I'm not sure that anyone who isn't a zealot believes that open source software is bug free. Open and closed source software are, after all, both written by humans of varying ability.
But I think they're looking at the wrong stat. What should be compared is how long users of that software are forced to live with the bug.
I just tried to pull up one of my own pages with this engine. Got:
"Redirection limit for this URL exceeded. Unable to load the requested page."
Which, as near as I can tell, is their way of throttling commercial hits. Wonderful. Moving the mouse over the link doesn't reveal the address in the bottom bar, either, so the only way I can think of to obtain the address of the item it matches is by right-clicking and selecting 'copy link address', opening a new window and pasting it it (and having a browser that is capable of doing this), then editing the URL so only the target link text remains.
You can't even right-lick and open in a new window to do this. If you try, you get "about:blank" which, afaik, means they're using javascript.
These people sure go through a lot pains to render a result and then not let you anywhere near it. Saying they're bigger than Google is a bit like someone bragging about how their PDP-11 is bigger than my Athlon. Cripes.
Plus: It groups matches with a site. So if, say, you get a hit on Salon on a search for 'DDR', you can click on 'more hits from' to get other matches on Salon. I've found this to not work very well on Google while it seems to work well on this site.
Big, BIG minus: Doesn't cache. Which is a huge reason why I use Google.
Conclusion: I probably won't even bookmark this site. It doesn't do much that just a little bit of digging wouldn't do anyway, and probably comes with a lot more cruft in the process.
Given that a good portion of the Slashdot readership (myself included) couldn't dance to save their collective bashes (ahem), I'm not so sure y'all should be rooting this on.
You realize, of course, I'm just kidding. But you have to wonder if the grade is linked to the score.
"The question is, who walks out of the destination chamber? Is it me or is it a reconstructed "me" with a different awareness, while the original "me" was destroyed?"
We'll just have to ask the wife of the first volunteer, won't we? =)
This might make P2P evolve...but go away? Doubtful.
If I was writing P2P apps and facing this situation, I would simply incorporate a credit method with a cap. In other words, a file sharer gets nnn credits for serving nnn MB of files and I allow the user to specify the cutoff in the client. That way they would need to share to partake in the sharing (which would be great to have in general and will probably increase what's available instead of decrease it, thanks RIAA) and the user can specify a cutoff so they're guaranteed to not exceed the cap.
And if they're a real MP3 fan, they just blow past the cap, pay the extra $9.99 (or whatever) a month and get another 150 records. Oh no.
P2P developers may be "inextricably linked" to bandwidth, but what the cable companies provide, by definition, is bandwidth. So unless you can come up with a way to block certain types of data (don't get me started), this will just make the apps 'smarter' and yet transparent to your average web user.
That's like saying any chase that ends in a crash is blatantly ripping off Tom & Jerry. I once had a roommate who insisted the wheeled-toy-truck-under-Silent-Bob's-foot was actually a clear ripoff of Wallace & Grommit's train chase.
Give me a break.
There is a finite number of themes in the world and using one a second time does not equate to 'ripping it off.' Does everyone cite Burt Reynolds when they make a shitty movie? No. Do you complain about it?
While I tend to lean toward the gentic algorithm-weighted neural network school of thought for AI's (think Blondie 24, I'm trying to do something somewhat similar with Go), I think it would be interesting to ask Cyc to make conclusions based on it's "truth-set". Tell it when it gets things right and when it doesn't, and see if it gets better at coming to conclusions (sounds like a new litmus test for intelligence =).
The fact that it asked if it was human or if another machine was currently being given the same task doesn't surprise me. If you provide enough bits of data and you let it patch together questions, it'll eventually ask something that seems bright. The next question is, "how many 'stupid' things has it asked?" In fact, mentioning that it inquired about it's nature in such a leading, out-of-context fashion sounds more like PR spin than quality science.
But I think it goes without saying that while it might be useful, I'm not sure this could shed much light on how thinking occurs, regardless of it's species emulation. For the $60M pricetag, I sure hope it is, anyway.
