All valid concerns, but certainly something that could be worked around.
Exact-phrase matching is enough, I s'pose. However, I'm continually irritated by irrelivant search results due to there being the same words on the same page, but drastically spaced appart.
Now, let's say I'm looking for something that I'm not sure of specifically, say, a quote from a famous person that I know a couple key phrases of. Let's say the quote is "fuck monkeys, for they don't want to cuddle after sex". I search for, "monkey cuddling sex" and you come up with a bunch of irrelivant sites because you'll have a spammed site with all those words in it - but they're throughout a massive document.
Google should at least have the ability to search for for words within a certain margin, such as "limit scope of search to within 100 words of other search terms" or such, to limit such abuse and increase results.
That alone should be enough to drastically improve results, I'd think.
Google is damned cool. It's definately the best thing out there right now. However, it could be better.
What is missing is a simple regex interpreter: it would drastically increase the efficiency of searches. Boolean stuff is cool, but it is by no means powerful: we've had boolean searches since, what, 1995, 1996? It's incredibly limited to AND OR NOT logic.
If MS's search engine attempts were to have such regex features, it would likely replace google for many of my features, provided it wasn't overly intrusive (which I doubt as even a remote possibility, actually). Google really needs to get with the times, so to speak.
here's a thought. If it's an antitrust violation for MS to distribute a free antivirus, what are the implications for Open Source, when and if it becomes predominant in the market?
Will it be possible for there to be an Open Source monopoly, or will it be inherrently impossible because Open Source isn't an entity, but simply a classification for individual efforts?
I personally see McAfee, Norton, and a slew of other companies making a legal fuss about this - and rightfully so.
It would be one thing to compete with antivirus software indirectly by making their OS work properly, ie, have properly designed security, so that viruses and worms became a negligible concern.
It's another thing entirely to make a work-alike product when you're a monopoly, and give it away for free, bundled with another product, as MS is doing in this scenario.
It's just yet another step towards a perscription based computing service. First they'll have a virus update fee, then they'll start giving their OS away to compete on "TCO" with Linux - and increase the fee for virus updates, as TCO assessments never take into account viruses, it seems. At least when done 'by' MS.
It won't be long now until it's not possible to actually purchase hardware: everything will be a 'service'. The short lifespan of computing hardware only makes it more inevitable.
Build in =good= OCR software, and such a thing would actually be useful. Phones have pathetic storage.
I'd say the ultimate phone, at the time being, would be the following:
- a phone. obviously. - built-in LED flashlight - USB interface for uploading stuff to - reasonable storage (32M? 128M?) - voice recorder (c'mon, this makes complete sense!) - (given this development) scanner + OCR - (I'm dreaming here) run on linux so that I can ssh to it over WiFi:P
I wonder what the chances are of EA open sourcing old projects such as Privateer or any of the Wing Commander stuff; I'd love to see games built using some of that framework, even if it's old: you'd be able to have a complex world without too much hastle, as the framework is already available, and content creation could be focused on.
Probably not. Old games tend to just die, unfortunately.
They already have fallen into the wrong hands. Just because those hands don't seem to be making immediate use for the data does not mean that those people should have that data.
Local law enforcement would probably be the first 'authority' group of people to start taking advantage of the populace, as doing so is relatively easy due to the proximity of space - they don't need to go half way across the country to smack someone down, they can do it as easily as they can go to the 7-11.
The degree is worthless in terms of applicable knowledge and understanding, IMO, compared to the "doing it because you love it" factor.
I'd take a tech school grad over a college grad, if they demonstrated more of a love and drive to learn, and learned a large degree of their knowledge on their own time.
That said, there's certainly value to "thinking" classes - a large number of colleges don't even seem to teach students how to think; a shame, since thinking should be a prerequisite for higher education, and taught in HS.
heh, plastics. Wunderbar:P +1 "The Graduate" reference.
