Huh? You're saying that the Compact Flash based mp3 players prevent me from taking my compact flash card and plugging them into another reader on another computer and transferring the files?
First you say that no-one is trying to find methods that produce relatively accurate estimates, and you use that to dismiss a large fraction of his theory:
Despite Lewis's claims to the contrary, no serious researcher in software engineering is trying to find a guaranteed method for producing estimates of time and effort that are certain to be correct. No one is even trying to find methods that produce estimates guaranteed to be correct within a known error range.
Then you say that you *are* trying to produce relatively accurate estimates:
We are just trying to get somewhere close a reasonable percentage of the time!
This "hidden information" encoded in the ball number is similar to the classic game show paradox...
Hmmm, that's the best explanation of the game show paradox that I've seen, and now I understand it much better, thank-you (although I still think that the game show paradox is often misquoted and misused, so I always have to be careful). None-the-less, something still bothers me about all of this. Something to do with past independent random events not influencing the future independent random events, or to-do with the assumptions necessary to go from *being* the seventh ball to being an independent third party observer who can equivalently consider the scenario where we get to randomly pick more "balls" from the urn and thus get a statistical picture of how many balls the urn likely contains. You might be right, but I still need to discover that "aha!" thought that clarifies my thinking. I'm not at all comfortable with the complexities of these "compartment/cubicle-farm" experiements.
AFAIK it should be possible to simplify it down to a linear real number line where you are only free to choose one random position between zero and N where N is a number greater than zero that you do not know. (Of course this leads into the idea of a numerical simulation, which you alluded to...)
I've been wrestling with the article's issue, on a game-theoretic level, for years. For example, many people simply do not understand what I say when I discuss the events and aftermath of What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
Holy *ow.
Did anyone else see the line in that linked article which identifies the 'Michael who took down Censorware' (not a quote, my personal opinion on the linked articles claims) as being *our* Slashdot Michael? Anyone got any links to any other tidbits of information. I'd like to hear some more viewpoints/opinions. Very disturbing.
I once was on the periphery of a great Canadian DSL Users Group that self destructed in a similar way, and as a result had it's primary resource, a fabulous website of information and faqs, eventually taken down (although they were left up for a long time after the breakdown, so it's not quite the same).
This is a warning to all who participate in such loose "groups" of individuals. If your site/group eventually reaches critical mass and creates a site/object of some kind of value or weight, make sure it's ownership isn't in the hands of one individual. Make sure early on that all contributions are not delivered into the hands of one person.
One of the "Doomsday Arguments" starts off like this:
The core idea is this. Imagine that two big urns are put in front of you, and you know that one of them contains ten balls and the other a million, but you are ignorant as to which is which. You know the balls in each urn are numbered 1, 2, 3, 4... etc. Now you take a ball at random from the left urn, and it is number 7. Clearly, this is a strong indication that that urn contains only ten balls.
I would like to propose the following as a counterpoint:
There is only
ONE big urn in front of you. It contains an unknown number of balls numbered consecutively, 1, 2, 3, 4... etc. You take a ball at random and it is number 7. This tells you that there are at least 7 balls in the urn. Clearly, it tells you absolutely nothing else about the probability of there being 10 or 10,000 balls in the urn.
"I live in a city with a population of 170,000 and our Telco Company Sasktel has had ADSL offered here since 1996. Our cable company offers high speed even to small towns in our province. You know your person in charge of deploying this technology isn't moving fast enough when Farm Boys are playing Tribes2 with a 40 Ping."
Here's a list of small communities that should have DSL by now. Their projections for the next few years were amazing, something like 60-85% of the province having DSL by 2005 (only 40-45% of the province lives in the two main cities > 25,000 people).
It'll probably be delayed a bit now, seeing as how the Sept 11th thing meant that money that was going to go into DSL for Libraries/Schooles in rural areas (which would have effectively subsidized SaskTel entry into *really* tiny towns, pops of 1000 or so), is now going to security in the latest budget.
However, Toyota is in the right about asserting no responsibility to employ her.
Why not? Their job *created* her condition.
If I want to run a company that churns through physically fit employees and spits out people with 5 years ditch digging experience and horrifically broken backs, there's nothing stopping me?
My *immediate* reaction to your first two sentences is "ooooh YES, this is exactly what I need!".
