What's the availability of Windows in Cantonese? I don't know at all. I also have no idea how to create a desire to install anything other than windows apparently... I'm just an Engineer... not much of a business man. Could cultural pride cause some countries to create their own programming language and operating system or even create their own version of Microsoft to go with it? If they could create an install base similar to that of Microsoft why not try and do it in a market that isn't dominated already?
I guess I'm saying that if there really is a market for another billion PCs in the world and most of them aren't in America... and most people don't speak English... and by extension most custom software will end up in non-English speaking countries... then why does C,C++,C# still say "if", "for", and "while" why not a Cantonese based programming language? Why not a from the ground up Cantonese Operating System?
I mean the Moon's been done. Why can't China and India live with hitching a ride on US Space Shuttle missions? Why do they tolerate hitching a ride on Microsoft Windows and not create their own software companies? Is software really that boring?
IIRC (If I Recall Correctly) that means there is one PC for every six people in the world. So what do people like me who own six computers do to that logic? Am I skewing the numbers or a statistical anomaly?
But seriously folks...
If we really do see 200,000 every five years if a large percentage of these developing markets adopt a non-windows OS as their defacto install base it could represent a significant erosion of the Microsoft OS's position world wide. In time that might not affect US software markets but it would radically affect world wide software markets.
Sadly, my first thought was "fire a few of them." While this is a brilliant success story, I'm left wondering why on earth there wasn't an out of the box Linux solution they could have used... Why is a high-school doing this independently instead of paying into a centralized development model?
Never underestimate how difficult it is to find and keep a competent IT staff.
Now, the company cannot win. Would you buy a Gateway computer after reading the Slashdot article? Not likely.
Well, seriously this needs to get picked up by CNN, Fox, Good Morning America, or even Jon Stewart before it has real impact. But, if the right people read the/. article they could push this to the right people and get that impact. Honestly, any Gateway competitor should seize this in their jaws and shake vigorously.
Once the news is in the common media then all it takes is clean cut Dell spokes person talking about "customer satisfaction" while showing a salesman with a dalmatian spotted tie (can't reference cows for legal reasons) ripping off someone with a computer that sparks. Something like: "Other companies will throw you to the dogs"... dalmatian spotted lawyers attack customer when she complains "it doesn't even work"... "but Dell cares because we aren't evil jerks. At Dell you can buy a computer that actually works. If it doesn't work we won't sue you. We promise. That's the Dell guarantee!"
There are many subtle points to walking that this robot clearly shows a finer control over. I think this superior walking style represents the future of walking robots.
I don't know how we could do that in hardware, and have changing "weights" like
in living brain.
One amongst many ideas about how to do this is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neural_net work and earlier on Slashdot a story about Numenta put forth their ideas for doing likewise. If one neuron is one process then many neurons are many processes spread over many processors. The way you get the processes to communicate is an implementation detail. Synchronous versus Asynchronous neuron states is another implementation detail. Not that implementation details are trivial, but, you should be able to simulate these neurons on existing hardware... for example in Linux try a neuron simulation that is a kernel module (virtual hardware) that uses the DBUS to communicate with other neuron kernel modules. All the tools are in front of you... just make the connections.
instead of increasing the clock speed,
use wider bus. Instead of 32/64 bit bus, move to 256, 512 or 1024 bit
wide bus.
The network is a bus, the bus is a network. Distributed processing is the same core idea if it happens over a WAN, a LAN, a USB hub, or an internal bus on the same chip. Create OS as an ecosystem to support asynchronous communication between buses. Programs as autonomous organisms living in an environment interacting with each other. Emergent behaviors could be a problem.
System of Systems is a philosophy that should look a helluva lot like the Unix Philosophy because... it is the same philosophy... and people do write code for these environments. If you want Parallel Programming to succeed make it work as systems of systems interacting to create a complex whole. Create environments where independent "objects" or code units can interact with each other asynchronously.
Otherwise, as discussed in TFA there are certain problems that just don't parallelize. However, there are whole classes of algorithms that aren't developed in modern Computer Science because such stuff is too radical a departure from classical mathematics. Consider HTA as a computing model. It is just too far away from traditional programming.
