You can do this with StrokeMe, libstroke, and XYZ (name software here)
Ha! I've captured all the comments with only 3 lines!
Seriously though, I think this is wayCool (ducks as piano flies over head, nearly hits. Or did it nearly miss?) I loves the black&white gestures (They should make it draw the gesture on the screen with you, a la Black&White)
I think that associations, in computing, is a great idea for user interface.
A program like this (lets disregard the Big Brother for one second, and look at computer+user alone) tells you what songs it thinks you'll like, based on what you've heard before.
It could also tell you what songs you'd like to hear NEXT, based on order of songs you had before, and make these easier to access on the playlist (like, on the recommendation list. I'm getting out of hand aren't I?)
The whole idea of associating user actions can be great. Suppose you work on a project. Slowly, the computer (the brand-new GPLed Associator program) associates a certain directory, where all the files are, with the files themselves, your favorite editor, the compiler for that language, and certain sites you visited researching for it. via some UI, it'll make all these accessible when 'triggered' - when it is pretty sure you're working on the project right now, or going to.
In some sense (in a small amount of cases), the computer will be 'one step ahead of you' - holding the line when you're just about to ask it to call...
What I really don't get, and sounds a bit fishy to me, is the whole username/profiling thing.
I mean, this can be done without it: Have an anonymous user handle on that site. No email, no nothing. (sure, they can have your IP. They can have mine, too, if they want, it's a dynamic one)
Whenever you hear a song, it sends the info: a user who heard (set of songs) decided to hear (new song), and of course heuristics of how much any song is heard, bla bla bla.
The server keeps this huge database. When you want recommendations (downloaded every 15 min? or something) your program asks what the database recommends for someone who listened to (the set of songs you listened to). You're not giving away an email, no personal info, just an anonymous username (created automatically, or something. There is alot of 'or something's here)
There's no real reason for the server to know who you are or what you like for this to work. Perfect profiling is also not nessecary, in my view, but that's a different issue altogether
There is no real reason why that would be a feedback loop: You're listening to a set A of songs. So, you recieve a reccomendation from someone listening partly to A, partly to another set (all the songs he heard which are not in A), B. You exercise your own taste (which is not included in your text at all), and integrate part of B. (You might also give up a few over-played songs of A) Now you have new recommendations...
There's absolutely no reason why this should gravitate towards the MTV play list: it'll gravitate towards "music you like and music people who like that, likes"
I'm also not sure where that equation comes from. There's absolutely nothing which allows you to derive math from the situation. A person recieves a recommendation, and may choose to take it or not. He may listen to part of the song, decide to remove it, and the program will disregard that song.
You cannot write an equation to tell what that person is going to do...
Not to mention the fact that the software hates you personally for some reason. It just seemed to sense the fact that you're a bad person the moment you ran it.
What I'm really trying to say is: Quite possibly you could edit your 'history' through some config file or app. And if not, you can always write the history-editor
Besides, I think that if the software is any good, it tracks changes in preference too. All the 'Boy bands' reccomendations will go away in a few days, if you're too lazy to edit them out.
That's actually not a bad idea.. Except for making file-sharing kind of like the drug business, that is. "Does he want my Simpsons divx's, or is he an FBI provocatuer?"
Most of the code had comments like:// this next part is really stupid/* read_buffer_thingie
I wrote this while stoned, so code review anyone?
BTW, anyone see "Gilligan's Island" yesterday?
Da bom!!! */
It just took em a while to make it 'publishable';)
I don't know if that's true, but in any case google's site is automatic and these days automatic machines can get away with alot more than us intelligent entities (I don't want to seem like a human chauvinist)
All they need to do is prove in court that they selected the articles in an automatic manner, without any intelligence. This would be extremely amusing to witness
"Your honour, my client moves that he is not intelligent"
Sure, Lindows may be GPL compliant. I haven't even looked at the code yet, but consider this:
A company wants to write a Linux distribution which will seem all Linuxy and open and free and stuff (and redundant?), but keep the monopoly for future versions and support:
They write a simply code-obfuscator (take the preprocessor output, now align it oddly, change all the var names to a,b,c,d...), work on the original code, obfuscate it, and publish that.