And while I'm at it, it'll scale like ****.
Anyone know if they'll be opening the database to the public? If not, anybody from that team know who should be asked? I'd be very interested in seeing that.
I hate to be one of those "remember when Slashdot [fill in blank]" people, but remember when Slashdot would have run a story on a guy that made his own and posted the pics on how to do it?
Frankly, I enjoyed BBS'ing more than I enjoy the internet. Don't even get me going on the signal:noise ratio. I remember hearing about it around 1991 and thinking...so?
I remember waiting for 12:01 so I could log in and take my days turn of Tradwars.
Not really meant as a "it was better when I was a kid" rants but I guess it sounds like one, doesn't it? =)
While the Slashdot community is more or less renown for such stupidity, this pile of replies embodies the circlejerk mentality more than ever.
I have never witnessed so much mental masurbation, ever, anyplace. This is a 1,300-page tome that I'm fairly not a single fscking one of the people who replied actually read. Without delving into Argument from Authority, it's written by a guy who wrote his first book at particle physics at the age of 14 and obtained his doctorate, if my memory serves, at the age of 17. Does this mean that whatever spews from his lips is universal law? No. Does it mean that maybe, perhaps, what he wrote is worth looking at before dismissing him out of hand as a kook? Yeah, maybe.
My opinion of the/. community just went down the shitter. It, as a whole, is far more concerned with hearing itself talk than giving this guy a well-deserved hearing.
Go ahead, mod this into the ground. Only karma-whores (and there are a lot more of you around than you'll admit) give a rat's ass about such a system. My copy arrives tomorrow and I'm looking forward to see if people with more to bring to the table than lipservice can do something with his theories.
MSFUDMOD01.ZIP: Introduces Bill Gates' henchmen to your IT/Finance dept. This will install "virtual IIS" on every campus machine, increases complexity geometrically, saps resources, makes the better CS students grouchy.
PSEUDCHTMOD01.ZIP: Enforcment of such gems as "trying to learn how to be a CS major will get you thrown out of the class".
SLAVEMOD01.ZIP: Increases revenue for the school by making all of your students research yours to sell.
Let me apologize in advance for saying what plenty of other people are and already have, but if enough people say it, maybe they'll pay attention.
Sixteen dollars and ninety-nine cents for 8 tracks of music is preposterous.
What the industry is seeing is the result of kids learning that burning a CD that is every bit as good in the way of quality as the original is dirt cheap. So the obvious question then becomes, where's all this money going to?
The record industry is an incestuous network of kissing cousins whose existance is superfluous and merely to propogate it's own necessity. A record requires two things -- a band with talent and the money to record it. That's it. End of story. What the record industry has become accustomed to is clusterbombing the market with promotion. In other words, quality has become not second-hand, not third-hand, but an entirely forgotten quantity. How many seconds of blank-stare do you suppose you'd get from a record label exec when you asked how large a factor the artistic quality and originality of the artist played into their marketing scheme? I'll give you a hint; it involves two numbers.
So what's happening? Kids are getting a copy of Jack Off Jill or A New Found Glory and saying, "hey, this is pretty good" and lo!, all that Brittney/nSync marketing is for nothing. Blown. Wasted. Something that execs DO know is that nothing...I repeat nothing beats good word-of-mouth. You can't buy that kind of publicity. But absent that vector, the industry has little choice.
In summary, the industry shifted from embracing talent to embracing marketability and now the market is learning that markteting is a dubious bedfellow, their foundation is sand. They can't abandon their model and they can't survive where they stand.
In other words, hey're panicking. And I have zero sympathy.
Let them make a CD $6 and nobody will bother with piracy because it simply won't pay. Nobody ever seems to take the industry to task on the roots of their own demise -- the monopoly-like abuse of their medium.
This buffoon from Newbury talks about the "hacker ethic" like he gets it. If he understood the concept of making something and then not hording it (Linux, anyone?) for his own gain (copyright, when applied to the recording industry, is nothing more than artificial information scarcity), would he even be speaking against this? Goddamn right it's the hacker ethic. Let me apologize in advance for believing that sharing is an ethically superior modus operandi.
