You are right that I read rather too much into his comment. I think he would, as you say, disagree with the kind of sexist enslaving scenario I presented. What I was trying to say is that the sort of reasoning he presented: "accept" differences and "use" them (as opposed to, as I advocate, accept them but then largely ignore them in practice to avoid discrimination --- essentially the same as what you say), when brought to its logical conclusion, naturally and unconsciously leads to discrimination. It's just that I phrased it in a way that made me sound too extreme, sorry.
It is not sexist to say that women suffer sexism more than men? Thats as much a gender-based generalization as any other.
No, it is not sexist to say this. Any more than it is racist to say that black people in America suffer from racism more than suburban white males.
I was complaining about applying a generalization to individuals, not about making generalizations themselves. It's a subtle but important point. I of course do not deny, for instance, that on average, women are physically weaker than men. The problem would be if I saw a woman and I automatically refused to have her work on my construction site on the assumption that being a woman, she must be too weak to work properly.
For the record, I do think that men suffer from sexism somewhat, but it's silly to say that they do so more than women.
Use those differences? How? By and pigeonholing women into tasks that take advantage of their supposed "intuition" and "social skills", like day-care center workers and elementary school teachers, while discouraging them from taking jobs, like science and programming, that require male rationality? Can you propose any method of "using those differences" other than this type of blatant sexual profiling? Following your train of thought to its logical conclusion leads to disgusting conclusions.
How about this not-so-revolutionary idea, that's been touted by gender and race activists for decades: accept that differences, if any, exist only in the average case and that
there is huge overlap in the spectrum of individuals. That is, many women are much more "manly" than the average man, and vice versa. Automatically assigning the average properties of a group to an individual is called stereotyping, and it is repellent and wrong. But this is what you imply by your suggestion of "using those differences".
I'm lucky enough to live in Japan and the level of DDR play here is mindblowing. I'm a top-notch player by North American standards but here I hardly ever see anyone who's less good than I am. The other day I saw a guy choose Maxx Unlimited as his final song, AA it and then go on to clear the impossible bonus song, Legend of Max. Insane. (Those songs have a speed of about 300 BPM, which means that you often have to dance at a speed of 10 steps per second! And a rating of AA means that your performance was essentially perfect, aside from a few tiny slips.)
Another interesting thing is that DDR may look like an absurd parody of dance, but it actually does teach you rhythm and a kind of basic dance movement. It's actually harder than real dancing in the sense that it's much faster and more frantic: whenever I see a professional dancer I'm surprised at how leisurely and slow it is. I didn't believe it at first either, but when I go to a real nightclub now and do DDR-like legwork, everyone is impressed and thinks I've taken dance courses. Of course you don't tell them the real story:).
If you like Money Puzzle Exchanger, check out Magical Drop 3, also for the Neo Geo. Basically the same principle, except that all you need to make a combo is to clear 2 or more groups of colored balls really fast, even if they are unrelated. If you pause for half a second your combo stops. The kind of frantic game where you pound on the controller and yell trash talk at your opponent; I like it much better than MPE personally.
I'm not advocating going to pure kana (ouch, painful), but it's obvious that the Japanese writing system is overcomplicated in comparison to the Western alphabetic system.
I could read English novels in third grade, whereas many Japanese 10-year-olds are forced to read only "kiddie" books because of lack of kanji knowledge. And as you surely know from your own experience, learning to read Japanese is far more difficult to learn for a foreigner than for a Japanese to learn to read English.
"Exactly as complex as it needs to be" applies to spoken language, which evolves freely, but definitely not to writing systems, which are consciously defined by imperfect individuals.
Lucasarts has consistently pumped out high quality Star Wars games, whereas the Star Trek license has been passed off to bit companies, inevitably resulting in garbage. Star Trek doesn't have a good track record in the gaming industry, so I wouldn't react with much excitement to an announcement that it's being turned into an MMORPG.
You seem to think that the SETI team is analyzing every possible wavelength from every part of the sky, looking for any possible pattern that might be generated by aliens. Not even close. Not getting any results tells us nothing more than that SETI wasn't looking in the right direction. There is nothing "telling" in that SETI has not found anything yet, and bogus negative results are harmless.
You can renew your IP address on a regular basis, which is likely to let you keep it for weeks/months, but it is bound to change eventually when they reboot their server or something. The bottom line is that it's under their control and there's no surefire way for you to keep the same address indefinitely.
