I've written a few genetic algorithm/programming things for "music" over the years. However, not being a musician, I approached it only from an algorithmic perspective. The last of these, called "grammidity" can attempt to evolve sequences of midi events based on a kind of grammar that evolves (loosely based on the ideas behind L-systems). I had it online for a couple of years, but it never evolved much of anything interesting. The source code (java) is on sourceforge and includes ways to evolve "plants" and a fuzzer that generates html and which worked quite nicely to break browsers a couple of years back.
But, if you'd used unix first and used "ls", "dir" would not be intuitive at all. It is always interesting how many people equate "intuitive" to "I learned it already" even when that learning process was often far from intuitive itself.
They probably were working on Windows 8 when they put Windows 7 into freeze. I suspect they've been working on new ideas and features (and misfeatures) for a couple of years now. But the article says that they'll be focusing more on Windows 8 next year, which gives them time to put out the major Windows 7 fires and plan for the next release.
Google has had competitors for as long as it has been around. If you compare Google's share of search to Microsoft's share of OS installs, you'll see the difference.
If Microsoft manages this, it won't take long before Microsoft does have an effective monopoly on search as well - between their making it hard to set Google as the default search provider in IE and perhaps taking over indexing of major news sites, it wouldn't take all that much to make Google a secondary player in the short run and potentially kill it in the longer term.
I had the same experience - it took some digging to figure out how to make Google the default search provider, and there were several Googles listed on the page where Google eventually showed up and no good information on which to choose. Worse yet, I was in the process of installing Windows 7 and it decided to install updates after I'd done this, and somehow managed to reset the default search provider to Bing in one of those.
I think that the US goes too far in the direction of making it tough for convicted criminals to reintegrate with normal society (way too far when it comes to sex offenders). But I don't think a law like this helps particularly - convictions should be a matter of public record and should be accessible to those who want to seek out that information.
More importantly, this raises all sorts of much weirder questions. If an online publication covers a trial, or prints a story about the crime, or even if an author writes a book about it, should that information then be erased when the criminals are released from jail? ("Winston Smith - paging Winston Smith...") Or will it become public policy to forbid writing about any crime ever in the expectation that the criminals will serve their time and eventually be released?
I did the same thing (essentially), but noticed and killed the "rm" process before it deleted too much stuff. Managed to recover all user files (it was a multi-user machine), and to restore system files without a complete os reinstall. 25 years ago or such and I still remember it. I suspect that most admins (or users who have root/administrator capabilities do something this bad at least once, and I think that it is sometimes a good experience in that it teaches you to double check potentially harmful commands.
On the whole it was a good learning experience, nothing important was lost and I gained from it. I think I agree that I'd rather these guys don't get fired, but instead they should spend some time on the ground thinking about what could have happened and they're likely to be much more careful in the future.
Good point. But since it wouldn't be hard to add this to/sys, (and I see some of that info already there) I suspect that nobody has really needed it in that format yet. Also, if you're going to get more than a couple pieces of that,/proc/cpuinfo has it nicely in one place and is far from hard to parse.
But this isn't an "anyone", it is an "anything" - a corporation. Corporations exist for just this reason, so that individual persons can avoid taking moral (and legal and often economic) responsibility.
The usual response to this (and not just about "technical people") is something like: Then they're not really technical people.
It's the "No true Scotsman" line of reasoning.
He was nominated for the peace prize, but did not win. It only takes one submission to be nominated so the bar is probably pretty low - there were over 200 nominees this year. Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini were all nominated, but didn't win.
Indeed. He seems to think that his sole goal as a scholar is to grab information from wherever and make publications (in fairness, that is the job of most university professors and they have often forgotten the real point of scholarship), instead of trying to improve the state of knowledge of the world (in which case he should be finding the best metadata for his sources and helping google - or other sources - to incorporate that). He also seems to believe that google is there primarily to support his (rather narrow) viewpoint on scholarship in general and that mistakes on their part are somehow personally betraying him. He is wrong in several ways.
But "computer literacy" courses (and I work as a professor in a department that makes all kinds of money by making people take these courses) are almost always about "how to change fonts in MS Word". Ech. There is some minimal discussion of security, but only in the sections taught by our better grad students.
I would, almost certainly, click on such a button - just to see if anything interesting happened. I might, depending on circumstances, do it from a safe browser or in a sandbox of some sort. And I suspect that most people would click on it just as your statistics indicated. On the other hand, I'd be a bit dubious that many people would sandbox the process.
I think I remember reading something a year or so ago that suggested that nose-picking actually helped to improve children's overall disease resistance by exposing them to more airborn pathogens internally. Eating dirt was also mentioned in the same context.
No, the only true random number is 17. This was asserted by several mathematicians who used several lines of reasoning (one rather like this). Then you get the random sequence 17,17,17... and the random rational 0.17171717... and lots of other perfectly good random numbers. Though you probably shouldn't use them as a source for cryptographically strong random numbers.
I used to have one of those "Powered by Intel" stickers on my 1980 era, battered, rusty, ugly old Dodge pickup truck. And a Microsoft one too for good measure.
Evidently you've not dealt much with the publishers who print books with crappy glue and paper so they (almost literally) disintegrate after a while. I have a couple of these that I spent reasonable amounts of money for that ended up in the paper recyclables as I read them (for the second time or after a while) and tossed out each section of pages as they fell out of the book.
Slashdot Mirror
I've written a few genetic algorithm/programming things for "music" over the years. However, not being a musician, I approached it only from an algorithmic perspective. The last of these, called "grammidity" can attempt to evolve sequences of midi events based on a kind of grammar that evolves (loosely based on the ideas behind L-systems). I had it online for a couple of years, but it never evolved much of anything interesting. The source code (java) is on sourceforge and includes ways to evolve "plants" and a fuzzer that generates html and which worked quite nicely to break browsers a couple of years back.
