Many people shrug off the Loebler competition as just a demonstration of "yet another Eliza" every year. Do you have any plans (or defense) to show that this is not the case with Alice, or do you have no more loftier goal than to simply be the best chatbot engine around?
Is the creator of Eliza familiar with your work? I am assuming that he is still alive and well, he has a faculty page listing on mit.edu.
History tells us that Weizenbaum was quite horrified at the reaction people had to Eliza, and how such a simple program could invoke such strong emotional responses in people. I believe he went on to suggest that we didn't need (or perhaps would never attain) true AI because people would simply project their own illusions onto whatever model they were given.
Would that have been "More BASIC Computer Games", by David Ahl? If so, then I think I've met my clone:). I even wrote my own Eliza at the time, calling it Alice, ironically enough, though mine stood for "Artificial Learning Interactive Computer Experiment". My favorite bit was the "rewrite" function where the person doing the talking could add new responses on the fly. And the math simulator I wrote so that you could type in "What do you get when you multiply all the odd numbers between 17 and 1113?" and have it give you the answer. My science teacher was flabbergasted at that one.
By the way, it's is only used for the contraction "it is". You might know the difference between your and you're but you should look that one up:).
Check out Cacheon, who does exactly this. Their product offering is a Java/JSP rules engine + converter for going from one application server to another. The idea is that you port via an incremental method -- run the converter, see what didn't convert, modify the rules, repeat.
Disclaimer: Don't work for them, but my company is evaluating their product.
If you're in Waltham, Mass and in the mood for real hands-on construction toys be sure to check out The Construction Site, the only toy store I know dedicated to such things. Who knows, they might even have software, I didn't look.
There are at least two major reasons to use content publishing -- either it's just a convenience for the developers who otherwise would know how to fire up emacs, hack some HTML, and then ftp it to the server...or else you have an audience of content authors who, even if they do know how to ftp files, probably shouldn't, because it'll be IT's job to fix it when the process screws up.
If your case is the former, then you likely fall under the "scratch your own itch" category and could seriously benefit from rolling your own, because you likely know exactly what you need.
However, if you fall into the latter category, then I suggest looking at what's already out there, because odds are you're not going to be able to simulate all of the tools that your users want. For example:
have you considered workflow? In many places content needs to go from an author through an approval manager, through compliance, before getting out to production, and you'll need a workflow management system to handle that.
How about virtual documents? In most instances you'll find that your author has changed a dozen or so items and wants to make sure that they all get rev'd and workflowed as one big unit.
Will you be integrating with existing editors like Dreamweaver? What about ftp, will your authors be able to ftp large amounts of content into your system?
How will your alert mechanism work? When something has been pushed through to my area of approval in the workflow, can I get an email that tells me I need to do some sort of action? Can I perform that action simply by replying to the email?
Something bad went out to the front page - a news story that turns out to be wrong. What's your rollback procedure?
Speaking of which, how about backups? You can't take the docbase down for hours a day to do a backup, but you always need a full backup available because you'll have authors cranking out new content faster than you could imagine. How do you plan to solve that little dilemma?
Do you have an object model and metadata strategy in mind? Will everything be just 'file' or 'page' or 'image'? Or can your authors create an object of type 'news story', which has attributes for 'headline', 'date', and so on?
Oh, and don't forget drag and drop.
And security. Group X can edit files of type Y in folder Z, but group Y can edit files only of type Z in folder Q.
Get my point? I've been tech leading an ecommerce team for about 4 years now using Documentum as the content management system for over a dozen production sites. Everything I mentioned above has been a question or issue at one time or another. I highly doubt you're in a position to buy one of the commercial packages, since all of them cost an absolute fortune (Documentum, Interwoven, Vignette to name a few). If you hadn't even considered most of the issues that I just put up there, then perhaps you should at least look at some of the better existing systems, because they most likely have, and when it turns out that you do need feature X, it's already there.
Zaurus ships with a calendar, and Intellisync Windows client for syncing to Outlook. If you meant a *better* calendar, well, I agree completely (theKompany does have one, I believe). But it does indeed sync to Outlook right out of the box. The trick is to use the Intellisync software, not the QTopia Desktop (much like Palm's solution).