What they say: "This is unfair! This is unethical!" What they mean: "You're learning that we're screwing you and you're no longer standing for it, so we're scared we just lost our meal ticket."
Anyway, if you've read this far, thanks. It bugs me that they can shift the focus of the issue as well as they can. They've managed to mask their own blatant greed and vilify a college kid who burns a CD for a friend at the same time. Where is the outrage over their own artist-screwing practices? But the answer doesn't...shouldn't surprise me. Just follow the money trail, it leads right to our government. You can't legislate this sort of obfuscation without a legislator. And that's where the battle has to be fought.
An Anonymous Coward wrote: "You also make this guy sound saner than he really is. He wants to mine materials on the moon for building a plant. [Well of course! cast a magic wand, change moon rocks into power plants!]"
Sending up machinery that can mine lunar soil (for the ores) and water (for fuel and oxygen) is far less expensive than shipping the constructed materials, even for extremely small projects. This would not be an extremely small project.
Give the moon a solar array and you can get a few watts. Give the moon a fab plant and it can make arrays for one heck of a long time. Better still, the gravity of the moon is 1/5th of that on Earth, so launching fabricated items to, say, Mars, becomes significantly less expensive.
It's certainly not trivial, but it is forward-looking. You can save a few bucks by launching parts to the moon, but economically, it scales worse than Napster. =P
Well, in my defense, I didn't realize that it was posted on slashdot (for the life of me, I can't recall how it came to my attention), and it's not entirely obvious that the Zipf research is relevant here.
People need to lighten up about this karma thing. As proof of concept, I beg the next person who reads this with moderator points bean it. Really. Who cares? Just tryin' to be helpful.
'course, it would have been nice if I realized it was already on slash. Wouldn't have spent:15 grepping my opera history file. =)
An exerpt: "Every so often scientists notice a rule or a regularity that makes no particular sense on its face but seems to hold true nonetheless. One such is a curiosity called Zipf's Law. George Kingsley Zipf was a Harvard linguist who in the 1930s noticed that the distribution of words adhered to a regular statistical pattern. The most common word in English--"the"--appears roughly twice as often in ordinary usage as the second most common word, three times as often as the third most common, ten times as often as the tenth most common, and so on. As an afterthought, Zipf also observed that cities' sizes followed the same sort of pattern, which became known as a Zipf distribution. Oversimplifying a bit, if you rank cities by population, you find that City No. 10 will have roughly a tenth as many residents as City No. 1, City No. 100 a hundredth as many, and so forth. (Actually the relationship isn't quite that clean, but mathematically it is strong nonetheless.) Subsequent observers later noticed that this same Zipfian relationship between size and rank applies to many things: for instance, corporations and firms in a modern economy are Zipf-distributed."
It's one of the best articles I've read in a long time, demonstrating how they've managed to model not only extinct populations accurately (who knows how much after-the-fact tweaking went on, but...) but race riots and honesty in social groups.
Add to that, I spent a good fifteen minutes trying to find it again, so someone had better read it. It's just under 10,000 words.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure that anyone who isn't a zealot believes that open source software is bug free. Open and closed source software are, after all, both written by humans of varying ability.
But I think they're looking at the wrong stat. What should be compared is how long users of that software are forced to live with the bug.
That is a much more meaningful question.
Hemos wrote:
"this has to be a rough day for the NPR ombudsman who's deluged with email by now..."
Oh, the irony to be found in in this statement which appears in a Slashdot headline...
Man, do I feel stupid.
And here I was all impressed when I saw my post got modded +5. Guess that just goes to show that mod points don't equal squat. =)
Whoever sees this, please mod it down into oblivion as my pennance for being so stupid.
Oh yeah. I'm using Mozilla 0.9.9. I could edit the link, but that seemed rather backwards. Your explanation makes perfect sense though.