I suspect that the malware producers just haven't figured out how to game Bing quite as well yet. Be patient for a bit and they'll figure it out.
But, if you'd used unix first and used "ls", "dir" would not be intuitive at all. It is always interesting how many people equate "intuitive" to "I learned it already" even when that learning process was often far from intuitive itself.
They probably were working on Windows 8 when they put Windows 7 into freeze. I suspect they've been working on new ideas and features (and misfeatures) for a couple of years now. But the article says that they'll be focusing more on Windows 8 next year, which gives them time to put out the major Windows 7 fires and plan for the next release.
gmail started going down for hours (and for some users, more than a day) at a time on a regular basis.
By "on a regular basis" do you mean twice (and unpredictably) in the last year or so?
And thats why it is wilting. Would you want to be peed on daily? Urr, on second thought, don't answer that.
Mmmmm, branes....
Google has had competitors for as long as it has been around. If you compare Google's share of search to Microsoft's share of OS installs, you'll see the difference.
If Microsoft manages this, it won't take long before Microsoft does have an effective monopoly on search as well - between their making it hard to set Google as the default search provider in IE and perhaps taking over indexing of major news sites, it wouldn't take all that much to make Google a secondary player in the short run and potentially kill it in the longer term.
One word. Pysol.
I had the same experience - it took some digging to figure out how to make Google the default search provider, and there were several Googles listed on the page where Google eventually showed up and no good information on which to choose. Worse yet, I was in the process of installing Windows 7 and it decided to install updates after I'd done this, and somehow managed to reset the default search provider to Bing in one of those.
I think that the US goes too far in the direction of making it tough for convicted criminals to reintegrate with normal society (way too far when it comes to sex offenders). But I don't think a law like this helps particularly - convictions should be a matter of public record and should be accessible to those who want to seek out that information.
More importantly, this raises all sorts of much weirder questions. If an online publication covers a trial, or prints a story about the crime, or even if an author writes a book about it, should that information then be erased when the criminals are released from jail? ("Winston Smith - paging Winston Smith...") Or will it become public policy to forbid writing about any crime ever in the expectation that the criminals will serve their time and eventually be released?
I did the same thing (essentially), but noticed and killed the "rm" process before it deleted too much stuff. Managed to recover all user files (it was a multi-user machine), and to restore system files without a complete os reinstall. 25 years ago or such and I still remember it. I suspect that most admins (or users who have root/administrator capabilities do something this bad at least once, and I think that it is sometimes a good experience in that it teaches you to double check potentially harmful commands.
On the whole it was a good learning experience, nothing important was lost and I gained from it. I think I agree that I'd rather these guys don't get fired, but instead they should spend some time on the ground thinking about what could have happened and they're likely to be much more careful in the future.
Good point. But since it wouldn't be hard to add this to /sys, (and I see some of that info already there) I suspect that nobody has really needed it in that format yet. Also, if you're going to get more than a couple pieces of that, /proc/cpuinfo has it nicely in one place and is far from hard to parse.
anyone with a shred of moral responsibility
But this isn't an "anyone", it is an "anything" - a corporation. Corporations exist for just this reason, so that individual persons can avoid taking moral (and legal and often economic) responsibility.
The usual response to this (and not just about "technical people") is something like :
Then they're not really technical people.
It's the "No true Scotsman" line of reasoning.
Perhaps we need to arrange an introduction between the Martians and the Magratheans.
He was nominated for the peace prize, but did not win. It only takes one submission to be nominated so the bar is probably pretty low - there were over 200 nominees this year. Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini were all nominated, but didn't win.
Also, it seems likely to lead to human scorers being hired and retained because they tend to grade the same way the computer does.
Indeed. He seems to think that his sole goal as a scholar is to grab information from wherever and make publications (in fairness, that is the job of most university professors and they have often forgotten the real point of scholarship), instead of trying to improve the state of knowledge of the world (in which case he should be finding the best metadata for his sources and helping google - or other sources - to incorporate that). He also seems to believe that google is there primarily to support his (rather narrow) viewpoint on scholarship in general and that mistakes on their part are somehow personally betraying him. He is wrong in several ways.
But "computer literacy" courses (and I work as a professor in a department that makes all kinds of money by making people take these courses) are almost always about "how to change fonts in MS Word". Ech. There is some minimal discussion of security, but only in the sections taught by our better grad students.
I would, almost certainly, click on such a button - just to see if anything interesting happened. I might, depending on circumstances, do it from a safe browser or in a sandbox of some sort. And I suspect that most people would click on it just as your statistics indicated. On the other hand, I'd be a bit dubious that many people would sandbox the process.
I think I remember reading something a year or so ago that suggested that nose-picking actually helped to improve children's overall disease resistance by exposing them to more airborn pathogens internally. Eating dirt was also mentioned in the same context.
No, the only true random number is 17. This was asserted by several mathematicians who used several lines of reasoning (one rather like this). Then you get the random sequence 17,17,17... and the random rational 0.17171717... and lots of other perfectly good random numbers. Though you probably shouldn't use them as a source for cryptographically strong random numbers.
I used to have one of those "Powered by Intel" stickers on my 1980 era, battered, rusty, ugly old Dodge pickup truck. And a Microsoft one too for good measure.
Evidently you've not dealt much with the publishers who print books with crappy glue and paper so they (almost literally) disintegrate after a while. I have a couple of these that I spent reasonable amounts of money for that ended up in the paper recyclables as I read them (for the second time or after a while) and tossed out each section of pages as they fell out of the book.