Years ago I helped a friend wire a new house for net. He said, "Every room but the bathroom." I'm just saying.
I just put 802.11b in the house. This enabled me to put the servers in the basement ("Look, honey, no more eyesore!") as well as having the laptop available to me in every room ("See honey, we can sit in the living room and watch tv, and I'm not always running off to the office to do work.")
True story. Once upon a time I went out with my fiance and her college friends. They said that we were going out to pick up their friend, Foo. I said "If you tell me we're going to meet Foo at the bar, I'm going to die a happy man." Not being CS geeks, none of them got it.
I know, I know, off topic.
But you didn't tell us....
on
The Venture Cafe
·
· Score: 3, Funny
...did the kids with the rats and the Burger King cup get $5 million in VC money??:) See, THAT would be a funny story. Granted, funny in sort of a "shoot me in the head now" type of way, but still funny.
Re:What I did/do
on
Disconnecting
·
· Score: 2, Funny
My business requires that I open and close many ISP accounts...
I have experience in field X. I wish to switch to field Y. I have no experience in field Y. I claim that there is no way I can get experience because I don't have the time. You've created your own catch 22.
FIND the time. Got a laptop? Take the train in the morning. Hack code. Sunday mornings get up at 6am, 3 hours before the wife, and go sit in the park and code. Stay up 2 hours after her. Code code code. Sitting in a boring meeting? Sketch. Need to use the men's room? Take a copy of Game Developer's Magazine.
Get it? No magic bullets here (maybe there'll be some in your game, though) or in any industry switch that needs such specific experience.
And for the love of god don't try to jumpstart it by reading any books with "Extreme", "Black Art", or "21 Days" in the title. They take away from your coding time.
I don't know why you limited yourself to PPCs. I have my Zaurus talking 802.11b to my home network just fine. Plenty of color and resolution. And it has Opera as a browser built right in. If you need a full office suite (such as for powerpoint-like stuff) there is a company Hancom that makes a compatible office suite for it.
Clark Kent gets up and heads to work one morning only to realize on his way there that he forgot his glasses. How does he prevent people from recognizing him as Superman?
Sorry, it's early and I'm too lazy to look up a link for this book, but it describes exactly this. For everybody that says "well, duh, I thought of that years ago..." the problem has always been that you need to create a technology for an id mechanism that essentially costs you less than a penny, because you're going to be throwing them all away. The author of this book talks about the id tag that you often find in books and clothes, which is really just a boolean -- it's either activated (in which case the alarms will go off when you walk through the field) or its not, in which case you can ignore it. What you really need for an id is something that will store, oh, 64 bits or something like that? as well as having a way to get that information back after the fact.
Having said that, there's an article in the most recent issue of MIT Tech Review that talks about a company in Philadelphia that has done exactly that. Created a tag that has network abilities, and a teeny bit of storage, all smaller than a dime and at the cost of "pennies."
I have shown my Zaurus to everyone I can find. Without fail, no one has managed to find the keyboard. I don't show them until they hand it back to me. I then pop open the keyboard and hand it back. Without fail every one of them has said something along the lines of "Sweet!", "Oh, well, that makes all the difference", or my favorite literal one, "Now, see, that is key.":)
There was also some discussion on the zaurus-general list that the "selector circle" could prove to be a killer difference between the Z and some of the other PDAs. When programmed properly, you can run your Z entirely from that circle with your thumb. Try that with a Palm. Blackberry has it close with the thumbwheel, but the selector circle can potentially give you two dimensional cursor, not just the back-and-forth of the wheel. I haven't seen any reviews really pick up on this fact yet (probably because the standard apps aren't programmed to 100% support it).
I remember when The Sims guy (I think) did an interview where he said that doing multiplayer online worlds across platforms like Win/Linux was incredibly difficult, verging on impossible, due to the tremendously minute detail required in keeping everything in sync. I wonder if this problem appears here as well.
In other words, will PS2 users play in the same world as PC users?
This guy wasn't there, huh? :)
on
.NET at JavaONE
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The buttons says no to.NET (big red circle and slash through it and were given out by Data Representations, makers of the Simplicity IDE). I got one from a hot girl on the first day.:) And the Bill Gates lookalike had a shirt that said.NOT on the front, and C-flat on the back.