All the source code is there, you can even recompile it and see its the same - but understanding it would take you years... Only they could ever publish a bug-patch, an upgrade... they'd get a monopoly on that code. And it's all GPL, too.
You can even obfuscate just the patches, and publish them with the originals and a patch-applying-script, so no one can accuse you of obfuscating the source - this is simply how we write, you'd say..;)
You could even sell the non-obfuscated code for money;)
The point of this foolishness is: GPL does not gurantee free software, if people don't want it to. Some of the 'free software' I've seen can't really be maintained by someone who didn't write it - they simply never took the time to comment, structure, etc.
I got the idea wrong - they filed the patent 1996 - prior art may or may not exist, Im not sure - I think my dad wrote prior art several years before 1996 - I'll check it out.
Anyway, it seems we're fscked;) Everyone has been using formats which seem open and free and public, but are actually patented and the patenter could, at any time, pop up and demand his money (see the threats, etc. over MP3 creation programs)
But still, it seems to me that the patent idea is ridicilous. They're not patenting a product they make, or a technique to make products, but an idea in product making - after all, anyone can claim they're not using 'their HTML' - you can't sue a person for writing 'what seems to be HTML' - only for using a product against its use license. I could be wrong, of course.
I think the Information Age caught the patent office a bit off-guard... If these things don't sort out, we might find ourselves working in a completely patent/license world, where you have to pay to use every 'idea' someone made once.
Isn't there some restriction on what you can patent, in form of its use?
I know you can't patent an 'obvious' feature/advancement - what is obvious is decided by experts hired by the patent office (which is why new sciences always get odd patents through)
A patent can be revoked if 'prior art' exists to prove the guy can't legally be the patent holder - BTW, can patents be moved this way - i.e. A patents his 'one-click' feature, B proves he did it first, so the patent moves from A to B? Or does it simply disappear?
But isn't there some clause which says you can't patent a feature after everyone used it publicly for years? I can just imagine some huge-bearded 3' guy with a club, wearing only a loincloth saying: "Hey, guys, I invented the wheel some 10,000 years ago, so, uh, pay up"
Simple question - simple answer: The last I heard, the first time a company sued over "deep-linking", it's claim was simple:
People clicking this link, they said, would think the site's author wrote the content they arrive at, thus destroying our reputation, causing confusion.
People need to go through our main page, they said, for them to fully register the fact that this company wrote this content and should recieve credit for it.
The complete change in style, colors, and the company logo is obviously not enough.
The RIAA is only upset with P2P networking because of the illegal MP3 sharing. Legal-wise, they have the ammunition they need - people use it to do illegal things
If I didn't totally misunderstand the article, deep-linking is not illegal everywhere - just in Denmark where the company resides, and maybe several other countries. Deep-linking from the P2P network has not been pronounced illegal in any court (it is not even under any jurisdiction, except maybe the computer client's country) and in most countries actions are legal until pronounced otherwise (at least in law they are)
It seems at first that deep-linking might cause a Newsbooster's reader to think they wrote the article the link is sending to, thus hurting the credit-per-bandwidth of the real news company's server.
However, if anyone uses the P2P network, he'll be aware of all these issues, and will know the links simply refer to other news companies. Their reputation is not damaged - it would be excatly the same as if he entered on their main page, and clicked an article he liked
No one's work is being ripped off in any way - when you click on a link on newsbooster.com (try it!) you reach a news website - you can't ignore it - you see the headline, a link to the news site's home, etc.
You'd have to be very thick to believe newsbooster.com wrote the article the link refers to. They're providing an index (portal?) of news articles, and nothing seems to suggest otherwise.
You might as well sue TV guides for "deep-linking" into the TV - after all, someone might only open his TV set at 5:00pm, without seeing all the great crap they showed before! There is no real difference between opening a TV set on a second show in a row of three than opening a web browser into the middle of someone's site, skipping the main page.
Wait a minute, they're deep-linking, against European law, in cyberspace, where we can't claim they're under our legislation, since they're not in out country? Bomb them!
Seriously though: Could people 'fake' news through this net? I mean, what format are they using? Someone could (theorically, for now) break the format, and post any news he wants (or rather, links to what he wants) that seem like Newsbooster's content
This whole story is interesting: It seems that any law on Internet content can be solved with a decentralized network. This could also make internet traffic very interesting - everyone will always be connected to several networks - one for music/video/files, one for news, one for subversive terrorist activity. Im sorry, did I write that out loud?;)
<bad UF reference>Then we could run a TCP/IP network on top of that...</bad>
Wouldn't we (always) want to improve the Linux kernel performane in comparison to itself?