I just tried to pull up one of my own pages with this engine. Got:
"Redirection limit for this URL exceeded. Unable to load the requested page."
Which, as near as I can tell, is their way of throttling commercial hits. Wonderful. Moving the mouse over the link doesn't reveal the address in the bottom bar, either, so the only way I can think of to obtain the address of the item it matches is by right-clicking and selecting 'copy link address', opening a new window and pasting it it (and having a browser that is capable of doing this), then editing the URL so only the target link text remains.
You can't even right-lick and open in a new window to do this. If you try, you get "about:blank" which, afaik, means they're using javascript.
These people sure go through a lot pains to render a result and then not let you anywhere near it. Saying they're bigger than Google is a bit like someone bragging about how their PDP-11 is bigger than my Athlon. Cripes.
Plus: It groups matches with a site. So if, say, you get a hit on Salon on a search for 'DDR', you can click on 'more hits from' to get other matches on Salon. I've found this to not work very well on Google while it seems to work well on this site.
Big, BIG minus: Doesn't cache. Which is a huge reason why I use Google.
Conclusion: I probably won't even bookmark this site. It doesn't do much that just a little bit of digging wouldn't do anyway, and probably comes with a lot more cruft in the process.
Given that a good portion of the Slashdot readership (myself included) couldn't dance to save their collective bashes (ahem), I'm not so sure y'all should be rooting this on.
You realize, of course, I'm just kidding. But you have to wonder if the grade is linked to the score.
Odds are pretty good that the same person submitted it to both. =)
Leave the coinboxes in and credit the depoits towards a college escrow account.
"The question is, who walks out of the destination chamber? Is it me or is it a reconstructed "me" with a different awareness, while the original "me" was destroyed?"
We'll just have to ask the wife of the first volunteer, won't we? =)
This might make P2P evolve ...but go away? Doubtful.
If I was writing P2P apps and facing this situation, I would simply incorporate a credit method with a cap. In other words, a file sharer gets nnn credits for serving nnn MB of files and I allow the user to specify the cutoff in the client. That way they would need to share to partake in the sharing (which would be great to have in general and will probably increase what's available instead of decrease it, thanks RIAA) and the user can specify a cutoff so they're guaranteed to not exceed the cap.
And if they're a real MP3 fan, they just blow past the cap, pay the extra $9.99 (or whatever) a month and get another 150 records. Oh no.
P2P developers may be "inextricably linked" to bandwidth, but what the cable companies provide, by definition, is bandwidth. So unless you can come up with a way to block certain types of data (don't get me started), this will just make the apps 'smarter' and yet transparent to your average web user.
That's like saying any chase that ends in a crash is blatantly ripping off Tom & Jerry. I once had a roommate who insisted the wheeled-toy-truck-under-Silent-Bob's-foot was actually a clear ripoff of Wallace & Grommit's train chase.
Give me a break.
There is a finite number of themes in the world and using one a second time does not equate to 'ripping it off.' Does everyone cite Burt Reynolds when they make a shitty movie? No. Do you complain about it?
While I tend to lean toward the gentic algorithm-weighted neural network school of thought for AI's (think Blondie 24, I'm trying to do something somewhat similar with Go), I think it would be interesting to ask Cyc to make conclusions based on it's "truth-set". Tell it when it gets things right and when it doesn't, and see if it gets better at coming to conclusions (sounds like a new litmus test for intelligence =).
The fact that it asked if it was human or if another machine was currently being given the same task doesn't surprise me. If you provide enough bits of data and you let it patch together questions, it'll eventually ask something that seems bright. The next question is, "how many 'stupid' things has it asked?" In fact, mentioning that it inquired about it's nature in such a leading, out-of-context fashion sounds more like PR spin than quality science.
But I think it goes without saying that while it might be useful, I'm not sure this could shed much light on how thinking occurs, regardless of it's species emulation. For the $60M pricetag, I sure hope it is, anyway.
And while I'm at it, it'll scale like ****.