Parallel programing is just alien to traditional procedural declarative programming models. One solution is to abandon traditional programming languages and/or models as inadequate to represent more complex parallel problems. Another is to isolate procedural code to message each other asynchronously. Another is to create a system of systems... or combinations of both.
If there is a limitation it is in the declarative sequential paradigm and that limitation is partially addressed by all the latest work in asynchronous 'net technologies. These distributed paradigms still haven't filtered through the whole industry.
Am I "net-blind" or is there no where to download this thing? Google around for "Download Lina" produces hits on some MP3s and some hits on the Lina logo. If there is a download version of this project I can't find it.
On the matter of the product itself:
From the videos on the website it sounds like Lina is a new type of VM for C/C++ code similar to the JVM. If that is the case I can easily contain my excitement and hope these guys have a good marketing department. The technology is not 10x better and as such will have a long road to success.
If you can write to Lina and distribute Lina "binaries" or native binaries (that is "exe" on windows) I don't think you'll see much resistance to Lina as a product. You may not see much fervor over it either though.
If you can recompile a Linux project and distribute either "Lina binaries" or native binaries for a program then I think we have gold here. I'll be very excited and it means that Linux could morph into a kind of super Java style API for all Operating Systems... a sort of meta System V.
If all Lina does is provide a VM to write to, (which is what I suspect), then Lina's success is going to be a matter of marketing. But not traditional big marketing... it will succeed on a combination of smart technologist marketing and viral marketing. If Lina has that it might carve out a niche for itself.
The question is, true believer, can Lina make your heart flutter like Linux, Ruby, Python, or PHP did? If it doesn't learn to make your heart go pitter-patter then I it will have to find a way to cut deals to make you want to learn to dance with Lina. Maybe folks at dLoo can cut a few deals that move a critical mass of developers over to the Lina side of the force.
I don't know if I like Lina or not, I haven't even met her. With a hook like this on Slashdot today would have been the perfect time for me to meet Lina and maybe have dinner. As it stands, I'm a desirable geek and get lots of young new technologies interested in my time and attention. I've got Beryl that I'm hanging out with right now, some python code from Numenta that keeps calling me back and looks mighty nifty, I've got new FX-y tech I'm going to spend some time with too... And, that's just this weekend. I may not notice Lina again. I'm sure she's a nice girl with great personality but... the other tech I can meet and talk to right now and Lina didn't even give me a month and day to get back to her on.
In your high school or college sociology class you might have learned that societies are created on the surplus food that a group of humans can create. In other words you don't get tributes to Zeus until there is a surplus of food lying around that the peasants won't mind parting with. The arts, religion, politics, and kingdoms all come from the ready supply of extra food.
The fewer people that are required to produce crops to feed the maximum amount of people frees those people for the pursuit of things like religion, philosophy, politics, literature, technology, or whatever other discipline doesn't lead to the direct creation of crops and cattle.
So basically, yes, Open Source is driven on free clock cycles that don't have to be dedicated to survival. This is even true for the company that commissions open source projects for its own use. If the company wasn't creating enough profit to allow for investment in future growth or any risky investment behavior then it wouldn't have the spare cycles to devote to the investment. And, software is risky it only pays off half the time.
You don't invest in the stock market with your lunch money. You might invest your retirement account in stocks, but not the cash you need to stay alive in the next few days. If the need is too vital it precludes any risk behavior.
If you want more open source, then create an environment where more people can take the risk of creating open source projects and even potentially waste their time on them. Consider that most projects fail. Most projects do not become popular. There must be enough surplus developer time to support those risks so that the one lucky project that changes everything has the chance to get created and have a few people waste their time on it before it becomes a product.
Indeed the implementation that DERI reported on is realizing named graphs for exactly that reason, and Aidan is working on a ranking algorithm which is taking the source of the data into account.
Then the fast search engine is not really proving its speed on the real problem... only a problem sub-set. I see now I was missing the part about the quad. (None of the linked materials talked about them either I don't think) Thank you for educating me on that point.