Why is what we compare it to the most important issue?
Sure, we want to see how the Linux kernel is performing, but that's unrelated to increasing it's performance - when working on the performance of a single part, people built a test for that part, and tweaked it.
No benchmark or comparison is required in this case.
linux kernel doesn't affect end-users.
Also, overhauling your engine won't make your driving any better - you just have to get over the illusion that you're in England.
Anyone else, just think about it - program installation on the kernel - you ain't seen 'monolithic' yet;)
Nothing can insure data integrity in case of mid-write shutdown. That's logically obvious
Journaling insures filesystem integrity, which is very important. Mounting an unclean ext3 fs will take seconds - no need to check the filesystem for mid-write evidence, etc. - the journal says excatly what mid-write problems there are, and wether to delete them or keep them as files.
If your system crashes in the middle of your work, and your hard drive wasn't physically damaged (it can happen. Use RAID if you're so paranoid), everything but your open files will be normal. Your open files might be 'un-journaled' (new official term? no) back to before you wrote them.
The idea of weapon usage for this just went through my head, so I decided to post a little 'mini-article' about it (notice it is now 4 am...)
Notice this does not mean I object to this technology, just thinking of putting in something new for discussion:
First of all, you ask, how can this be a weapon? I am reffering to the nanotechnology robot combined with the cancer-cell-seeking-molecule. These can be built in different ways to be offensive.
This first and interesting way would be to make the molecule act only in response to some other molecule (hormone or other) or DNA strand (although that probably won't be effective as DNA strands are not common outside the cell, and the thing doesn't enter the cell unless the binding molecule is active). This would allow this technology to be used as an ethnic weapon: discover a protein built only by 'colored people', and target it. Distribute the composure around (I think even bin Laden doesn't have enough money to make effective doses of this) and vwalla: colored people get cancer (or maybe the robot should emit cyanide molecules?)
Advantages on this part?
I'm not sure how well this nanotechnology is built, but it might prove a poison better-built than normal chemical poisons, and which the attacker has perfect anti-dote to.
Why would this be used? (for crying out loud?)
1. Weapon research in shape of 'regular' research: an underdeveloped country could get millions on millions of dollars to cure breast cancer among it's population, and use nanotechnology facilites built for it to develop weapons.
2. To target certain targets: ethnic weapons, as said above, created by insane but powerful people to promote some twisted philosophy
3. By mistake: normal nanotechnology 'cure' gone a bit awry attacking wrong cells, or other.
Major points as to wether or not this is feasible:
1. Targeting - can this 'weapon' be targeted properly? Or does it have to be injected straight into the 'target'?
2. Power - can something like this be a real killer? how much of a 'killer droid' would be a lethal dose?
3. Feasible as distribution: can it infiltrate the body from water? food? air/touch? can it survive days/weeks/years in operating condition? Can it exit an attacked body and attack another? (man having cells killed extracting cells with the weapon to sewage, where they go attacking again)
4. Unavoidable - can such an 'infestation' be dealt with easily? by heating/cooling/treating with chemical/building antidote/suing the company who made them;)
To conclude, this technology looks great. I sincerely believe there is a 'fast-cure' for cancer (as the problem seems simple, enginerringly speaking.). This solution seems excelent.
The discussion about using this as weapon technology existed long before this post or this usage for nanotechnology - it existed since nanotechnology and biology were combined.
I believe in building this technology. I just wondered what others think about the possibility of this turning into a weapon
"If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck but takes a cab instead of walking like a duck, it's simply a snobby duck. shoot it"
Slashdot Mirror
In Soviet Russia, software screenshots YOU!
Just another step on the road to trolldom...
Hmm. Didn't ever see me doing this.
Cool, though
Seems like too much special hardware for something that for most features, software will do nicely
Black & White had this
Gesturing is hard
You can do this with StrokeMe, libstroke, and XYZ (name software here)
Ha! I've captured all the comments with only 3 lines!
Seriously though, I think this is wayCool (ducks as piano flies over head, nearly hits. Or did it nearly miss?)
