I am angry. Any sane person who has lived with the horror of deadly violence knows that it cannot become entertainment. The fact that it is based on real events makes it intolerable as a game. Peter Tamte's boasts about it have re-traumatized hundreds of thousands of survivors, at a time when violence is on the rise in our nation.
Nick Arnett, grief counselor with the Bay Area Critical Incident Stress Management Team and extended family of a Marine killed in action in Fallujah 11/10/2004.
I *think* the first computer I owned was an NEC PC-8201A... and I still have two of them. I mentioned something about it once at a lunch with Bill Gates, who was all smiles talking about how it had the best implementation of BASIC ever. Later, I asked one of the original MS employees what the deal was about that. He said it was probably the last piece of code that Bill actually worked directly on. I haven't seen Bill for years, but if our paths cross again and I want to make him smile, I guess I know how.
The first computer I ever used was on the top floor of Scaife Hall at Carnegie Tech -- now CMU. It was a mainframe, IBM, if I recall correctly. It was one of the university's five computers at that original center. I was part of a research project to see if kids could use computers, a mystery back then (I was 11). We learned some interactive system and later Algol on it.
Feeling more fear doesn't mean that you're cowardly. In fact, if you feel no fear, it's impossible to be courageous, since courage is the overcoming of fear.
The person who is afraid and acts anyway is the courageous one. What's the old saying?
I've been using this technique for years... We partially developed it at Opion, now part of Intelliseek, and I'm currently using it as one of a number of methods to find out what's going on in developer communities. It's not necessarily even all that clever, since the data are readily available by comparing the statistics that search engines inherently create.
The intelligence agencies have always been closely involved in search technology, one way or another (who else has lots of text *and* money?). So it is not at all unusual to find leaders in the field who have been associated with them, directly or indirectly. Verity, for example, began as a project for the CIA by Advanced Decision Systems. When I was at Verity, there was hardly anything "new" that we created in our products that hadn't been done in one way or another on a custom basis for the agencies.
Have you looked at the balance sheet? Sun's cash dropped $100 million last year. Current assets -- what the company runs on -- dropped $1.1 billion (divide the total, $6.8 billion, by that number, and you get a vague idea of how long it can survive at the current burn rate). Net tangible assets dropped about $600 million. No matter how you look at it, Sun *must* turn its financials around, or as Cringely suggested, its days could be numbered.
But I'll happily acknowledge that Cringely is a professional troll -- I know because I've *been* Robert X. Cringely!
I'm not offering this to predict the fall of Sun, just to get some more facts on the table. It has been a very tech-driven company, achieving leadership through product innovation. But that's not a good way to make money in this economy, where new products aren't getting much attention and investment. Industries go through product innovation cycles that are followed by process innovation... which is why customers are looking more at cost-efficiency than new capabilities.
Nick
"Kil'n People" in the U.K.
on
Kiln People
·
· Score: 2, Informative
In the U.K, the paperback version actually is titled "Kil'n People." I've asked David if the title was a deliberate pun, since so many dittos die, but he doesn't seem to want to say if it was or not (which also leaves me wondering if I gave him the idea in the first place). Nobody so far has mentioned the incredible number of puns in the novel, which come increasingly frequently through the end. David did admit that he held back some of the worst puns he imagined.
Considering that the mass media is fundamentally in the business of "selling eyeballs to advertisers," it seems quite reasonable to infer that this research would help them. Gotta attract the eyeballs to be able to sell them...
These are companies who have been accustomed for decades to domination of the industry through their control of distribution. They have consistently rejected new technology that would threaten that control, even when it was clear that consumers wanted it.
IIRC, in 1985, I wrote a piece for Rolling Stone about a company, Personics, that had a system that would allow people to make custom audio cassettes at high quality and speed in music stores. People loved it because it was what they were doing ANYWAY -- making tapes of their favorite songs in the order they wanted. But the record companies used their control of music copyrights to deny Personics access to popular music. And this was in spite of the fact that it partially solved the enormous cost of returns from music stores (50 percent) and the lost sales when sudden hits weren't in stock (and most hits are sudden hits).