Dan Brown is a Genius
on
Digital Fortress
·
· Score: 1, Informative
I've read all of Dan Brown's books except Digital Fortress; I'll be sure to check it out.:P
His writing style has drastically improved from Angels and Demons (at least in Deception Point, which I finished last night, er, this morning at 4am.:P He did a really good job with his character development and personality creation in DP, which I personally think were the biggest shortcomings in the first two books. Deception Point is certainly less egotistical as the first two books, as the main character (as described) seems to closely resemble the author himself.:P
Deception Point might be a wee bit lacking in the loads of information, at least compared to the first two books, but that might just be me getting used to his style of writing. I will say, his overall character setup ("Which guy is the badguy?") is fairly similar throughout his books, if not predictable.
I am continually amazed at Dan Brown's depth of knowledge - if not that, then the amount of information he had to research for each book. Mythology, theology, philosophy, conspiracy, obscure science - he covers all these things in his books, and claims at the beginning that the underlying facts (descriptions of technology, relics, procedures, organizations, etc.). I can't vouch for the truth of most of the facts, but I have done research after reading his books, having had my interest spurred to investigation, and the claims seem to be, at least, overall accurate.
Furthermore, he's always able to churn books out fairly quickly it seems, and his books are definately improving - they're very interesting and intertwined, the perfect stuff for those of us that read Hardy Boys books back in 1st and 2nd grade:P. He's my favorite author at the time being, I might even say.
I can only imagine her as a black, 'working class' individual. With a last name such as Scimeca, it seems likely to me.
All I can say is: the RIAA is in trouble. With the bent that the US has in favor nowadays for the rights and freedoms of non-whites and women, it looks like they're in for a time of it.:)
urg, he couldn't have made this any more obvious. Imagine he was a company selling sendmail: what would they try and do? They'd try and make it look like they weren't the ones responsible for the spam, as they'd have money (in his case, ego) on the line.
The problem here is a fundamental flaw in smtp.
The solution here is to redesign smtp. Even something as simple as a 'trusted peer server' model would work and wouldn't need a complete redesign: each server is the trusted peer of several others (say 5, and all would have to be fqdn). After mail is sent, and before that mail is delivered, the server it is sent from is validified to be a peer (by doing a quick check on the 5 servers that it claims are its peers). If the server sent from doesn't have peers, then the mail isn't delivered.
While this wouldn't completely trap all spam, and some spam would certainly still get through from exploited networks, it would make the job of maintaining accurate RBLs much, much easier, and would functionally run spammers out of business, if (say) the next sendmail version were to impliment the feature, and people started using it.
Congratulations, you've just given justification to the Holocaust! What happens when you get rid of an ethnic group that controls most of the wealth? That wealth becomes available for others, yay! Profit!
This "all things equal" approach that ignores fairly critical aspects of society (such as morality and ethics) is incredibly flawed. Would I release a report saying that it's possible to throw a baseball well over a mile - provided gravity isn't taken into account? No, simply because it's not true.
no ianal disclaimer, as I talked to one about this very thing tonight: such a thing is extortion and a frivilous lawsuit. they can (and likely will) get thrown in jail once this whole scenario works itself out and IBM/Novell's case gets proven - then there's sufficient evidence that SCO had no sufficient grounds for their lawsuits.
I wonder how 'vaguely Wolverine" these healing abilities are.
It's be interesting to see precisely what applications these advancements are seeing in military use. Sure, it's unlikely that any serious or controversal issue gets used right away by mainstream military, but surely there are special military groups that get "advanced tech" quite, in, er, advance of the main military force.
I heard/read somewhere once that the US military's "high end" technology is 12 years more advanced than anything that is actually available for the mainstream military force, and only used by Special Ops.
Consider how un-advanced things were during the first desert storm compared to how they are now - and jump ahead another years, and think of an equal amount of differential, if not an exponential differential. Wow.