For those that are saying "ooo, childish", do try to remember that it's supposed to be in fun, to entertain the crowd. There's a role for evangelizing. Many people will tell you that the primary reason they go is to get pumped up about what they do for a living. You don't do that by saying "Wow, ya know,.NET is just as good as Java." At last McNealy stopped the damned top ten lists.
And don't forget Monkey Boy Ballmer. No one at JavaONE yelled "Give it up for me."
If you have a Palm app, would you port it to zaurus? That's probably not the first thing that I had in mind. But as a developer of an application that is not on the PDA yet, look what you have available to you -- Linux and QT, right off the bat, and Java. That's a tremendous environment. You can write real applications using a whole slew of development tools that are currently available for a variety of prices and styles. Say you write it in Java (because as a Java geek I push Java whenever I can:)). It'll work on iPaq, too. And Wince has a JVM too. It's only Palm that needs to catch up.
The best incentive to write for (note I don't say port to) it is developer flexibility. You can write *better* apps. Think about getting to use a real interface, with multiple windows (within reason). A good screen resolution. High likelihood that it's networked (via the variety of CF options). About a zillion free development environments and languages (unlike Wince) mean low overhead. Someone has even ported SDL, a popular games library, if you want to go that route.
Just my thoughts. As I keep reiterating, I don't expect anyone to singlehandedly keep the market alive. But for everybody that says "I don't want to write for anything but Microsoft because they are all going to die out", just remember that you are causing the problem. Sometimes it takes a little extra effort and not just the easiest path. What's teh incentive, long term? Philosophically? I don't think any of us like that Microsoft rules the world. It's just that some are trying to change it, and some are just shrugging and saying "Nope, not me, that would cost me effort, I'll just go with the flow." If you have an existing app, make a token effort at porting it to this thing. Consider it a learning experience. Then release it into the wild -- for free. See what happens. You say yourself that you couldn't have expected a great deal of profit from this segment, so why not prime the pump a little bit by just giving it away? You'll help sell more zauruses, which in turn will allow you to sell your second app (ok, maybe fifth:)) to more people.
The first thing everybody did when they got a Palm was to replace Launcher with something that had tabs, the ability to move stuff around, and so on. On a Palm interface you can't even get a list of your own documents without going into the app they are for. This thing even has a Documents tab. The clock and battery life are displayed all times. You can multitask and have several apps open at once. Using the mousy wheel thing I can even navigate and launch apps with one thumb, something that's not easy on a Palm. What is poor, exactly? Sure, you can't delete or move around ROM apps. I prefer that, though -- ROM apps means apps that don't take up the memory that they advertise as being for my use.
Plus, there are standardization issues to take into account. The majority of PDAs in the market are PalmOS-based. Wouldn't it make sense if I could transfer data to and from a Palm with my Zaraus? Why isn't data stored and transmitted in industry-standard formats for cross-platform compatibility?
Have you even tried it? You can. When my friend and I got ours the first thing we did was to beam business cards and calendar events back and forth. No problem! You might notice that the apps in the Zaurus are storing their data in XML -- something that is far more industry standard than anything in PDB format.
Yes, I'm a geek and like having a command prompt available to me from my PDA. What normal consumer would ever want that? What about security issues?
Wait...so, because most people don't want it, it shouldn't even be offered as an option? I thought we were always about having lots of choice. If that's the case, then I'd like to suggest a whole slew of XP features that I think suck, so Microsoft can please take them out because they must not be useful to anyone.
The Zaurus is good as an alpha-quality Linux PDA, but it is certainly not ready for primetime. There are technical and usability issues that need to be addressed, and Sharp (and Trolltech, developers of the Qtopia interface that is used on the Zaurus) seems to be ignoring these issues or not doing enough to correct them.
There are numerous ROM updates from Sharp already. Sharp sponsors a page for developers to advertise their applications (not just a perk for developers, but good for consumers to see what is available). Are you referring to the physical machine? It's not like they can keep tweaking that -- those changes have to be revolutions not evolutions.
