It was discussed openly at an international conference in June (InfoScale). I was one of the many academics there who asked for exactly this sort of thing -- that an anonymous set of searches be released. The vetting process (or lack there-of) is the problem in this case: The searches aren't anonymous by their very nature.
It's not like this sort of thing is a regular occurence with associated well designed processes. The researchers probably talked to their supervisor, who probably said it was okay so long as it was anonymous and not for use by competitors.
Classic slashdot. A ridiculously biased summary, and the last point is completely irrelevant to the subject.
Amen.
Hell yeah! CTO doesnt 'get' blogging!
Yeah, that's why they have a search engine (A9) and remote search protocol (OpenSearch) that's focused on blog type information. All you need to do is to look at the list of sources that it uses and implementations of the spec... most of them are blogging software.
Having read TFA (after finding it in all the links) seems to me like it's publicity for the offendeds' book, and that they are easily offended when someone is not 100% supportive of them.
In '95 at university I used a laptop to transcribe much of what the lecturer was saying. Why? Because it's easy to look back at notes and get completely the wrong idea unless you remember the lecture. It's easier to remember the tone, context and the little things that the lecturer says which are important when you have a majority of the discussion written down.
The reason I needed to do this was because the lectures were primarily lectures -- the lecturer would stand at the front and either read their prepared speech or go through and talk off the cuff about the topics they've spent their life researching and know intimately.
Yes my laptop was old and clunky (386sx25 mono screen, 20 megabyte hdd) and it ran out of battery with a loud BEEP! at times if I had 3 lectures in a row. Yes that was annoying to others and I tried to always shut it down before that happened. Sometimes I failed and got well deserved dirty looks.
Now I'm a lecturer. Here's what I've taken from my experiences from the other side of the lectern with regards to laptops and note taking:
* Provide good course notes.
If the student doesn't need to write down the majority of the lecture, because they can get it for free from the course web site, they will spend more time listening and paying attention to the examples that you give outside of the course notes. This way they have their own copy *in advance* that they can write what is important *to them* down from what I say.
* Allow laptops, but don't allow the internet.
If a student learns best by doing exactly what I did in class, then that's great. However, having access to the internet is not important. If they have to google something I've said, then I am not explaining it properly. They have access to someone who understands the content, they can ask me to explain rather than going to the web for that information. Consequently, the lecturer needs to be approachable. The students need to feel like they CAN ask that question.
* Engage the students with your information on their terms
Don't give examples which are interesting to you, give examples which the student can relate to. Discuss things in the world view of an average 19 year old, not in terms of your average university professor because these worlds, while physically very close in a lecture theatre, are very very far apart in terms of what is important or interesting. Example: The relational data model has complex relationships which involve three or more entities. Some artificial example won't stick in the students' minds... but relate it to a love triange (eg a real world complex relationship!) and you've caught their attention at least briefly enough that this might stick and more importantly the/next/ thing you say might also be retained.
The next big question is whether or not it's standards based. While it would be surprising if it used Z39.50, it would be a shame if it didn't use SRW and/or CQL.
Especially as NISO is recommending them in their current 'Metasearch Initiative' -- an industry/academic/government cross sector committee with the major players and interested parties for allowing cross searching of bibliographic databases with other sorts of things.
(ObDisc, member of both SRW Editorial Board and Taskgroup 3 of NMSI)
You mean like ID gave away the first levels of DOOM and then sold a more advanced version (ie with more levels)?
This is hardly a new model.
--Azaroth
Re:"open standard" are a waste of time
on
IT, Be Free!
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
> What the world wants is a free reference implementation that works and which other > implemetations if they need to exist at all, can be compared to.
Yes. But to have a reference implementation, you need to have the standard of which it's a reference. SRW (http://www.loc.gov/srw) has 3 different reference implementations, in Java, C and Python and all OSS. But without the SRW standard, could you tell what was going on? I doubt it.
OpenOffice has multiple levels at which you can extend it. There's OpenOffice Basic, which is more powerful than just simple macros, but less powerful than your examples above.
Secondly, there's UNO bindings for C++, Java and (less well implemented) Python. From here you can do A Lot Of Stuff, including your examples, with ease. Additions like this don't require recompiling OO, they can be distributed (simple zip file) and linked with a single command (pkgchk)
Thirdly, as it's OSS, you could just hack the source code directly, though obviously option 2 is better.
Or at least created for people who will react to buzzwords. For example:
The only way to provide global education and health care services in coming decades at reasonable cost and broad coverage is via space-based communication systems.
Uhhh... Health Care Services require things like trained medical staff, medical equipment, drugs, and so forth. Broad coverage is via having more hospitals and better working conditions within them, not satellite communications. Education needs the same things -- schools, teachers and better resources.
Yes, Ethopia, you thought you needed hospitals and schools, but what you really need are satellites!
> Should governments (ANY government) directly fund > the development of an OS? (Or for that matter, any > application that will compete with commercial > providers).