Here we are 17 years later and they're still abusing copyright to control distribution of music. Personic's founder had a good idea -- create a compulsory license for music distribution, similar to the one that exists for music performance.
Belle Haven School is not in Palo Alto; it is in a nearby community that barely resembles the wealth and privilege of Palo Alto. It's on the other side of the freeway, from Palo Alto, in a different county. Most of the students are from East Palo Alto and the Belle Haven area of Menlo Park, both on the other side of the freeway. (I'm on the board of directors of Plugged In, which is a community technology center, born in Belle Haven, now in East Palo Alto.
BEEP came to life as BXXP at Invisible Worlds a few years back, where I was an executive. Our goal for a while was to use it to federate heterogenous search engines. Invisible is no more, but the protocol lives. A lot of thought by people with a great deal of Internet architecture went into it... but I'm not about to pass judgment on whether or not that's a good thing!
"Music sharing may cut down on superstars and promote new music" is not something the industry wants to hear. Sales of music by superstars are predictable and that's what the entertainment industry loves about stars-- that's why the pay at the high end is asymptotic in music, movies, etc. And that's why the industry tries to create stars.
I wrote about one of the first digital custom music systems (Personics) for Rolling Stone in the mid-80s, and even back then, the industry feared technology because it might break their stranglehold on distribution. They've long been using copyright law to prevent any technology that would broaden distribution and therefore create broader choice in music.
In-Q-Tel is a venture capital fund set up by the CIA to invest in technologies that may serve the intelligence community. This is not a CIA contract for search technology. The CIA was Verity Inc.'s first big customer and as far as I know, they're still mostly using Verity internally (I managed Verity Internet products for years).
This is not a patent on RDF, as the original posting suggested. It has something to do with the way RDF works.
I was an original member of the W3C working group on RDF and I don't recall anybody associated with this company being involved. The main inventor of RDF was R.V. Guha, who was at Apple at the time.
It took a long time for the invention of printing to lead to the American revolution's pamphleteering. Paine and related authors were deeply inspired by Milton (see Areopagitica), who lived a century earlier... whose writings came about a century and a half after Gutenberg. Figuring that the Internet is at most 30 years old, the next Thomas Paine might not arise for 220 years, if the timeline is similar. However, a new Martin Luther might be here in just 20 years or so, leading the world out from under corporate, rather than church, dominance. Paul Saffo (Institute for the Future) makes a good case that it always takes technology 20-30 years to go from invention to widespread impact -- things just seem to move faster now. Patience, Jon.
Alan Kay described the missing piece of information-laden systems very well many years ago, saying that until computers can respond *intelligently* to the request, "Show me something interesting," we still have a long way to go. We're still just following paths, for the most part. "Generally, when you are finding things, the last thing you want to do is follow paths," Kay said in 1988, talking about how user interfaces were becoming inadequate. "You need something that gets you to the general area, then you follow a path, because most of the stuff you want, you don't even think of. It's very hard to remember all the things you're interested in." That's still true and we still don't have systems that respond with much intelligence to "Show me something interesting."
A venture capitalist suggested that I read Brin's "Earth" years ago. Since then, I've re-read it twice, getting more out of it each time. A lot of the ideas he covered as non-fiction in "The Transparent Society" were present in "Earth." Of course, it's hard to measure how much Brin influenced the world with his vision of the effects of networking, v. how much he simply foresaw many of its effects. I know it influenced me considerably and I passed on many of the ideas in my talks at many of the early Web-related conferences.
It would be pretty darn simple to write one, given the various public domain sources for robots, most of which support robots.txt. All you'd have to do is reverse the logic of which pages to look at.
More to the point, anybody who is using robots.txt to keep information secret totally misunderstands its purpose. It has absolutely nothing to do with secrecy. Its purpose is to keep robots out of pages that shouldn't be crawled for other reasons. Examples include pages that change so fast that by the time they roll into a search engine index, they'll already have changed, or pages generated dynamically, which can send robots into black holes of recursion.