Try finding a 35" high bistro table of a certain stle before this! Prior to this finding *any* general catalog type item on the web was a total crapshoot involving tons of crap suppliers, storefronts, and "web malls" with nothing of value in them. (Unless the product you were looking for was something carried by one of the "big name" places like amazon.com or ebay).
What CODEC did the pirates, who could choose any one they want to swap pirate video, choose to use? Quicktime Sorenson? RealMedia? No, Media Player (He means Microsoft's mpeg4 codec used for DivX)
And who developed that codec in an open standards forum?
Apple. (and others)
And what has Microsoft done with it? They've used all the money they have from their OS monopoly to implement it in a proprietary way, and given it to no-one. It's been left it to the pirates to bring it into the light and make it useful for everyone.
I'll give the coders and engineers at Apple and Microsoft all the credit they deserve. But the business suits and marketing droids can [expletives deleted].
There is one aspect that is not covered by your analogy.
Making the fault known before there is a known fix does not, in car circles, increase the risk that someone will get injured.
The big philosophical question here is, what does publishing the existence of the fault do, on average? Increase or decrease the odds of bad things happening? And if we give people a reason to hide faults for a time, may they not abuse it to all our detriment?
But is the currenty "commercially viable" marketplace the best way to determine which software is best for mankind?
I look to my left and see Microsoft. And I must say, NO. Just because we currently *use* the capitalist marketplace model for a lot of things, does not mean that it is the best. It's there because of historical reasons. Personal rights reasons. And utility.
The general base of lusers and pointy haired managers that determine who wins in the "commercial marketplace" are too damn stupid to pick the proper combination of power, performance, price, and stability, that is important. That's why we spent so many years with DOS, Win3.x and even 9x, while things like AmigaOS (1985) lingered and died.
Doomed by the mediocrity of the masses. What fun it's been.
I don't see anything in there that would prevent Microsoft from continuing with their standard practice of disallowing vendors from shipping competing operating systems. It says they must offer the same terms to a significant group of vendors over five years, but it makes no restrictions on what those terms can be.
You make room and go out of your way to store and keep your film? Maybe you should go out of your way to store and keep your digital shots?
Of course you do have a point. Currently, by-default, (not hypothetically what people *could* do, but what many *currently* do), film is never discarded, while digital photo's probably are. (Not all of us. I'm a digital packrat.)
For the first time in my life I went and bought a camera, because I was going to my brothers wedding in a unique and far-away place. I bought digital. I came home with *360* photos. If I had a film camera I would have come home with 24-48. That's 7 times as many photos to discover "hidden beauty" in later. Currently 56 totally identical copies of these photos now exist across the continent. That I know of.
Again, no amount of understanding the root of the problem will make that go away.
True, but it will prevent it from happening again!!!
If we unknowningly allow our government agencies to screw over *another* country that eventually collapses and produces more extremists, we'll be right back where we started.
Let's assume one camera per VCR, full 30 fps. That's 3 8-hour tapes per day per camera, 3000 tapes a day from 1000 VCRs. 1000 VCR's should cost you $100,000 and take up one
medium sized room (power and AC will need to be enhanced). 3000 tapes per day shouldn't cost more than $3000, or $1 million per year.
You'll only need a few tape monkeys at any given instant, because they'll be around one tape needing changing every 28 seconds. A days's worth of VCR tapes (assuming we pack them in boxes with NO room to spare and stack the boxes in blocks) will take up about 1.5 cubic meters or 50 cubic feet (based on 1x4x8 inches per tape, my rough estimate). That means for a year's worth of tape you need 550 cubic meters or 20,000 cubic feet, which is 3300 square feet if piled six feet high. 3300 square feet is about the floor-size of one big house.
Question to original: Are you still sure you want to do this? If so you might be best off "spreadking the load around". IE: Don't do it all in one place. There are a million convenience store camera's and vcr systems in the world, but they're not all in one place.
Off-hand I can only think of one thing that would handle 3,000 terrabytes per year, and that's if the half million people using Morpheus donated 6 Gigabytes of space each year to your cause.
Google used to scan my small site once a month. The last couple times it came by, it only did the top level pages. Two months in and it still hasn't come back to discover all the new links that were on those top level pages, which lead to a ton of useful files that are otherwise hard to find on the net.
I'm beginning to wonder if they're not having troubles keeping up as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Huh? You're saying that the Compact Flash based mp3 players prevent me from taking my compact flash card and plugging them into another reader on another computer and transferring the files?