Or for that matter give money to anything which could conceivably be 'commercial'... but that's the definition of 'commercial', having to do with commerce or money.
Oh no, the government paid for some research into an AIDS cure! That's taking away valuable dollars from some Big Corporation somewhere for sure. They paid for a study in how to avoid terrorism? Some company could have done that study.
If Microsoft wanted to fit the government call for a secure and open source operating system, then they should be allowed to. But they won't, so someone else will.
> BerkeleyDB is a hierarchial database. SQL is > godzillion times faster on complex searches.
Great, but who is going to often do complex enough searches for files that makes any sort of RDBMS worthwhile? The vast majority of searches would be simple keyed terms.
And exercise in how many people get to see jeremymann's account name before either: (a) the account is closed for non payment (b) the auction is pulled for breach of Ebay policy (c) jeremymann gets an honorary darwin award for paying 970000% of retail value for something
Viruses force the software to be made more secure. If we were already immune then the virus would never have been written, so yes in some respect, the community as a whole benefits from publicised viruses in the long term while those infected are negatively affected in the short term.
It's the opposite of security through obscurity -- the security issue is forced into public awareness and the software company is forced to fix it. Obviously this line of argument doesn't affect the fact that people are lazy and won't patch their systems.
Slashdot Mirror
Will the CTO of AT&T resign like AOL's did over the search history release, which was significantly less damaging than this.
I'm putting my money on No, personally.
-- Azaroth
It was discussed openly at an international conference in June (InfoScale). I was one of the many academics there who asked for exactly this sort of thing -- that an anonymous set of searches be released. The vetting process (or lack there-of) is the problem in this case: The searches aren't anonymous by their very nature.
InfoScale program: http://www.infoscale.org/techprog.html
The first paper after the keynote discussed in great detail this exact information.
The full paper: http://www.ir.iit.edu/~abdur/publications/pos-inf
It's not like this sort of thing is a regular occurence with associated well designed processes. The researchers probably talked to their supervisor, who probably said it was okay so long as it was anonymous and not for use by competitors.
-- Azaroth
SVG in 1.5.0.2 is a little busted -- one of my relatively simple SVGs took out the browser. That bug is fixed in 1.5.0.3.
Samples, including Tetris in Javascript + SVG:
http://www.croczilla.com/svg/samples/
-- Azaroth
Classic slashdot. A ridiculously biased summary, and the last point is completely irrelevant to the subject.
... most of them are blogging software.
Amen.
Hell yeah! CTO doesnt 'get' blogging!
Yeah, that's why they have a search engine (A9) and remote search protocol (OpenSearch) that's focused on blog type information. All you need to do is to look at the list of sources that it uses and implementations of the spec
Having read TFA (after finding it in all the links) seems to me like it's publicity for the offendeds' book, and that they are easily offended when someone is not 100% supportive of them.
-- Az
I've been on both sides of the fence.
/next/ thing you say might also be retained.
In '95 at university I used a laptop to transcribe much of what the lecturer was saying. Why? Because it's easy to look back at notes and get completely the wrong idea unless you remember the lecture. It's easier to remember the tone, context and the little things that the lecturer says which are important when you have a majority of the discussion written down.
The reason I needed to do this was because the lectures were primarily lectures -- the lecturer would stand at the front and either read their prepared speech or go through and talk off the cuff about the topics they've spent their life researching and know intimately.
Yes my laptop was old and clunky (386sx25 mono screen, 20 megabyte hdd) and it ran out of battery with a loud BEEP! at times if I had 3 lectures in a row. Yes that was annoying to others and I tried to always shut it down before that happened. Sometimes I failed and got well deserved dirty looks.
Now I'm a lecturer. Here's what I've taken from my experiences from the other side of the lectern with regards to laptops and note taking:
* Provide good course notes.
If the student doesn't need to write down the majority of the lecture, because they can get it for free from the course web site, they will spend more time listening and paying attention to the examples that you give outside of the course notes.
This way they have their own copy *in advance* that they can write what is important *to them* down from what I say.
* Allow laptops, but don't allow the internet.
If a student learns best by doing exactly what I did in class, then that's great. However, having access to the internet is not important. If they have to google something I've said, then I am not explaining it properly. They have access to someone who understands the content, they can ask me to explain rather than going to the web for that information. Consequently, the lecturer needs to be approachable. The students need to feel like they CAN ask that question.
* Engage the students with your information on their terms
Don't give examples which are interesting to you, give examples which the student can relate to. Discuss things in the world view of an average 19 year old, not in terms of your average university professor because these worlds, while physically very close in a lecture theatre, are very very far apart in terms of what is important or interesting.
Example: The relational data model has complex relationships which involve three or more entities. Some artificial example won't stick in the students' minds... but relate it to a love triange (eg a real world complex relationship!) and you've caught their attention at least briefly enough that this might stick and more importantly the
-- Az
More likely to be warez or movies than someone with a quarter million mp3s.
