I just read Good Germs Bad Germs by Jessica Snyder Sachs, a fascinating, accessible and up-to-date account of roughly the same subject matter. Will change your view on bacteria forever.
Let me remind you what table-top role-playing used to mean, at least with a good group and GM. It used to mean just that: playing a role, as in a theatre play. The whole point was taking part in an interactive fiction exercise, sorta like being co-autor in a theatre play.
The theatrical aspect is exactly what appealed to me back in the old days when I had still plenty of time on my hands to frolic around with my friends and some dice and GURPS. The interesting thing to do was to get into some method acting. There was this guy, an apprehensive and eloquent young man, who had chosen to play the role of a big, stupid brute with a speech impediment. He stuck very close to his role, and he cracked us up every time he roared "I d..d..d..draw my s..s..sword and cc..c..cut off his f..f..fucking head!"
In another situation I myself was playing a character who was always poking mischief at other people. I was playing with this guy I hardly knew and who had called himself "Bloodshed". I was constantly mispronouncing his name, calling him things like "Bullshit". He obviously didn't know about my character's trait because after that session he never talked to me again.
Whatever you do, be sure to read the following article first. It's a bit dated, but it's written by people who definitely know what they are talking about (Seagate engineers) and may help put things in perspective. The hefty pricetag of SCSI does not depend on the interface. Read this and you'll now why.
The Road to Reality is a ferociously difficult book if you only did high school math. My feeling is that at least the mathematical introduction should have been at least two times as long. As it is, you often get the feeling that so much is left out that it might as well have not been written. For instance, this is how Penrose deals with linear algebra: he starts out with explaining what matrices are, deals with linear trafo's, determinants, traces, eigenvalues and eigenvectors, and finally introduces Lie Algebra's... all in 15 pages (including some illustrations). Unless you already know this stuff, forget about understanding it.
Be prepared to do a lot of digging on mathworld, wikipedia and some trips to the library.
What works for me is reading this book with a couple of friends, one of whom is mathematically educated. Your mileage may vary.
Does anybody have an informed idea about how they do the full-text instant search results trick? I use Opera's mail client, and it does the same trick when searching your mail. It is pretty impressive, algorithmically speaking. To pull this off, standard inverted files used by search engines are probably too slow. I personally suspect they use some variant of a suffix tree. Maybe some of you know for a fact how they do it?
(1) publishing what exactly they consider to be a single metatag keyword (e.g. a string of alphanumeric characters) (2) publishing that they will only process the first, say, ten metatag keywords in a document. (3) acting accordingly
A healthy competition would evolve. Other engines would follow suit. Problem solved. No lawyers needed.
Although I detest this verdict, I cannot say Lindows didn't have it coming. The name is a deliberate gamble. And when you gamble, you win some and you lose some. They won a lot free publicity all around the globe. Now they lost a case. Big deal. It's all in the game.
No offense, but your argumentation leads me to believe you have no idea what you're talking about. I suggest you pick up a book about information retrieval, e.g. Modern Information Retrieval by Baeza-Yates and Ribeiro-Neto. Or at least the seminal paper about Google, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine. It's a fun read.
Obviously, Google has to do a lot of acrobatics to keep its service as fast as possible. One of the things it does is distributing its database over a lot of servers. There is no way that they can dynamically sift through hundreds of millions of pages for each common word, so they obviously just look at the top pages for each word. Which pages are top is probably determined by pagerank or something similar.
When you do this, there is no guarantee that you will get hits for every single combination of words out there. However, it may very well be possible to calculate the probability of relevant results not showing up and using this measure to make a more or less optimal trade-off between response time and user satisfaction.
When you start tweaking this trade-off, certain queries are bound to get screwed up. It probably takes them some time to notice this behavior, gather statistics and re-tweak their formula.
Another thing that crossed my mind recently is that they might be using precooked phrases or word collocations instead of single words. This makes sense since they use an implicit AND operator, it improves statistics and words are often strongly correlated anyway so your vocabulary probably wouldn't swell as much as you'd expect.
Mind you, this is pure speculation. I don't have any intimate knowledge about Google's inner workings.
One of the neat things of Real Life is the massive amount of energy the makers put in emulating old hardware like for instance Intel Pentium IV systems (anyone remember those?). On these you can actually play bit-perfect versions of thousands of games, among which precursors of the game itself. It was called the Sims I think. Talking about Easter Eggs!
Duh.. The other way around would be a much cooler hack, because it would be even more useless: software to convert an mp3 into a huge PNG of a well worn record, that plays just fine when fed back into this guys software.
> though it's interesting to note that even now > some indie bands (notably the White Stripes with > their recent Elephant album) are still releasing > stuff on vinyl.
This sentence strikes me as slightly weird: why would I buy the latest White Stripes on vinyl if I was intending to convert it into mp3? Maybe because of the artwork? *shrugs*
Cool record btw, although De Stijl remains their best.
> I don't feel I have the time or money to invest > in trying to pick women up in the old fshioned > ways so online methods can be a big help.