"I'm going to be attending college this fall, so I have been looking into a mainframe to use about campus. My preference has been to looking at IBM's range of iron, although they are a bit out of my price range. I have been looking at a multitude of vendors. I'm looking for something that will fit within a small cargo van, has a decent support contract, and only needs one or two gas-powered generators to keep running. What are some of the better models on the market with these characteristics?"
I don't remember who said it, but there's a saying, "Given enough steps, anything can be proven."
I think this applies. Consider the physics of someone like the Hulk - as he grows, his strength -must- grow exponentially, simply to be able to deal with his larger body mass. Not proportionately.
If any of you like thriller books, grab Dan Brown's Deception Point - it talks about the commercialization of the space industry. Brown's best book so far, IMO. A lot of the things mentioned in the book should be fairly familiar to your average slashdot reader.
He also wrote the books "The Da Vinci Code" and "Angels and Demons". All his books are fairly well packed with various trivia - the guy must be a walking encyclopedia of rare knowledge.
I think it's probably some perverse combination. I doubt that most of these writers have the foundation of thought necessary to rationalize a logical conclusion. Their impressions are more likely than not a cohesive enganglement of social status quo hubbub, pop culture appeal, and a despicable moral corruption.
The only thing they're good at is contortion and deceit.
It's like fighting a war where we simply re-win the same outpost over and over again, and never make progress. Why?
Because the damned fools think that they're making a valid arguement when they're simply spitting out the same FUD over and over. Now, if they were to refute previously made refutations, further arguement can be made.
However, that would require them to be able to find something to refute our arguements with. Esentially, "Your guns are too big, so we'll back down and make this point again later." Urg.
Slashdot Mirror
All valid concerns, but certainly something that could be worked around.
Exact-phrase matching is enough, I s'pose. However, I'm continually irritated by irrelivant search results due to there being the same words on the same page, but drastically spaced appart.
Now, let's say I'm looking for something that I'm not sure of specifically, say, a quote from a famous person that I know a couple key phrases of. Let's say the quote is "fuck monkeys, for they don't want to cuddle after sex". I search for, "monkey cuddling sex" and you come up with a bunch of irrelivant sites because you'll have a spammed site with all those words in it - but they're throughout a massive document.
Google should at least have the ability to search for for words within a certain margin, such as "limit scope of search to within 100 words of other search terms" or such, to limit such abuse and increase results.
That alone should be enough to drastically improve results, I'd think.
Google is damned cool. It's definately the best thing out there right now. However, it could be better.
What is missing is a simple regex interpreter: it would drastically increase the efficiency of searches. Boolean stuff is cool, but it is by no means powerful: we've had boolean searches since, what, 1995, 1996? It's incredibly limited to AND OR NOT logic.
If MS's search engine attempts were to have such regex features, it would likely replace google for many of my features, provided it wasn't overly intrusive (which I doubt as even a remote possibility, actually). Google really needs to get with the times, so to speak.
here's a thought. If it's an antitrust violation for MS to distribute a free antivirus, what are the implications for Open Source, when and if it becomes predominant in the market?
Will it be possible for there to be an Open Source monopoly, or will it be inherrently impossible because Open Source isn't an entity, but simply a classification for individual efforts?
Er, right.
And you can also run multiple browsers - for additional redundancy, HTML spec compliancy, whatever. That doesn't mean it's not an issue for antitrust.
I personally see McAfee, Norton, and a slew of other companies making a legal fuss about this - and rightfully so.
It would be one thing to compete with antivirus software indirectly by making their OS work properly, ie, have properly designed security, so that viruses and worms became a negligible concern.
It's another thing entirely to make a work-alike product when you're a monopoly, and give it away for free, bundled with another product, as MS is doing in this scenario.
This has been coming for a long time.
It's just yet another step towards a perscription based computing service. First they'll have a virus update fee, then they'll start giving their OS away to compete on "TCO" with Linux - and increase the fee for virus updates, as TCO assessments never take into account viruses, it seems. At least when done 'by' MS.