Probably the best course of action for you would be to get a free DNS subdomain (i.e. "dyndns.org", "dhs.org" etc.) instead, and to update that regularly. Even if your IP address changes, you will still be able to use the name, and it's easier to remember and communicate besides.
I wonder the speed and the effects some Doom III would have if it was written mainly in Asm...
It would just take a lot longer to write. The reason demo efficiency blows the socks off anything in games is because demos are specifically designed to render a single scene and nothing else, not because demo coders are that much better at optimization than game coders (they are often the same people). What makes the difference is the various hacks demo programmers can pull off because they only have to worry about a single situation.
Anyway, with the advent of 3d accelerators, the whole scene has become rather meaningless --- the bottleneck of Doom 3 will be your GPU, not the efficiency of the x86 asm.
Based on the probability theory of Thomas Bayes, an 18th century philosopher. In a nutshell, whereas orthodox statistics emphasises a "distribution function" that wholly describes everything about a random variable, Bayesian methods take a more ground-up approach that works with incomplete information and revises probabilistic beliefs as new evidence comes to light. It's been attracting a lot of attention and research lately.
Just to point out that you should be wary of disease death statistics like the flu. The problem is that many of those who die from the flu are near-death old people. These would probably have died from something else within a week in any case. So I would say that the terrorism we have seen so far, if we evaluate the harm solely by number of years of life lost, is likely a more serious problem than the flu.
Ha. I've never seen this mentioned anywhere else on the Internet, but interestingly enough, the smiley occured to the author Vladimir Nabokov (known for the novel Lolita, which incidentally rules) back in 1973. I was reading a book of interviews with him (Strong Opinions) and I started when I saw this bit:
[asked how he would rank himself among great writers] I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile -- some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket, which I would now like to trace in reply to your question.
That's Nabokov all right, inadvertently predicting the invention of the smiley 10 years in advance:). Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if it had occured to lots of people, and the smiley has a very long history, if only someone could be bothered to dig it up.
What are you complaining about? You're saying new computers from all-in-one providers like Dell shouldn't need BIOS tweaking to start working? Well guess what, they don't. But the BIOS doesn't hurt anybody, and it's still necessary if you want to plug old non-plug-and-play peripherals into your PC.
Yeah, yeah, if PCs had been properly designed for true plug-and-play from the start, BIOS configuration wouldn't be necessary. But they weren't, and it's no use blaming today's manufacturers, who are stuck with it. If we removed the BIOS, it wouldn't benefit ordinary users who never have to touch it anyway, and it would make it hard or impossible to
use legacy hardware on PCs
install alternative operating systems who need different settings than the default.
No wonder Microsoft is pushing BIOS-less computers, like the new Toshiba laptops which are painful to install Linux on.
In sum, BIOS access is harmless and necessary, and I can't see what you're complaining about. Do you think the hood of your car should be soldered shut too, so that you never have to look at your fearfully complex engine?
There's also a disproportionate amount of Soundblaster-bashing going on here. Apparently my SB Lives have been crashing my systems and suffering poor sound latency for the last couple of years. Funny that I never noticed.
Lucky you. The SB Live crashed my system. It instantly destroyed my previously rock-stable W2K installation as soon as I plugged in the card and rebooted. I'm not touching that crap anymore. Anyway, keep on laughing for now, but keep in mind who to blame the next time your system goes horribly wrong.
Yeah, this is such a problem. I mean, right now, the Internet contains more content than me or even a large group of people could possibly hope to consume in a lifetime. And don't even start to say that most of the content now is garbage. That's (one) very much a matter of personal taste and (two) ignoring the fact that an essentially infinite amount of good information plus an essentially infinite amount of garbage still supplies you with plenty of good content...and search engines help us tune out the garbage.
Sure, but just because the amount of content on the Internet is practically infinite doesn't mean there's enough. For instance, a few years ago I wanted to learn Japanese, and I looked on the web to see if there were helpful resources. There wasn't anything on the whole web that provided what I needed: I had to buy paper books. On any given (non-computer-related) topic, there is usually no in-depth information on the entire web. I can see the web becoming much, much more useful than it is now in the future, as it becomes a legitimate publishing medium.
Not that I'm pro-Palladium or anything; I'm just saying it's not true that the web has enough content. If we look at specific fields, we find it has very little content.
No, it wouldn't. All you're doing is writing the IP address in a different way. Your web browser then converts that address to a 32-bit integer in any case: it's the same number whether it was gotten from a DNS lookup or your strange way of writing it. The connection packet that the Chinese firewall blocks is unchanged.