The way you talk about it ("time nor money", "pick up women") you don't sound like you're ready for a relationship at all. Getting to know someone costs a lot of time and energy, and, since you bring it up: yes, usually money as well. The internet is no shortcut to that. Granted, it might be easier to find people sharing your interests, but the lion's share of the considerable investment of building something together remains the same.
5. Death Machine - Stephen Norrington 4. The irrefutable truth about demons - Glen Standring 3. Manhunter - Michael Mann 2. Strange Days - Kathryn Bigelow 1. Reanimator - Brian Yuzna
Dvorak is predicting that Apple will start migrating from Motorola to Intel's Itanium within a year, and he has some credible arguments to back it up.
Am I missing something?
on
Film Gimp
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
While the MPAA is campaigning for new restrictions on content, the artists at the studios are using and helping create open source.
This is highly suggestive. AFAIK Open Source does not equate to being against anti-piracy measures. I am not trying to defend the MPAA here. I am only saying that these are two different things, and mixing them up is bad polics.
Elsewhere he carries a shaving kit, comprehensive first aid gear, a mini-saw, blow-up mattress, spare batteries, a change of clothes, a water-pouch, a water-filtering unit, soldering iron, tape-measure, digital camera...
That should create an interesting dilemma for this person, not unlike the dilemma faced by the barber who would only shave people that didn't shave themselves.
If the HTML-standard had imposed a limit on the number of meta-keywords a webmaster may enter for her page (say 10 max), webmasters would have been forced to think about which words they were including. It's the perceived lack of scarcity of resources that prevents a healthy "keyword-economy" from developing.
In my opininion it would still be possible to turn this thing around. If a couple of big search engines plastered an announcement all over their sites: "We only look at the first ten uniqe meta-keywords", things might change for the better.
Re:Linux torvalds is 3 degrees from Kevin Bacon
on
Revolution OS
·
· Score: 1
And Eric S. Raymond a Traci Lords number of 3! Or is it the other way around? Check it out
It seems to me that Google's (patent-pending) pagerank algorithm wouldn't be of much help on an intraweb. The linkstructure of a single website mostly reflects design decisions, and hardly says anything about the popularity/authority/value of a page. And even if it did, it wouldn't be very objective (let's call that "inter-subjective") since the site is probably maintained by a rather small group of people.
If that is so, why choose Google over a cheaper competitor?
Slashdot Mirror
I just read Good Germs Bad Germs by Jessica Snyder Sachs, a fascinating, accessible and up-to-date account of roughly the same subject matter. Will change your view on bacteria forever.
http://www.amazon.com/Good-Germs-Bad-Survival-Bacterial/dp/0809050633
I for one don't hope they find any signs of any kind of life whatsoever. Here's why:
https://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20569/
An intricate argument but well worth the read. (Bugmenot has passwords if you're too lazy to sign in.)
You can also omit the last quote of a phrase: /"to be or not to be/
The theatrical aspect is exactly what appealed to me back in the old days when I had still plenty of time on my hands to frolic around with my friends and some dice and GURPS. The interesting thing to do was to get into some method acting. There was this guy, an apprehensive and eloquent young man, who had chosen to play the role of a big, stupid brute with a speech impediment. He stuck very close to his role, and he cracked us up every time he roared "I d..d..d..draw my s..s..sword and cc..c..cut off his f..f..fucking head!"
In another situation I myself was playing a character who was always poking mischief at other people. I was playing with this guy I hardly knew and who had called himself "Bloodshed". I was constantly mispronouncing his name, calling him things like "Bullshit". He obviously didn't know about my character's trait because after that session he never talked to me again.
Whatever you do, be sure to read the following article first. It's a bit dated, but it's written by people who definitely know what they are talking about (Seagate engineers) and may help put things in perspective. The hefty pricetag of SCSI does not depend on the interface. Read this and you'll now why.
r /D2c_More_than_Interface_ATA_vs_SCSI_042003.pdf
http://www.seagate.com/content/docs/pdf/whitepape
The Road to Reality is a ferociously difficult book if you only did high school math. My feeling is that at least the mathematical introduction should have been at least two times as long. As it is, you often get the feeling that so much is left out that it might as well have not been written. For instance, this is how Penrose deals with linear algebra: he starts out with explaining what matrices are, deals with linear trafo's, determinants, traces, eigenvalues and eigenvectors, and finally introduces Lie Algebra's... all in 15 pages (including some illustrations). Unless you already know this stuff, forget about understanding it.
Be prepared to do a lot of digging on mathworld, wikipedia and some trips to the library.
What works for me is reading this book with a couple of friends, one of whom is mathematically educated. Your mileage may vary.
Does anybody have an informed idea about how they do the full-text instant search results trick? I use Opera's mail client, and it does the same trick when searching your mail. It is pretty impressive, algorithmically speaking. To pull this off, standard inverted files used by search engines are probably too slow. I personally suspect they use some variant of a suffix tree. Maybe some of you know for a fact how they do it?
