"Wow. Look at the markup on miniature vegetables."
:) True. I'd probably be more worried about it if I wasn't surrounded by people who are very interested in that sort of thing. It's a fact of life that industry wants profiling information.
At least IBM is taking the right approach -- "We want profiling information so that we can help streamline the information we're providing to you." If I know you play tennis, there's two ways you can look at it. One is, "Oooo good, now I can sell him more tennis balls." Everybody hates this, of course, because nobody likes to feel like a target. But the second is, "Hey, you know what? Maybe I really am interested in knowing whose got a deal on tennis balls." Sometimes targeted messaging does actually work. It's really the same thing that the demographics have always been, only with better profiling they really know. They're not assuming "Oh, because you're in group X, there's a Y% likelihood that you play tennis."
There's a new movement in this area. That's to get away from the use of the word "targeting" and to start making use of expressions like "1:1" and "relationship". People are happier having a relationship with the businesses they use. The whole point of the IBM focusgroup commercial is a bunch of people being pissed off because the ad people don't know them.
And just in case anybody is prepared to argue that "1:1 relationship" is just new marketing hype for the same old spam, let me put it this way. When my grandfather walked into the local hardware store, the shopkeeper could say "Hello, Dan! Getting ready to send the kids off to college pretty soon, aren't ya? Got a good sale on bookcases down in aisle 3." And he would never, ever say "Have ya seen our sale on house paint?" if he knew that my dad had aluminum siding. And service like that was *appreciated*. People go on to the internet today and they ask where all the service went. The optimist in me says that all this 1:1 relationship stuff is actually a way to try and bring that *back*. If I really thought that I was just coming up with a better mousetrap (or in this case, spamtrap), I don't think I'd be working where I work.
Microsoft does do research, apparently. Nathan Mhyrvold is supposedly their resident genius who is supposed to do nothing but think about the future of the technology. But I read an article earlier this year in MIT Tech Review about the so called research shop of MS that basically asked, "What has it produced?" and the answer was pretty much "Nothing yet."
From what I've read about MS and their people, Mhyrvold apparently spends most of his time writing massive memos that nobody reads.:) This guy was around the company when Gates said the Internet was no big thing. You'd think he would have whispered something in Bill's ear:).
Sure, we could argue about what uncrackable truly means(*), but if you assume that people are willing to go to any lengths to copy something, you have to make it *unfeasible* to copy, rather than *impossible*.
Say, for example, that I've got a 700 page user manual on paper. I wish to copy it. I can sit at the copy machine for several hours and make a copy that is really cumbersome, not as good as the original, and took up way more of my time than simply buying another copy. I remember being asked many times in the early 90's when CD software was becoming popular how people could copy it. Luckily at the time the only answer was, "If you've got the space, go ahead and copy everything onto your hard drive". And most people didn't have the space.:)
So how do you solve the DVD problem? Keep it unfeasible to "rip" them. Right now it is -- I don't think recordable DVDs are on the market yet, are they? But they're coming soon enough, and eventually they'll be as prevalent as CD burners. So get the cost of the DVD cheap enough that it costs the same if not more to buy a recordable DVD and rip a copy. The problem will still exist. But people will be more likely to say "Ya know what? I'll just buy the thing." If the potential bootlegger had to spend as much to rip the thing as the original cost, then he can't stay in business long because he won't be able to make a profit.
How do you get your costs down? Lots of ways.
Stop wasting your time on encryption games.
Open source some code and get some free help/support.
Work on supporting more operating systems, so that you have a larger potential customer base.
Advance your own technology so that you'll continue to stay one step ahead of the crackers. Make playable DVDs that have 8x the capacity of a recordable DVD so that it'll be that much less likely people will copy.
Help make DVD a popular standard. This will encourage more movie companies to want to produce DVD versions. This will cause more people to buy players. Repeat ad infinitum.
d
(*) The argument I hear most is, "What about retinal scans? Those rule!" Yeah, until I hold a gun to your kid's head and make you open your account for me. Hey, I never said realistic, I just said *not impossible*. You never know what people are willing to do, it all depends on what it is that you're trying to hide.
I love the way IBM has turned itself around. People look at the 80's now and say "Big Blue's previous life ended when the government basically sat on them for 10 years and let their competition keep up." Now look at some of the stuff IBM is up to:
Wonderful commercials with a real sense of humor. ("Can I get realtime access to my inventory and legacy systems?" "I...don't know how to do that. Look! Your logo has flames.")
