Re:The man is clearly mentally unstable
on
Bobby Fischer Found
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
What Fischer calls "cheating" is what others call "chess study". His criticism of the current form of chess is that being a grandmaster involves memorization of openings and endgames more than general strategy and tactics. His particular criticism of the "Russian Chess Machine", as he called it, was that it cheated by having hordes of grandmasters studying chess to back up their contender in a tournament; when there was a break in the game, the contender would meet with his committee of experts and receive the abridged version of their studies. The effect was to multiply the power of the contender because the rote memorization and study was done for him.
Of course, Fischer also accused Russian chess players of throwing games to advance other Russian chess players who'd been picked to be the champion so that their contendor could get to the final round without exerting himself, and be fresh for the championship match, while someone like Fischer had to fight his way to that match and be exhausted when he got there.
Fischer saw the former kind of cheating as an inherent problem in the fixed starting position of the game, and invented Fischerandom (TM) to overcome it. By randomizing the starting positions, book openings become meaningless and chess becomes much more an exercise in pure strategy/tactics and on-the-board analysis.
Doesn't changing the spin on one change the spin on the other instantaneously? If so, then the change in spin would be an event that could be used to transmit information (in addition to being information itself).
I've been told this is wrong, but nobody's ever explained why clearly.
I had a meeting today with reps from NCR, who hope to be a big reseller/implementer of RFID solutions, and the salesman basically said that, yes, the first $50,000 you spend will be wasted.
The (economic) reason for this is that the technology is seriously underdeveloped and encumbered by IP claims just like this. But that's not stopping Walmart, Target, and a host of others from requiring manufacturers to participate in pilot programs to force manufacturers and retailers to implement the technology and work out the bugs. Walmart is requiring its top 10 vendors to ship all product to one of its DCs with RFID labels on cases and pallets this January; Target is requiring the same thing for selected vendors by July 2005.
So companies like my employer will have to spend $5-10,000/printer, and $0.50/label (on products we sell for $10), which is pure expense for us, for printers that will need to be replaced in a year to handle new standards, and labels that fail 20% of the time. Oh, and the fastest printing rate they've got is 2-4 inches/minute, which is half what we print at now.
The only way we can hope to recover these expenses (since retailers laugh at us when we say that we need to raise prices to cover expenses they're forcing us to incur) is to start transitioning our own inventory management system to RFID in order to improve efficiency and save money.
Was it this bad when Walmart forced the adoption of UPCs on everyone?
Really? Proves your point? Howso? Were you tyrannized by my sig? Does the fact that I have a glib opinion somehow demonstrate that Wikipedia is the paving on the road to dictatorship? Or do you just not get to call people "fuckwad" enough?
What happens, in practice, is that it's geneticists writing articles on genetics, while people who don't know anything don't contribute. That's the strength of the big community in Wikipedia: real experts camp out on their favourite topics, and where flame wars start, it's between people who really know the subject, arguing the sort of detail that gets hashed out in professional journals. People who don't know don't dare wade in.
It wouldn't work as well without that big a community, but Wikipedia is there already.
Nothing except the constant traffic by a wide variety of disparate individuals who are empowered to correct anything they see as wrong. The extensive peer review, overall, works very well to prune gross (and even fine) inaccuracies and bias, especially for more popular articles.
And how can you trust that the Encyclopedia Britannica is truly accurate and unbiased? Ultimately, you trust the process that produced it, since you have no other means of checking. So, like open source software, Wikipedia relies on the 'many eyeballs' principle.
It's a nice little rant that says nothing about Wikipedia.
Yes, people have agendas, and inaccurate beliefs, and no fact checker backing them up. The premise of Wikipedia is exactly that those problems are mitigated by the structure of the wiki: if everyone can edit, then compromise and agreement and fact checking and backup sources are necessary to resolve disputes.
And for the most part, it works. It really works. There are lots of debates there about NPOV ("neutral point of view"), and people fight over it to the point of banning, but for the most part, the articles are rigourously peer reviewed and continually stripped of unfactual, biased information; moreso the more popular an article is.
Far from tyranny, Wikipedia is about the best living example of democracy in action.
Hitchens isn't a Bush campaigner, but he's definitely a supporter of the war and the general neo-con platform of a muscular foreign policy. It's counter-propaganda, not a critique.
Buy a LinkSys cable/dsl router for $50, which includes a firewall (if you can't afford a Cisco Pix). I've never had anything get through to any Windows box I was installing up to the point I got it completely updated.
No one should have any Windows box directly on a cable/dsl line anyway.
Because installing sendmail and some spam filter is non-trivial, and often a pain in the ass, and you have to worry about system security, patching, maintenance...
I'm seriously considering shutting down my own mail host because I've moved it three times in the last year, and every time I set it up again, I wonder why I'm putting all this effort into it.
Had Philip Morris taken AdTI up on their offer, we'd have seen something similar back then to what we're seeing today: an apparently disinterested think tank raising a public policy issue for debate, while silently taking payoffs from a beneficiary of the debate.