AskJolene.com works for me. (And disclaimer: I work for AskJolene ;)
(1) publishing what exactly they consider to be a single metatag keyword (e.g. a string of alphanumeric characters)
(2) publishing that they will only process the first, say, ten metatag keywords in a document.
(3) acting accordingly
A healthy competition would evolve. Other engines would follow suit. Problem solved. No lawyers needed.
Although I detest this verdict, I cannot say Lindows didn't have it coming. The name is a deliberate gamble. And when you gamble, you win some and you lose some. They won a lot free publicity all around the globe. Now they lost a case. Big deal. It's all in the game.
No offense, but your argumentation leads me to believe you have no idea what you're talking about. I suggest you pick up a book about information retrieval, e.g. Modern Information Retrieval by Baeza-Yates and Ribeiro-Neto. Or at least the seminal paper about Google, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine. It's a fun read.
Obviously, Google has to do a lot of acrobatics to keep its service as fast as possible. One of the things it does is distributing its database over a lot of servers. There is no way that they can dynamically sift through hundreds of millions of pages for each common word, so they obviously just look at the top pages for each word. Which pages are top is probably determined by pagerank or something similar.
When you do this, there is no guarantee that you will get hits for every single combination of words out there. However, it may very well be possible to calculate the probability of relevant results not showing up and using this measure to make a more or less optimal trade-off between response time and user satisfaction.
When you start tweaking this trade-off, certain queries are bound to get screwed up. It probably takes them some time to notice this behavior, gather statistics and re-tweak their formula.
Another thing that crossed my mind recently is that they might be using precooked phrases or word collocations instead of single words. This makes sense since they use an implicit AND operator, it improves statistics and words are often strongly correlated anyway so your vocabulary probably wouldn't swell as much as you'd expect.
Mind you, this is pure speculation. I don't have any intimate knowledge about Google's inner workings.
One of the neat things of Real Life is the massive amount of energy the makers put in emulating old hardware like for instance Intel Pentium IV systems (anyone remember those?). On these you can actually play bit-perfect versions of thousands of games, among which precursors of the game itself. It was called the Sims I think. Talking about Easter Eggs!
Duh.. The other way around would be a much cooler hack, because it would be even more useless: software to convert an mp3 into a huge PNG of a well worn record, that plays just fine when fed back into this guys software.
> though it's interesting to note that even now
> some indie bands (notably the White Stripes with
> their recent Elephant album) are still releasing
> stuff on vinyl.
This sentence strikes me as slightly weird: why would I buy the latest White Stripes on vinyl if I was intending to convert it into mp3? Maybe because of the artwork? *shrugs*
Cool record btw, although De Stijl remains their best.
> I don't feel I have the time or money to invest
> in trying to pick women up in the old fshioned
> ways so online methods can be a big help.
The way you talk about it ("time nor money", "pick up women") you don't sound like you're ready for a relationship at all. Getting to know someone costs a lot of time and energy, and, since you bring it up: yes, usually money as well. The internet is no shortcut to that. Granted, it might be easier to find people sharing your interests, but the lion's share of the considerable investment of building something together remains the same.
Can someone shed some light on the relation between Universal Hashing and the Rabin Fingerprint?
..in some generally underappreciated genres
5. Death Machine - Stephen Norrington
4. The irrefutable truth about demons - Glen Standring
3. Manhunter - Michael Mann
2. Strange Days - Kathryn Bigelow
1. Reanimator - Brian Yuzna
Dvorak is predicting that Apple will start migrating from Motorola to Intel's Itanium within a year, and he has some credible arguments to back it up.
While the MPAA is campaigning for new restrictions on content, the artists at the studios are using and helping create open source.
This is highly suggestive. AFAIK Open Source does not equate to being against anti-piracy measures. I am not trying to defend the MPAA here. I am only saying that these are two different things, and mixing them up is bad polics.
Elsewhere he carries a shaving kit, comprehensive first aid gear, a mini-saw, blow-up mattress, spare batteries, a change of clothes, a water-pouch, a water-filtering unit, soldering iron, tape-measure, digital camera ...
That should create an interesting dilemma for this person, not unlike the dilemma faced by the barber who would only shave people that didn't shave themselves.
If the HTML-standard had imposed a limit on the number of meta-keywords a webmaster may enter for her page (say 10 max), webmasters would have been forced to think about which words they were including. It's the perceived lack of scarcity of resources that prevents a healthy "keyword-economy" from developing.
In my opininion it would still be possible to turn this thing around. If a couple of big search engines plastered an announcement all over their sites: "We only look at the first ten uniqe meta-keywords", things might change for the better.
And Eric S. Raymond a Traci Lords number of 3! Or is it the other way around?
Check it out
Because of the /. effect xenu.net is now effectively unreachable. Way to go.
It seems to me that Google's (patent-pending) pagerank algorithm wouldn't be of much help on an intraweb. The linkstructure of a single website mostly reflects design decisions, and hardly says anything about the popularity/authority/value of a page. And even if it did, it wouldn't be very objective (let's call that "inter-subjective") since the site is probably maintained by a rather small group of people.
If that is so, why choose Google over a cheaper competitor?