Adopting Apache.
Alphaworks, probably the definitive resource for almost all things Java/XML.
Invention announcements like these.
Wearables.
Adoption of Linux.
Now what I'm really wondering is this : at least one theory suggests that the government is in the process of doing to MS what it did to IBM back in the 80's. If that's true, and the DOJ keeps MS so tangled up over the next decade that competitors emerge, does anybody think that Microsoft will reinvent itself in a similar way? Sure, we can all hate MS as the big bad corporate enemy now, but we all did that 20 years ago, too, when it was IBM. Now we love them.
Seems to me like Amazon is only attacking B&N on this point because they're major competitors. Two questions I have would be, is there any evidence that Amazon would then attack any/all booksellers that use a similar technology? And, how book-specific is the technology? Is sounds like it could be applied to the purchasing of many things. Would Amazon really start going after any/everybody? I'm hoping that this is just a case of Amazon wanting to beat up on B&N.
d
Does anybody remember the "press release war" these two had, when B&N acquired somebody, so then Amazon posted a press release stating "We're afraid of you becoming a monopoly and we hope there's room in the industry for the little independent booksellers". So then, B&N posted another press release in response stating "Don't whine, Jeff, everybody knows that Amazon has got more revenue than all of us bigboys combined. Little independent indeed." So then Amazon responded back in a press release with "Oh." (Or something like that, I wish I could remember the exact details)
Hmmmmm, so many things with this post I have problems with.
That closed language comes with the source code for all the class libraries. Sure, I can't hack the jVM, but I don't want to. I don't want to write a C++ optimizer either, so I don't.
Java's not portable? I'm running code on my PalmPilot that works on my NT box. I don't even get the option to do that with Perl.
Performance bites? Why, when the issue is Java, does everybody turn to performance...but when the issue is something like Windows being dog slow everybody just shrugs and says "Machines will get faster." The original C++ optimizers weren't very good, either. They get better. Java is faster now than it was yesterday, and it will be faster tomorrow.
strict adherence to object orientation? Java's not really a particularly strong OO language, such as a Smalltalk. I've found it to be a nice balance in which my programmers have to put in enough structure so that I can read the fool thing, but not so much that we are taking too much time having been hindered by the structure requirements.
For the record, I work at a place where we do entirely serverside Java development on a Solaris box, serving up JSP pages. Not a Microsoft technology in the place. Could it be faster? Of course -- but I'll say that about any technology you put in front of me. I'd rather have a 733Mhz machine than a 700Mhz machine, too. That's not the point.
I suppose it all depends on how you define "living thing", because the a-life people will certainly want to discuss it. A flock of birds is not necessarily a living entity unto itself, but it moves in its own way, responds to stimuli, and so on. A "glider" in a game of Conway's Life is really just an optical illusion, it's really one 6 cells that are either on or off independently and just happen to look like a little angle bracket marching across the screen. And then there's a bag of independent molecules all doing their own little job in order to produce......well, us. At what point did we shift from just being the emergent behavior of a bunch of cells into being something that really is alive?
Absolutely agree! I got no books last year, I was very bummed. And I've informed my mom that the worst thing she can do -- gift certificates! AHHHH! I want something I can play with that morning! I don't want to go to the mall the day after christmas and wait in those lines!
It actually works out pretty well, because if I really want a certain book, I'll get it for myself...therefore, the books that other people give me are things that I wouldn't necessarily buy. Thus, I expand my horizons. Sure, sometimes they suck:), but other times you hit on a winner.
I dunno, whenever I hear "nerd" I can't help but thing Fonzi and the Happy Days gang.
Geek, on the other hand, is a cool word, and I proudly label myself one. It lends itself to all sorts of interesting forms:
geek out
true geek
geek central
One of the few places it doesn't fit is in the zenlike construct "hacker nature". "geek nature" just doesn't work for me (hence, "true geek").
Of course, I come from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, the home of the word "gweep". But since that word was pretty much seized by a group of guys that called themselves GweepCo, it just never really stuck to think of yourself as a gweep unless you were part of that crew. And I'll bet a nickel that there's at least a handful of GweepCo reading right now that are gonna yell at me.
