Re:slashdot become marketing troll
on
Wikinomics
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I think this comment is a perfect example of my point. I didn't get paid anything for this review, except perhaps for a quick link to one of my books at the bottom. Clearly the kind of writers that you like have found other things to do with their time than writing the kind of review that you want to read. If, as one commenter suggests, that Slashdot is in decline, then I think it's just a canary-in-the-coal-mine for the entire wiki world.
The book was quite nice and there is nothing wrong with producing a clearly written, well-constructed exploration of thoughts that others have had. It takes plenty of work to do. Believe me. Plus, the fact that I suggested it as a gift for others should be a big fat clue that it's not for cutting edge folks.
Re:Wrong comparison - money and information
on
Wikinomics
·
· Score: 1
I think I mean that hoarde=not produce. Or if they produce it, they don't bother to go through the trouble of marking it up in HTML and posting it on a website. For instance, I could have just watched TV instead of subjecting myself to the slings and arrows of Slashdot complaints about people who don't like the phrasing of some sentence. Luckily I've got a thick skin and while I do care about whether people like words like "memespace", I have no problem taking a word out for a spin. It's more fun to me than sitting and watching TV.
Re:Wrong comparison - money and information
on
Wikinomics
·
· Score: 2, Informative
You're right that the comparison is not exact-- that's why I said "in much the same way."
In the free economy, time is the limiting factor. In an information economy, information is an asset. And so expensive information is information that takes a long time to create. Cheap information takes little. People share the cheap stuff and hoard the expensive stuff, if they have any expensive stuff at all. This is why most blogs concentrate on reacting to articles by the mainstream media. Original research is very expensive and most newspapers don't even have the time to pay much of an investigative staff any longer.
I don't think so. Or at least I didn't mean to give that impression. These are just the two extremes. The fact that they're not really true opposites might mean that there's some hope for a middle ground. The RIAA et al, worried about losses, is painting any tool for swapping files as a tool for theft. The creators, who often use the same tools, are losing their ability to rip, mix and burn culture, something that gave us so much before.
They didn't even get to my number. They took the first 12 that met their requirements and that came surprisingly quickly. They started off with 150+ in the room, but filled the jury box after going through about 35.
Re:Jury duty
on
Free Culture
·
· Score: 4, Informative
My "civic duty" involved sitting there. Just sitting there. Some watched a movie. Some read books. Others just talked.
I'm a big fan of fair use. I hate the DMCA. But behavior like this just makes me wonder. The free registration at the NYT is not that much of a pain. Sheesh. The newspaper world is being very cool, at least compared to the music and movie business. Let them make a few bucks on the ads so they can pay me.
One of the main ideas of the book is to just scramble the personal information but leave the impersonal information in the clear. So a store database might scramble the name and credit card number but leave the purchase information in the clear. The regular database operations work quickly on the items. The marketing department can figure out who bought how much of what. They can compute great stats. But they can't tell how much Bob Smith spent last month. So we get privacy and some efficiency. This is why it's translucent not opaque or transparent.
One of the other ideas explored in the book is blurring the data just the right amount. When this works, the sensitive data disappears but there's still enough information left around to do useful work. You can think of rounding off a person's age to be 30's, 40's or 50's instead of spelling it out. There are some better examples in the book about naval ships.
The techniques are far from perfect. Many of them aren't very new. They don't work for all situations. But I think they represent a different way of looking at the problem. The viewpoint may be the most novel part of the book.
I can see why Hettinga wants to tweak Brin, but that wasn't the point of the book. The solutions are, according to the metaphor, translucent , so that makes them half-transparent. I think these are pretty good compromises that, in the right circumstances, let DBAs have their cake and eat it too. The personal information is scrambled, but the rest is left in the clear. Some forms of scrutiny are possible even if the personal information is cloaked. There are, for instance, some interesting algorithms for electronic voting that preserve secrecy while avoiding all of the problems we recently encountered in FLA.
It's a deep field and there's plenty of room for interpreting and reinterpreting the right amount of light to let through the window.
Hey, you've got a point. What can I say? I sent the review of Minority Report in last Friday night. This is just how the queue dumped it out.
Unfortunately, the directions are pointed in the wrong way. I would be glad to give a great review to IBUC if it meant that Speilberg would buy the movie rights to Translucent Databases .:-) Boy that would be a snoozer.