Anyone know if they'll be opening the database to the public? If not, anybody from that team know who should be asked? I'd be very interested in seeing that.
I hate to be one of those "remember when Slashdot [fill in blank]" people, but remember when Slashdot would have run a story on a guy that made his own and posted the pics on how to do it?
You think you're upset?
I just found out ABBA broke up. =(
He picked a crappy view if you ask me. I mean, if you can pick anything you want, wouldn't you build a view from the top?
Heck, mine would be a view out of the window of the ISS. Hm. That might get a bit expensive, though...
Frankly, I enjoyed BBS'ing more than I enjoy the internet. Don't even get me going on the signal:noise ratio. I remember hearing about it around 1991 and thinking ...so?
I remember waiting for 12:01 so I could log in and take my days turn of Tradwars.
Not really meant as a "it was better when I was a kid" rants but I guess it sounds like one, doesn't it? =)
While the Slashdot community is more or less renown for such stupidity, this pile of replies embodies the circlejerk mentality more than ever.
/. community just went down the shitter. It, as a whole, is far more concerned with hearing itself talk than giving this guy a well-deserved hearing.
I have never witnessed so much mental masurbation, ever, anyplace. This is a 1,300-page tome that I'm fairly not a single fscking one of the people who replied actually read. Without delving into Argument from Authority, it's written by a guy who wrote his first book at particle physics at the age of 14 and obtained his doctorate, if my memory serves, at the age of 17. Does this mean that whatever spews from his lips is universal law? No. Does it mean that maybe, perhaps, what he wrote is worth looking at before dismissing him out of hand as a kook? Yeah, maybe.
My opinion of the
Go ahead, mod this into the ground. Only karma-whores (and there are a lot more of you around than you'll admit) give a rat's ass about such a system. My copy arrives tomorrow and I'm looking forward to see if people with more to bring to the table than lipservice can do something with his theories.
MSFUDMOD01.ZIP: Introduces Bill Gates' henchmen to your IT/Finance dept. This will install "virtual IIS" on every campus machine, increases complexity geometrically, saps resources, makes the better CS students grouchy.
PSEUDCHTMOD01.ZIP: Enforcment of such gems as "trying to learn how to be a CS major will get you thrown out of the class".
SLAVEMOD01.ZIP: Increases revenue for the school by making all of your students research yours to sell.
IANAL, but I think this "innocent until proven guilty" is correct for criminal trials. I don't believe it's true for civil.
Again, I could be wrong. In fact I could be very wrong.
Let me apologize in advance for saying what plenty of other people are and already have, but if enough people say it, maybe they'll pay attention.
...I repeat nothing beats good word-of-mouth. You can't buy that kind of publicity. But absent that vector, the industry has little choice.
...shouldn't surprise me. Just follow the money trail, it leads right to our government. You can't legislate this sort of obfuscation without a legislator. And that's where the battle has to be fought.
Sixteen dollars and ninety-nine cents for 8 tracks of music is preposterous.
What the industry is seeing is the result of kids learning that burning a CD that is every bit as good in the way of quality as the original is dirt cheap. So the obvious question then becomes, where's all this money going to?
The record industry is an incestuous network of kissing cousins whose existance is superfluous and merely to propogate it's own necessity. A record requires two things -- a band with talent and the money to record it. That's it. End of story. What the record industry has become accustomed to is clusterbombing the market with promotion. In other words, quality has become not second-hand, not third-hand, but an entirely forgotten quantity. How many seconds of blank-stare do you suppose you'd get from a record label exec when you asked how large a factor the artistic quality and originality of the artist played into their marketing scheme? I'll give you a hint; it involves two numbers.
So what's happening? Kids are getting a copy of Jack Off Jill or A New Found Glory and saying, "hey, this is pretty good" and lo!, all that Brittney/nSync marketing is for nothing. Blown. Wasted. Something that execs DO know is that nothing
In summary, the industry shifted from embracing talent to embracing marketability and now the market is learning that markteting is a dubious bedfellow, their foundation is sand. They can't abandon their model and they can't survive where they stand.