This strategy is in *direct* contradiction to what Loki told me, which was basically "Brick-n-mortar is last on our list, so just go ahead and buy it online." I sat here when Civ:CTP came out and said that I wanted to wait for it to come out retail in order to show my dollars to the retailers. I was soundly thrashed by everybody that told me the retail market in general is full of devils who put the little software guy down, and that I should only support the online shops. Somebody even pointed me at a rant by the Bungee people, I believe it was, all about how horrid their experience was trying to get their game onto the retail shelves.
I bought Civ:CTP off the shelf. I wanted to buy MythII, but could never find it. When Eric's Ultimate Solitaire was ready, I ordered that online because I wanted it. I personally don't even want Quake3 (never really liked deathmatch), but if I see it on the retail shelves I will buy it. I'm interested in furthering the cause of retail games for Linux more than I care about giving Id my dollars. But I won't go chasing it down like I tried to do with those other games (every mall I was in, I stopped at every store and asked for Linux games. Repeat once a week for each store, for many weeks).
I've been to Disney exactly twice. Once, in 1976, when I was 6 years old. All I remember of Epcot was a sign saying "Coming Soon":).
Second was a month ago. Wow.
I will sound like I'm echoing Katz, here, but I came away thinking "The corporate sponsorship is just nasty." Even the neat stuff was marred by it. People often comment that the magical sounds and voices from nowhere in Disney (I think they have speakers in the trees?) can be neat, like having your own reallife soundtrack. But one night, before the big fireworks show, the magic voice came up and said "Ladies and Gentlemen. Because GE brings good things to life, the fireworks will begin in 5 minutes." ARGH!
Did get to see backstage Disney, though, which I understand is rare. We brokedown in the ride near the Mexican restaurant, and after 15 minutes of listening to a tape loop tell us to come back soon in ancient Mayan or something, they finally led us all out a fire exit, where we found ourselves on a bare street and realized that it was behind the scenes. There was a row of ushers (or whatever they call themselves) lining it to make sure none of us wandered off.:)
Seems a good time to tell the story of when Ray was on Politically Incorrect, and the subject was sexual harassment. Ray was saying all kinds of wonderfully incorrect things like, "Ok, is there any man here who hasn't pinched a cute woman's butt?" and "I sexually harassed my wife for years, and then I married her." Poor Bill Maher seemed aghast, but another guest (I think it might have been John Leguizamo?) was just laughing his ass off and saying "He doesn't care, man! I love this guy! He doesn't care!"
And for the record I loved Martian Chronicles. The chapter about the house that wakes up, lives, and dies all without any humans was spooky.
Oh lord, the memories. When I heard the name Alan Mendelsohn again, that's the first thing that I thought: missile whistle. I don't even remember what that was -- something about whistling at people really loudly from behind so that it scares the bejeesus out of them.
My memory of that book goes back eons to junior high (or was it elementary school?) where I had chosen that as my book report. Well, one of the bullies of the class decided that he didn't want to write his, so me being the geek, he grabbed me and made me tell him what the book was about. Then he wrote it down and passed it in. Well, the next day (or something) there was a substitute, and she wanted us to read our reports aloud. So she grabbed this kid's. And he got up and read what he wrote, which was about one page, exactly what I told him, and took him like 30 seconds. She then shuffled through the stack and pulled out mine. Saying "I thought it was interesting that the two of you chose the same book," she had me read mine. Which, of course, took like 15 minutes and sounded like a completely different book.
Of course, it made mr. jock look like an idiot. Luckily I didn't get my ass kicked. I had a good school, the geeks didn't get beat up so much as just generally tormented.
...is that when I hit the page, the freakin' banner ad started playing a background sound file! They wanna talk about the evils of forcing somebody to watch porn? How about the evil of forcing me to listen to Brad Pitt say "How much ya really know about yahself yah never been inna fight?" before I can lunge for the volume control?
My boss arrives, and establishes the first Solaris workstation for the team. He names it artichoke, because he is boring and went with a vegetable theme.
I arrive next, and have always wanted to do Shakespearean characters (although I hear they are common, I've never gotten to use them). I have two machines to config, so I call them macbeth and macduff.
The first sys admin is hired. He follow my lead and creates hamlet, prospero, lear, and falstaff.