Or how about the CD MP3 players?
> Just the threat of a lawsuit can change behavior and that is what is happening here.
I know, I meant "effecitvely". An entire revolution in efficiency and technological use is being suppressed. And it pisses me off royally.
First you say that no-one is trying to find methods that produce relatively accurate estimates, and you use that to dismiss a large fraction of his theory: Then you say that you *are* trying to produce relatively accurate estimates: So which is it?
Oh bloody great.
So now the convenient ability to copy files from one computer to another using any new spectacular piece of technology is **cking illegal?
[INSERT BOILING ANGER]
Hmmm, that's the best explanation of the game show paradox that I've seen, and now I understand it much better, thank-you (although I still think that the game show paradox is often misquoted and misused, so I always have to be careful). None-the-less, something still bothers me about all of this. Something to do with past independent random events not influencing the future independent random events, or to-do with the assumptions necessary to go from *being* the seventh ball to being an independent third party observer who can equivalently consider the scenario where we get to randomly pick more "balls" from the urn and thus get a statistical picture of how many balls the urn likely contains. You might be right, but I still need to discover that "aha!" thought that clarifies my thinking. I'm not at all comfortable with the complexities of these "compartment/cubicle-farm" experiements.
AFAIK it should be possible to simplify it down to a linear real number line where you are only free to choose one random position between zero and N where N is a number greater than zero that you do not know. (Of course this leads into the idea of a numerical simulation, which you alluded to...)
I'll keep thinking.
Holy *ow.
Did anyone else see the line in that linked article which identifies the 'Michael who took down Censorware' (not a quote, my personal opinion on the linked articles claims) as being *our* Slashdot Michael? Anyone got any links to any other tidbits of information. I'd like to hear some more viewpoints/opinions. Very disturbing.
I once was on the periphery of a great Canadian DSL Users Group that self destructed in a similar way, and as a result had it's primary resource, a fabulous website of information and faqs, eventually taken down (although they were left up for a long time after the breakdown, so it's not quite the same).
This is a warning to all who participate in such loose "groups" of individuals. If your site/group eventually reaches critical mass and creates a site/object of some kind of value or weight, make sure it's ownership isn't in the hands of one individual. Make sure early on that all contributions are not delivered into the hands of one person.
Hmmm, here's an interesting question.
How many Indians and Pakastanis would be dead right now if they *didn't* have nuclear weapons?
Will the Pakastani. and Indian nuclear weapons prevent death and destruction, or inevitibly create it?
One of the "Doomsday Arguments" starts off like this:
I would like to propose the following as a counterpoint:
Saskatchewan
Here's a quote on DSL in Saskatchewan:
"I live in a city with a population of 170,000 and our Telco Company Sasktel has had ADSL offered here since 1996. Our cable company offers high speed even to small towns in our province. You know your person in charge of deploying this technology isn't moving fast enough when Farm Boys are playing Tribes2 with a 40 Ping."
Here's a list of small communities that should have DSL by now. Their projections for the next few years were amazing, something like 60-85% of the province having DSL by 2005 (only 40-45% of the province lives in the two main cities > 25,000 people).
It'll probably be delayed a bit now, seeing as how the Sept 11th thing meant that money that was going to go into DSL for Libraries/Schooles in rural areas (which would have effectively subsidized SaskTel entry into *really* tiny towns, pops of 1000 or so), is now going to security in the latest budget.
Ahhhh, now *that's* a comprehensive explanation of the circumstances. Thankyou.
Please mod parent up.
However, Toyota is in the right about asserting no responsibility to employ her.
Why not? Their job *created* her condition.
If I want to run a company that churns through physically fit employees and spits out people with 5 years ditch digging experience and horrifically broken backs, there's nothing stopping me?
My *immediate* reaction to your first two sentences is "ooooh YES, this is exactly what I need!".
Try finding a 35" high bistro table of a certain stle before this! Prior to this finding *any* general catalog type item on the web was a total crapshoot involving tons of crap suppliers, storefronts, and "web malls" with nothing of value in them. (Unless the product you were looking for was something carried by one of the "big name" places like amazon.com or ebay).
What CODEC did the pirates, who could choose any one they want to swap pirate video, choose to use? Quicktime Sorenson? RealMedia? No, Media Player (He means Microsoft's mpeg4 codec used for DivX)
And who developed that codec in an open standards forum?