If you're seriously interested in robots.txt, there's a mailing list for it (I'm the owner). Send "subscribe robots" in the body of a message to "listar@mccmedia.com". Robots.txt could get smarter, but it'll never, ever, be a privacy mechanism. It is focused on publicly accessible pages, after all.
At my last startup, before we launched one of our services (pseuds.org), we controlled access via DNS by pointing "www.pseuds.org" to a placeholder page. Testing showed that it was indeed secure. Unfortunately, nobody noticed that the DNS entry for "pseuds.org" pointed to the unannounced site, which led it to appear on several search engines before long. Since we hadn't linked to it from anywhere public, I'm guessing that at least some of the search engines use domain registration info to find starting points for their robots.
The real irony of this was that my co-founder ran the InterNIC for a while and the employees responsible were former employees of Network Solutions. Of course, some of you will not be a bit surprised by that...
Picking out the "irrelevant" words is much harder than creating tags that contain the most relevant ones, which is the main point of meta-tags. Most of us have brains that are trained to pick out what is important, not the opposite, so few people would bother to implement this. Language is hard, computers are dumb and few people have been willing to "explain" language to them to make search smarter.
In other words, nothing like works on a significant scale if much effort has to go into it. Tagging important words can be semi-automated with summarization software, which will accomplish much more in terms of relevancy ranking than tagging the ones to ignore.
And by the way, this proposal misunderstands robots.txt. The point isn't to conceal the existence of pages, it is to tell *robots*, not people, to stay away from them. (I'm the owner of the mailing list for it.
Back in the days when I'd see Bill regularly (1988-1993 or so), I discovered that mentioning the Model 100 would always put him in a good mood. I had earlier done some work with the NEC PC-8201A, which is the same computer under the manufacturer's brand. He was so darn happy about how they squeezed such a good implementation of BASIC into that machine. Now I wonder if that's why Bill referred consulting customers to me and was so friendly... I didn't realize that it was the last thing Bill personally worked on until much later, when I mentioned it to Tom Corrdry, who worked at Microsoft before it was Microsoft.
While it's good to see this story on the record, now *everybody* knows my secret to putting Bill in a good mood. Well, if our paths cross again, I'm sure he'll remember that I was praising hte Model 100 long, long ago.
I still have two 8201As in my closet. Wonder if they're worth something.
It seems quite likely that *stupid* privacy legislation would carry a huge, unnecessary price tag. So what kind of legislation is appropriate? How much privacy can be achieved with technology alone, without any change in current law?
Considering the nature of the Internet, isn't it possible to achieve a high level of privacy without new laws? What kind of laws would smooth the way for technology-based solutions?
From my viewpoint, the greatest value of cultural diversity on-line, which doesn't get much attention, is exposure to diverse points of view, which mass media hasn't been giving us. I The benefits of participating in diverse on-line communities resemble those of bio-diversity: there are more approaches to problem-solving, which increases the system's stability and responsiveness to stress... even though internally, there's more chaos. I'm alluding to complexity theory here, with its odd marriage of chaos and order.
Inexpensive distribution of new points of view can have a deep impact even when only a portion of the population can access them at the source. Five hundred years ago in Europe, much of the population was illiterate, but *everybody* was quickly talking about Martin Luther's theses challenging the alleged supreme ruler of the universe. Those who could read shared the ideas with those who couldn't. This is not an argument against bringing technology to under-served communities (I'm on the board of Plugged In (http://www.pluggedin.org/, which does exactly that). It's an argument against the idealists who insist that all people must have free net access or we're doomed.
See http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/294779.html for some research at Stanford on technology that especially applies to building very fast switches. This is standard CMOS at 50 Ghz. The researcher used to work for Intel on the Pentium chips -- I can remember when he was working on trying to break the 1 Ghz barrier... Not sure if the record has been broken, but he told me a few months ago that he had made the fastest processer to date, which was 20+ Ghz. He said built a radar with it...