That admin, being a contractor, leaves us and is replaced. New admin sees macbeth and macduff and decides to go with the "mac-word" theme. Eschewing "macintosh" because it's too easy, he makes macnugget, macleod, mac-n-cheese(I don't know how he spelled it to make it legal) and macfly. He admits he stretched it in a few of those cases.
Seeing "macfly" his assistant goes with the "taglines from 80's teen movies" naming scheme, and makes the next machine bueller.
Why would you call Palm to cancel a visor? They're not the same company, unless they're in bed much closer than I thought. Do you mean you cancelled your visor in order to get a PalmV? Or cancelled a PalmV in order to get a visor?
If I recall correctly, in the fine print of the Loebner Prize it says that in order to win the real money, you have to pass a *fully multimedia* Turing Test. In other words, do computer generated audio and video so convincingly that you think you're talking to a person over a webcam or something. Of course, since we're barely even close to coherent conversation now, nobody's likely to win that money.
They have this contest every year. Some years, the contestants do well, others, not so well. When taken as an abstract, i.e. "A computer that can always fool any human for any length of time into thinking that he is talking to another human", the Turing Test is valid -- but untestable. Once you put constraints on it ("these 10 people for 15 minutes...") it's no longer valid because each constraint is a weakness (maybe the people were stupid. Maybe if they just had time to ask another question they would have been able to tell the difference...)
I think something important that's forgotten frequently in dealing with natural language technology is that right now, in almost all cases, you don't want to have a conversation with your computer! You want to tell it to turn on the lights, and to ask it how much money you have in the bank, and to find cool new warez and MP3s, dood. The sentence structure for queries and commands is far different (and far similar) than trying to parse out conversations in which context almost always becomes the downfall of comprehension.
Someday, yes, people will want to have a conversation with the machines that control their houses. I envision a machine that can tell by my sentence structure what mood I'm in, and put on some appropriate music, set the lights, and so on. But those things will all happen *after* we get the basics down, like differentiating "Lights on" from "Could you turn on the lights please, computer?" and having them both do the same thing. Nobody would call the former true natural language. It's when we can do the latter, and have "noise suppression" be so seamless that you can say what you mean in almost any conceivable way, that people will take it seriously as an interface.
Ahhh, a classic. Remember this one, with Tom Hanks as the kid who goes crazy playing D&D and runs around the subways of New York? I remember that live D&D in the fields around our school became big after that (hey, we didn't have many caves to play in, just really tall swamp grass). And who was that kid who whined about only being into computers because he wanted to write videogames? I distinctly remember walking from my room to my parents' room, where they were watching the same thing, and saying "SEE!?!"
We're hearing lots about Neal Stephenson in the geek set these days. What's your opinion of the man, his writing style, and his choice of topics upon which to write?
90% of the time it's great, but sometimes I want to search for something specific and it doesn't always work. I was looking for references to "E-Business Advisor" (a magazine), and it kept telling me "e is a very common word and so it is ignored" even though I put it in there on purpose!
The Pilot jumped to the front of the pack because of Jeff Hawkins, and his approach to the design of the device. He didn't think primarily about the OS, or the cost, or the color. Read an interview with the guy, and it'll be essentially him talking about how he believes the human brain works, and why his devices fit that model.
Now he's making a competitor to the Palm. And 3Com (soon to be just Palm) is stuck catering to the high end corporate accounts that can afford to pay extra hundreds of $$ for units with no upgrade path that are essentially variations on a theme over and over again. The Vx is the exact same machine as the V, except more memory. Why didn't some genius figure out how to make the V expandable (that is, "officially" expandable)?
Hawkins and Handspring are taking a different approach. Lower the entry pricetag and target the consumer market. As a boss of mine said, "I've got kids entering college, there's no way I wouldn't get them one, priced right. But no way I'm spending $500 or more to buy them each a PalmV just because it's lighter." And the iMac-like (or is it Gameboy-like) color schemes don't hurt if you're going after a younger market. VP's may want the cool metallic look, but college kids want the yellow one or the orange one.
What was a primary complaint about the Pilot? Addon devices. It was just the right size to fit into a pocket, so as soon as you stuck something on it like a pager or modem, it got bulkier. Handspring solves that by introducing an upgrade slot (external, not like the PalmIII's!) that only adds "wheat thin" sized cards. How does 3Com solve the problem? By introducing a series of machines (the V series) that aren't upgradeable at all?!