It won't be long now until it's not possible to actually purchase hardware: everything will be a 'service'. The short lifespan of computing hardware only makes it more inevitable.
Build in =good= OCR software, and such a thing would actually be useful. Phones have pathetic storage.
:P
I'd say the ultimate phone, at the time being, would be the following:
- a phone. obviously.
- built-in LED flashlight
- USB interface for uploading stuff to
- reasonable storage (32M? 128M?)
- voice recorder (c'mon, this makes complete sense!)
- (given this development) scanner + OCR
- (I'm dreaming here) run on linux so that I can ssh to it over WiFi
I wonder what the chances are of EA open sourcing old projects such as Privateer or any of the Wing Commander stuff; I'd love to see games built using some of that framework, even if it's old: you'd be able to have a complex world without too much hastle, as the framework is already available, and content creation could be focused on.
Probably not. Old games tend to just die, unfortunately.
They already have fallen into the wrong hands. Just because those hands don't seem to be making immediate use for the data does not mean that those people should have that data.
Local law enforcement would probably be the first 'authority' group of people to start taking advantage of the populace, as doing so is relatively easy due to the proximity of space - they don't need to go half way across the country to smack someone down, they can do it as easily as they can go to the 7-11.
The degree is worthless in terms of applicable knowledge and understanding, IMO, compared to the "doing it because you love it" factor.
I'd take a tech school grad over a college grad, if they demonstrated more of a love and drive to learn, and learned a large degree of their knowledge on their own time.
That said, there's certainly value to "thinking" classes - a large number of colleges don't even seem to teach students how to think; a shame, since thinking should be a prerequisite for higher education, and taught in HS.
heh, plastics. Wunderbar :P +1 "The Graduate" reference.
I've read all of Dan Brown's books except Digital Fortress; I'll be sure to check it out. :P
:P He did a really good job with his character development and personality creation in DP, which I personally think were the biggest shortcomings in the first two books. Deception Point is certainly less egotistical as the first two books, as the main character (as described) seems to closely resemble the author himself. :P
:P. He's my favorite author at the time being, I might even say.
His writing style has drastically improved from Angels and Demons (at least in Deception Point, which I finished last night, er, this morning at 4am.
Deception Point might be a wee bit lacking in the loads of information, at least compared to the first two books, but that might just be me getting used to his style of writing. I will say, his overall character setup ("Which guy is the badguy?") is fairly similar throughout his books, if not predictable.
I am continually amazed at Dan Brown's depth of knowledge - if not that, then the amount of information he had to research for each book. Mythology, theology, philosophy, conspiracy, obscure science - he covers all these things in his books, and claims at the beginning that the underlying facts (descriptions of technology, relics, procedures, organizations, etc.). I can't vouch for the truth of most of the facts, but I have done research after reading his books, having had my interest spurred to investigation, and the claims seem to be, at least, overall accurate.
Furthermore, he's always able to churn books out fairly quickly it seems, and his books are definately improving - they're very interesting and intertwined, the perfect stuff for those of us that read Hardy Boys books back in 1st and 2nd grade
Ohhh, a fiesty New Jersey woman!
:)
I can only imagine her as a black, 'working class' individual. With a last name such as Scimeca, it seems likely to me.
All I can say is: the RIAA is in trouble. With the bent that the US has in favor nowadays for the rights and freedoms of non-whites and women, it looks like they're in for a time of it.
As a relative noob at programming, I'd have to say that Accelerated C++ is the best C++ book I've seen, particularly in respect to OOP.
It's a short 300-some pages, and isn't too inundating, while covering the topic properly: not from a non-OOP perspective.
urg, he couldn't have made this any more obvious. Imagine he was a company selling sendmail: what would they try and do? They'd try and make it look like they weren't the ones responsible for the spam, as they'd have money (in his case, ego) on the line.
The problem here is a fundamental flaw in smtp.