I loves the black&white gestures (They should make it draw the gesture on the screen with you, a la Black&White)
I've got nothing more to say to this.
I think that associations, in computing, is a great idea for user interface.
A program like this (lets disregard the Big Brother for one second, and look at computer+user alone) tells you what songs it thinks you'll like, based on what you've heard before.
It could also tell you what songs you'd like to hear NEXT, based on order of songs you had before, and make these easier to access on the playlist (like, on the recommendation list. I'm getting out of hand aren't I?)
The whole idea of associating user actions can be great. Suppose you work on a project. Slowly, the computer (the brand-new GPLed Associator program) associates a certain directory, where all the files are, with the files themselves, your favorite editor, the compiler for that language, and certain sites you visited researching for it.
via some UI, it'll make all these accessible when 'triggered' - when it is pretty sure you're working on the project right now, or going to.
In some sense (in a small amount of cases), the computer will be 'one step ahead of you' - holding the line when you're just about to ask it to call...
What I really don't get, and sounds a bit fishy to me, is the whole username/profiling thing.
I mean, this can be done without it:
Have an anonymous user handle on that site. No email, no nothing. (sure, they can have your IP. They can have mine, too, if they want, it's a dynamic one)
Whenever you hear a song, it sends the info: a user who heard (set of songs) decided to hear (new song), and of course heuristics of how much any song is heard, bla bla bla.
The server keeps this huge database. When you want recommendations (downloaded every 15 min? or something) your program asks what the database recommends for someone who listened to (the set of songs you listened to). You're not giving away an email, no personal info, just an anonymous username (created automatically, or something. There is alot of 'or something's here)
There's no real reason for the server to know who you are or what you like for this to work.
Perfect profiling is also not nessecary, in my view, but that's a different issue altogether
There is no real reason why that would be a feedback loop:
You're listening to a set A of songs. So, you recieve a reccomendation from someone listening partly to A, partly to another set (all the songs he heard which are not in A), B.
You exercise your own taste (which is not included in your text at all), and integrate part of B. (You might also give up a few over-played songs of A)
Now you have new recommendations...
There's absolutely no reason why this should gravitate towards the MTV play list: it'll gravitate towards "music you like and music people who like that, likes"
I'm also not sure where that equation comes from. There's absolutely nothing which allows you to derive math from the situation.
A person recieves a recommendation, and may choose to take it or not. He may listen to part of the song, decide to remove it, and the program will disregard that song.
You cannot write an equation to tell what that person is going to do...
ransack it.
Just imagine: you'd be illegally telling people what you like...
Not to mention the fact that the software hates you personally for some reason.
It just seemed to sense the fact that you're a bad person the moment you ran it.
What I'm really trying to say is:
Quite possibly you could edit your 'history' through some config file or app.
And if not, you can always write the history-editor
Besides, I think that if the software is any good, it tracks changes in preference too. All the 'Boy bands' reccomendations will go away in a few days, if you're too lazy to edit them out.
That's actually not a bad idea..
Except for making file-sharing kind of like the drug business, that is. "Does he want my Simpsons divx's, or is he an FBI provocatuer?"
no one yet wrote 'the capacitor couldn't take it. Har Har Har'
;)
Maybe it's a conspiracy - all the capacitors in the entire world would commit suicide at the same time, destroying computing world wide.
Or maybe I have nothing to reply to this. Except that, as a mostly-software-guy, I feel in many ways 'morally superior' to mere hardware faults...
Most of the code had comments like: // this next part is really stupid /* read_buffer_thingie
;)
I wrote this while stoned, so code review anyone?
BTW, anyone see "Gilligan's Island" yesterday?
Da bom!!! */
It just took em a while to make it 'publishable'
I don't know if that's true, but in any case google's site is automatic and these days automatic machines can get away with alot more than us intelligent entities (I don't want to seem like a human chauvinist)
All they need to do is prove in court that they selected the articles in an automatic manner, without any intelligence. This would be extremely amusing to witness
"Your honour, my client moves that he is not intelligent"
Sure, Lindows may be GPL compliant. I haven't even looked at the code yet, but consider this:
;)
;)
A company wants to write a Linux distribution which will seem all Linuxy and open and free and stuff (and redundant?), but keep the monopoly for future versions and support:
They write a simply code-obfuscator (take the preprocessor output, now align it oddly, change all the var names to a,b,c,d...), work on the original code, obfuscate it, and publish that.