Slashdot Mirror
I am angry. Any sane person who has lived with the horror of deadly violence knows that it cannot become entertainment. The fact that it is based on real events makes it intolerable as a game. Peter Tamte's boasts about it have re-traumatized hundreds of thousands of survivors, at a time when violence is on the rise in our nation.
Nick Arnett, grief counselor with the Bay Area Critical Incident Stress Management Team and extended family of a Marine killed in action in Fallujah 11/10/2004.
I *think* the first computer I owned was an NEC PC-8201A... and I still have two of them. I mentioned something about it once at a lunch with Bill Gates, who was all smiles talking about how it had the best implementation of BASIC ever. Later, I asked one of the original MS employees what the deal was about that. He said it was probably the last piece of code that Bill actually worked directly on. I haven't seen Bill for years, but if our paths cross again and I want to make him smile, I guess I know how.
The first computer I ever used was on the top floor of Scaife Hall at Carnegie Tech -- now CMU. It was a mainframe, IBM, if I recall correctly. It was one of the university's five computers at that original center. I was part of a research project to see if kids could use computers, a mystery back then (I was 11). We learned some interactive system and later Algol on it.
Feeling more fear doesn't mean that you're cowardly. In fact, if you feel no fear, it's impossible to be courageous, since courage is the overcoming of fear.
The person who is afraid and acts anyway is the courageous one. What's the old saying?
Nick
David shows up to talk about this and various other subjects on Brin-L: http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
I've been using this technique for years... We partially developed it at Opion, now part of Intelliseek, and I'm currently using it as one of a number of methods to find out what's going on in developer communities. It's not necessarily even all that clever, since the data are readily available by comparing the statistics that search engines inherently create.
Nick
The intelligence agencies have always been closely involved in search technology, one way or another (who else has lots of text *and* money?). So it is not at all unusual to find leaders in the field who have been associated with them, directly or indirectly. Verity, for example, began as a project for the CIA by Advanced Decision Systems. When I was at Verity, there was hardly anything "new" that we created in our products that hadn't been done in one way or another on a custom basis for the agencies.
Have you looked at the balance sheet? Sun's cash dropped $100 million last year. Current assets -- what the company runs on -- dropped $1.1 billion (divide the total, $6.8 billion, by that number, and you get a vague idea of how long it can survive at the current burn rate). Net tangible assets dropped about $600 million. No matter how you look at it, Sun *must* turn its financials around, or as Cringely suggested, its days could be numbered.
But I'll happily acknowledge that Cringely is a professional troll -- I know because I've *been* Robert X. Cringely!
I'm not offering this to predict the fall of Sun, just to get some more facts on the table. It has been a very tech-driven company, achieving leadership through product innovation. But that's not a good way to make money in this economy, where new products aren't getting much attention and investment. Industries go through product innovation cycles that are followed by process innovation... which is why customers are looking more at cost-efficiency than new capabilities.
Nick
In the U.K, the paperback version actually is titled "Kil'n People." I've asked David if the title was a deliberate pun, since so many dittos die, but he doesn't seem to want to say if it was or not (which also leaves me wondering if I gave him the idea in the first place). Nobody so far has mentioned the incredible number of puns in the novel, which come increasingly frequently through the end. David did admit that he held back some of the worst puns he imagined.
Nick
Considering that the mass media is fundamentally in the business of "selling eyeballs to advertisers," it seems quite reasonable to infer that this research would help them. Gotta attract the eyeballs to be able to sell them...
These are companies who have been accustomed for decades to domination of the industry through their control of distribution. They have consistently rejected new technology that would threaten that control, even when it was clear that consumers wanted it.
IIRC, in 1985, I wrote a piece for Rolling Stone about a company, Personics, that had a system that would allow people to make custom audio cassettes at high quality and speed in music stores. People loved it because it was what they were doing ANYWAY -- making tapes of their favorite songs in the order they wanted. But the record companies used their control of music copyrights to deny Personics access to popular music. And this was in spite of the fact that it partially solved the enormous cost of returns from music stores (50 percent) and the lost sales when sudden hits weren't in stock (and most hits are sudden hits).
