I just tried random page 10 times, and only one of them was a place. Not a very scientific test, but you probably did your test quite a while ago, when they had first loaded 30,000 places into Wikipedia. Things are different now.
I am surprised that no-one has mentioned Wikipedia's codebase, Mediawiki, which runs on a standard LAMP architecture.
We have installed it at our company and are finding it is perfect for Knowledge Management.
Just some of the features it has are: - complete revision history of every article - back links (what links here) - watchlists - preferences - skins - comprehensive link analysis - namespaces - editing assistant (buttons that turn selected text into a link, bold, italics, etc) - customized pages - pages inclusions - many more - and of course the simplicity and ease of editing that comes with a Wiki.
It has a dynamic mailing list, lots of developers (and hence improvements going on), and a vibrant community behind it.
Once you can convince managers to back it, you can't lose. Suggestion: install it and build it for a while before you show it to management, that way the content helps to show how useful the product is.
If you check the bottom of this page you will see that the rate of earth's rotation has not sped up, neither has the slowing of the earth's rotation stopped. In actually the slowing of the earth's rotation has slowed, so instead of having to add a leap second nearly every year, they only need to add one every several years (if the current trend continues).
Of course, one can still speculate as to why the rate of slowing down has slowed down.
A maze of twisty little nanotubes, all alike - nanoDiamond.
"Won't the 'joints' between individual fibres be a weak point in the system...".
Not necessarily, it depends on how you join them. You need to ensure that the joints are totally seamless so there are no weak points.
See nanodiamond.info for an example of how to join them which increases the overall strength (or strength to weight ratio) rather than weakens them. The trick involved actually lets you use them for buildings and bridges under compression as well as cables under tension. Warning: shameless plug (I wrote the site), but well worth looking at anyway IMHO.
Just ask the users to prioritize all their requests into High, Medium, and Low so you know what to work on first.
They of course then give every request a priority of High, except for two requests they give Low which only will take 5 minutes to do anyway. And most of the requests are 'minor' (i.e. 'not so minor') changes to a project that is going live next week.
I just love that Waterfall Method, don't you? I just love being hit with several tons of water and being washed into the river of 'Time to go insane again!".
It has been known for some time now that dyslexia is not a disorder, but a special ability in certain individuals that enables them to perceive objects in full 3D. That is, when they look at something, their minds instantly build a full 3D image and lets them 'see' it from all directions simultaneously, with no particular direction being any more important than the other. That is why they treat letters and words as 3D, spin them around in their mind, and often write them down backwards or in the wrong order, or confuse certain letter combinations like p and d, or N and Z. The researcher that first conceived of this idea found a technique that improved the reading and writing ability of 80% of dyslexsics nearly instantly: get them to imagine a camera just above their right shoulder (or left) which is looking at whatever they are looking at. Focus their attention on what the view through the camera lens would be. This slight change raises that particular viewpoint above the others in their minds. People with dyslexia, once they learn the above technique, have an advantage over the rest of us, and are well suited to any job involving 3D, such as architects, 3D games designers, choreographers etc. So we (the ones without dyslexia) have a limitation that they lack.
Re:appears to be similar David Brin's Kiln People
on
Altered Carbon
·
· Score: 1
I did exactly that many years ago with a credit card sized (including thickness) calculator. After a few times it didn't work amymore (surprise, surprise).
But seriously, you only have a very few degrees of freedom with bending. Let's see: bend in, bend out, twist left, twist right... that's about it.
A much more practical alternative is touch sensitivity, not just on the front as someone else mentioned, to directly interface with the display, but all over, especially on the edges.
For example, slide your finger along the side edge to scroll down and up, along the top edge to scroll sideways. Touch the top of the edge for button click, touch twice for double-click, touch the bottom of the edge for right click (and the middle of the edge for those who like three button mice). This is assuming you don't just touch the screen directly for these functions. On a credit card sized device you have at least 14 locations along the edge you can touch alone, although you probably wouldn't want to use all of these (since you have to hold the device somehow).