I have a IIIx. I'm going to skip the V generation completely. Come Q1 next year, I'm probably going to become the first Visor person at my company. On top of everything else it's got going for it, it's still Palm compatible, so I don't even have to fight the wince vs palm battle.
...make it go faster, add rechargeable batteries, bump it up to 8Meg Ram, improve the method by which I add modules, offer modules for pager, MP3, voice recorder....and deliver it in a price that's almost half the cost of 3Com's top of the line model.
If I understand right from what I read, here's a few bullets of interest:
I saw one page say that it was $1/file, but the Agreement seems to say $3/file. Would want that cleared up - which is it?
Royalties "between 50%-100%" means that for normal operation, you get 50%. The 100% is a special promotion that goes through the end of the year if you publish before 10/15. I didn't see any mention of any sort of sliding royalty scale.
There are minimum prices based on filesize, with $2 being the minimum selling price for files up to 5 meg.
The license does appear to say that you are the owner of your content, and that you are granting fatbrain the rights to distribute it digitally. Hopefully that means that you're not giving away the rights to the great american novel. But I couldn't find mention abouthow long the agreement lasts.
I've had the opportunity to build client-side certificate systems for two companies now, one customer based (Liberty Mutual Funds) and one intranet (State Street Bank). I've written on the subject a bunch, and our work at Liberty was a case study for a book on digital signatures. Some reasons why they don't work yet:
Too much new info coming out of your browser. Typical customers don't understand the deluge of messages they'll get about Certificate Authorities, and accepting things forever, etc... Solution: I don't know. It took a long time (and lots of bad scifi movies) for people to understand the notion of username and password. It's going to take longer to understand the notion of a digital certificate.
You're still expected to provide a password (to protect your private keys). In many eyes, this defeats the purpose. Sure, you've reduced a bunch of username/password combinations to one password, but it's still something to remember. Solution: Some sort of biological print, such as iris, or thumbprint. The key being that you don't have to remember anything, you just have to show up. (Of course this brings up all sorts of privacy/security issues about copying that data. I've met people with about $100 in the bank who are afraid of being killed and having someone cut off their thumb. Seriously.)
Corporate paranoia. I've seen places where they take out the normal username/password, and put in clientside certificates, and then put BACK a webserver ACL protection. They're paranoid about turning off the passwords. Then they ask, what did we gain from certificates? Well, nothing. Solution: More knowledge usually lessens paranoia. A few companies out in front demonstrating that it can be done, a few Forrester reports or something saying that certificates are ok, and here look, company X is using them without a problem, will start getting the pointy haired bosses interested.
Non portable. Although a variety of standards exist for transporting your certificates, see earlier point about the whole process being too confusing for the average surfer. Solution: Smart cards. Put the digital certificate, along with a copy of your thumbprint, on the card. Stick the card in, put your thumb on the scanner, it's you.
Those are a few of the main problems with certs, in my experience. Of course, each of those has it's own issues and could be an entire thread. But I'm at work doing non certificate related things, so I can't really discuss it all day.:)
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:) True. I'd probably be more worried about it if I wasn't surrounded by people who are very interested in that sort of thing. It's a fact of life that industry wants profiling information.
At least IBM is taking the right approach -- "We want profiling information so that we can help streamline the information we're providing to you." If I know you play tennis, there's two ways you can look at it. One is, "Oooo good, now I can sell him more tennis balls." Everybody hates this, of course, because nobody likes to feel like a target. But the second is, "Hey, you know what? Maybe I really am interested in knowing whose got a deal on tennis balls." Sometimes targeted messaging does actually work. It's really the same thing that the demographics have always been, only with better profiling they really know. They're not assuming "Oh, because you're in group X, there's a Y% likelihood that you play tennis."
There's a new movement in this area. That's to get away from the use of the word "targeting" and to start making use of expressions like "1:1" and "relationship". People are happier having a relationship with the businesses they use. The whole point of the IBM focusgroup commercial is a bunch of people being pissed off because the ad people don't know them.