Here we are 17 years later and they're still abusing copyright to control distribution of music. Personic's founder had a good idea -- create a compulsory license for music distribution, similar to the one that exists for music performance.
Nick
Belle Haven School is not in Palo Alto; it is in a nearby community that barely resembles the wealth and privilege of Palo Alto. It's on the other side of the freeway, from Palo Alto, in a different county. Most of the students are from East Palo Alto and the Belle Haven area of Menlo Park, both on the other side of the freeway. (I'm on the board of directors of Plugged In, which is a community technology center, born in Belle Haven, now in East Palo Alto.
BEEP came to life as BXXP at Invisible Worlds a few years back, where I was an executive. Our goal for a while was to use it to federate heterogenous search engines. Invisible is no more, but the protocol lives. A lot of thought by people with a great deal of Internet architecture went into it... but I'm not about to pass judgment on whether or not that's a good thing!
"Music sharing may cut down on superstars and promote new music" is not something the industry wants to hear. Sales of music by superstars are predictable and that's what the entertainment industry loves about stars-- that's why the pay at the high end is asymptotic in music, movies, etc. And that's why the industry tries to create stars.
I wrote about one of the first digital custom music systems (Personics) for Rolling Stone in the mid-80s, and even back then, the industry feared technology because it might break their stranglehold on distribution. They've long been using copyright law to prevent any technology that would broaden distribution and therefore create broader choice in music.
In-Q-Tel is a venture capital fund set up by the CIA to invest in technologies that may serve the intelligence community. This is not a CIA contract for search technology. The CIA was Verity Inc.'s first big customer and as far as I know, they're still mostly using Verity internally (I managed Verity Internet products for years).
And the article misspelled Gilman Louie's name...
Nick
This is not a patent on RDF, as the original posting suggested. It has something to do with the way RDF works.
I was an original member of the W3C working group on RDF and I don't recall anybody associated with this company being involved. The main inventor of RDF was R.V. Guha, who was at Apple at the time.
Nick
It took a long time for the invention of printing to lead to the American revolution's pamphleteering. Paine and related authors were deeply inspired by Milton (see Areopagitica), who lived a century earlier... whose writings came about a century and a half after Gutenberg. Figuring that the Internet is at most 30 years old, the next Thomas Paine might not arise for 220 years, if the timeline is similar. However, a new Martin Luther might be here in just 20 years or so, leading the world out from under corporate, rather than church, dominance. Paul Saffo (Institute for the Future) makes a good case that it always takes technology 20-30 years to go from invention to widespread impact -- things just seem to move faster now. Patience, Jon.
Alan Kay described the missing piece of information-laden systems very well many years ago, saying that until computers can respond *intelligently* to the request, "Show me something interesting," we still have a long way to go. We're still just following paths, for the most part. "Generally, when you are finding things, the last thing you want to do is follow paths," Kay said in 1988, talking about how user interfaces were becoming inadequate. "You need something that gets you to the general area, then you follow a path, because most of the stuff you want, you don't even think of. It's very hard to remember all the things you're interested in." That's still true and we still don't have systems that respond with much intelligence to "Show me something interesting."
A venture capitalist suggested that I read Brin's "Earth" years ago. Since then, I've re-read it twice, getting more out of it each time. A lot of the ideas he covered as non-fiction in "The Transparent Society" were present in "Earth." Of course, it's hard to measure how much Brin influenced the world with his vision of the effects of networking, v. how much he simply foresaw many of its effects. I know it influenced me considerably and I passed on many of the ideas in my talks at many of the early Web-related conferences.
It would be pretty darn simple to write one, given the various public domain sources for robots, most of which support robots.txt. All you'd have to do is reverse the logic of which pages to look at.
More to the point, anybody who is using robots.txt to keep information secret totally misunderstands its purpose. It has absolutely nothing to do with secrecy. Its purpose is to keep robots out of pages that shouldn't be crawled for other reasons. Examples include pages that change so fast that by the time they roll into a search engine index, they'll already have changed, or pages generated dynamically, which can send robots into black holes of recursion.