Apple. (and others)
And what has Microsoft done with it? They've used all the money they have from their OS monopoly to implement it in a proprietary way, and given it to no-one. It's been left it to the pirates to bring it into the light and make it useful for everyone.
I'll give the coders and engineers at Apple and Microsoft all the credit they deserve. But the business suits and marketing droids can [expletives deleted].
There is one aspect that is not covered by your analogy.
Making the fault known before there is a known fix does not, in car circles, increase the risk that someone will get injured.
The big philosophical question here is, what does publishing the existence of the fault do, on average? Increase or decrease the odds of bad things happening? And if we give people a reason to hide faults for a time, may they not abuse it to all our detriment?
But is the currenty "commercially viable" marketplace the best way to determine which software is best for mankind?
I look to my left and see Microsoft. And I must say, NO. Just because we currently *use* the capitalist marketplace model for a lot of things, does not mean that it is the best. It's there because of historical reasons. Personal rights reasons. And utility.
The general base of lusers and pointy haired managers that determine who wins in the "commercial marketplace" are too damn stupid to pick the proper combination of power, performance, price, and stability, that is important. That's why we spent so many years with DOS, Win3.x and even 9x, while things like AmigaOS (1985) lingered and died.
Doomed by the mediocrity of the masses. What fun it's been.
I'm not happy.
I don't see anything in there that would prevent Microsoft from continuing with their standard practice of disallowing vendors from shipping competing operating systems. It says they must offer the same terms to a significant group of vendors over five years, but it makes no restrictions on what those terms can be.
Yes, it's way to scary to program in assembler now-a-days. The human brain can't store both Perl and Assembler code, so one of them has to go.
Cool, a cure!
I like Steven Maurer's version much more.
Did anyone sue when the mute button came out?
You make room and go out of your way to store and keep your film? Maybe you should go out of your way to store and keep your digital shots?
Of course you do have a point. Currently, by-default, (not hypothetically what people *could* do, but what many *currently* do), film is never discarded, while digital photo's probably are. (Not all of us. I'm a digital packrat.)
Exactly.
For the first time in my life I went and bought a camera, because I was going to my brothers wedding in a unique and far-away place. I bought digital. I came home with *360* photos. If I had a film camera I would have come home with 24-48. That's 7 times as many photos to discover "hidden beauty" in later. Currently 56 totally identical copies of these photos now exist across the continent. That I know of.
Again, no amount of understanding the root of the problem will make that go away.
True, but it will prevent it from happening again!!!
If we unknowningly allow our government agencies to screw over *another* country that eventually collapses and produces more extremists, we'll be right back where we started.
That's *NOT* offtopic. You may argue whether people should care or not, but it's clearly ON-TOPIC.
That'd be a storage nightmare.
I don't think so.
Let's assume one camera per VCR, full 30 fps. That's 3 8-hour tapes per day per camera, 3000 tapes a day from 1000 VCRs. 1000 VCR's should cost you $100,000 and take up one
medium sized room (power and AC will need to be enhanced). 3000 tapes per day shouldn't cost more than $3000, or $1 million per year.
You'll only need a few tape monkeys at any given instant, because they'll be around one tape needing changing every 28 seconds. A days's worth of VCR tapes (assuming we pack them in boxes with NO room to spare and stack the boxes in blocks) will take up about 1.5 cubic meters or 50 cubic feet (based on 1x4x8 inches per tape, my rough estimate). That means for a year's worth of tape you need 550 cubic meters or 20,000 cubic feet, which is 3300 square feet if piled six feet high. 3300 square feet is about the floor-size of one big house.
Question to original: Are you still sure you want to do this? If so you might be best off "spreadking the load around". IE: Don't do it all in one place. There are a million convenience store camera's and vcr systems in the world, but they're not all in one place.
Off-hand I can only think of one thing that would handle 3,000 terrabytes per year, and that's if the half million people using Morpheus donated 6 Gigabytes of space each year to your cause.
Google used to scan my small site once a month. The last couple times it came by, it only did the top level pages. Two months in and it still hasn't come back to discover all the new links that were on those top level pages, which lead to a ton of useful files that are otherwise hard to find on the net.
I'm beginning to wonder if they're not having troubles keeping up as well.