Well, this is good stuff. Once again it seems that the web is saved by a variation of the karma point model. The more valuable data you provide the more likely your data is to be trusted the more heavily you are rated as a source. I guess I should pay more attention to search engines... it may be hard for some of you to believe but I've been ignoring them for the most part.
I did have the opinion that the only way to provide a truly useful search system was to create an engine that could read and understand unstructured text at least well enough to know what a page was really talking about. But then, I don't even work on web pages that much so I don't necessarily think about these things often. Thanks for the link.
Actually, is there a virtual "kill" button? You could add a feature to the game that virtually "killed" any character touching yours. It would protect characters against virtual rape. Or, we could have virtual restraining orders that caused the rapist character to be physically unable to get within one hundred distance units of the other character causing them to ricochet off of an invisible barrier whenever the other character approached pushing the rapist character out of the region the victim character entered.
I don't know anything about second life but I understand how much people invest emotionally in their virtual characters and I'd think there would be an in-game solution to the problem. With people that invested in the game I'm sure you could get some to participate in a virtual court system... or karma system just like Slashdot... one that was even meta-moderated.
I just read the basics of RDF and I can see that this could be a really really bad idea. If RDF is intended as an internal data representation for a search engine company to use then this is great. The search engine company or your own company's search engine staff can police and audit your RDF data. However, if I'm reading this right RDF is *supposed* to be populated by *volunteered* data. As such you're going to suffer not just the Wikipedia effect but all the problems seen in MetaData from an internet generation ago.
You'll see RDF associations linking the president to a crass picture of a donkey or a goat of some kind. You'll see companies set up to deliberately poison RDF data with false links designed to drive traffic to a site... you'll see sock-puppets and all kinds of other attacks.
This whole effort reminds me of the "this is spam" bit that was proposed to stop spam. You can't expect spammers to say to themselves, "wait, I better flip the this-is-spam but to true before I send this" you also can't expect people to not abuse the RDF system in similar ways.
Don't expect that if you RDF search for Stephen King that everything that comes up was actually posted by him. Imagine the pages that would get attributed to the president or Mr. T as a prank... the information would only be useful if you could verify the document as legitimate first.
The "is part of" feature is the most likely target of abuse I think. I could say that everything I wrote is part of the New York Times or as part of some official document that gets searched for often. The result would be erroneous hits in RDF search and artificial authority for my crack pot theories.
You might as well ask "Has the automobile jumped the shark?" The answer to that question would be just as informative. Just as the article points out things like Open Source should become the "well duh" part of certain software strategies.
From a marketing perspective the marketing concept of "Open Source" may have jumped the proverbial shark... but from a marketing stand point the Automobile as a new and innovative buzzword concept jumped the shark about the time Speed Racer came out.
Nobody runs around any more and sticks the word "mobile" at the end of things to make them cool any more. When was the last time you heard something like "Banana-Mobile", "Twinkie-Mobile", or "Penguin-Mobile" and thought... Jinkies! I gotta get a look at that!... seriously?
Folks, the Open Source - Mobile has left the building.
I think this attitude will catch on and by the 23rd century it will be fashionable to have analog buttons, switches, and analog counters and dials for everything. That completely explains why the original Enterprise was bristling with switches and buttons. Yep. That's the ticket.
Of course, then there's this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zp-y3ZNaCqs and I suppose that explains Star Trek: The Next Generation. In the future you'll gesture to control everything. It will give a new meaning to the "three-fingered-salute"...
Arr, thar be no pirates aboard me ship. She be yar and she be true as spit shine as all me laddies. Ye nay be needin' th' poochie here cap'n. Wha? Why tha' be chemicals fer me special scurvy cream. I swar I ne'er heard o' no Day-vee-day piratein' They be like gold bar? Arr! L'emme go ye scalliwags! Ye, canna keel haul a-man fer youst ha'in chemicals fer the scurvy! I swar ser it's medicinal! Don' let 'em lock me in thar brig! I did'na heard no Day-vee-day pirates! Dis is per-poster-mos!
Poor Long Burn Silver Disc we never saw him again.
