I know I should RTFAs, but how different are the Swing and SWT APIs anyway? Would it make sense for JDK to make SWT comply to the Swing API and quietly remove the Swing implementation? This way older applications wouldn't break, and Sun would save face to a certain point. I for one don't want to see 3 different GUI APIs in the same JDK...
My Yahoo already helps me customize my information feed to some extent, but I am limited to their "walled garden". It would be great if I could add any RSS feed I like to my My Yahoo page.
I think the parent link is the closest answer to what was asked for. The software running the site can apparently be downloaded and adapted. Doesn't look OSS though.
The software open source movement, MIT making their courses available online, the BBC making their old shows available, the US outsourcing their workforce, free trade, clandestine immigration... all look like a part of the same trend to me. The protectionist stance is less and less sustainable, if only due to advances in technology.
Pretty soon, as much as we might like to, we won't be able to speak in terms of nations. The boundaries are becoming more and more meaningless and artificial (if they weren't already, according to some ideologies). Indians are working for American companies, American forces are in Iraq, it's already happening!
Funnily enough, quite opposing ideologies are fighting the same protectionist battle, but on different fronts: the people defending copyright are not really the same people opposing free trade!
All I'm saying is, protectionism seems doomed in the long term, on all fronts, for better or for worse.
Well I don't know what the author of the post had in mind, but the following authors are worth checking out:
- Moebius (French Sci Fi), he also uses other names for side projects
- Schuiten&Peeters (Belgian architectural delirium!), these guys sometimes work on their own too
- Bilal (French Sci Fi), great drawings
- Hugo Pratt (Italian poetic adventures)
- Manara (Italian erotica)
The last two authors have definitely been translated to English, not sure about the others...
they're not really the only ones doing this...
on
MIT Everyware
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· Score: 1
A lot of courses from a lot universities are already available online, what is new here is that they're trying to do this systematically. Also of course given that this is MIT, the quality of the course material might be superior to others.
Agreed, and that's why it depends on the application! If the task can be accomplished with some approximation and tolerance to error, then a learning Clippy might be suitable.
If you want to emulate human intelligence you must also accept the approximations that will come with it. When you delegate a task to a human being, you don't expect everything to be perfect either.
Say *you* (not Clippy) want to automate a repetitive task, but do not want to learn how to program it. You could put the program in "learn mode" right when you are in the middle of this repetitive task. From time to time you would check to see if Clippy has learnt how to execute that task properly. At that point you would let it do the rest.
Once the task is finished, you could either "unlearn" the task, keep it in Clippy's database, or just plain disable Clippy.
The difference though, is that as far as I know, Clippy didn't learn from the user, he/it merely used his predefined expert rules. With a learning feature, he could have learned for example that we don't really need him, and would have disappeared for good...
I fell asleep whilst watching the original Solaris...
So did my girlfriend... I guess we're just too used to the fast-paced hollywood movies these days to sit through a contemplative movie (hey I'm no intellectual viewer either). It confirms in a way the point of my original post in that the SMS generation won't bring back movies which aren't just made to entertain.
The fact that viewers spread the word of mouth faster could actually lead to more bad movies!!! Take a look at the box office... It's not like Gigli was replaced in the top 10 by the latest Almodovar.
I bet those SMS messages are along the line of "GIGLI SUX!!!1" or "X2 = COOL CGI", not "the paintings in the sitting room of the spaceship in the original Solaris by Tarkovski were the Seasons by Bruegel, symbolising the cycle of life which is one of the major underlying themes of the movie"...
Something to consider also is that you need to think hard about where you want to be 5 years after you get that PhD. Forget the employer, *you* might feel overqualified for your job, with no growth perspective (in salary or position). Usually an entry position for a PhD in a company is the top of the hierarchy already, so it will be depressing to know that you can't get any higher. Management positions aren't the answer, as PhDs often don't have adequate social skills and would rather concentrate on the technical aspects.
Academia on the other hand will offer such possibility for growth.
- Let each user decide who some of his friends/foes are, just like in Slashdot. Rate them accordingly, say on a scale of 0-1.
- that will filter posts by the people you've rated.