That said, these devices will probably only fill a market niche for specialized functions and mini-PDAs, and many people will continue to use larger devices, especially those who want more screen real estate and an actual keyboard and mouse.
A maze of twisty little nanotubes, all alike - nanoDiamond
No, he is not being serious. He's just having a dig at the recent renaming of USB 1.1 to USB 2.0 for a similar reason as mentioned a couple of days ago here
Then again...
A maze of twisty little nanotubes, all alike - nanoDiamond
So what? I don't know how to use a buggy whip either. Who cares?
(The answer is of course people who are stuck in the past. Nobody is stopping them from continuing to use pencils, so I'm not sure why they are complaining.)
And since when is handwriting 'a uniquely American form of expression"?
You can always send your emails using a cursive script, if you want it to look pretty.
Hey, I don't want to have a clunky wristphone slowing me down!
Where is my waterproof, robust, bluetooth containing, Wifi internet searchable, buzzword compliant RingPhone(TM) with fold out 152 dpi 24 bit color screen?
Most of the current approaches in AI research try to find a 'magic bullet' to the problem of intelligence, and hence fail completely (e.g. many of them just implement something like the big brother of Eliza: Eliza was (meant to be) a joke when it came out and it still is.)
One promising approach realizes that intelligence is a complex area that needs to be analyzed at multiple levels. It is called
Deliberative General Intelligence:
read the complete document here: http://www.singinst.org/LOGI.html and decide for yourself if the concrete, clear, and comprehensive theory that it presents seems light years ahead of anything else.
Warning: it is a few dozen pages - be prepared to read it over multiple sittings. IMHO it is well worth it.
At the last Foresight Conference Eric Drexler expressed his frustration at the amount of hype and effort going into research and development on this psuedo nanotechnology. Everyone is jumping on the bandwagon and getting "nano" into their products.
Real nanotechnology, often called molecular nanotechnology, consists of actual manipulation of atoms into molecules and structures with useful properties, and will make most of the current claims of nano products look extremely weak. But no-one knows exactly how to do it just yet!
Lots of progress is being made on the research front, and they will get there, but anyone who tells you they have nanotechnology products available now or in the near future are talking about the weak versions of nanotechnology that have been around for thousands of years.
See here for a better description of the distinction between weak and strong nanotechnology.
If you're programs are stupid, And you're getting the blues: Just remember to always Watch your Ps and Qs.
Google has a sense of humor (but we all knew that)
on
Google Does the News
·
· Score: 1
Have you noticed this on the bottom of the Google news page: "No humans were harmed or even used in the creation of this page."?
But what about those pigeons? They conveniently forget to mention that animals were used and abused in the creation of the page! (oh wait, that's only when you search google news...)
Google's PageRank technology works very well on the web with lots of pages pointing to lots of other pages.
The Google Search Appliance, however, is targeted at an office environment. Most of the documents (especially the non-html ones) in the typical office stand alone and do not have links to each other.
How has Google modified or complimented (if at all) the PageRank algorithm to make it more suited to an office environment?
I am currently pushing management at my site to purchase a Google Search Appliance, so I need an answer to this to help justify the change from our existing search application. i.e. without a good PageRank score, how does the Search Appliance order the result set in a useful way?
"Your body keeps moving with the same velocity..."
In this case, if you are moving forward, your body hits the steering grip and control shaft. This will attempt to prevent you from falling flat on your face.
If the motors are strong enough, maybe it would succeed.
Or maybe you would just go flying over the top, just like I can remember flying over the handlebars of my bike several years ago and landing on gravel, then sliding on my back for 30 feet until my shirt was in tatters and my back was not much better. Yeehaa! (Serves me right for going downhill without brakes.)
In Canberra, Australia's capital city, TransACT is rolling out fibre optic cable to all residential properties (not sure about apartments). The prices are about $29USD for 1Mbps/128kbps or $37 for 2Mbps/256kbps.
The bad news is it is going to take a couple of years to roll it out throughout the city. And not all Australian cities are as lucky. But at least it is better than nothing.
