Re:Dumbest thing I've read all week...
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The Evil in E-Mail
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· Score: 1
Yes, but that would keep the real secret cops in line, because they would avoid risking the chance that they might be observed violating their power themselves. For example, a police officer is much more likely to follow proper procedure if you're watching him while he makes an arrest. If we have to move to a monitored society, that is the best option, IMO. David Brin writes about this in "The Transparent Society"... it's an interesting read, regardless of what you think of his ideas.
Re:Dumbest thing I've read all week...
on
The Evil in E-Mail
·
· Score: 1
The 4 and 5 year old systems should be powerful enough to run Publisher + IE; one of the systems I used to admin was less powerful than that and was able to run Publisher, IE, Photoshop, and a bunch of other apps concurrently without any problems, though we were not using WinXP on that machine. That those systems are having trouble is probably more related to the software environment (the spyware, etc.) than the hardware one.
I presented two research projects at a recent conference: One was a demonstration of a system I created to make programming knowledge-based agents easier, with a whole bunch of pretty screenshots and diagrams. The other was a new type of tree data structure that balanced itself using descriptive statistics, with a few diagrams demonstrating the algorithms, but mostly text and pseudocode. Guess which one was more popular.
The moral of the story? Presentation matters at least as much as content, in school or out.
I think it's that Microsoft tries to portray itself as a "defender of innovation" (Remember the DOJ case? Microsoft was claiming that their cause was "the freedom to innovate"), while most of its new offerings have been the result of corporate buyouts and/or copying features.
The key difference is that most of the projects you've mentioned don't go around bragging about how innovative they are, even though some of their features are new and innovative. Opensource projects also have an advantage, as simply opensourcing an existing concept (Jabber) is viewed as an innovative step.
It isn't just you; most people who have used it agree that the GIMP's UI is in need of improvement. It has been getting much better recently, though, and other than the UI problems, GIMP is a great image editor (IMO).
Granted, Gentoo's performance on a laptop is acceptable, but it's nowhere near the level that you will get on an equivalent desktop machine. I was planning on switching distros on my laptop until I found out about quickpkg (compile on desktop, quickpkg, emerge -K from laptop with desktop as PKGHOST).
The same system that lots of people are ignoring because "it's only 2-3x as powerful as the Gamecube"? It seems that, at least for now, most people just want more powerful hardware, rather than more innovative games. Corporations will use whatever model rakes in the biggest profit. If gamers want more innovative games, they need to vote with their wallets.
"If you ask anyone in this country, 'Do you believe that the United States should cede the moon to say the Chinese, Europeans, Russians, whoever?' I bet you the answer would be, 'No,'" he said.
Interesting choice of words. It sounds like the speaker is implying that the United States owns the Moon because we got there first.
There's also the possibility that, if your code is good, the organization will be impressed enough to hire you (at more than $8.65/hr). At the very least, it's something to put in your portfolio.
I remember hearing somewhere that it seemed to have a high prevalence in INTP (which, according to typelogic, is the dichotomy that both Einstein and Newton belong to), but I don't think they've ever done any formal studies on that correlation. I'm an INTJ myself, BTW.
Graphics attract gamers, but good AI keeps them playing. Unfortunately, since there is no extra money to be made once someone has bought the game, I don't think that the gaming industry cares very much.
I wonder if the new business models involving online play and fees for installments will begin to change that. I'm not too happy about those, but at least it stands a chance of increasing replayability.
As one who has written semantic web pages, it's also rather difficult. OWL is a real pain to write, and most interpreters don't support "OWL Full", which means I'm stuck writing for either "OWL Lite" (now with only half the calories!) or "OWL DL". Forget (X)HTML, too - you need to use XML+RDF to use OWL, which means that if you want content you either need a parser or you need to code two documents for each one: One for human readability, and one that contains the metadata. There used to be a language called SHOE that embedded metadata into HTML via meta tags, but that seemed to have been supplanted by DAML+OIL and OWL.
If it's made easier to write (like SHOE was, actually), I can see widespread adoption, because the idea of adding machine-searchable metadata to a document is very good; the implementation is just very poor. Otherwise, expect to be paying your web developers a lot more, both rate and timewise, in the future!
I know that Moore's Law doesn't state anything about power - that was the misstatement I was trying to avoid. There is, however, a correlation between number of transistors and processing power.
