Well, a big part of their push seems to be training-games/etc., which just seems like the adult version of educational games.
I do agree that there are other aspects games can cover, of which the representing-what-something-is-like part is a big one. But those haven't always been taboo for games, either. One of the best 80s games on the Cold War was Chris Crawford's Balance of Power, which aimed to illustrate the issues involved, not just provide a "fun" war simulation. To emphasize the point, if you triggered a nuclear war, the game did nothing but end and print a textual message: "You have ignited a nuclear war. And no, there is no animated display of a mushroom cloud with parts of bodies flying through the air. We do not reward failure." There's a lot more examples too, although I agree expanding them would be good.
Is that really where "serious games", especially in the form of the "serious games industry" is going, though? Things going vaguely under the heading "newsgames", like Darfur is Dying seem to be doing that better, while the "serious games industry" seems to be focused on, well, people who would pay them to make a serious game, which tends to be more training-ish stuff.
Apple Computer and Scholastic Inc. are pleased with the inroads "educational games" have been making in K-12 education, and argue that intelligently designed games can be both entertaining and educational, and usefully supplement the traditional curriculum, especially in terms of engagement.
(And seriously, a lot of those games were better than the kind of stuff in that Cisco game arcade.)
It unfortunately doesn't appear to be freely available online anywhere, but you might be interested in this survey paper if you have access to a university library.
Indeed, but that points even strongly towards my conclusion, because for a small business, the filing fee is small compared to the lawyer fees, so they won't much care about an increase in filing fees. But for a large company that already has a lawyer on retainer anyway, an increase filing fees times 10,000 might matter, so I could see why they would want to drum up opposition.
The vast majority of patents, and therefore the vast majority of patent fees, are paid by large entities. I suspect they're the ones most opposed to any increase, because it will hit companies that file 10,000 patents much harder than companies that file 1 patent. But nice job hiding behind concern for small business.
What if the experts not only compiled the articles, but wrote them? Imagine some sort of multi-volume book filled with nothing but overview articles of various subjects, written by people who were experts in those subjects...
It depends partly on what you think an encyclopedia should contain, partly on what you think is necessary, and partly on what you think constitutes porn. Should any of the articles under Category:Human sexuality contain images? If so, what kinds of images? There are a lot of articles in that category and its subcategories, you'll note. Does, say, Clothed male, naked female need some images? If so, are they porn?
I would've thought after the embezzling-expenses scandal, the Canadian-right-wing-talk-show-host scandal, the conflict of interest between his for-profit business at Wikia and the non-profit charity Wikipedia, and who knows how many others, that he would've been put out to pasture by now.
Sure, there are plenty of stalled open-source projects, but there are a whole lot of wildly successful ones too. Besides Linux and gcc, web infrastructure is in large part open-source: Apache, nginx, Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, MySQL, PostgreSQL combine for significant marketshare, and there's a lot of innovation in that area. In fact there's not much interesting happening on the web that isn't open-source: Microsoft and Adobe are pretty much the only two games in town on that front.
It seems like it depends on the connectivity of the host as well. If the server has good IPv6 and good IPv4 connectivity, this problem can still manifest itself if the client has good IPv4 connectivity, but crappy IPv6 connectivity only via a 6to4 tunnel. In that case, OSX will prefer the 6to4 tunnel rather than the native IPv4 connection. If it were all native connections (native IPv6 and native IPv4), it'd be much less of a problem; it really seems to be preferring the tunnel that's causing all the reliability issues. The fix (applied to glibc, among others) seems to be to distinguish between native IPv6 connectivity and tunnel-based connectivity, and deprioritize tunnel-based connectivity.
That's a somewhat different kind of selfishness, though. Rand, being somewhat Nietzschean in orientation (especially early on), isn't a pure hedonist (do what makes you feel good), but feels that some kinds of instincts and desires are "better" than other kinds, and (like Nietzsche) classifies some of the things traditionally thought of as "altruism" as bad ones.
Sounds like basically the name plus some core devs. It's BSD-licensed, so in theory they could've made their own proprietary version without even buying it, but in that case it might've been harder to get any attention or traction, and they might have had difficulty finding people familiar enough with the codebase and willing to write proprietary-licensed additions/extensions.
The challenge for open source is that, while it's a fun hobby, how can we make it sustainable?
That's pretty much what people said in the 80s, arguing that the GNU project maybe could build a text editor as hobbyists, but certainly couldn't build something like, say, a compiler. Then Linux was just a hobby project, fun, but surely nobody could use it for real work. Debian, a whole OS without any paid devs? Ridiculous! And yet despite being supposedly unsustainable, the flood of open source software doesn't seem to be showing any signs of stopping? Next you're going to tell me these hippie kids will write a free encyclopedia, too.
Sure, exploring ways of tying together funding and development is always interesting, but I don't think it's because of any crisis of sustainability...
The health-care thing has been bipartisan consensus for decades, just various fuck-ups kept keeping it from being enacted (mostly the Democrats holding out for something even better, a bluff they lost several times). Richard Nixon proposed a universal health-care plan in the 1970s, and in the 1990s, the Heritage Foundation, of all people, proposed an insurance-mandate scheme.