All the source code is there, you can even recompile it and see its the same - but understanding it would take you years... Only they could ever publish a bug-patch, an upgrade... they'd get a monopoly on that code.
And it's all GPL, too.
You can even obfuscate just the patches, and publish them with the originals and a patch-applying-script, so no one can accuse you of obfuscating the source - this is simply how we write, you'd say..
You could even sell the non-obfuscated code for money
The point of this foolishness is: GPL does not gurantee free software, if people don't want it to. Some of the 'free software' I've seen can't really be maintained by someone who didn't write it - they simply never took the time to comment, structure, etc.
I got the idea wrong - they filed the patent 1996 - prior art may or may not exist, Im not sure - I think my dad wrote prior art several years before 1996 - I'll check it out.
;)
Anyway, it seems we're fscked
Everyone has been using formats which seem open and free and public, but are actually patented and the patenter could, at any time, pop up and demand his money (see the threats, etc. over MP3 creation programs)
But still, it seems to me that the patent idea is ridicilous. They're not patenting a product they make, or a technique to make products, but an idea in product making - after all, anyone can claim they're not using 'their HTML' - you can't sue a person for writing 'what seems to be HTML' - only for using a product against its use license. I could be wrong, of course.
I think the Information Age caught the patent office a bit off-guard...
If these things don't sort out, we might find ourselves working in a completely patent/license world, where you have to pay to use every 'idea' someone made once.
Isn't there some restriction on what you can patent, in form of its use?
I know you can't patent an 'obvious' feature/advancement - what is obvious is decided by experts hired by the patent office (which is why new sciences always get odd patents through)
A patent can be revoked if 'prior art' exists to prove the guy can't legally be the patent holder - BTW, can patents be moved this way - i.e. A patents his 'one-click' feature, B proves he did it first, so the patent moves from A to B? Or does it simply disappear?
But isn't there some clause which says you can't patent a feature after everyone used it publicly for years?
I can just imagine some huge-bearded 3' guy with a club, wearing only a loincloth saying: "Hey, guys, I invented the wheel some 10,000 years ago, so, uh, pay up"
Simple question - simple answer:
The last I heard, the first time a company sued over "deep-linking", it's claim was simple:
People clicking this link, they said, would think the site's author wrote the content they arrive at, thus destroying our reputation, causing confusion.
People need to go through our main page, they said, for them to fully register the fact that this company wrote this content and should recieve credit for it.
The complete change in style, colors, and the company logo is obviously not enough.
The RIAA is only upset with P2P networking because of the illegal MP3 sharing. Legal-wise, they have the ammunition they need - people use it to do illegal things
If I didn't totally misunderstand the article, deep-linking is not illegal everywhere - just in Denmark where the company resides, and maybe several other countries. Deep-linking from the P2P network has not been pronounced illegal in any court (it is not even under any jurisdiction, except maybe the computer client's country) and in most countries actions are legal until pronounced otherwise (at least in law they are)
It seems at first that deep-linking might cause a Newsbooster's reader to think they wrote the article the link is sending to, thus hurting the credit-per-bandwidth of the real news company's server.
However, if anyone uses the P2P network, he'll be aware of all these issues, and will know the links simply refer to other news companies. Their reputation is not damaged - it would be excatly the same as if he entered on their main page, and clicked an article he liked
No one's work is being ripped off in any way - when you click on a link on newsbooster.com (try it!) you reach a news website - you can't ignore it - you see the headline, a link to the news site's home, etc.
You'd have to be very thick to believe newsbooster.com wrote the article the link refers to. They're providing an index (portal?) of news articles, and nothing seems to suggest otherwise.
You might as well sue TV guides for "deep-linking" into the TV - after all, someone might only open his TV set at 5:00pm, without seeing all the great crap they showed before!
There is no real difference between opening a TV set on a second show in a row of three than opening a web browser into the middle of someone's site, skipping the main page.
I think I've yammered enough.
Wait a minute, they're deep-linking, against European law, in cyberspace, where we can't claim they're under our legislation, since they're not in out country?
;)
Bomb them!