In other words, hey're panicking. And I have zero sympathy.
Let them make a CD $6 and nobody will bother with piracy because it simply won't pay. Nobody ever seems to take the industry to task on the roots of their own demise -- the monopoly-like abuse of their medium.
This buffoon from Newbury talks about the "hacker ethic" like he gets it. If he understood the concept of making something and then not hording it (Linux, anyone?) for his own gain (copyright, when applied to the recording industry, is nothing more than artificial information scarcity), would he even be speaking against this? Goddamn right it's the hacker ethic. Let me apologize in advance for believing that sharing is an ethically superior modus operandi.
What they say: "This is unfair! This is unethical!"
What they mean: "You're learning that we're screwing you and you're no longer standing for it, so we're scared we just lost our meal ticket."
Anyway, if you've read this far, thanks. It bugs me that they can shift the focus of the issue as well as they can. They've managed to mask their own blatant greed and vilify a college kid who burns a CD for a friend at the same time. Where is the outrage over their own artist-screwing practices? But the answer doesn't
But that's another rant. =)
An Anonymous Coward wrote:
"You also make this guy sound saner than he really is. He wants to mine materials on the moon for building a plant. [Well of course! cast a magic wand, change moon rocks into power plants!]"
Sending up machinery that can mine lunar soil (for the ores) and water (for fuel and oxygen) is far less expensive than shipping the constructed materials, even for extremely small projects. This would not be an extremely small project.
Give the moon a solar array and you can get a few watts. Give the moon a fab plant and it can make arrays for one heck of a long time. Better still, the gravity of the moon is 1/5th of that on Earth, so launching fabricated items to, say, Mars, becomes significantly less expensive.
It's certainly not trivial, but it is forward-looking. You can save a few bucks by launching parts to the moon, but economically, it scales worse than Napster. =P
Wups.
:15 grepping my opera history file. =)
Well, in my defense, I didn't realize that it was posted on slashdot (for the life of me, I can't recall how it came to my attention), and it's not entirely obvious that the Zipf research is relevant here.
People need to lighten up about this karma thing. As proof of concept, I beg the next person who reads this with moderator points bean it. Really. Who cares? Just tryin' to be helpful.
'course, it would have been nice if I realized it was already on slash. Wouldn't have spent
I'll bet you a nickel that if they run the Kazaa TOS through TextArc, Bill Gate's face will appear. =)
The Atlantic has a GREAT article about this effect:
t m
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/04/rauch.h
An exerpt:
"Every so often scientists notice a rule or a regularity that makes no particular sense on its face but seems to hold true nonetheless. One such is a curiosity called Zipf's Law. George Kingsley Zipf was a Harvard linguist who in the 1930s noticed that the distribution of words adhered to a regular statistical pattern. The most common word in English--"the"--appears roughly twice as often in ordinary usage as the second most common word, three times as often as the third most common, ten times as often as the tenth most common, and so on. As an afterthought, Zipf also observed that cities' sizes followed the same sort of pattern, which became known as a Zipf distribution. Oversimplifying a bit, if you rank cities by population, you find that City No. 10 will have roughly a tenth as many residents as City No. 1, City No. 100 a hundredth as many, and so forth. (Actually the relationship isn't quite that clean, but mathematically it is strong nonetheless.) Subsequent observers later noticed that this same Zipfian relationship between size and rank applies to many things: for instance, corporations and firms in a modern economy are Zipf-distributed."
It's one of the best articles I've read in a long time, demonstrating how they've managed to model not only extinct populations accurately (who knows how much after-the-fact tweaking went on, but...) but race riots and honesty in social groups.
Add to that, I spent a good fifteen minutes trying to find it again, so someone had better read it. It's just under 10,000 words.
PS - I strongly doubt it'll get slashed, but if it does, here is the Google cached copy.
Quantity != quality.
If I say I have one glass of really good beer, are you going to reply, "it's somewhat telling that you consider one glass of beer to be good"?