I'm no expert on this topic, but this doesn't sound very new or revolutionary to me. It looks very familiar with known model theories of neuronal networks. Aren't concepts of backpropagation or pattern recognition known for ages?
Well, when I read this:
Numenta's goal is to build a software model of the human brain capable of face recognition, object identification, driving, and other tasks currently best undertaken by humans.
I thought: Hey! That's been my goal my whole career. Nobody pays me for that stuff though! The difference between you and I knowing this type of stuff and someone like Jeff Hawkins declaring they are working on this type of stuff is that Jeff Hawkins has the money, time, and intelligence that he might actually pull it off. The problem for people like you and I might be that we want to do those things but we can't actually spend the cash to make them happen because we still worry about making the rent/mortgage and have to work on silly little programs for making money.
And count your lucky stars that your company is incapable of writing proper specs - if they were, they would have outsourced your job to India or Brazil a long time ago.
Damn straight. All of us who get specs like these are in a special place. We have to bridge both the Analyst and Programmer jobs. If you are lucky the person who writes your specs won't go on a power trip and scream at you if you don't write exactly what they put in their word document. If you are lucky you have been given the chance to find the needs, fill the needs, and write great software.
You might not be that lucky. But, the harder you work the luckier you get.
the heck are you talking about??? They're using the exact same protocols: IP, TCP, HTTP, and SSL if the page is encrypted! And what does DRM have to do with serving up a web page??? And most importantly, what exactly do you think these charts have to do with protocols, and how do you figure you would tell a good one from a bad one, especially seeing how they are just a bunch of lines with no labels or other information???
Remember 3CPO was a protocol droid do you think that meant he handled HTTP traffic?
I am speaking of protocol in the cryptographic or algorithmic sense.
IP, TCP, HTTP, and SSL are all specifically network communications protocols.
The flow diagrams show that the windows internal messaging protocols... in this sense of the word these are the lines that connect the blocks that represent the internal communications end points of the windows sub-systems... are not disciplined like the linux internal messaging is shown to be.
In computer science a communications end point can be another computer over the network or another program on the same system. We will also refer to programs that use other programs as users. TCP/IP is a protocol, but so is the MFC and the windows internal GDI in a theoretical sense. Users of the GDI... that is programs that call GDI methods... for example send messages to the graphics device interface to draw things on your screen. The way you message the GDI is governed strictly.
Describe the four different ways I can draw a line using the GDI. If I want a line drawn I must use one of these four methods. C++ will interpret my call to one of these DrawLine methods as a message to a graphics object. The message will be sent to the Graphics object and the object will probably send messages to other objects it knows.
These API embody messaging protocols that occur inside the computer's memory. So whether we are talking about networks that span continents or networks that span your motherboard networks all have protocols driven by the software that is running them.
The protocol of the operating system's intercommunicating components becomes important when you are talking about enforcing an access restriction of some kind on data in the OS. Remember these messages are traversing memory on one system. The same memory may hold your DRM protected AVI file. If the protocols of the operating system are poorly implemented even a perfect DRM program will not prevent me from subverting the DRM system by use of a faulty protocol in the graphics system. Perhaps a hacker will subvert the GDI to grab the decrypted pixels before they reach their designated windows canvas.
The diagram of the windows internal messaging shows that the API are allowing messages, not along linear paths (as a defined and enforced by a master messaging queue) but cutting almost randomly through the architecture. I don't need to know what is being messaged to see that the messaging follows virtually no internal order. The network would be messy if it was built with Cat5 or with C++.
If you haven't heard the joke:
A procedural programmer writes a function: screwIn(lightBulb) but an Object Orient Programmer messages the light-bulb to screw itself.
Slashdot Mirror
This presumes that people listen to me at all. Most people ignore me. Has something to do with my being a Linux geek.
What's the availability of Windows in Cantonese? I don't know at all. I also have no idea how to create a desire to install anything other than windows apparently... I'm just an Engineer... not much of a business man. Could cultural pride cause some countries to create their own programming language and operating system or even create their own version of Microsoft to go with it? If they could create an install base similar to that of Microsoft why not try and do it in a market that isn't dominated already?