The solution here is to redesign smtp. Even something as simple as a 'trusted peer server' model would work and wouldn't need a complete redesign: each server is the trusted peer of several others (say 5, and all would have to be fqdn). After mail is sent, and before that mail is delivered, the server it is sent from is validified to be a peer (by doing a quick check on the 5 servers that it claims are its peers). If the server sent from doesn't have peers, then the mail isn't delivered.
While this wouldn't completely trap all spam, and some spam would certainly still get through from exploited networks, it would make the job of maintaining accurate RBLs much, much easier, and would functionally run spammers out of business, if (say) the next sendmail version were to impliment the feature, and people started using it.
Um, right.
Congratulations, you've just given justification to the Holocaust! What happens when you get rid of an ethnic group that controls most of the wealth? That wealth becomes available for others, yay! Profit!
This "all things equal" approach that ignores fairly critical aspects of society (such as morality and ethics) is incredibly flawed. Would I release a report saying that it's possible to throw a baseball well over a mile - provided gravity isn't taken into account? No, simply because it's not true.
no ianal disclaimer, as I talked to one about this very thing tonight: such a thing is extortion and a frivilous lawsuit. they can (and likely will) get thrown in jail once this whole scenario works itself out and IBM/Novell's case gets proven - then there's sufficient evidence that SCO had no sufficient grounds for their lawsuits.
I wonder how 'vaguely Wolverine" these healing abilities are.
It's be interesting to see precisely what applications these advancements are seeing in military use. Sure, it's unlikely that any serious or controversal issue gets used right away by mainstream military, but surely there are special military groups that get "advanced tech" quite, in, er, advance of the main military force.
I heard/read somewhere once that the US military's "high end" technology is 12 years more advanced than anything that is actually available for the mainstream military force, and only used by Special Ops.
Consider how un-advanced things were during the first desert storm compared to how they are now - and jump ahead another years, and think of an equal amount of differential, if not an exponential differential. Wow.
Ah, see, I was going for more of a "thick, smothering layer of irony" effect than a "flaimbait" effect. :P
"I'm going to be attending college this fall, so I have been looking into a mainframe to use about campus. My preference has been to looking at IBM's range of iron, although they are a bit out of my price range. I have been looking at a multitude of vendors. I'm looking for something that will fit within a small cargo van, has a decent support contract, and only needs one or two gas-powered generators to keep running. What are some of the better models on the market with these characteristics?"
I don't remember who said it, but there's a saying, "Given enough steps, anything can be proven."
I think this applies. Consider the physics of someone like the Hulk - as he grows, his strength -must- grow exponentially, simply to be able to deal with his larger body mass. Not proportionately.
If any of you like thriller books, grab Dan Brown's Deception Point - it talks about the commercialization of the space industry. Brown's best book so far, IMO. A lot of the things mentioned in the book should be fairly familiar to your average slashdot reader.
He also wrote the books "The Da Vinci Code" and "Angels and Demons". All his books are fairly well packed with various trivia - the guy must be a walking encyclopedia of rare knowledge.
I think it's probably some perverse combination. I doubt that most of these writers have the foundation of thought necessary to rationalize a logical conclusion. Their impressions are more likely than not a cohesive enganglement of social status quo hubbub, pop culture appeal, and a despicable moral corruption.
The only thing they're good at is contortion and deceit.
It's like fighting a war where we simply re-win the same outpost over and over again, and never make progress. Why?
Because the damned fools think that they're making a valid arguement when they're simply spitting out the same FUD over and over. Now, if they were to refute previously made refutations, further arguement can be made.
However, that would require them to be able to find something to refute our arguements with. Esentially, "Your guns are too big, so we'll back down and make this point again later." Urg.
Everyone here seems to be foaming at hte mouth, "Mac vs. Linux". No. You've got it all wrong.
That market share increase for Linux came out of MS's market share, not Apple's. This is progress.