So was that version 0.6 or thereabouts that you downloaded?
Why don't you have a look at version 1.0 before making such a harsh judgement - you may find it has improved dramatically.
Someone made a mistake and set the alarm clock for 3pm, rather than 3am (we won't name names). Fortunately my internal clock brought me to full wakefulness at 15 minutes past the hour. After getting dressed and ready with sleeping bag, blanket and the remaining heat in the hot water bottle, I crept outside, careful not to wake the rest of the house. Sitting down in the adirondack on the deck out the back door, I settled down into a comfortable position at 3:25. It was quiet, deadly quiet. The only noise was the rumble of a faraway car. No breeze stirred in the cloudless sky. A perfect night for viewing the Leonid Meteor Storm of 2001, one of the most hyped up events in astronomy in many years.
At first they came slowly, and spasmodically. Just like the ones I remembered as a kid, with the awe and wonder of young eyes. Flashes of light, speeding across the expanse of the heavens.
Double digits, my first ten for the evening. More than I had ever seen in my whole life. Twenty, thirty, forty. On the forty-second one, I made my wish, which as for most wishes, will only come true if I make it so. Fifty, sixty. The sixty-seventh one was special, ten times the brightness of the others, leaving a thin trail like that of a high-altitude aeroplane. The thin trail dissipated slowly, and was still visible several minutes later. Seventy, eighty, ninety. Ninety-six was another bright one, which bounced the atmosphere and reappeared in a single, even brighter flash of extinction. Altogether that night I would see six bright shooting stars, each one deserving of an Oscar.
Owls hooting nearby, with the spooky sound that would make you jump if you were walking through a cemetery. A family of deer creeping carefully through the underbrush, trying not be seen. They are safe - the darkness under the trees is absolute.
At 4:38, after seeing 160 so far, I had to go replenish the hot water bottle, which by now was no longer hot. It was cold out there, refreshingly cold, refreshing enough that I needed something to stop my hands from getting frost-bite.
From 4:41 to 5:17 I saw another 140 shooting stars, although comparing a fragment of a comet the size of a grain of sand to a star is overstating things just a bit. I even saw two that were heading towards the radiant, that part of the sky from which most of the meteors appear to come from, somewhere in the constellation of Leo (although the configuration of stars at that point looks much more like a giant snake to me).
Satellites, sailing serenely across the black night sky of Wilton, Connecticut. In no rush at all, compared to the fleeting meteors, living fast and dying young.
At 5:20 I returned outside after waking my wife so she could join me in watching the splendor of the heavens. Together we saw more satellites, and another 150 specks of transient light between us, huddling in the middle of the deck, turning around to catch the ones behind us, wishing just once we had as many eyes as an arachnid so we could see them all at once. By 5:50 the beginnings of the rising sun could be seen, drowning out the fainter of the stars, shooting and stationary both. We headed inside and tried to grab a couple more hours of half-sleep before the morning impinged itself upon our consciousnesses. We dreamed of astronomical marvels, but our dreams were only half as good as reality. And though it will not be for another 98 years that we expect to see such a sight again, our memories will last that long.
Michael Richards
Don't Take It So Seriously
on
God's Debris
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Many readers of God's Debris apparently seem to think that Scott Adams actually believes all the stuff he put in the book. Ok, so maybe he has a big ego, but even he is not that uneducated.
He did ask people not to blame him for the words that a fictional character said in his prologue, but some readers chose not to take that bit seriously, even though they then proceeded to take the rest of the book seriously, and find holes in it.
Of course there are holes in, but that wasn't the point. The point was to make you think. And in that the book certainly succeeds. In parts he does sound like he is lecturing like a professor, but most of the book is just a ploy to get the grey matter going.
So take it all with a grain of salt, pick out the bits you think are good, and don't let the other bits upset you.
Slashdot Mirror
I just tried random page 10 times, and only one of them was a place. Not a very scientific test, but you probably did your test quite a while ago, when they had first loaded 30,000 places into Wikipedia. Things are different now.