In other words, it's not a smoking gun, but it's a gun case and a couple of empty shells, to the effect that AdTI can be bought for astroturfing.
What's really compelling, I think, is that a tobacco company apparently acted in a more moral fashion than Microsoft by refusing to use a fundamentally dishonest PR tactic.
All of the killer apps I mention *could be* rewritten with glitzy, rich client experience interfaces, but that would add nothing of value in proportion to the original service's value, and those service's current popularity means that a rich client experience just isn't needed.
If it existed, people would use it, but those services aren't failing for lack of a rich client experience. You're talking about icing, not cake.
We've had the opportunity and the ability to deliver "rich client experience in the browser" for five years (Flash, Java, DHTML, ActiveX), and users/execs haven't demanded it yet. Why do you think anything will change?
The killer app of the web is distributed services, not interfaces. Porn, Ebay, Amazon, online banking and bill payment, media channels, not Office knockoffs or Flash games. The need for richer client experiences is in developer's minds, not users.
At work, I set up a document scanning function for our BAR system (Business Approval Request)--everything that's submitted must include documentation, which is often a paper quote or invoice.
We bought an HP Scanjet with sheet feeder for about $200 (sorry, don't remember the exact model), and use Paperport to scan the documents to a network folder named for the person requesting the scan (the executive assistant does it). We save in 300 dpi TIFF files in 1 bit color (B+W), which are small (8.5" x 11" comes out around 50K), and extremely clear and legible, and can be printed out again at almost the same quality. The scanning is pretty fast, and it includes batches. The only slow part is that PaperPort (which comes with the scanner) scans to MAX files, which need to be saved as TIFFs.
I've been following this problem for a while, so it was with a diaper firmly taped in place that I installed FC2 on my laptop, a Dell Latitude D600 with a 30GB HD, with the following partition table:
My read on the problem is that there's a combination of factors having to do with changes to HDs plus changes to the 2.6 kernel plus Windows XPs non-standard way of handling HD geometry. Put those together and you might hose your partition in a fixable or non-fixable way, depending on which conditions are present.
In my case, no problem. I repartitioned according to the existing scheme and did a clean install of FC2, which worked fine, and had no problems booting WinXP.
This fixed my problem exactly: I have a SCSI and an IDE drive, with FC2 on the SCSI, and WXP on the IDE; the BIOS boots the SCSI first, and grub is on the MBR of the SCSI. When Windows was selected, it would hang, displaying
rootnoverify (hd1,0) chainloader +1
I put the parent's code into grub.conf, and it booted correctly.
It's not spying if it's 1) automated, and 2) aggregated, meaning that only code parses your email (as it already does for spam and virus control), and that it doesn't connect you to the ad directly, only the fact that an ad presented in response to keywords X, Y, and Z got a click-through.
I thought it added credibility to Tanenbaum's recounting of the interview, insofar as he was acknowledging the simple fact that Linus wrote Linux without expressing any solidarity with him. It wasn't a case of academics and hackers closing ranks against a hostile interviewer, it was a competitor acknowledging that no wrongdoing had occurred.
It's on the order of Michael Cowpland's acknowledging that Microsoft's undocumented APIs were no threat and no hindrance in the development of WordPerfect because they were just for internal plumbing and of no benefit to someone writing an app on top of them.
I'm not sure that this is an appropriate marketing response to Lycos and others. Past a certain point, the numbers become effectively meaningless for users, meaning nothing other than "a whole lot of storage space". I would concentrate on searchability and that patented, slick Google interface.
And I would add the other things that Yahoo has, like a complete address book (currently it only accepts email addresses). Calendaring would be nice, too.
I think that it was exactly Simon's point that Ehrlich wasn't taking into account all those other factors, while Simon was, which is why Simon was right. Ehrlich was considering strictly Malthusian factors (exponential population growth plus limited resources).
The bet was between David Ehrlich (the doomsayer in question) and Julian Simon (the statistician who invented the airline's practice of overbooking flights and then paying people to get off the plane, in order to ensure maximal occupancy).
In 1980 he bet Mr. Ehrlich that natural resources would become cheaper rather than more expensive. After all, reasoned Simon, if natural resources were to become scarcer, their prices should rise.... Mr. Ehrlich, with John Harte and John P. Holdren, two colleagues from the University of California at Berkeley, chose five metals--copper, chrome, nickel, tin, and tungsten--to follow over a decade. Simon won. During those ten years, the prices of all five minerals fell: copper by 18 percent, chrome by 40 percent, nickel by 3 percent, tin by 72 percent, and tungsten by 57 percent. Mr. Ehrlich, whose word of honor was more reliable than his forecast of increasing scarcity, paid up.