I guess I'm saying that if there really is a market for another billion PCs in the world and most of them aren't in America... and most people don't speak English... and by extension most custom software will end up in non-English speaking countries... then why does C,C++,C# still say "if", "for", and "while" why not a Cantonese based programming language? Why not a from the ground up Cantonese Operating System?
I mean the Moon's been done. Why can't China and India live with hitching a ride on US Space Shuttle missions? Why do they tolerate hitching a ride on Microsoft Windows and not create their own software companies? Is software really that boring?
IIRC (If I Recall Correctly) that means there is one PC for every six people in the world. So what do people like me who own six computers do to that logic? Am I skewing the numbers or a statistical anomaly?
But seriously folks...
If we really do see 200,000 every five years if a large percentage of these developing markets adopt a non-windows OS as their defacto install base it could represent a significant erosion of the Microsoft OS's position world wide. In time that might not affect US software markets but it would radically affect world wide software markets.
Sadly, my first thought was "fire a few of them." While this is a brilliant success story, I'm left wondering why on earth there wasn't an out of the box Linux solution they could have used... Why is a high-school doing this independently instead of paying into a centralized development model?
Never underestimate how difficult it is to find and keep a competent IT staff.
Now, the company cannot win. Would you buy a Gateway computer after reading the Slashdot article? Not likely.
/. article they could push this to the right people and get that impact. Honestly, any Gateway competitor should seize this in their jaws and shake vigorously.
... dalmatian spotted lawyers attack customer when she complains "it doesn't even work" ... "but Dell cares because we aren't evil jerks. At Dell you can buy a computer that actually works. If it doesn't work we won't sue you. We promise. That's the Dell guarantee!"
Well, seriously this needs to get picked up by CNN, Fox, Good Morning America, or even Jon Stewart before it has real impact. But, if the right people read the
Once the news is in the common media then all it takes is clean cut Dell spokes person talking about "customer satisfaction" while showing a salesman with a dalmatian spotted tie (can't reference cows for legal reasons) ripping off someone with a computer that sparks. Something like: "Other companies will throw you to the dogs"
Clearly this robot is a superior walker: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKHtEt_x6FI
There are many subtle points to walking that this robot clearly shows a finer control over. I think this superior walking style represents the future of walking robots.This looks just like a robot from Dexter's lab. Sweet.
The laws of physics do not differ from one OS to the other...do they?
Apparently, Scotty couldn't change the laws of physics but Ubuntu can!I don't know how we could do that in hardware, and have changing "weights" like in living brain.
t work and earlier on Slashdot a story about Numenta put forth their ideas for doing likewise. If one neuron is one process then many neurons are many processes spread over many processors. The way you get the processes to communicate is an implementation detail. Synchronous versus Asynchronous neuron states is another implementation detail. Not that implementation details are trivial, but, you should be able to simulate these neurons on existing hardware ... for example in Linux try a neuron simulation that is a kernel module (virtual hardware) that uses the DBUS to communicate with other neuron kernel modules. All the tools are in front of you... just make the connections.
One amongst many ideas about how to do this is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neural_ne
I am a Linux zealot. I hate Microsoft. I push Open Source everywhere. I don't have any windows or macintosh computers. I have five linux servers in my house. I have two linux workstations on my desk. I just launched an initiative for Linux on the desktop at work. I have wanted multi-touch since I saw this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ftJhDBZqss, http://cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirsense/ and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcKqyn-gUbY
I'm afraid that is cool enough that I might switch back from Linux to Windows. Where do I get in line for one of these again?
instead of increasing the clock speed, use wider bus. Instead of 32/64 bit bus, move to 256, 512 or 1024 bit wide bus.
The network is a bus, the bus is a network. Distributed processing is the same core idea if it happens over a WAN, a LAN, a USB hub, or an internal bus on the same chip. Create OS as an ecosystem to support asynchronous communication between buses. Programs as autonomous organisms living in an environment interacting with each other. Emergent behaviors could be a problem.