Yeah, it's gone up, but most of that has been due to autopilots put in place decades ago (mostly social security and medicare expanding faster than inflation). I don't see much actual support for new policies among politicians.
There's going to be a lot of intra-corporate wrangling too, I suspect. BP will likely try to at least partially blame one of the other involved companies, and they might even be at least partially right, though who knows. It's quite possible the drilling firm (Transocean) did something wrong, and/or that some of the work contracted from Halliburton was shoddy. It appears the blow-out preventer valve didn't work, either, and who knows who manufactured that and whether it met its advertised operating parameters.
It seems that, if anything, it's swung away from statism. In the post-WW2 but pre-Reagan era, both parties were in favor of a whole range of statist approaches that now often struggle to get support among even the nominally "left" party. For example, Nixon imposed price controls, created the EPA, and was in favor of a national healthcare program, and was seen as right-wing at the time.
I see a lot of claims, but not much evidence. If we're going to use perceptions and anecdotes as evidence, my impression is that speech recognition has always been considered vaguely stalled. In 2000, people didn't think much progress had been made since 1991 besides some commercialization of stuff academia already knew how to do. In 2010, this guy doesn't think much progress has been made since 2001 besides some commercialization of stuff academia already knew how to do. Yet I think some progress has been made over the past 20 years. There just haven't been any breakthroughs, which is maybe what he's expecting, given his vague suggestion that "AI", a pretty vague concept, is our hope.
I'm also skeptical that accuracy has flatlined, though it's possible that's true in some areas. My impression is that multi-speaker recognition, use of large corpora to improve accuracy, and use of language modeling to improve accuracy, have all improved over the past 10 years. Of course, not all improvements go everywhere: the speech recognition running in real-time on a mobile ARM processor is not using every possible state-of-the-art technique. The advance there is that you can run speech recognition in real-time on a mobile ARM processor at all, and get performance that was once only possible on pretty hefty workstations.
Wolfram Alpha's math stuff is basically a wrapper around Mathematica, which is more standard anyway when doing math stuff like computing Pi. MATLAB is popular for things like engineering simulations, not number theory.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, a big part of their push seems to be training-games/etc., which just seems like the adult version of educational games.
I do agree that there are other aspects games can cover, of which the representing-what-something-is-like part is a big one. But those haven't always been taboo for games, either. One of the best 80s games on the Cold War was Chris Crawford's Balance of Power , which aimed to illustrate the issues involved, not just provide a "fun" war simulation. To emphasize the point, if you triggered a nuclear war, the game did nothing but end and print a textual message: "You have ignited a nuclear war. And no, there is no animated display of a mushroom cloud with parts of bodies flying through the air. We do not reward failure." There's a lot more examples too, although I agree expanding them would be good.
Is that really where "serious games", especially in the form of the "serious games industry" is going, though? Things going vaguely under the heading "newsgames", like Darfur is Dying seem to be doing that better, while the "serious games industry" seems to be focused on, well, people who would pay them to make a serious game, which tends to be more training-ish stuff.
Apple Computer and Scholastic Inc. are pleased with the inroads "educational games" have been making in K-12 education, and argue that intelligently designed games can be both entertaining and educational, and usefully supplement the traditional curriculum, especially in terms of engagement.
(And seriously, a lot of those games were better than the kind of stuff in that Cisco game arcade.)
It unfortunately doesn't appear to be freely available online anywhere, but you might be interested in this survey paper if you have access to a university library.
Indeed, but that points even strongly towards my conclusion, because for a small business, the filing fee is small compared to the lawyer fees, so they won't much care about an increase in filing fees. But for a large company that already has a lawyer on retainer anyway, an increase filing fees times 10,000 might matter, so I could see why they would want to drum up opposition.
The vast majority of patents, and therefore the vast majority of patent fees, are paid by large entities. I suspect they're the ones most opposed to any increase, because it will hit companies that file 10,000 patents much harder than companies that file 1 patent. But nice job hiding behind concern for small business.
True, but mostly I was hoping for a +1, Funny moderation. I've been told that once I hit 1,000 "funny" mods I'm allowed to retire.
What if the experts not only compiled the articles, but wrote them? Imagine some sort of multi-volume book filled with nothing but overview articles of various subjects, written by people who were experts in those subjects...
I don't think it's been on Slashdot yet, but the news is about a week old, so no longer particularly timely.
It depends partly on what you think an encyclopedia should contain, partly on what you think is necessary, and partly on what you think constitutes porn. Should any of the articles under Category:Human sexuality contain images? If so, what kinds of images? There are a lot of articles in that category and its subcategories, you'll note. Does, say, Clothed male, naked female need some images? If so, are they porn?
I would've thought after the embezzling-expenses scandal, the Canadian-right-wing-talk-show-host scandal, the conflict of interest between his for-profit business at Wikia and the non-profit charity Wikipedia, and who knows how many others, that he would've been put out to pasture by now.