If you're seriously interested in robots.txt, there's a mailing list for it (I'm the owner). Send "subscribe robots" in the body of a message to "listar@mccmedia.com". Robots.txt could get smarter, but it'll never, ever, be a privacy mechanism. It is focused on publicly accessible pages, after all.
Nick
At my last startup, before we launched one of our services (pseuds.org), we controlled access via DNS by pointing "www.pseuds.org" to a placeholder page. Testing showed that it was indeed secure. Unfortunately, nobody noticed that the DNS entry for "pseuds.org" pointed to the unannounced site, which led it to appear on several search engines before long. Since we hadn't linked to it from anywhere public, I'm guessing that at least some of the search engines use domain registration info to find starting points for their robots.
The real irony of this was that my co-founder ran the InterNIC for a while and the employees responsible were former employees of Network Solutions. Of course, some of you will not be a bit surprised by that...
Picking out the "irrelevant" words is much harder than creating tags that contain the most relevant ones, which is the main point of meta-tags. Most of us have brains that are trained to pick out what is important, not the opposite, so few people would bother to implement this. Language is hard, computers are dumb and few people have been willing to "explain" language to them to make search smarter. In other words, nothing like works on a significant scale if much effort has to go into it. Tagging important words can be semi-automated with summarization software, which will accomplish much more in terms of relevancy ranking than tagging the ones to ignore. And by the way, this proposal misunderstands robots.txt. The point isn't to conceal the existence of pages, it is to tell *robots*, not people, to stay away from them. (I'm the owner of the mailing list for it.
Back in the days when I'd see Bill regularly (1988-1993 or so), I discovered that mentioning the Model 100 would always put him in a good mood. I had earlier done some work with the NEC PC-8201A, which is the same computer under the manufacturer's brand. He was so darn happy about how they squeezed such a good implementation of BASIC into that machine. Now I wonder if that's why Bill referred consulting customers to me and was so friendly... I didn't realize that it was the last thing Bill personally worked on until much later, when I mentioned it to Tom Corrdry, who worked at Microsoft before it was Microsoft.
While it's good to see this story on the record, now *everybody* knows my secret to putting Bill in a good mood. Well, if our paths cross again, I'm sure he'll remember that I was praising hte Model 100 long, long ago.
I still have two 8201As in my closet. Wonder if they're worth something.
Nick
It seems quite likely that *stupid* privacy legislation would carry a huge, unnecessary price tag. So what kind of legislation is appropriate? How much privacy can be achieved with technology alone, without any change in current law?
Considering the nature of the Internet, isn't it possible to achieve a high level of privacy without new laws? What kind of laws would smooth the way for technology-based solutions?
Nick
From my viewpoint, the greatest value of cultural diversity on-line, which doesn't get much attention, is exposure to diverse points of view, which mass media hasn't been giving us. I The benefits of participating in diverse on-line communities resemble those of bio-diversity: there are more approaches to problem-solving, which increases the system's stability and responsiveness to stress... even though internally, there's more chaos. I'm alluding to complexity theory here, with its odd marriage of chaos and order. Inexpensive distribution of new points of view can have a deep impact even when only a portion of the population can access them at the source. Five hundred years ago in Europe, much of the population was illiterate, but *everybody* was quickly talking about Martin Luther's theses challenging the alleged supreme ruler of the universe. Those who could read shared the ideas with those who couldn't. This is not an argument against bringing technology to under-served communities (I'm on the board of Plugged In (http://www.pluggedin.org/, which does exactly that). It's an argument against the idealists who insist that all people must have free net access or we're doomed.
See http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/294779.html for some research at Stanford on technology that especially applies to building very fast switches. This is standard CMOS at 50 Ghz. The researcher used to work for Intel on the Pentium chips -- I can remember when he was working on trying to break the 1 Ghz barrier... Not sure if the record has been broken, but he told me a few months ago that he had made the fastest processer to date, which was 20+ Ghz. He said built a radar with it...