System of Systems is a philosophy that should look a helluva lot like the Unix Philosophy because... it is the same philosophy... and people do write code for these environments. If you want Parallel Programming to succeed make it work as systems of systems interacting to create a complex whole. Create environments where independent "objects" or code units can interact with each other asynchronously.
Otherwise, as discussed in TFA there are certain problems that just don't parallelize. However, there are whole classes of algorithms that aren't developed in modern Computer Science because such stuff is too radical a departure from classical mathematics. Consider HTA as a computing model. It is just too far away from traditional programming.
Parallel programing is just alien to traditional procedural declarative programming models. One solution is to abandon traditional programming languages and/or models as inadequate to represent more complex parallel problems. Another is to isolate procedural code to message each other asynchronously. Another is to create a system of systems... or combinations of both.
If there is a limitation it is in the declarative sequential paradigm and that limitation is partially addressed by all the latest work in asynchronous 'net technologies. These distributed paradigms still haven't filtered through the whole industry.
Am I "net-blind" or is there no where to download this thing? Google around for "Download Lina" produces hits on some MP3s and some hits on the Lina logo. If there is a download version of this project I can't find it.
On the matter of the product itself:
From the videos on the website it sounds like Lina is a new type of VM for C/C++ code similar to the JVM. If that is the case I can easily contain my excitement and hope these guys have a good marketing department. The technology is not 10x better and as such will have a long road to success.
If you can write to Lina and distribute Lina "binaries" or native binaries (that is "exe" on windows) I don't think you'll see much resistance to Lina as a product. You may not see much fervor over it either though.
If you can recompile a Linux project and distribute either "Lina binaries" or native binaries for a program then I think we have gold here. I'll be very excited and it means that Linux could morph into a kind of super Java style API for all Operating Systems... a sort of meta System V.
If all Lina does is provide a VM to write to, (which is what I suspect), then Lina's success is going to be a matter of marketing. But not traditional big marketing... it will succeed on a combination of smart technologist marketing and viral marketing. If Lina has that it might carve out a niche for itself.
The question is, true believer, can Lina make your heart flutter like Linux, Ruby, Python, or PHP did? If it doesn't learn to make your heart go pitter-patter then I it will have to find a way to cut deals to make you want to learn to dance with Lina. Maybe folks at dLoo can cut a few deals that move a critical mass of developers over to the Lina side of the force.
I don't know if I like Lina or not, I haven't even met her. With a hook like this on Slashdot today would have been the perfect time for me to meet Lina and maybe have dinner. As it stands, I'm a desirable geek and get lots of young new technologies interested in my time and attention. I've got Beryl that I'm hanging out with right now, some python code from Numenta that keeps calling me back and looks mighty nifty, I've got new FX-y tech I'm going to spend some time with too... And, that's just this weekend. I may not notice Lina again. I'm sure she's a nice girl with great personality but... the other tech I can meet and talk to right now and Lina didn't even give me a month and day to get back to her on.
expirate: a person who used to be a pirate.
expirite: a mineral created by heating an irony pyrite rock until it expires.
expirey: the act of creating expirite by an expirate.
For example:
He's good at expirey look at all the irony in this expirite. Only an expirate could produce such irony expirite through expirey. Arr.
In your high school or college sociology class you might have learned that societies are created on the surplus food that a group of humans can create. In other words you don't get tributes to Zeus until there is a surplus of food lying around that the peasants won't mind parting with. The arts, religion, politics, and kingdoms all come from the ready supply of extra food.
The fewer people that are required to produce crops to feed the maximum amount of people frees those people for the pursuit of things like religion, philosophy, politics, literature, technology, or whatever other discipline doesn't lead to the direct creation of crops and cattle.
So basically, yes, Open Source is driven on free clock cycles that don't have to be dedicated to survival. This is even true for the company that commissions open source projects for its own use. If the company wasn't creating enough profit to allow for investment in future growth or any risky investment behavior then it wouldn't have the spare cycles to devote to the investment. And, software is risky it only pays off half the time.