Slashdot Mirror
Many people shrug off the Loebler competition as just a demonstration of "yet another Eliza" every year. Do you have any plans (or defense) to show that this is not the case with Alice, or do you have no more loftier goal than to simply be the best chatbot engine around?
History tells us that Weizenbaum was quite horrified at the reaction people had to Eliza, and how such a simple program could invoke such strong emotional responses in people. I believe he went on to suggest that we didn't need (or perhaps would never attain) true AI because people would simply project their own illusions onto whatever model they were given.
By the way, it's is only used for the contraction "it is". You might know the difference between your and you're but you should look that one up :).
Disclaimer: Don't work for them, but my company is evaluating their product.
If you're in Waltham, Mass and in the mood for real hands-on construction toys be sure to check out The Construction Site, the only toy store I know dedicated to such things. Who knows, they might even have software, I didn't look.
If your case is the former, then you likely fall under the "scratch your own itch" category and could seriously benefit from rolling your own, because you likely know exactly what you need.
However, if you fall into the latter category, then I suggest looking at what's already out there, because odds are you're not going to be able to simulate all of the tools that your users want. For example:
Get my point? I've been tech leading an ecommerce team for about 4 years now using Documentum as the content management system for over a dozen production sites. Everything I mentioned above has been a question or issue at one time or another. I highly doubt you're in a position to buy one of the commercial packages, since all of them cost an absolute fortune (Documentum, Interwoven, Vignette to name a few). If you hadn't even considered most of the issues that I just put up there, then perhaps you should at least look at some of the better existing systems, because they most likely have, and when it turns out that you do need feature X, it's already there.
Zaurus ships with a calendar, and Intellisync Windows client for syncing to Outlook. If you meant a *better* calendar, well, I agree completely (theKompany does have one, I believe). But it does indeed sync to Outlook right out of the box. The trick is to use the Intellisync software, not the QTopia Desktop (much like Palm's solution).
I just put 802.11b in the house. This enabled me to put the servers in the basement ("Look, honey, no more eyesore!") as well as having the laptop available to me in every room ("See honey, we can sit in the living room and watch tv, and I'm not always running off to the office to do work.")
That's my two cents.
Ah, so that's where all the profits went. Telephone bill.
universe = 10^90 bits
Therefore, the entire universe can be found at Google.
d, disappointed that "googol" is not spelled "google".
p.s. the word has now lost all meaning to me. google google google. nothing.
True story. Once upon a time I went out with my fiance and her college friends. They said that we were going out to pick up their friend, Foo. I said "If you tell me we're going to meet Foo at the bar, I'm going to die a happy man." Not being CS geeks, none of them got it. I know, I know, off topic.
...did the kids with the rats and the Burger King cup get $5 million in VC money?? :) See, THAT would be a funny story. Granted, funny in sort of a "shoot me in the head now" type of way, but still funny.
Spamford? Is that YOU???
:) Sorry, had to be said.
And any one who has read Slaughterhouse Five will get *that*.
Poo tee weet?
FIND the time. Got a laptop? Take the train in the morning. Hack code. Sunday mornings get up at 6am, 3 hours before the wife, and go sit in the park and code. Stay up 2 hours after her. Code code code. Sitting in a boring meeting? Sketch. Need to use the men's room? Take a copy of Game Developer's Magazine.
Get it? No magic bullets here (maybe there'll be some in your game, though) or in any industry switch that needs such specific experience.
And for the love of god don't try to jumpstart it by reading any books with "Extreme", "Black Art", or "21 Days" in the title. They take away from your coding time.
Did he really put a bunch of URL's to imdb into his poster? NEAT. :)
I don't know why you limited yourself to PPCs. I have my Zaurus talking 802.11b to my home network just fine. Plenty of color and resolution. And it has Opera as a browser built right in. If you need a full office suite (such as for powerpoint-like stuff) there is a company Hancom that makes a compatible office suite for it.
Tells everybody he got contacts.