Actually, some algorithms in the book unsuck
on
Translucent Databases
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
You make great points. There's no reason for innovation to keep sucking money out of your wallet. I think some of the techniques in the books will definitely take more cycles, but many of them won't.
The first, and most important point to remember, is that many of the cycles on your machine are going to waste. While you're reading Slashdot, the CPU is doing basic maintenance. Even the basic Pentium does little after the page is rendered. All of these cycles can be put to use.
Java applets are great (okay pretty good) technology that can put those cycles to work. The book uses Java so any developer can easily take their code and push it out to the user's machine. The same code runs on either the server or the client.
The code on the client is even more secure. It can do all of the encryption at the local machine and scramble the data before it hits the web. Voila. The server has less work and the client's wasted cycles are put to work.
Many of the other techniques in the book can make databases more efficient. It's hard to say how much, but it's important to remember that cryptographically secure hash functions like MD5 or SHA are also plain old hash functions. They do a good job of distributing the values. If you're using a hash function, the values in the column are very evenly distributed making binary search faster and more efficient. This might not be a big deal, but it's a step in the right direction.
Of course, some of the techniques just suck computations. Sorry. But if you need the security, they're there for you.
Some of the more important patents are expired. RSA and Diffie-Hellman are long gone. Many of the other techniques are protected by prior art. The UNIX password database, for instance, is a great example of a basic translucent database. That's 20 to 30 years old.
I wouldn't be surprised if there are patents out there, but I hope people will point to the ones they're talking about.
Or maybe only one if the code only runs on the server. It kind of depends where you run it. And to tell you the truth, you can recode it quickly and avoid all license costs. The examples are meant to be simple.
Drive though Sunnyvale sometime.. Architecturely its like driving through the 1970s..
Yes and no. There are big changes. Many of the Eichlers are being torn down by people who want something bigger. The rest have been renovated a number of times. The colors change with the fashions and so does the landscaping. If anything, the new drought regulations must have changed things dramatically between the 1950s and today. Now desert -like gardens are hip.
You're right that much of the architecture doesn't change over time. The Washington Monument looks pretty much the same. But details almost always change.
Here's another datapoint. The Levittown suburb looks very different from the original swirl of houses that, in the words of Pete Seeger, "all looked just the same." Every owner has added a porch here, a laundry room there, and now all of the houses are vastly different. In fact the historical society from the town deliberately bought one relatively unchanged house to preserve the memory of the 1950s.
Re:Timothy has obviously never read the short stor
on
Minority Report
·
· Score: 2
Yes, there's a difference, but that's not what I was talking about. This basic premise is that technology can pre-judge people and let us put them in jail before they do something. This is just as much part of the short story as the movie. The evolution is a bit different, but the assumptions are the same in both.
Funny you should make this joke
on
Minority Report
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I was eating dinner at a cafe last night and talking about the RIAA, the TCPA, the DMCA, and other four letter words. The music was too loud and everyone agreed that they would rather not have it. Someone joked that the RIAA would still make us find a way to pay for it. We laughed. Then someone pointed out that ASCAP and the RIAA do go to cafes and hit them up for royalties. So some of what we paid probably did go to the RIAA. And we had no choice in the matter.
I've got a retreaded version. Mattel is making them again and selling them under the Classic label. My original is long gone. The buttons wore out. The new one's got the same feel as the first. It's wonderful.
I've noticed that they are also shipping the baseball version. And I also have a micro-mini version of the football game that's about 1 inch square. It's a working version for the key chain. Don't miss it.
It was a great computer. I never owned one, but a friend did. He let me hack on it a bit. He was quite a sharp guy who knew how to toggle in the bootstrap loader. If I remember correctly, it was one of the last machines with a front panel. The Sol-20 I built soon afterwards managed without a panel.
I also just got a retro Mattel football game as a gift. What a wonderful era. It was cheaper than the original too!
Omidyar ran his consulting through a company called "Echo Bay Technology Group." It wasn't named after the Echo Bay in Nevada. The quotes him as saying, "It just sounded cool." That was abbreviated to eBay when he couldn't register EchoBay.com. The first auction site was just one page on the website for this consulting group, but it eventually outstripped everything else.