You don't invest in the stock market with your lunch money. You might invest your retirement account in stocks, but not the cash you need to stay alive in the next few days. If the need is too vital it precludes any risk behavior.
If you want more open source, then create an environment where more people can take the risk of creating open source projects and even potentially waste their time on them. Consider that most projects fail. Most projects do not become popular. There must be enough surplus developer time to support those risks so that the one lucky project that changes everything has the chance to get created and have a few people waste their time on it before it becomes a product.
Indeed the implementation that DERI reported on is realizing named graphs for exactly that reason, and Aidan is working on a ranking algorithm which is taking the source of the data into account.
Then the fast search engine is not really proving its speed on the real problem... only a problem sub-set. I see now I was missing the part about the quad. (None of the linked materials talked about them either I don't think) Thank you for educating me on that point.
Well, this is good stuff. Once again it seems that the web is saved by a variation of the karma point model. The more valuable data you provide the more likely your data is to be trusted the more heavily you are rated as a source. I guess I should pay more attention to search engines... it may be hard for some of you to believe but I've been ignoring them for the most part.
I did have the opinion that the only way to provide a truly useful search system was to create an engine that could read and understand unstructured text at least well enough to know what a page was really talking about. But then, I don't even work on web pages that much so I don't necessarily think about these things often. Thanks for the link.
Actually, is there a virtual "kill" button? You could add a feature to the game that virtually "killed" any character touching yours. It would protect characters against virtual rape. Or, we could have virtual restraining orders that caused the rapist character to be physically unable to get within one hundred distance units of the other character causing them to ricochet off of an invisible barrier whenever the other character approached pushing the rapist character out of the region the victim character entered.
I don't know anything about second life but I understand how much people invest emotionally in their virtual characters and I'd think there would be an in-game solution to the problem. With people that invested in the game I'm sure you could get some to participate in a virtual court system... or karma system just like Slashdot... one that was even meta-moderated.
I just read the basics of RDF and I can see that this could be a really really bad idea. If RDF is intended as an internal data representation for a search engine company to use then this is great. The search engine company or your own company's search engine staff can police and audit your RDF data. However, if I'm reading this right RDF is *supposed* to be populated by *volunteered* data. As such you're going to suffer not just the Wikipedia effect but all the problems seen in MetaData from an internet generation ago.
You'll see RDF associations linking the president to a crass picture of a donkey or a goat of some kind. You'll see companies set up to deliberately poison RDF data with false links designed to drive traffic to a site... you'll see sock-puppets and all kinds of other attacks.
This whole effort reminds me of the "this is spam" bit that was proposed to stop spam. You can't expect spammers to say to themselves, "wait, I better flip the this-is-spam but to true before I send this" you also can't expect people to not abuse the RDF system in similar ways.
Don't expect that if you RDF search for Stephen King that everything that comes up was actually posted by him. Imagine the pages that would get attributed to the president or Mr. T as a prank... the information would only be useful if you could verify the document as legitimate first.
The "is part of" feature is the most likely target of abuse I think. I could say that everything I wrote is part of the New York Times or as part of some official document that gets searched for often. The result would be erroneous hits in RDF search and artificial authority for my crack pot theories.
You might as well ask "Has the automobile jumped the shark?" The answer to that question would be just as informative. Just as the article points out things like Open Source should become the "well duh" part of certain software strategies.
... Jinkies! I gotta get a look at that! ... seriously?
From a marketing perspective the marketing concept of "Open Source" may have jumped the proverbial shark... but from a marketing stand point the Automobile as a new and innovative buzzword concept jumped the shark about the time Speed Racer came out.
Nobody runs around any more and sticks the word "mobile" at the end of things to make them cool any more. When was the last time you heard something like "Banana-Mobile", "Twinkie-Mobile", or "Penguin-Mobile" and thought
Folks, the Open Source - Mobile has left the building.
I think this attitude will catch on and by the 23rd century it will be fashionable to have analog buttons, switches, and analog counters and dials for everything. That completely explains why the original Enterprise was bristling with switches and buttons. Yep. That's the ticket.
...