:)
Having said that, there's an article in the most recent issue of MIT Tech Review that talks about a company in Philadelphia that has done exactly that. Created a tag that has network abilities, and a teeny bit of storage, all smaller than a dime and at the cost of "pennies."
d
There was also some discussion on the zaurus-general list that the "selector circle" could prove to be a killer difference between the Z and some of the other PDAs. When programmed properly, you can run your Z entirely from that circle with your thumb. Try that with a Palm. Blackberry has it close with the thumbwheel, but the selector circle can potentially give you two dimensional cursor, not just the back-and-forth of the wheel. I haven't seen any reviews really pick up on this fact yet (probably because the standard apps aren't programmed to 100% support it).
In other words, will PS2 users play in the same world as PC users?
For those that are saying "ooo, childish", do try to remember that it's supposed to be in fun, to entertain the crowd. There's a role for evangelizing. Many people will tell you that the primary reason they go is to get pumped up about what they do for a living. You don't do that by saying "Wow, ya know, .NET is just as good as Java." At last McNealy stopped the damned top ten lists.
And don't forget Monkey Boy Ballmer. No one at JavaONE yelled "Give it up for me."
You'd get the +1 funny from me if I could moderate in the same discussion I posted, dude. :) :) :)
The best incentive to write for (note I don't say port to) it is developer flexibility. You can write *better* apps. Think about getting to use a real interface, with multiple windows (within reason). A good screen resolution. High likelihood that it's networked (via the variety of CF options). About a zillion free development environments and languages (unlike Wince) mean low overhead. Someone has even ported SDL, a popular games library, if you want to go that route.
Just my thoughts. As I keep reiterating, I don't expect anyone to singlehandedly keep the market alive. But for everybody that says "I don't want to write for anything but Microsoft because they are all going to die out", just remember that you are causing the problem. Sometimes it takes a little extra effort and not just the easiest path. What's teh incentive, long term? Philosophically? I don't think any of us like that Microsoft rules the world. It's just that some are trying to change it, and some are just shrugging and saying "Nope, not me, that would cost me effort, I'll just go with the flow." If you have an existing app, make a token effort at porting it to this thing. Consider it a learning experience. Then release it into the wild -- for free. See what happens. You say yourself that you couldn't have expected a great deal of profit from this segment, so why not prime the pump a little bit by just giving it away? You'll help sell more zauruses, which in turn will allow you to sell your second app (ok, maybe fifth :)) to more people.
The first thing everybody did when they got a Palm was to replace Launcher with something that had tabs, the ability to move stuff around, and so on. On a Palm interface you can't even get a list of your own documents without going into the app they are for. This thing even has a Documents tab. The clock and battery life are displayed all times. You can multitask and have several apps open at once. Using the mousy wheel thing I can even navigate and launch apps with one thumb, something that's not easy on a Palm. What is poor, exactly? Sure, you can't delete or move around ROM apps. I prefer that, though -- ROM apps means apps that don't take up the memory that they advertise as being for my use.
Plus, there are standardization issues to take into account. The majority of PDAs in the market are PalmOS-based. Wouldn't it make sense if I could transfer data to and from a Palm with my Zaraus? Why isn't data stored and transmitted in industry-standard formats for cross-platform compatibility?
Have you even tried it? You can. When my friend and I got ours the first thing we did was to beam business cards and calendar events back and forth. No problem! You might notice that the apps in the Zaurus are storing their data in XML -- something that is far more industry standard than anything in PDB format.
Yes, I'm a geek and like having a command prompt available to me from my PDA. What normal consumer would ever want that? What about security issues?
Wait...so, because most people don't want it, it shouldn't even be offered as an option? I thought we were always about having lots of choice. If that's the case, then I'd like to suggest a whole slew of XP features that I think suck, so Microsoft can please take them out because they must not be useful to anyone.
The Zaurus is good as an alpha-quality Linux PDA, but it is certainly not ready for primetime. There are technical and usability issues that need to be addressed, and Sharp (and Trolltech, developers of the Qtopia interface that is used on the Zaurus) seems to be ignoring these issues or not doing enough to correct them.
There are numerous ROM updates from Sharp already. Sharp sponsors a page for developers to advertise their applications (not just a perk for developers, but good for consumers to see what is available). Are you referring to the physical machine? It's not like they can keep tweaking that -- those changes have to be revolutions not evolutions.