Slashdot Mirror
I think this comment is a perfect example of my point. I didn't get paid anything for this review, except perhaps for a quick link to one of my books at the bottom. Clearly the kind of writers that you like have found other things to do with their time than writing the kind of review that you want to read.
If, as one commenter suggests, that Slashdot is in decline, then I think it's just a canary-in-the-coal-mine for the entire wiki world.
The book was quite nice and there is nothing wrong with producing a clearly written, well-constructed exploration of thoughts that others have had. It takes plenty of work to do. Believe me. Plus, the fact that I suggested it as a gift for others should be a big fat clue that it's not for cutting edge folks.
I think I mean that hoarde=not produce. Or if they produce it, they don't bother to go through the trouble of marking it up in HTML and posting it on a website. For instance, I could have just watched TV instead of subjecting myself to the slings and arrows of Slashdot complaints about people who don't like the phrasing of some sentence. Luckily I've got a thick skin and while I do care about whether people like words like "memespace", I have no problem taking a word out for a spin. It's more fun to me than sitting and watching TV.
You're right that the comparison is not exact-- that's why I said "in much the same way."
In the free economy, time is the limiting factor. In an information economy, information is an asset. And so expensive information is information that takes a long time to create. Cheap information takes little. People share the cheap stuff and hoard the expensive stuff, if they have any expensive stuff at all. This is why most blogs concentrate on reacting to articles by the mainstream media. Original research is very expensive and most newspapers don't even have the time to pay much of an investigative staff any longer.
Kirk had the Razr. At least we've caught up with that generation.
Apart from being inflammatory,
:-)
Well, yes, it's kind of that.
this question sets up a false dichotomy,
I don't think so. Or at least I didn't mean to give that impression. These are just the two extremes. The fact that they're not really true opposites might mean that there's some hope for a middle ground. The RIAA et al, worried about losses, is painting any tool for swapping files as a tool for theft. The creators, who often use the same tools, are losing their ability to rip, mix and burn culture, something that gave us so much before.
They didn't even get to my number. They took the first 12 that met their requirements and that came surprisingly quickly. They started off with 150+ in the room, but filled the jury box after going through about 35.
My "civic duty" involved sitting there. Just sitting there. Some watched a movie. Some read books. Others just talked.
I'm a big fan of fair use. I hate the DMCA. But behavior like this just makes me wonder. The free registration at the NYT is not that much of a pain. Sheesh. The newspaper world is being very cool, at least compared to the music and movie business. Let them make a few bucks on the ads so they can pay me.
One of the main ideas of the book is to just scramble the personal information but leave the impersonal information in the clear. So a store database might scramble the name and credit card number but leave the purchase information in the clear. The regular database operations work quickly on the items. The marketing department can figure out who bought how much of what. They can compute great stats. But they can't tell how much Bob Smith spent last month. So we get privacy and some efficiency. This is why it's translucent not opaque or transparent.
One of the other ideas explored in the book is blurring the data just the right amount. When this works, the sensitive data disappears but there's still enough information left around to do useful work. You can think of rounding off a person's age to be 30's, 40's or 50's instead of spelling it out. There are some better examples in the book about naval ships.
The techniques are far from perfect. Many of them aren't very new. They don't work for all situations. But I think they represent a different way of looking at the problem. The viewpoint may be the most novel part of the book.
-Peter
Just for the record: nothing.
I can see why Hettinga wants to tweak Brin, but that wasn't the point of the book. The solutions are, according to the metaphor, translucent , so that makes them half-transparent. I think these are pretty good compromises that, in the right circumstances, let DBAs have their cake and eat it too. The personal information is scrambled, but the rest is left in the clear. Some forms of scrutiny are possible even if the personal information is cloaked. There are, for instance, some interesting algorithms for electronic voting that preserve secrecy while avoiding all of the problems we recently encountered in FLA.
It's a deep field and there's plenty of room for interpreting and reinterpreting the right amount of light to let through the window.
Hey, you've got a point. What can I say? I sent the review of Minority Report in last Friday night. This is just how the queue dumped it out.
:-) Boy that would be a snoozer.
Unfortunately, the directions are pointed in the wrong way. I would be glad to give a great review to IBUC if it meant that Speilberg would buy the movie rights to Translucent Databases .