The next big question is whether or not it's standards based. While it would be surprising if it used Z39.50, it would be a shame if it didn't use SRW and/or CQL.
Especially as NISO is recommending them in their current 'Metasearch Initiative' -- an industry/academic/government cross sector committee with the major players and interested parties for allowing cross searching of bibliographic databases with other sorts of things.
(ObDisc, member of both SRW Editorial Board and Taskgroup 3 of NMSI)
--Azaroth
You mean like ID gave away the first levels of DOOM and then sold a more advanced version (ie with more levels)?
This is hardly a new model.
--Azaroth
> What the world wants is a free reference implementation that works and which other
> implemetations if they need to exist at all, can be compared to.
Yes. But to have a reference implementation, you need to have the standard of which it's a reference.
SRW (http://www.loc.gov/srw) has 3 different reference implementations, in Java, C and Python and all OSS. But without the SRW standard, could you tell what was going on? I doubt it.
--Azaroth
OpenOffice has multiple levels at which you can extend it. There's OpenOffice Basic, which is more powerful than just simple macros, but less powerful than your examples above.
Secondly, there's UNO bindings for C++, Java and (less well implemented) Python. From here you can do A Lot Of Stuff, including your examples, with ease. Additions like this don't require recompiling OO, they can be distributed (simple zip file) and linked with a single command (pkgchk)
Thirdly, as it's OSS, you could just hack the source code directly, though obviously option 2 is better.
-- Azaroth
You mean like IBM and RedHat, the only real contributors to the linux kernel in a financial position to do so?
Uhh, what planet have you been living on for the last 6 months?
--Azaroth
There were no search results matching alternatives to verisign
What a huge surprise.
--Azaroth
Or at least created for people who will react to buzzwords. For example:
The only way to provide global education and health care services in coming decades at reasonable cost and broad coverage is via space-based communication systems.
Uhhh... Health Care Services require things like trained medical staff, medical equipment, drugs, and so forth. Broad coverage is via having more hospitals and better working conditions within them, not satellite communications. Education needs the same things -- schools, teachers and better resources.
Yes, Ethopia, you thought you needed hospitals and schools, but what you really need are satellites!
-- Azaroth
So, uhh, you use an operating system based on how many people ask stupid questions about -applications which run on it-?
Just don't interact with people who ask 'stupid' questions. If you don't like the signal:noise ratio on a list, unsubscribe and look for a dev list.
That said, Linux is probably better without elitist jerks giving it a bad name anyway.
And the stuff distributed on CDs by the RIAA is not really music either
--Azaroth
They forgot the shift key when typing 2:
Peer @ Porn
--Azaroth
> Should governments (ANY government) directly fund > the development of an OS? (Or for that matter, any > application that will compete with commercial
> providers).
Or for that matter give money to anything which could conceivably be 'commercial'... but that's the definition of 'commercial', having to do with commerce or money.
Oh no, the government paid for some research into an AIDS cure! That's taking away valuable dollars from some Big Corporation somewhere for sure. They paid for a study in how to avoid terrorism? Some company could have done that study.
If Microsoft wanted to fit the government call for a secure and open source operating system, then they should be allowed to. But they won't, so someone else will.
--Azaroth
> BerkeleyDB is a hierarchial database. SQL is
> godzillion times faster on complex searches.
Great, but who is going to often do complex enough searches for files that makes any sort of RDBMS worthwhile? The vast majority of searches would be simple keyed terms.
SQL is slow compared to things like BerkeleyDB
We already have journaled file systems that can save metadata (though not user defined, I think)
Your database becomes corrupt, you lose everything.
Sorry, give me something that gives me back my data -fast-. If I want to do selects for files, I'll use locate and xargs.
--Azaroth
Can we say DieboldGate?
--Azaroth
More importantly, do you avoid the 5 pound congestion road tax in London when you're driving on the Thames?
--Azaroth
And exercise in how many people get to see jeremymann's account name before either:
(a) the account is closed for non payment
(b) the auction is pulled for breach of Ebay policy
(c) jeremymann gets an honorary darwin award for paying 970000% of retail value for something
--Az
Viruses force the software to be made more secure. If we were already immune then the virus would never have been written, so yes in some respect, the community as a whole benefits from publicised viruses in the long term while those infected are negatively affected in the short term.
It's the opposite of security through obscurity -- the security issue is forced into public awareness and the software company is forced to fix it. Obviously this line of argument doesn't affect the fact that people are lazy and won't patch their systems.
-- Azaroth
>> Boromir, son of Faramir ... you got it the wrong way round.
> Uhhh, dude
Uhhh, dude... you're both like totally wrong.
Faramir is Boromir's brother, they're both sons of Denethor, Steward of Gondor.
Now go read the books.
--Azaroth
Look at it again and read the comment at the bottom.
S is for Shuttle.
--Azaroth