I have another theory for the low sales of adventure games: they suck. Back in the eighties, there wasn't really an alternative to adventure games if you wanted to play games on your PC. The only notable PC game from those days that comes to my mind is Silpheed. Other than that, you had the Sierra and Lucasfilm adventure games --- I bought and played them as much as everyone else, but in hindsight they were terrible games.
Playing adventure games has always been more about second-guessing the author of the game than actual logic. Can't enter the castle?
Reasonable things like killing the guard aren't allowed. No, the developer has decreed you must make a disguise.
Take the mustard, use it on the cat hair to make a fake mustache, then fashion false glasses out of the gears of the music box you found in the dungeon basement. How is this "fun" exactly? And gee, being sane you can't figure this "puzzle" out? Then you'll just have to stay stuck and frustrated for hours.
And the writing in most adventure games is atrocious. The authors were mostly just random programmers with no real creativity or sense of drama. The text of many Sierra games looks like it was written by a half-literate 15-year-old.
No, all this adventure game praising is just false nostalgia. Face it: GTA3 is much more fun than whatever you were playing back then.
Er, sorry, I'm not an expert on Windows sysadminning, but how could changing \Winnt to something else improve security? All I can see is that this might break lazily programmed viruses/rootkits/etc (as well as legitimate applications...) that have \Winnt hardcoded instead of looking in the registry. Isn't this kind of like renaming the root user on a Unix system?
I'd be more impressed with people who play DDR if they could bust their moves at random instead of the physical game of memorization DDR is.
All the DDR players I know don't do any memorization at all. They read the arrows off the screen in real time. Try it: ask a high-level player to do something they've never done before, and they'll clear it with no more problems than usual. Seeing all those arrows, I wouldn't have thought the human brain could process that much information at once, but it's possible with training.
Id may not have offered revolutionary gameplay advances since Doom, but realize that each time they release a game, they push forward current graphics technology by another order of magnitude. Your precious Half-life was derived from the Quake 2 codebase, and as for Duke Nukem 3d, that's Doom technology copied years later.
UF is successful because of good marketing
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· Score: 2
It's deeply ironic that UF spends so much time blasting "marketing" types, because marketing is the only reason the strip got off the ground in the first place.
As most people agree, UF is poorly drawn, unoriginal, and unfunny garbage. So how come anybody reads it? Simple: Illiad chose a underrepresented market segment --- techie types --- figured out a list of topics they like to see, and proceeded to pander to them as much as possible. Marketing-oriented business at its finest, in the tradition of Harlequin romance novels. But I don't think Illiad is even aware of his hypocrisy.
In other words, only if knowing that the word "sex" appears tells you nothing about how likely the word "sexy" is to appear, can you reason as he is doing above. That's probably a very poor assumption in this case.
Graham is using a naive Bayes text classifier here, which is a pretty common approach. The naive classifier, as you perceptively point out, does relies on the obviously incorrect assumption that the appearance of any word is independent of all other words. But:
It's computationally impossible to be as statistically rigorous as you would like. If we had to keep a probability table of every word given every other word, we'd have awful combinatorial explosion. Even today's most powerful supercomputers would be unable to classify spam:).
The naive Bayes classifier, despite the incorrect assumption, has been empirically shown to be one of the best algorithms for dividing text documents into categories. Because of the variety of words and very small correlation between words in different sentences, the assumption seems to do very little harm.
Your objection is one of the reasons why AI researchers shunned Bayesian methods for so long: in practice it's impossible to implement them rigorously. Unfortunately, building a completely rational system is not tractable without a planet-sized computer. The only viable solution is to make compromises: just like humans do, when they skip steps and make not-100%-warranted assumptions in their reasoning.
According to a quick google search, the annual suicide rate in the U.S. is 12 per 100,000. There are approximately 400,000 everquest players (AFAIK) so one would expect 48 of them to have killed themselves last year.
So it's absolutely not surprising that at least one everquest player would have killed himself. It makes no sense to blame this on the game. The fact that I haven't heard of any other suicides of everquest players (when there should be 50) makes me suspect that playing everquest is actually negatively correlated to suicide.