I am surprised that no-one has mentioned Wikipedia's codebase, Mediawiki, which runs on a standard LAMP architecture.
We have installed it at our company and are finding it is perfect for Knowledge Management.
Just some of the features it has are:
- complete revision history of every article
- back links (what links here)
- watchlists
- preferences
- skins
- comprehensive link analysis
- namespaces
- editing assistant (buttons that turn selected text into a link, bold, italics, etc)
- customized pages
- pages inclusions
- many more
- and of course the simplicity and ease of editing that comes with a Wiki.
It has a dynamic mailing list, lots of developers (and hence improvements going on), and a vibrant community behind it.
Once you can convince managers to back it, you can't lose. Suggestion: install it and build it for a while before you show it to management, that way the content helps to show how useful the product is.
Of course, one can still speculate as to why the rate of slowing down has slowed down.
A maze of twisty little nanotubes, all alike - nanoDiamond.
"Won't the 'joints' between individual fibres be a weak point in the system...".
Not necessarily, it depends on how you join them. You need to ensure that the joints are totally seamless so there are no weak points.
See nanodiamond.info for an example of how to join them which increases the overall strength (or strength to weight ratio) rather than weakens them. The trick involved actually lets you use them for buildings and bridges under compression as well as cables under tension. Warning: shameless plug (I wrote the site), but well worth looking at anyway IMHO.
Just ask the users to prioritize all their requests into High, Medium, and Low so you know what to work on first.
They of course then give every request a priority of High, except for two requests they give Low which only will take 5 minutes to do anyway. And most of the requests are 'minor' (i.e. 'not so minor') changes to a project that is going live next week.
I just love that Waterfall Method, don't you? I just love being hit with several tons of water and being washed into the river of 'Time to go insane again!".
It has been known for some time now that dyslexia is not a disorder, but a special ability in certain individuals that enables them to perceive objects in full 3D. That is, when they look at something, their minds instantly build a full 3D image and lets them 'see' it from all directions simultaneously, with no particular direction being any more important than the other. That is why they treat letters and words as 3D, spin them around in their mind, and often write them down backwards or in the wrong order, or confuse certain letter combinations like p and d, or N and Z.
The researcher that first conceived of this idea found a technique that improved the reading and writing ability of 80% of dyslexsics nearly instantly: get them to imagine a camera just above their right shoulder (or left) which is looking at whatever they are looking at. Focus their attention on what the view through the camera lens would be. This slight change raises that particular viewpoint above the others in their minds.
People with dyslexia, once they learn the above technique, have an advantage over the rest of us, and are well suited to any job involving 3D, such as architects, 3D games designers, choreographers etc.
So we (the ones without dyslexia) have a limitation that they lack.
Since you've read The Practice Effect, maybe you can improve the encyclopedia article on it that I started:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Practice_Effect
But seriously, you only have a very few degrees of freedom with bending. Let's see: bend in, bend out, twist left, twist right ... that's about it.
A much more practical alternative is touch sensitivity, not just on the front as someone else mentioned, to directly interface with the display, but all over, especially on the edges.
For example, slide your finger along the side edge to scroll down and up, along the top edge to scroll sideways. Touch the top of the edge for button click, touch twice for double-click, touch the bottom of the edge for right click (and the middle of the edge for those who like three button mice). This is assuming you don't just touch the screen directly for these functions. On a credit card sized device you have at least 14 locations along the edge you can touch alone, although you probably wouldn't want to use all of these (since you have to hold the device somehow).
That said, these devices will probably only fill a market niche for specialized functions and mini-PDAs, and many people will continue to use larger devices, especially those who want more screen real estate and an actual keyboard and mouse.
A maze of twisty little nanotubes, all alike - nanoDiamond
No, he is not being serious. He's just having a dig at the recent renaming of USB 1.1 to USB 2.0 for a similar reason as mentioned a couple of days ago here
Then again...
A maze of twisty little nanotubes, all alike - nanoDiamond
So what? I don't know how to use a buggy whip either. Who cares?