And just in case anybody is prepared to argue that "1:1 relationship" is just new marketing hype for the same old spam, let me put it this way. When my grandfather walked into the local hardware store, the shopkeeper could say "Hello, Dan! Getting ready to send the kids off to college pretty soon, aren't ya? Got a good sale on bookcases down in aisle 3." And he would never, ever say "Have ya seen our sale on house paint?" if he knew that my dad had aluminum siding. And service like that was *appreciated*. People go on to the internet today and they ask where all the service went. The optimist in me says that all this 1:1 relationship stuff is actually a way to try and bring that *back*. If I really thought that I was just coming up with a better mousetrap (or in this case, spamtrap), I don't think I'd be working where I work.
d
From what I've read about MS and their people, Mhyrvold apparently spends most of his time writing massive memos that nobody reads. :) This guy was around the company when Gates said the Internet was no big thing. You'd think he would have whispered something in Bill's ear :).
Say, for example, that I've got a 700 page user manual on paper. I wish to copy it. I can sit at the copy machine for several hours and make a copy that is really cumbersome, not as good as the original, and took up way more of my time than simply buying another copy. I remember being asked many times in the early 90's when CD software was becoming popular how people could copy it. Luckily at the time the only answer was, "If you've got the space, go ahead and copy everything onto your hard drive". And most people didn't have the space. :)
So how do you solve the DVD problem? Keep it unfeasible to "rip" them. Right now it is -- I don't think recordable DVDs are on the market yet, are they? But they're coming soon enough, and eventually they'll be as prevalent as CD burners. So get the cost of the DVD cheap enough that it costs the same if not more to buy a recordable DVD and rip a copy. The problem will still exist. But people will be more likely to say "Ya know what? I'll just buy the thing." If the potential bootlegger had to spend as much to rip the thing as the original cost, then he can't stay in business long because he won't be able to make a profit.
How do you get your costs down? Lots of ways.
d
(*) The argument I hear most is, "What about retinal scans? Those rule!" Yeah, until I hold a gun to your kid's head and make you open your account for me. Hey, I never said realistic, I just said *not impossible*. You never know what people are willing to do, it all depends on what it is that you're trying to hide.
Now what I'm really wondering is this : at least one theory suggests that the government is in the process of doing to MS what it did to IBM back in the 80's. If that's true, and the DOJ keeps MS so tangled up over the next decade that competitors emerge, does anybody think that Microsoft will reinvent itself in a similar way? Sure, we can all hate MS as the big bad corporate enemy now, but we all did that 20 years ago, too, when it was IBM. Now we love them.
d
Does anybody remember the "press release war" these two had, when B&N acquired somebody, so then Amazon posted a press release stating "We're afraid of you becoming a monopoly and we hope there's room in the industry for the little independent booksellers". So then, B&N posted another press release in response stating "Don't whine, Jeff, everybody knows that Amazon has got more revenue than all of us bigboys combined. Little independent indeed." So then Amazon responded back in a press release with "Oh." (Or something like that, I wish I could remember the exact details)
For the record, I work at a place where we do entirely serverside Java development on a Solaris box, serving up JSP pages. Not a Microsoft technology in the place. Could it be faster? Of course -- but I'll say that about any technology you put in front of me. I'd rather have a 733Mhz machine than a 700Mhz machine, too. That's not the point.
I suppose it all depends on how you define "living thing", because the a-life people will certainly want to discuss it. A flock of birds is not necessarily a living entity unto itself, but it moves in its own way, responds to stimuli, and so on. A "glider" in a game of Conway's Life is really just an optical illusion, it's really one 6 cells that are either on or off independently and just happen to look like a little angle bracket marching across the screen. And then there's a bag of independent molecules all doing their own little job in order to produce......well, us. At what point did we shift from just being the emergent behavior of a bunch of cells into being something that really is alive?
It actually works out pretty well, because if I really want a certain book, I'll get it for myself...therefore, the books that other people give me are things that I wouldn't necessarily buy. Thus, I expand my horizons. Sure, sometimes they suck :), but other times you hit on a winner.
Geek, on the other hand, is a cool word, and I proudly label myself one. It lends itself to all sorts of interesting forms:
- geek out
- true geek
- geek central
One of the few places it doesn't fit is in the zenlike construct "hacker nature". "geek nature" just doesn't work for me (hence, "true geek").Of course, I come from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, the home of the word "gweep". But since that word was pretty much seized by a group of guys that called themselves GweepCo, it just never really stuck to think of yourself as a gweep unless you were part of that crew. And I'll bet a nickel that there's at least a handful of GweepCo reading right now that are gonna yell at me.
