know? Not saying it does, just saying that unlike in the Palm world, for instance, theKompany doesn't have 10 competitors breathing down its neck and making sure the quality stays high.
Ummm...let's not forget that it has a builtin compact flash and SD slot in that footprint, shall we? How big do the other guys get when you add the special sleeves and adapters to do that? Not to mention the integrated keyboard.
I got the job but only because a friend (this guy's peer) wanted to hire me. And, last time I checked, the guy who asked the question was still looking for work.
One of my favorites to ask people is questions about languages they don't know. Stresses the concepts over the syntax. For instance, "You know OO programming, right? ok, Smalltalk is an OO language. Tell me a little bit about what it probably has." My favorite answer was from the college kid who had written Prolog on his resume because one of his courses did a week on it. I asked him to describe the language, and he couldn't, so I described it for him. Then I asked him to think about what uses the language might have, what applications it would be good for. He said, "none, I guess."