Admittedly, to my surprise, the Windows protocol stack does support it, at least in XP. Open a DOS prompt and type "ipv6 install" to enable it. Of course, this isn't default, so the "great unwashed masses" still won't be using it.
Moore's Law makes thirtyfold increases in power over less than 5 years unlikely (though not impossible - that's a misstatement of the law). I wouldn't be surprised if, like the Revolution, the other two consoles are about 2-3x more powerful than their predecessors, or perhaps slightly more, as they were released before the GameCube was.
I find it odd that so far everyone has been discussing this from an economic perspective, but no one has really considered what this will do to technological progress. Money isn't everything!
As I once said to a friend (also CS), "Students treat you like nerds throughout elementary and high school and like free tech. support through college, professors try their hardest to kill you off, and when you graduate in spite of all this, you get to work as a 'code monkey' with little job security or respect while you watch your tech-ignorant bosses, who probably make many times your salary, screw up management decisions because they couldn't be bothered to learn the stuff". As the field is now, only the most dedicated students would enter it because we are basically treated like [insert vulgarity here] from the beginning of education to retirement. I think that we will eventually start to see more respect from society... when all the jobs are gone and the full impact of a dwindling supply of tech. workers can be seen.
It's a lot harder to prove a criminal case ("beyond a reasonable doubt") than a civil one, not to mention the negative publicity that sending "12 year-olds" and "grandma" to jail for downloading files would generate.
That's OK; I'm sure the pirated versions won't require this.
Seriously, when are the DRM-supporters going to realize that they're just making piracy more and more appealing? I don't buy (or pirate) movies, but if I ever wanted to, I certainly wouldn't consent to giving up biometric data. The scary thing is that most people probably would, no questions asked.
One of the more interesting bits of patent law (and one that I found out much to my own chagrin) is that if Microsoft themselves presented this idea to the public, it is still considered to be prior art. I think the USPTO gives a grace period of about a year between one's own presentation and the filing of a patent, though. I'm also not sure if use in software would qualify as "presentation".
Google's strengh lies in that it hires so many smart people and allows them time to work on whatever they feel like. That essentially gives them their own research lab. Combine that with the fact that many smart people who don't work for Google very much want to work for Google, and I think I can see why they're having so much success.
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Yes, but that would keep the real secret cops in line, because they would avoid risking the chance that they might be observed violating their power themselves. For example, a police officer is much more likely to follow proper procedure if you're watching him while he makes an arrest. If we have to move to a monitored society, that is the best option, IMO. David Brin writes about this in "The Transparent Society"... it's an interesting read, regardless of what you think of his ideas.
Unless you can monitor the monitors.
The 4 and 5 year old systems should be powerful enough to run Publisher + IE; one of the systems I used to admin was less powerful than that and was able to run Publisher, IE, Photoshop, and a bunch of other apps concurrently without any problems, though we were not using WinXP on that machine. That those systems are having trouble is probably more related to the software environment (the spyware, etc.) than the hardware one.
I presented two research projects at a recent conference: One was a demonstration of a system I created to make programming knowledge-based agents easier, with a whole bunch of pretty screenshots and diagrams. The other was a new type of tree data structure that balanced itself using descriptive statistics, with a few diagrams demonstrating the algorithms, but mostly text and pseudocode. Guess which one was more popular.
The moral of the story? Presentation matters at least as much as content, in school or out.
I think it's that Microsoft tries to portray itself as a "defender of innovation" (Remember the DOJ case? Microsoft was claiming that their cause was "the freedom to innovate"), while most of its new offerings have been the result of corporate buyouts and/or copying features.
The key difference is that most of the projects you've mentioned don't go around bragging about how innovative they are, even though some of their features are new and innovative. Opensource projects also have an advantage, as simply opensourcing an existing concept (Jabber) is viewed as an innovative step.
It isn't just you; most people who have used it agree that the GIMP's UI is in need of improvement. It has been getting much better recently, though, and other than the UI problems, GIMP is a great image editor (IMO).
Granted, Gentoo's performance on a laptop is acceptable, but it's nowhere near the level that you will get on an equivalent desktop machine. I was planning on switching distros on my laptop until I found out about quickpkg (compile on desktop, quickpkg, emerge -K from laptop with desktop as PKGHOST).