I bought Civ:CTP off the shelf. I wanted to buy MythII, but could never find it. When Eric's Ultimate Solitaire was ready, I ordered that online because I wanted it. I personally don't even want Quake3 (never really liked deathmatch), but if I see it on the retail shelves I will buy it. I'm interested in furthering the cause of retail games for Linux more than I care about giving Id my dollars. But I won't go chasing it down like I tried to do with those other games (every mall I was in, I stopped at every store and asked for Linux games. Repeat once a week for each store, for many weeks).
Second was a month ago. Wow.
I will sound like I'm echoing Katz, here, but I came away thinking "The corporate sponsorship is just nasty." Even the neat stuff was marred by it. People often comment that the magical sounds and voices from nowhere in Disney (I think they have speakers in the trees?) can be neat, like having your own reallife soundtrack. But one night, before the big fireworks show, the magic voice came up and said "Ladies and Gentlemen. Because GE brings good things to life, the fireworks will begin in 5 minutes." ARGH!
Did get to see backstage Disney, though, which I understand is rare. We brokedown in the ride near the Mexican restaurant, and after 15 minutes of listening to a tape loop tell us to come back soon in ancient Mayan or something, they finally led us all out a fire exit, where we found ourselves on a bare street and realized that it was behind the scenes. There was a row of ushers (or whatever they call themselves) lining it to make sure none of us wandered off. :)
What it has to do with Quake, though, I have no idea.
And for the record I loved Martian Chronicles. The chapter about the house that wakes up, lives, and dies all without any humans was spooky.
My memory of that book goes back eons to junior high (or was it elementary school?) where I had chosen that as my book report. Well, one of the bullies of the class decided that he didn't want to write his, so me being the geek, he grabbed me and made me tell him what the book was about. Then he wrote it down and passed it in. Well, the next day (or something) there was a substitute, and she wanted us to read our reports aloud. So she grabbed this kid's. And he got up and read what he wrote, which was about one page, exactly what I told him, and took him like 30 seconds. She then shuffled through the stack and pulled out mine. Saying "I thought it was interesting that the two of you chose the same book," she had me read mine. Which, of course, took like 15 minutes and sounded like a completely different book.
Of course, it made mr. jock look like an idiot. Luckily I didn't get my ass kicked. I had a good school, the geeks didn't get beat up so much as just generally tormented.
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...is that when I hit the page, the freakin' banner ad started playing a background sound file! They wanna talk about the evils of forcing somebody to watch porn? How about the evil of forcing me to listen to Brad Pitt say "How much ya really know about yahself yah never been inna fight?" before I can lunge for the volume control?
- My boss arrives, and establishes the first Solaris workstation for the team. He names it artichoke, because he is boring and went with a vegetable theme.
- I arrive next, and have always wanted to do Shakespearean characters (although I hear they are common, I've never gotten to use them). I have two machines to config, so I call them macbeth and macduff.
- The first sys admin is hired. He follow my lead and creates hamlet, prospero, lear, and falstaff.
- That admin, being a contractor, leaves us and is replaced. New admin sees macbeth and macduff and decides to go with the "mac-word" theme. Eschewing "macintosh" because it's too easy, he makes macnugget, macleod, mac-n-cheese(I don't know how he spelled it to make it legal) and macfly. He admits he stretched it in a few of those cases.
- Seeing "macfly" his assistant goes with the "taglines from 80's teen movies" naming scheme, and makes the next machine bueller.
- I don't know what comes next.
I may have forgotten a few.Why would you call Palm to cancel a visor? They're not the same company, unless they're in bed much closer than I thought. Do you mean you cancelled your visor in order to get a PalmV? Or cancelled a PalmV in order to get a visor?
They have this contest every year. Some years, the contestants do well, others, not so well. When taken as an abstract, i.e. "A computer that can always fool any human for any length of time into thinking that he is talking to another human", the Turing Test is valid -- but untestable. Once you put constraints on it ("these 10 people for 15 minutes...") it's no longer valid because each constraint is a weakness (maybe the people were stupid. Maybe if they just had time to ask another question they would have been able to tell the difference...)
I think something important that's forgotten frequently in dealing with natural language technology is that right now, in almost all cases, you don't want to have a conversation with your computer! You want to tell it to turn on the lights, and to ask it how much money you have in the bank, and to find cool new warez and MP3s, dood. The sentence structure for queries and commands is far different (and far similar) than trying to parse out conversations in which context almost always becomes the downfall of comprehension.