Seriously though:
Could people 'fake' news through this net?
I mean, what format are they using? Someone could (theorically, for now) break the format, and post any news he wants (or rather, links to what he wants) that seem like Newsbooster's content
This whole story is interesting: It seems that any law on Internet content can be solved with a decentralized network.
This could also make internet traffic very interesting - everyone will always be connected to several networks - one for music/video/files, one for news, one for subversive terrorist activity.
Im sorry, did I write that out loud?
<bad UF reference>Then we could run a TCP/IP network on top of that...</bad>
Why is what we compare it to the most important issue?
Sure, we want to see how the Linux kernel is performing, but that's unrelated to increasing it's performance - when working on the performance of a single part, people built a test for that part, and tweaked it.
No benchmark or comparison is required in this case.
linux kernel doesn't affect end-users.
;)
Also, overhauling your engine won't make your driving any better - you just have to get over the illusion that you're in England.
Anyone else, just think about it - program installation on the kernel - you ain't seen 'monolithic' yet
if only that was a haiku...
/me not get much sleep)
(sorry,
(sorry again, me too much irc did, yes)
no one is to be let in.
Who is this no one guy anyway, and why let him in?
Learn english for RAW's sake.
Nothing can insure data integrity in case of mid-write shutdown. That's logically obvious
Journaling insures filesystem integrity, which is very important. Mounting an unclean ext3 fs will take seconds - no need to check the filesystem for mid-write evidence, etc. - the journal says excatly what mid-write problems there are, and wether to delete them or keep them as files.
If your system crashes in the middle of your work, and your hard drive wasn't physically damaged (it can happen. Use RAID if you're so paranoid), everything but your open files will be normal. Your open files might be 'un-journaled' (new official term? no) back to before you wrote them.
The idea of weapon usage for this just went through my head, so I decided to post a little 'mini-article' about it (notice it is now 4 am...)
;)
Notice this does not mean I object to this technology, just thinking of putting in something new for discussion:
First of all, you ask, how can this be a weapon? I am reffering to the nanotechnology robot combined with the cancer-cell-seeking-molecule. These can be built in different ways to be offensive.
This first and interesting way would be to make the molecule act only in response to some other molecule (hormone or other) or DNA strand (although that probably won't be effective as DNA strands are not common outside the cell, and the thing doesn't enter the cell unless the binding molecule is active). This would allow this technology to be used as an ethnic weapon: discover a protein built only by 'colored people', and target it. Distribute the composure around (I think even bin Laden doesn't have enough money to make effective doses of this) and vwalla: colored people get cancer (or maybe the robot should emit cyanide molecules?)
Advantages on this part?
I'm not sure how well this nanotechnology is built, but it might prove a poison better-built than normal chemical poisons, and which the attacker has perfect anti-dote to.
Why would this be used? (for crying out loud?)
1. Weapon research in shape of 'regular' research: an underdeveloped country could get millions on millions of dollars to cure breast cancer among it's population, and use nanotechnology facilites built for it to develop weapons.
2. To target certain targets: ethnic weapons, as said above, created by insane but powerful people to promote some twisted philosophy
3. By mistake: normal nanotechnology 'cure' gone a bit awry attacking wrong cells, or other.
Major points as to wether or not this is feasible:
1. Targeting - can this 'weapon' be targeted properly? Or does it have to be injected straight into the 'target'?
2. Power - can something like this be a real killer? how much of a 'killer droid' would be a lethal dose?
3. Feasible as distribution: can it infiltrate the body from water? food? air/touch? can it survive days/weeks/years in operating condition? Can it exit an attacked body and attack another? (man having cells killed extracting cells with the weapon to sewage, where they go attacking again)
4. Unavoidable - can such an 'infestation' be dealt with easily? by heating/cooling/treating with chemical/building antidote/suing the company who made them
To conclude, this technology looks great. I sincerely believe there is a 'fast-cure' for cancer (as the problem seems simple, enginerringly speaking.). This solution seems excelent.
The discussion about using this as weapon technology existed long before this post or this usage for nanotechnology - it existed since nanotechnology and biology were combined.
I believe in building this technology. I just wondered what others think about the possibility of this turning into a weapon
"If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck but takes a cab instead of walking like a duck, it's simply a snobby duck. shoot it"