(The answer is of course people who are stuck in the past. Nobody is stopping them from continuing to use pencils, so I'm not sure why they are complaining.)
And since when is handwriting 'a uniquely American form of expression"?
You can always send your emails using a cursive script, if you want it to look pretty.
What price were they before?
Hey, I don't want to have a clunky wristphone slowing me down!
Where is my waterproof, robust, bluetooth containing, Wifi internet searchable, buzzword compliant RingPhone(TM) with fold out 152 dpi 24 bit color screen?
Then I can make a call and look like Mini-Me !
Most of the current approaches in AI research try to find a 'magic bullet' to the problem of intelligence, and hence fail completely (e.g. many of them just implement something like the big brother of Eliza: Eliza was (meant to be) a joke when it came out and it still is.)
One promising approach realizes that intelligence is a complex area that needs to be analyzed at multiple levels. It is called Deliberative General Intelligence: read the complete document here: http://www.singinst.org/LOGI.html and decide for yourself if the concrete, clear, and comprehensive theory that it presents seems light years ahead of anything else.
Warning: it is a few dozen pages - be prepared to read it over multiple sittings. IMHO it is well worth it.
A maze of twisty little nanotubes, all alike.
At the last Foresight Conference Eric Drexler expressed his frustration at the amount of hype and effort going into research and development on this psuedo nanotechnology. Everyone is jumping on the bandwagon and getting "nano" into their products.
Real nanotechnology, often called molecular nanotechnology, consists of actual manipulation of atoms into molecules and structures with useful properties, and will make most of the current claims of nano products look extremely weak. But no-one knows exactly how to do it just yet!
Lots of progress is being made on the research front, and they will get there, but anyone who tells you they have nanotechnology products available now or in the near future are talking about the weak versions of nanotechnology that have been around for thousands of years. See here for a better description of the distinction between weak and strong nanotechnology.
If you're programs are stupid,
And you're getting the blues:
Just remember to always
Watch your Ps and Qs.
Have you noticed this on the bottom of the Google news page: "No humans were harmed or even used in the creation of this page."?
But what about those pigeons? They conveniently forget to mention that animals were used and abused in the creation of the page!
(oh wait, that's only when you search google news...)
Well, according to the Slashdot poll in January this year, CmdrTaco is not like the 80% of /. readers who do have broadband.
Bandwidth to Home Via...
C'mon man, what are you waiting for? Get yourself cable!
Google's PageRank technology works very well on the web with lots of pages pointing to lots of other pages.
The Google Search Appliance, however, is targeted at an office environment. Most of the documents (especially the non-html ones) in the typical office stand alone and do not have links to each other.
How has Google modified or complimented (if at all) the PageRank algorithm to make it more suited to an office environment?
I am currently pushing management at my site to purchase a Google Search Appliance, so I need an answer to this to help justify the change from our existing search application. i.e. without a good PageRank score, how does the Search Appliance order the result set in a useful way?
And then as soon as they edit the page and change some of the words, the "robust" hyperlink doesn't work anymore.
This doesn't sound very robust to me. What are webmasters more likely to change, the URL or the HTML?
"Your body keeps moving with the same velocity..."
In this case, if you are moving forward, your body hits the steering grip and control shaft. This will attempt to prevent you from falling flat on your face.
If the motors are strong enough, maybe it would succeed.
Or maybe you would just go flying over the top, just like I can remember flying over the handlebars of my bike several years ago and landing on gravel, then sliding on my back for 30 feet until my shirt was in tatters and my back was not much better. Yeehaa! (Serves me right for going downhill without brakes.)
Michi Henning has given his Computing Fallacies talk several times in various venues in the last few years.
Slides and video from one of these (given on April 18th, 2000) are available here.
He will probably continue to give his talk for many years to come, as it is unlikely things will change much in the short to medium term.
In Canberra, Australia's capital city, TransACT is rolling out fibre optic cable to all residential properties (not sure about apartments). The prices are about $29USD for 1Mbps/128kbps or $37 for 2Mbps/256kbps.