Of course, then there's this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zp-y3ZNaCqs and I suppose that explains Star Trek: The Next Generation. In the future you'll gesture to control everything. It will give a new meaning to the "three-fingered-salute"
Arr, thar be no pirates aboard me ship. She be yar and she be true as spit shine as all me laddies. Ye nay be needin' th' poochie here cap'n. Wha? Why tha' be chemicals fer me special scurvy cream. I swar I ne'er heard o' no Day-vee-day piratein' They be like gold bar? Arr! L'emme go ye scalliwags! Ye, canna keel haul a-man fer youst ha'in chemicals fer the scurvy! I swar ser it's medicinal! Don' let 'em lock me in thar brig! I did'na heard no Day-vee-day pirates! Dis is per-poster-mos!
Poor Long Burn Silver Disc we never saw him again.
I'm no expert on this topic, but this doesn't sound very new or revolutionary to me. It looks very familiar with known model theories of neuronal networks. Aren't concepts of backpropagation or pattern recognition known for ages?
Well, when I read this:
Numenta's goal is to build a software model of the human brain capable of face recognition, object identification, driving, and other tasks currently best undertaken by humans.
I thought: Hey! That's been my goal my whole career. Nobody pays me for that stuff though! The difference between you and I knowing this type of stuff and someone like Jeff Hawkins declaring they are working on this type of stuff is that Jeff Hawkins has the money, time, and intelligence that he might actually pull it off. The problem for people like you and I might be that we want to do those things but we can't actually spend the cash to make them happen because we still worry about making the rent/mortgage and have to work on silly little programs for making money.
And count your lucky stars that your company is incapable of writing proper specs - if they were, they would have outsourced your job to India or Brazil a long time ago.
Damn straight. All of us who get specs like these are in a special place. We have to bridge both the Analyst and Programmer jobs. If you are lucky the person who writes your specs won't go on a power trip and scream at you if you don't write exactly what they put in their word document. If you are lucky you have been given the chance to find the needs, fill the needs, and write great software.
You might not be that lucky. But, the harder you work the luckier you get.
Remember 3CPO was a protocol droid do you think that meant he handled HTTP traffic? I am speaking of protocol in the cryptographic or algorithmic sense. IP, TCP, HTTP, and SSL are all specifically network communications protocols. The flow diagrams show that the windows internal messaging protocols... in this sense of the word these are the lines that connect the blocks that represent the internal communications end points of the windows sub-systems... are not disciplined like the linux internal messaging is shown to be.
In computer science a communications end point can be another computer over the network or another program on the same system. We will also refer to programs that use other programs as users. TCP/IP is a protocol, but so is the MFC and the windows internal GDI in a theoretical sense. Users of the GDI... that is programs that call GDI methods... for example send messages to the graphics device interface to draw things on your screen. The way you message the GDI is governed strictly.
For example these methods: Describe the four different ways I can draw a line using the GDI. If I want a line drawn I must use one of these four methods. C++ will interpret my call to one of these DrawLine methods as a message to a graphics object. The message will be sent to the Graphics object and the object will probably send messages to other objects it knows. These API embody messaging protocols that occur inside the computer's memory. So whether we are talking about networks that span continents or networks that span your motherboard networks all have protocols driven by the software that is running them.
The protocol of the operating system's intercommunicating components becomes important when you are talking about enforcing an access restriction of some kind on data in the OS. Remember these messages are traversing memory on one system. The same memory may hold your DRM protected AVI file. If the protocols of the operating system are poorly implemented even a perfect DRM program will not prevent me from subverting the DRM system by use of a faulty protocol in the graphics system. Perhaps a hacker will subvert the GDI to grab the decrypted pixels before they reach their designated windows canvas.
The diagram of the windows internal messaging shows that the API are allowing messages, not along linear paths (as a defined and enforced by a master messaging queue) but cutting almost randomly through the architecture. I don't need to know what is being messaged to see that the messaging follows virtually no internal order. The network would be messy if it was built with Cat5 or with C++.
If you haven't heard the joke:
A procedural programmer writes a function: screwIn(lightBulb) but an Object Orient Programmer messages the light-bulb to screw itself.