Indeed, which is why things like netbooks have gotten popular: modern computers are overpowered for most normal end-user applications.
Almost all those processes spend almost all their time idle or blocking on something, though, not contending for a core.
6rd is a 6to4 replacement/extension pretty much designed to make that tunnel-for-a-single-site approach work reasonably
You can tell by the destination address: 6to4 addresses are all in the 2002::/16 prefix.
Sure, there are plenty of stalled open-source projects, but there are a whole lot of wildly successful ones too. Besides Linux and gcc, web infrastructure is in large part open-source: Apache, nginx, Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, MySQL, PostgreSQL combine for significant marketshare, and there's a lot of innovation in that area. In fact there's not much interesting happening on the web that isn't open-source: Microsoft and Adobe are pretty much the only two games in town on that front.
It seems like it depends on the connectivity of the host as well. If the server has good IPv6 and good IPv4 connectivity, this problem can still manifest itself if the client has good IPv4 connectivity, but crappy IPv6 connectivity only via a 6to4 tunnel. In that case, OSX will prefer the 6to4 tunnel rather than the native IPv4 connection. If it were all native connections (native IPv6 and native IPv4), it'd be much less of a problem; it really seems to be preferring the tunnel that's causing all the reliability issues. The fix (applied to glibc, among others) seems to be to distinguish between native IPv6 connectivity and tunnel-based connectivity, and deprioritize tunnel-based connectivity.
That's a somewhat different kind of selfishness, though. Rand, being somewhat Nietzschean in orientation (especially early on), isn't a pure hedonist (do what makes you feel good), but feels that some kinds of instincts and desires are "better" than other kinds, and (like Nietzsche) classifies some of the things traditionally thought of as "altruism" as bad ones.
Sounds like basically the name plus some core devs. It's BSD-licensed, so in theory they could've made their own proprietary version without even buying it, but in that case it might've been harder to get any attention or traction, and they might have had difficulty finding people familiar enough with the codebase and willing to write proprietary-licensed additions/extensions.
That's pretty much what people said in the 80s, arguing that the GNU project maybe could build a text editor as hobbyists, but certainly couldn't build something like, say, a compiler. Then Linux was just a hobby project, fun, but surely nobody could use it for real work. Debian, a whole OS without any paid devs? Ridiculous! And yet despite being supposedly unsustainable, the flood of open source software doesn't seem to be showing any signs of stopping? Next you're going to tell me these hippie kids will write a free encyclopedia, too.
Sure, exploring ways of tying together funding and development is always interesting, but I don't think it's because of any crisis of sustainability...
The health-care thing has been bipartisan consensus for decades, just various fuck-ups kept keeping it from being enacted (mostly the Democrats holding out for something even better, a bluff they lost several times). Richard Nixon proposed a universal health-care plan in the 1970s, and in the 1990s, the Heritage Foundation, of all people, proposed an insurance-mandate scheme.
Yeah, it's gone up, but most of that has been due to autopilots put in place decades ago (mostly social security and medicare expanding faster than inflation). I don't see much actual support for new policies among politicians.
There's going to be a lot of intra-corporate wrangling too, I suspect. BP will likely try to at least partially blame one of the other involved companies, and they might even be at least partially right, though who knows. It's quite possible the drilling firm (Transocean) did something wrong, and/or that some of the work contracted from Halliburton was shoddy. It appears the blow-out preventer valve didn't work, either, and who knows who manufactured that and whether it met its advertised operating parameters.
It seems that, if anything, it's swung away from statism. In the post-WW2 but pre-Reagan era, both parties were in favor of a whole range of statist approaches that now often struggle to get support among even the nominally "left" party. For example, Nixon imposed price controls, created the EPA, and was in favor of a national healthcare program, and was seen as right-wing at the time.
I see a lot of claims, but not much evidence. If we're going to use perceptions and anecdotes as evidence, my impression is that speech recognition has always been considered vaguely stalled. In 2000, people didn't think much progress had been made since 1991 besides some commercialization of stuff academia already knew how to do. In 2010, this guy doesn't think much progress has been made since 2001 besides some commercialization of stuff academia already knew how to do. Yet I think some progress has been made over the past 20 years. There just haven't been any breakthroughs, which is maybe what he's expecting, given his vague suggestion that "AI", a pretty vague concept, is our hope.
I'm also skeptical that accuracy has flatlined, though it's possible that's true in some areas. My impression is that multi-speaker recognition, use of large corpora to improve accuracy, and use of language modeling to improve accuracy, have all improved over the past 10 years. Of course, not all improvements go everywhere: the speech recognition running in real-time on a mobile ARM processor is not using every possible state-of-the-art technique. The advance there is that you can run speech recognition in real-time on a mobile ARM processor at all, and get performance that was once only possible on pretty hefty workstations.
Wolfram Alpha's math stuff is basically a wrapper around Mathematica, which is more standard anyway when doing math stuff like computing Pi. MATLAB is popular for things like engineering simulations, not number theory.