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You are right that I read rather too much into his comment. I think he would, as you say, disagree with the kind of sexist enslaving scenario I presented. What I was trying to say is that the sort of reasoning he presented: "accept" differences and "use" them (as opposed to, as I advocate, accept them but then largely ignore them in practice to avoid discrimination --- essentially the same as what you say), when brought to its logical conclusion, naturally and unconsciously leads to discrimination. It's just that I phrased it in a way that made me sound too extreme, sorry.
No, it is not sexist to say this. Any more than it is racist to say that black people in America suffer from racism more than suburban white males. I was complaining about applying a generalization to individuals, not about making generalizations themselves. It's a subtle but important point. I of course do not deny, for instance, that on average, women are physically weaker than men. The problem would be if I saw a woman and I automatically refused to have her work on my construction site on the assumption that being a woman, she must be too weak to work properly.
For the record, I do think that men suffer from sexism somewhat, but it's silly to say that they do so more than women.
How about this not-so-revolutionary idea, that's been touted by gender and race activists for decades: accept that differences, if any, exist only in the average case and that there is huge overlap in the spectrum of individuals. That is, many women are much more "manly" than the average man, and vice versa. Automatically assigning the average properties of a group to an individual is called stereotyping, and it is repellent and wrong. But this is what you imply by your suggestion of "using those differences".
Another interesting thing is that DDR may look like an absurd parody of dance, but it actually does teach you rhythm and a kind of basic dance movement. It's actually harder than real dancing in the sense that it's much faster and more frantic: whenever I see a professional dancer I'm surprised at how leisurely and slow it is. I didn't believe it at first either, but when I go to a real nightclub now and do DDR-like legwork, everyone is impressed and thinks I've taken dance courses. Of course you don't tell them the real story :).
If you like Money Puzzle Exchanger, check out Magical Drop 3, also for the Neo Geo. Basically the same principle, except that all you need to make a combo is to clear 2 or more groups of colored balls really fast, even if they are unrelated. If you pause for half a second your combo stops. The kind of frantic game where you pound on the controller and yell trash talk at your opponent; I like it much better than MPE personally.
I could read English novels in third grade, whereas many Japanese 10-year-olds are forced to read only "kiddie" books because of lack of kanji knowledge. And as you surely know from your own experience, learning to read Japanese is far more difficult to learn for a foreigner than for a Japanese to learn to read English.
"Exactly as complex as it needs to be" applies to spoken language, which evolves freely, but definitely not to writing systems, which are consciously defined by imperfect individuals.
Lucasarts has consistently pumped out high quality Star Wars games, whereas the Star Trek license has been passed off to bit companies, inevitably resulting in garbage. Star Trek doesn't have a good track record in the gaming industry, so I wouldn't react with much excitement to an announcement that it's being turned into an MMORPG.
You seem to think that the SETI team is analyzing every possible wavelength from every part of the sky, looking for any possible pattern that might be generated by aliens. Not even close. Not getting any results tells us nothing more than that SETI wasn't looking in the right direction. There is nothing "telling" in that SETI has not found anything yet, and bogus negative results are harmless.
Probably the best course of action for you would be to get a free DNS subdomain (i.e. "dyndns.org", "dhs.org" etc.) instead, and to update that regularly. Even if your IP address changes, you will still be able to use the name, and it's easier to remember and communicate besides.
It would just take a lot longer to write. The reason demo efficiency blows the socks off anything in games is because demos are specifically designed to render a single scene and nothing else, not because demo coders are that much better at optimization than game coders (they are often the same people). What makes the difference is the various hacks demo programmers can pull off because they only have to worry about a single situation.
Anyway, with the advent of 3d accelerators, the whole scene has become rather meaningless --- the bottleneck of Doom 3 will be your GPU, not the efficiency of the x86 asm.
Based on the probability theory of Thomas Bayes, an 18th century philosopher. In a nutshell, whereas orthodox statistics emphasises a "distribution function" that wholly describes everything about a random variable, Bayesian methods take a more ground-up approach that works with incomplete information and revises probabilistic beliefs as new evidence comes to light. It's been attracting a lot of attention and research lately.
Just to point out that you should be wary of disease death statistics like the flu. The problem is that many of those who die from the flu are near-death old people. These would probably have died from something else within a week in any case. So I would say that the terrorism we have seen so far, if we evaluate the harm solely by number of years of life lost, is likely a more serious problem than the flu.
That's Nabokov all right, inadvertently predicting the invention of the smiley 10 years in advance :). Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if it had occured to lots of people, and the smiley has a very long history, if only someone could be bothered to dig it up.