- as for the users you haven't rated:
- if there is a "path of trust" between you and that user, i.e. if there is a friend/foe of yours who has rated a friend/foe who has rated (...*x) this user, calculate a rate. You can try to multiply the rates, or use the average, whatever works best for you.
- if there isn't, or if the user is new, give him an initial rating, again, just like in slashdot.
At least that's the main idea... There are some complications when there are multiple path and so on. I have published a paper on this, so if you're interested, leave me a message and I'll send you the paper. I'm also curious about how the system can work in a non simulated setting.
On the downside, I have never found any way to really solve this. I just put up with failing myself over and over again, putting off stuff I should have done long ago. On the upside, even with such faulty strategies, I have managed to get a Ph.D. - and high blood pressure, jeadaches stomach pains and stress-related mood swings, but hey, you can't have it all.
Maybe being a procrastinator is what actually helped you do a PhD? Seriously, I mean maybe a mind needs to wander to generate interesting ideas.
At least that's what I try to convince myself with as consolation;-)
So true. Sometimes I'm still amazed that as a master procrastinator I managed to finish a thesis! The only reason I could make it was because I had to write a progress report every three months to my funding agency, to justify the money (yes, my supervisor should probably have written those, but that's beside the point...). Those deadlines forced me to get some work done on a regular basis.
Quite sad indeed that nobody here seems to care about a major developers conference. Although I must say that the article this story links to doesn't cover much of USENIX, so there's not much to react to either. Maybe that justified the choice of not posting this on the main/. page.
I've been reading about Freenet, and I'm trying to imagine how a potent search engine could be implemented on top of Freenet. Ideally it'd be great to use meta tags and such to index pages, but then how do you find the files if you do not know their keys in the first place?
Yes, I have heard about Frost. As far as I understand, it's some sort of anonymous newsgroup. I guess a search engine could harvest the keys posted on Frost, and index them after retrieving and analysing the content and possibly the meta tags. But then the question becomes: how do you host such a search engine anonymously? Aren't you liable/vulnerable if your search engine is known to help you retrieve questionable content? Can't Frost be attacked ultimately for that same reason? Or is it distributed/anonymous? Am I missing something? Should I RTFA?
The beauty of languages is that they evolve, and that their evolution is reflective of the world in which they are spoken. Currently, American culture is dominant and permeates other cultures, whether you like it or not. Shouldn't then other languages reflect such domination? The French don't mind using a Japanese word such as "manga" or "karate", as they do not feel threatened by Japanese culture. It is just fair to use those words as they reflect on the origin of the concept. However they feel that by not using an English word they are also resisting the american culture invasion. The point they are missing is that they will still be eating a "hotdog" or a "hamburger" no matter what they call it. Finding French words for American concepts won't make the concepts go away. Had the French invented e-mail, it would have been just fair for other countries to use "couriel" as the word representing the concept.
On the other hand, what would be truly worrisome is if people decided to use an English word where a French one existed already. That would be a real sign that the language is dying.
Re:Freenet's main problem lies in its design itsel
on
Freenet 0.5.2 Released
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· Score: 1
Your first sentence is wrong. As far as I understand, Freenet will mostly contain censorship-prone content as a result of its guaranteed anonymity. One could list all sorts of popular yet censored content, but I will leave it as an exercise to the reader... For such content, Freenet works just fine.
Now if the content you're looking after is both illegal AND unpopular (and I guess copyright violating MP3s of ballroom music would fall under that category), then you're just running out of luck...
I agree with you, and I think you can push your argument even further. I think the cost/benefit aspect of money in *all of research* could be reconsidered. How has research in computer science, physics, biotechnologies, [insert your favorite hardcore scientific discipline here], improved life in general? How do their results contribute to our general happiness (and I mean happiness, not comfort)? Are we living in more peace? Have we reduced poverty? Are we more grateful for what we got? More confident in our future? Is our planet in a better shape?
Simply put: what are the 2002 breakthroughs in "happiness science"?
Maybe the solutions will not come from hardcore science but from other disciplines: economics, philosophy, history, *gasp* arts... I don't know which discipline, I can't probably even name nor describe them properly, as I'm just another techie nerd... I'm just speculating on what the world would be if all the priorities in research budgets were turned upside down. Think of the department of philosophy/arts/economics in your university getting all the research grants and the brilliant students, think of in what state of progress such disciplines would be if they had the same publication rate as, say, what software engineering has now.