Someday, yes, people will want to have a conversation with the machines that control their houses. I envision a machine that can tell by my sentence structure what mood I'm in, and put on some appropriate music, set the lights, and so on. But those things will all happen *after* we get the basics down, like differentiating "Lights on" from "Could you turn on the lights please, computer?" and having them both do the same thing. Nobody would call the former true natural language. It's when we can do the latter, and have "noise suppression" be so seamless that you can say what you mean in almost any conceivable way, that people will take it seriously as an interface.
Ahhh, a classic. Remember this one, with Tom Hanks as the kid who goes crazy playing D&D and runs around the subways of New York? I remember that live D&D in the fields around our school became big after that (hey, we didn't have many caves to play in, just really tall swamp grass). And who was that kid who whined about only being into computers because he wanted to write videogames? I distinctly remember walking from my room to my parents' room, where they were watching the same thing, and saying "SEE!?!"
We're hearing lots about Neal Stephenson in the geek set these days. What's your opinion of the man, his writing style, and his choice of topics upon which to write?
90% of the time it's great, but sometimes I want to search for something specific and it doesn't always work. I was looking for references to "E-Business Advisor" (a magazine), and it kept telling me "e is a very common word and so it is ignored" even though I put it in there on purpose!
Now he's making a competitor to the Palm. And 3Com (soon to be just Palm) is stuck catering to the high end corporate accounts that can afford to pay extra hundreds of $$ for units with no upgrade path that are essentially variations on a theme over and over again. The Vx is the exact same machine as the V, except more memory. Why didn't some genius figure out how to make the V expandable (that is, "officially" expandable)?
Hawkins and Handspring are taking a different approach. Lower the entry pricetag and target the consumer market. As a boss of mine said, "I've got kids entering college, there's no way I wouldn't get them one, priced right. But no way I'm spending $500 or more to buy them each a PalmV just because it's lighter." And the iMac-like (or is it Gameboy-like) color schemes don't hurt if you're going after a younger market. VP's may want the cool metallic look, but college kids want the yellow one or the orange one.
What was a primary complaint about the Pilot? Addon devices. It was just the right size to fit into a pocket, so as soon as you stuck something on it like a pager or modem, it got bulkier. Handspring solves that by introducing an upgrade slot (external, not like the PalmIII's!) that only adds "wheat thin" sized cards. How does 3Com solve the problem? By introducing a series of machines (the V series) that aren't upgradeable at all?!
I have a IIIx. I'm going to skip the V generation completely. Come Q1 next year, I'm probably going to become the first Visor person at my company. On top of everything else it's got going for it, it's still Palm compatible, so I don't even have to fight the wince vs palm battle.
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But it doesn't do color man! It sucks! :)!
- Too much new info coming out of your browser. Typical customers don't understand the deluge of messages they'll get about Certificate Authorities, and accepting things forever, etc... Solution: I don't know. It took a long time (and lots of bad scifi movies) for people to understand the notion of username and password. It's going to take longer to understand the notion of a digital certificate.
- You're still expected to provide a password (to protect your private keys). In many eyes, this defeats the purpose. Sure, you've reduced a bunch of username/password combinations to one password, but it's still something to remember. Solution: Some sort of biological print, such as iris, or thumbprint. The key being that you don't have to remember anything, you just have to show up. (Of course this brings up all sorts of privacy/security issues about copying that data. I've met people with about $100 in the bank who are afraid of being killed and having someone cut off their thumb. Seriously.)
- Corporate paranoia. I've seen places where they take out the normal username/password, and put in clientside certificates, and then put BACK a webserver ACL protection. They're paranoid about turning off the passwords. Then they ask, what did we gain from certificates? Well, nothing. Solution: More knowledge usually lessens paranoia. A few companies out in front demonstrating that it can be done, a few Forrester reports or something saying that certificates are ok, and here look, company X is using them without a problem, will start getting the pointy haired bosses interested.
- Non portable. Although a variety of standards exist for transporting your certificates, see earlier point about the whole process being too confusing for the average surfer. Solution: Smart cards. Put the digital certificate, along with a copy of your thumbprint, on the card. Stick the card in, put your thumb on the scanner, it's you.
Those are a few of the main problems with certs, in my experience. Of course, each of those has it's own issues and could be an entire thread. But I'm at work doing non certificate related things, so I can't really discuss it all day.