The same system that lots of people are ignoring because "it's only 2-3x as powerful as the Gamecube"? It seems that, at least for now, most people just want more powerful hardware, rather than more innovative games. Corporations will use whatever model rakes in the biggest profit. If gamers want more innovative games, they need to vote with their wallets.
The fact that we are seeing these trends over 100 years is precisely the problem. Natural climate change doesn't happen that rapidly.
There's also the possibility that, if your code is good, the organization will be impressed enough to hire you (at more than $8.65/hr). At the very least, it's something to put in your portfolio.
I remember hearing somewhere that it seemed to have a high prevalence in INTP (which, according to typelogic, is the dichotomy that both Einstein and Newton belong to), but I don't think they've ever done any formal studies on that correlation. I'm an INTJ myself, BTW.
Graphics attract gamers, but good AI keeps them playing. Unfortunately, since there is no extra money to be made once someone has bought the game, I don't think that the gaming industry cares very much.
I wonder if the new business models involving online play and fees for installments will begin to change that. I'm not too happy about those, but at least it stands a chance of increasing replayability.
As one who has written semantic web pages, it's also rather difficult. OWL is a real pain to write, and most interpreters don't support "OWL Full", which means I'm stuck writing for either "OWL Lite" (now with only half the calories!) or "OWL DL". Forget (X)HTML, too - you need to use XML+RDF to use OWL, which means that if you want content you either need a parser or you need to code two documents for each one: One for human readability, and one that contains the metadata. There used to be a language called SHOE that embedded metadata into HTML via meta tags, but that seemed to have been supplanted by DAML+OIL and OWL.
If it's made easier to write (like SHOE was, actually), I can see widespread adoption, because the idea of adding machine-searchable metadata to a document is very good; the implementation is just very poor. Otherwise, expect to be paying your web developers a lot more, both rate and timewise, in the future!
Good point regarding the dual cores, though.
Admittedly, to my surprise, the Windows protocol stack does support it, at least in XP. Open a DOS prompt and type "ipv6 install" to enable it. Of course, this isn't default, so the "great unwashed masses" still won't be using it.
Moore's Law makes thirtyfold increases in power over less than 5 years unlikely (though not impossible - that's a misstatement of the law). I wouldn't be surprised if, like the Revolution, the other two consoles are about 2-3x more powerful than their predecessors, or perhaps slightly more, as they were released before the GameCube was.
He's rich. That makes people listen to him, in the hopes that they, too, will become rich.
I find it odd that so far everyone has been discussing this from an economic perspective, but no one has really considered what this will do to technological progress. Money isn't everything!
As I once said to a friend (also CS), "Students treat you like nerds throughout elementary and high school and like free tech. support through college, professors try their hardest to kill you off, and when you graduate in spite of all this, you get to work as a 'code monkey' with little job security or respect while you watch your tech-ignorant bosses, who probably make many times your salary, screw up management decisions because they couldn't be bothered to learn the stuff". As the field is now, only the most dedicated students would enter it because we are basically treated like [insert vulgarity here] from the beginning of education to retirement. I think that we will eventually start to see more respect from society... when all the jobs are gone and the full impact of a dwindling supply of tech. workers can be seen.
It's a lot harder to prove a criminal case ("beyond a reasonable doubt") than a civil one, not to mention the negative publicity that sending "12 year-olds" and "grandma" to jail for downloading files would generate.
That's OK; I'm sure the pirated versions won't require this.
Seriously, when are the DRM-supporters going to realize that they're just making piracy more and more appealing? I don't buy (or pirate) movies, but if I ever wanted to, I certainly wouldn't consent to giving up biometric data. The scary thing is that most people probably would, no questions asked.
One of the more interesting bits of patent law (and one that I found out much to my own chagrin) is that if Microsoft themselves presented this idea to the public, it is still considered to be prior art. I think the USPTO gives a grace period of about a year between one's own presentation and the filing of a patent, though. I'm also not sure if use in software would qualify as "presentation".
There's a registry hack that will stop it from popping up.
Google's strengh lies in that it hires so many smart people and allows them time to work on whatever they feel like. That essentially gives them their own research lab. Combine that with the fact that many smart people who don't work for Google very much want to work for Google, and I think I can see why they're having so much success.