I am not saying that allocating more money to social sciences would necessarily equate to getting the same results. But maybe just focussing more on such issues alone would contribute to a better awareness of the problems and questions that *really* matter.
Slashdot Mirror
I know I should RTFAs, but how different are the Swing and SWT APIs anyway? Would it make sense for JDK to make SWT comply to the Swing API and quietly remove the Swing implementation? This way older applications wouldn't break, and Sun would save face to a certain point. I for one don't want to see 3 different GUI APIs in the same JDK...
My Yahoo already helps me customize my information feed to some extent, but I am limited to their "walled garden". It would be great if I could add any RSS feed I like to my My Yahoo page.
I think the parent link is the closest answer to what was asked for. The software running the site can apparently be downloaded and adapted. Doesn't look OSS though.
Windows Toolkit looks interesting... I haven't completely RTFWS (the Web Site), but how does it compare with GnuWin ?
The software open source movement, MIT making their courses available online, the BBC making their old shows available, the US outsourcing their workforce, free trade, clandestine immigration... all look like a part of the same trend to me. The protectionist stance is less and less sustainable, if only due to advances in technology.
Pretty soon, as much as we might like to, we won't be able to speak in terms of nations. The boundaries are becoming more and more meaningless and artificial (if they weren't already, according to some ideologies). Indians are working for American companies, American forces are in Iraq, it's already happening!
Funnily enough, quite opposing ideologies are fighting the same protectionist battle, but on different fronts: the people defending copyright are not really the same people opposing free trade!
All I'm saying is, protectionism seems doomed in the long term, on all fronts, for better or for worse.
Well I don't know what the author of the post had in mind, but the following authors are worth checking out:
- Moebius (French Sci Fi), he also uses other names for side projects
- Schuiten&Peeters (Belgian architectural delirium!), these guys sometimes work on their own too
- Bilal (French Sci Fi), great drawings
- Hugo Pratt (Italian poetic adventures)
- Manara (Italian erotica)
The last two authors have definitely been translated to English, not sure about the others...
A lot of courses from a lot universities are already available online, what is new here is that they're trying to do this systematically. Also of course given that this is MIT, the quality of the course material might be superior to others.
Agreed, and that's why it depends on the application! If the task can be accomplished with some approximation and tolerance to error, then a learning Clippy might be suitable.
If you want to emulate human intelligence you must also accept the approximations that will come with it. When you delegate a task to a human being, you don't expect everything to be perfect either.
...and it depends on how it's done.
Say *you* (not Clippy) want to automate a repetitive task, but do not want to learn how to program it. You could put the program in "learn mode" right when you are in the middle of this repetitive task. From time to time you would check to see if Clippy has learnt how to execute that task properly. At that point you would let it do the rest.
Once the task is finished, you could either "unlearn" the task, keep it in Clippy's database, or just plain disable Clippy.
The fact that viewers spread the word of mouth faster could actually lead to more bad movies!!! Take a look at the box office... It's not like Gigli was replaced in the top 10 by the latest Almodovar.
I bet those SMS messages are along the line of "GIGLI SUX!!!1" or "X2 = COOL CGI", not "the paintings in the sitting room of the spaceship in the original Solaris by Tarkovski were the Seasons by Bruegel, symbolising the cycle of life which is one of the major underlying themes of the movie"...
Something to consider also is that you need to think hard about where you want to be 5 years after you get that PhD. Forget the employer, *you* might feel overqualified for your job, with no growth perspective (in salary or position). Usually an entry position for a PhD in a company is the top of the hierarchy already, so it will be depressing to know that you can't get any higher. Management positions aren't the answer, as PhDs often don't have adequate social skills and would rather concentrate on the technical aspects.
Academia on the other hand will offer such possibility for growth.
- Let each user decide who some of his friends/foes are, just like in Slashdot. Rate them accordingly, say on a scale of 0-1.
- that will filter posts by the people you've rated.
- as for the users you haven't rated:
- if there is a "path of trust" between you and that user, i.e. if there is a friend/foe of yours who has rated a friend/foe who has rated (...*x) this user, calculate a rate. You can try to multiply the rates, or use the average, whatever works best for you.