Yeah, yeah, if PCs had been properly designed for true plug-and-play from the start, BIOS configuration wouldn't be necessary. But they weren't, and it's no use blaming today's manufacturers, who are stuck with it. If we removed the BIOS, it wouldn't benefit ordinary users who never have to touch it anyway, and it would make it hard or impossible to
No wonder Microsoft is pushing BIOS-less computers, like the new Toshiba laptops which are painful to install Linux on.
In sum, BIOS access is harmless and necessary, and I can't see what you're complaining about. Do you think the hood of your car should be soldered shut too, so that you never have to look at your fearfully complex engine?
Lucky you. The SB Live crashed my system. It instantly destroyed my previously rock-stable W2K installation as soon as I plugged in the card and rebooted. I'm not touching that crap anymore. Anyway, keep on laughing for now, but keep in mind who to blame the next time your system goes horribly wrong.
Sure, but just because the amount of content on the Internet is practically infinite doesn't mean there's enough. For instance, a few years ago I wanted to learn Japanese, and I looked on the web to see if there were helpful resources. There wasn't anything on the whole web that provided what I needed: I had to buy paper books. On any given (non-computer-related) topic, there is usually no in-depth information on the entire web. I can see the web becoming much, much more useful than it is now in the future, as it becomes a legitimate publishing medium.
Not that I'm pro-Palladium or anything; I'm just saying it's not true that the web has enough content. If we look at specific fields, we find it has very little content.
No, it wouldn't. All you're doing is writing the IP address in a different way. Your web browser then converts that address to a 32-bit integer in any case: it's the same number whether it was gotten from a DNS lookup or your strange way of writing it. The connection packet that the Chinese firewall blocks is unchanged.
Playing adventure games has always been more about second-guessing the author of the game than actual logic. Can't enter the castle? Reasonable things like killing the guard aren't allowed. No, the developer has decreed you must make a disguise. Take the mustard, use it on the cat hair to make a fake mustache, then fashion false glasses out of the gears of the music box you found in the dungeon basement. How is this "fun" exactly? And gee, being sane you can't figure this "puzzle" out? Then you'll just have to stay stuck and frustrated for hours.
And the writing in most adventure games is atrocious. The authors were mostly just random programmers with no real creativity or sense of drama. The text of many Sierra games looks like it was written by a half-literate 15-year-old.
No, all this adventure game praising is just false nostalgia. Face it: GTA3 is much more fun than whatever you were playing back then.
Er, sorry, I'm not an expert on Windows sysadminning, but how could changing \Winnt to something else improve security? All I can see is that this might break lazily programmed viruses/rootkits/etc (as well as legitimate applications ...) that have \Winnt hardcoded instead of looking in the registry. Isn't this kind of like renaming the root user on a Unix system?
All the DDR players I know don't do any memorization at all. They read the arrows off the screen in real time. Try it: ask a high-level player to do something they've never done before, and they'll clear it with no more problems than usual. Seeing all those arrows, I wouldn't have thought the human brain could process that much information at once, but it's possible with training.
Id may not have offered revolutionary gameplay advances since Doom, but realize that each time they release a game, they push forward current graphics technology by another order of magnitude. Your precious Half-life was derived from the Quake 2 codebase, and as for Duke Nukem 3d, that's Doom technology copied years later.
As most people agree, UF is poorly drawn, unoriginal, and unfunny garbage. So how come anybody reads it? Simple: Illiad chose a underrepresented market segment --- techie types --- figured out a list of topics they like to see, and proceeded to pander to them as much as possible. Marketing-oriented business at its finest, in the tradition of Harlequin romance novels. But I don't think Illiad is even aware of his hypocrisy.
Thanks a lot, your explanation was very clear.
Graham is using a naive Bayes text classifier here, which is a pretty common approach. The naive classifier, as you perceptively point out, does relies on the obviously incorrect assumption that the appearance of any word is independent of all other words. But:
Your objection is one of the reasons why AI researchers shunned Bayesian methods for so long: in practice it's impossible to implement them rigorously. Unfortunately, building a completely rational system is not tractable without a planet-sized computer. The only viable solution is to make compromises: just like humans do, when they skip steps and make not-100%-warranted assumptions in their reasoning.
So it's absolutely not surprising that at least one everquest player would have killed himself. It makes no sense to blame this on the game. The fact that I haven't heard of any other suicides of everquest players (when there should be 50) makes me suspect that playing everquest is actually negatively correlated to suicide.