The book's website ( http://www.wayner.org/books/td/ ) has an FAQ , the table of contents and more. Feel free to write me (p3@wayner.org) if you have more questions.
You make great points. There's no reason for innovation to keep sucking money out of your wallet. I think some of the techniques in the books will definitely take more cycles, but many of them won't.
The first, and most important point to remember, is that many of the cycles on your machine are going to waste. While you're reading Slashdot, the CPU is doing basic maintenance. Even the basic Pentium does little after the page is rendered. All of these cycles can be put to use.
Java applets are great (okay pretty good) technology that can put those cycles to work. The book uses Java so any developer can easily take their code and push it out to the user's machine. The same code runs on either the server or the client.
The code on the client is even more secure. It can do all of the encryption at the local machine and scramble the data before it hits the web. Voila. The server has less work and the client's wasted cycles are put to work.
Many of the other techniques in the book can make databases more efficient. It's hard to say how much, but it's important to remember that cryptographically secure hash functions like MD5 or SHA are also plain old hash functions. They do a good job of distributing the values. If you're using a hash function, the values in the column are very evenly distributed making binary search faster and more efficient. This might not be a big deal, but it's a step in the right direction.
Of course, some of the techniques just suck computations. Sorry. But if you need the security, they're there for you.
Some of the more important patents are expired. RSA and Diffie-Hellman are long gone. Many of the other techniques are protected by prior art. The UNIX password database, for instance, is a great example of a basic translucent database. That's 20 to 30 years old.
I wouldn't be surprised if there are patents out there, but I hope people will point to the ones they're talking about.
Which ones? Can you point to ones in particular?
Translucent. Apparently a typo.
Or maybe only one if the code only runs on the server. It kind of depends where you run it. And to tell you the truth, you can recode it quickly and avoid all license costs. The examples are meant to be simple.
Drive though Sunnyvale sometime.. Architecturely its like driving through the 1970s..
Yes and no. There are big changes. Many of the Eichlers are being torn down by people who want something bigger. The rest have been renovated a number of times. The colors change with the fashions and so does the landscaping. If anything, the new drought regulations must have changed things dramatically between the 1950s and today. Now desert -like gardens are hip.
You're right that much of the architecture doesn't change over time. The Washington Monument looks pretty much the same. But details almost always change.
Here's another datapoint. The Levittown suburb looks very different from the original swirl of houses that, in the words of Pete Seeger, "all looked just the same." Every owner has added a porch here, a laundry room there, and now all of the houses are vastly different. In fact the historical society from the town deliberately bought one relatively unchanged house to preserve the memory of the 1950s.
Yes, there's a difference, but that's not what I was talking about. This basic premise is that technology can pre-judge people and let us put them in jail before they do something. This is just as much part of the short story as the movie. The evolution is a bit different, but the assumptions are the same in both.
I was eating dinner at a cafe last night and talking about the RIAA, the TCPA, the DMCA, and other four letter words. The music was too loud and everyone agreed that they would rather not have it. Someone joked that the RIAA would still make us find a way to pay for it. We laughed. Then someone pointed out that ASCAP and the RIAA do go to cafes and hit them up for royalties. So some of what we paid probably did go to the RIAA. And we had no choice in the matter.
At least I got to listen to it.
Nada. You just write something long enough and they give up editing by the end. :-)
I've got a retreaded version. Mattel is making them again and selling them under the Classic label. My original is long gone. The buttons wore out. The new one's got the same feel as the first. It's wonderful.
I've noticed that they are also shipping the baseball version. And I also have a micro-mini version of the football game that's about 1 inch square. It's a working version for the key chain. Don't miss it.
It was a great computer. I never owned one, but a friend did. He let me hack on it a bit. He was quite a sharp guy who knew how to toggle in the bootstrap loader. If I remember correctly, it was one of the last machines with a front panel. The Sol-20 I built soon afterwards managed without a panel.
I also just got a retro Mattel football game as a gift. What a wonderful era. It was cheaper than the original too!
Omidyar ran his consulting through a company called "Echo Bay Technology Group." It wasn't named after the Echo Bay in Nevada. The quotes him as saying, "It just sounded cool." That was abbreviated to eBay when he couldn't register EchoBay.com. The first auction site was just one page on the website for this consulting group, but it eventually outstripped everything else.
(Pages 21-22)