- if there isn't, or if the user is new, give him an initial rating, again, just like in slashdot.
At least that's the main idea... There are some complications when there are multiple path and so on. I have published a paper on this, so if you're interested, leave me a message and I'll send you the paper. I'm also curious about how the system can work in a non simulated setting.
Yes, Essential XML was a waste of my money... With a title like that, I didn't expect such a Microsoft-centric view of XML.
Maybe being a procrastinator is what actually helped you do a PhD? Seriously, I mean maybe a mind needs to wander to generate interesting ideas. At least that's what I try to convince myself with as consolation
So true. Sometimes I'm still amazed that as a master procrastinator I managed to finish a thesis! The only reason I could make it was because I had to write a progress report every three months to my funding agency, to justify the money (yes, my supervisor should probably have written those, but that's beside the point...). Those deadlines forced me to get some work done on a regular basis.
... you don't drink and drive!
Quite sad indeed that nobody here seems to care about a major developers conference. Although I must say that the article this story links to doesn't cover much of USENIX, so there's not much to react to either. Maybe that justified the choice of not posting this on the main /. page.
I've been reading about Freenet, and I'm trying to imagine how a potent search engine could be implemented on top of Freenet. Ideally it'd be great to use meta tags and such to index pages, but then how do you find the files if you do not know their keys in the first place?
Yes, I have heard about Frost. As far as I understand, it's some sort of anonymous newsgroup. I guess a search engine could harvest the keys posted on Frost, and index them after retrieving and analysing the content and possibly the meta tags. But then the question becomes: how do you host such a search engine anonymously? Aren't you liable/vulnerable if your search engine is known to help you retrieve questionable content? Can't Frost be attacked ultimately for that same reason? Or is it distributed/anonymous? Am I missing something? Should I RTFA?
The beauty of languages is that they evolve, and that their evolution is reflective of the world in which they are spoken. Currently, American culture is dominant and permeates other cultures, whether you like it or not. Shouldn't then other languages reflect such domination? The French don't mind using a Japanese word such as "manga" or "karate", as they do not feel threatened by Japanese culture. It is just fair to use those words as they reflect on the origin of the concept. However they feel that by not using an English word they are also resisting the american culture invasion. The point they are missing is that they will still be eating a "hotdog" or a "hamburger" no matter what they call it. Finding French words for American concepts won't make the concepts go away. Had the French invented e-mail, it would have been just fair for other countries to use "couriel" as the word representing the concept.
On the other hand, what would be truly worrisome is if people decided to use an English word where a French one existed already. That would be a real sign that the language is dying.
Your first sentence is wrong. As far as I understand, Freenet will mostly contain censorship-prone content as a result of its guaranteed anonymity. One could list all sorts of popular yet censored content, but I will leave it as an exercise to the reader... For such content, Freenet works just fine.
Now if the content you're looking after is both illegal AND unpopular (and I guess copyright violating MP3s of ballroom music would fall under that category), then you're just running out of luck...
But you get almost zero latency!
I agree with you, and I think you can push your argument even further. I think the cost/benefit aspect of money in *all of research* could be reconsidered. How has research in computer science, physics, biotechnologies, [insert your favorite hardcore scientific discipline here], improved life in general? How do their results contribute to our general happiness (and I mean happiness, not comfort)? Are we living in more peace? Have we reduced poverty? Are we more grateful for what we got? More confident in our future? Is our planet in a better shape?
Simply put: what are the 2002 breakthroughs in "happiness science"?
Maybe the solutions will not come from hardcore science but from other disciplines: economics, philosophy, history, *gasp* arts... I don't know which discipline, I can't probably even name nor describe them properly, as I'm just another techie nerd... I'm just speculating on what the world would be if all the priorities in research budgets were turned upside down. Think of the department of philosophy/arts/economics in your university getting all the research grants and the brilliant students, think of in what state of progress such disciplines would be if they had the same publication rate as, say, what software engineering has now.
I am not saying that allocating more money to social sciences would necessarily equate to getting the same results. But maybe just focussing more on such issues alone would contribute to a better awareness of the problems and questions that *really* matter.
End of utopic rant!