The bad news is it is going to take a couple of years to roll it out throughout the city. And not all Australian cities are as lucky. But at least it is better than nothing.
So was that version 0.6 or thereabouts that you downloaded?
Why don't you have a look at version 1.0 before making such a harsh judgement - you may find it has improved dramatically.
Someone made a mistake and set the alarm clock for 3pm, rather than 3am (we won't name names). Fortunately my internal clock brought me to full wakefulness at 15 minutes past the hour. After getting dressed and ready with sleeping bag, blanket and the remaining heat in the hot water bottle, I crept outside, careful not to wake the rest of the house. Sitting down in the adirondack on the deck out the back door, I settled down into a comfortable position at 3:25. It was quiet, deadly quiet. The only noise was the rumble of a faraway car. No breeze stirred in the cloudless sky. A perfect night for viewing the Leonid Meteor Storm of 2001, one of the most hyped up events in astronomy in many years.
At first they came slowly, and spasmodically. Just like the ones I remembered as a kid, with the awe and wonder of young eyes. Flashes of light, speeding across the expanse of the heavens.
Double digits, my first ten for the evening. More than I had ever seen in my whole life. Twenty, thirty, forty. On the forty-second one, I made my wish, which as for most wishes, will only come true if I make it so. Fifty, sixty. The sixty-seventh one was special, ten times the brightness of the others, leaving a thin trail like that of a high-altitude aeroplane. The thin trail dissipated slowly, and was still visible several minutes later. Seventy, eighty, ninety. Ninety-six was another bright one, which bounced the atmosphere and reappeared in a single, even brighter flash of extinction. Altogether that night I would see six bright shooting stars, each one deserving of an Oscar.
Owls hooting nearby, with the spooky sound that would make you jump if you were walking through a cemetery. A family of deer creeping carefully through the underbrush, trying not be seen. They are safe - the darkness under the trees is absolute.
At 4:38, after seeing 160 so far, I had to go replenish the hot water bottle, which by now was no longer hot. It was cold out there, refreshingly cold, refreshing enough that I needed something to stop my hands from getting frost-bite.
From 4:41 to 5:17 I saw another 140 shooting stars, although comparing a fragment of a comet the size of a grain of sand to a star is overstating things just a bit. I even saw two that were heading towards the radiant, that part of the sky from which most of the meteors appear to come from, somewhere in the constellation of Leo (although the configuration of stars at that point looks much more like a giant snake to me).
Satellites, sailing serenely across the black night sky of Wilton, Connecticut. In no rush at all, compared to the fleeting meteors, living fast and dying young.
At 5:20 I returned outside after waking my wife so she could join me in watching the splendor of the heavens. Together we saw more satellites, and another 150 specks of transient light between us, huddling in the middle of the deck, turning around to catch the ones behind us, wishing just once we had as many eyes as an arachnid so we could see them all at once. By 5:50 the beginnings of the rising sun could be seen, drowning out the fainter of the stars, shooting and stationary both. We headed inside and tried to grab a couple more hours of half-sleep before the morning impinged itself upon our consciousnesses. We dreamed of astronomical marvels, but our dreams were only half as good as reality. And though it will not be for another 98 years that we expect to see such a sight again, our memories will last that long.
Michael Richards
Many readers of God's Debris apparently seem to think that Scott Adams actually believes all the stuff he put in the book. Ok, so maybe he has a big ego, but even he is not that uneducated.
He did ask people not to blame him for the words that a fictional character said in his prologue, but some readers chose not to take that bit seriously, even though they then proceeded to take the rest of the book seriously, and find holes in it.
Of course there are holes in, but that wasn't the point. The point was to make you think. And in that the book certainly succeeds. In parts he does sound like he is lecturing like a professor, but most of the book is just a ploy to get the grey matter going.
So take it all with a grain of salt, pick out the bits you think are good, and don't let the other bits upset you.
Check out Theseus and the Minotaur