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What Fischer calls "cheating" is what others call "chess study". His criticism of the current form of chess is that being a grandmaster involves memorization of openings and endgames more than general strategy and tactics. His particular criticism of the "Russian Chess Machine", as he called it, was that it cheated by having hordes of grandmasters studying chess to back up their contender in a tournament; when there was a break in the game, the contender would meet with his committee of experts and receive the abridged version of their studies. The effect was to multiply the power of the contender because the rote memorization and study was done for him.
Of course, Fischer also accused Russian chess players of throwing games to advance other Russian chess players who'd been picked to be the champion so that their contendor could get to the final round without exerting himself, and be fresh for the championship match, while someone like Fischer had to fight his way to that match and be exhausted when he got there.
Fischer saw the former kind of cheating as an inherent problem in the fixed starting position of the game, and invented Fischerandom (TM) to overcome it. By randomizing the starting positions, book openings become meaningless and chess becomes much more an exercise in pure strategy/tactics and on-the-board analysis.
Doesn't changing the spin on one change the spin on the other instantaneously? If so, then the change in spin would be an event that could be used to transmit information (in addition to being information itself).
I've been told this is wrong, but nobody's ever explained why clearly.
I had a meeting today with reps from NCR, who hope to be a big reseller/implementer of RFID solutions, and the salesman basically said that, yes, the first $50,000 you spend will be wasted.
The (economic) reason for this is that the technology is seriously underdeveloped and encumbered by IP claims just like this. But that's not stopping Walmart, Target, and a host of others from requiring manufacturers to participate in pilot programs to force manufacturers and retailers to implement the technology and work out the bugs. Walmart is requiring its top 10 vendors to ship all product to one of its DCs with RFID labels on cases and pallets this January; Target is requiring the same thing for selected vendors by July 2005.
So companies like my employer will have to spend $5-10,000/printer, and $0.50/label (on products we sell for $10), which is pure expense for us, for printers that will need to be replaced in a year to handle new standards, and labels that fail 20% of the time. Oh, and the fastest printing rate they've got is 2-4 inches/minute, which is half what we print at now.
The only way we can hope to recover these expenses (since retailers laugh at us when we say that we need to raise prices to cover expenses they're forcing us to incur) is to start transitioning our own inventory management system to RFID in order to improve efficiency and save money.
Was it this bad when Walmart forced the adoption of UPCs on everyone?
Really? Proves your point? Howso? Were you tyrannized by my sig? Does the fact that I have a glib opinion somehow demonstrate that Wikipedia is the paving on the road to dictatorship? Or do you just not get to call people "fuckwad" enough?
What happens, in practice, is that it's geneticists writing articles on genetics, while people who don't know anything don't contribute. That's the strength of the big community in Wikipedia: real experts camp out on their favourite topics, and where flame wars start, it's between people who really know the subject, arguing the sort of detail that gets hashed out in professional journals. People who don't know don't dare wade in.
It wouldn't work as well without that big a community, but Wikipedia is there already.
Nothing except the constant traffic by a wide variety of disparate individuals who are empowered to correct anything they see as wrong. The extensive peer review, overall, works very well to prune gross (and even fine) inaccuracies and bias, especially for more popular articles.
And how can you trust that the Encyclopedia Britannica is truly accurate and unbiased? Ultimately, you trust the process that produced it, since you have no other means of checking. So, like open source software, Wikipedia relies on the 'many eyeballs' principle.
It's a nice little rant that says nothing about Wikipedia.
Yes, people have agendas, and inaccurate beliefs, and no fact checker backing them up. The premise of Wikipedia is exactly that those problems are mitigated by the structure of the wiki: if everyone can edit, then compromise and agreement and fact checking and backup sources are necessary to resolve disputes.
And for the most part, it works. It really works. There are lots of debates there about NPOV ("neutral point of view"), and people fight over it to the point of banning, but for the most part, the articles are rigourously peer reviewed and continually stripped of unfactual, biased information; moreso the more popular an article is.
Far from tyranny, Wikipedia is about the best living example of democracy in action.
Hitchens isn't a Bush campaigner, but he's definitely a supporter of the war and the general neo-con platform of a muscular foreign policy. It's counter-propaganda, not a critique.
Buy a LinkSys cable/dsl router for $50, which includes a firewall (if you can't afford a Cisco Pix). I've never had anything get through to any Windows box I was installing up to the point I got it completely updated.
No one should have any Windows box directly on a cable/dsl line anyway.
"How far will raw sex appeal get me? To what extent can I count on this sweet ass to do my job for me?"
Because installing sendmail and some spam filter is non-trivial, and often a pain in the ass, and you have to worry about system security, patching, maintenance...
I'm seriously considering shutting down my own mail host because I've moved it three times in the last year, and every time I set it up again, I wonder why I'm putting all this effort into it.
Okay, okay, it's a smoking gun. And tobacoo companies aren't more moral corporations than Microsoft.
Had Philip Morris taken AdTI up on their offer, we'd have seen something similar back then to what we're seeing today: an apparently disinterested think tank raising a public policy issue for debate, while silently taking payoffs from a beneficiary of the debate.
In other words, it's not a smoking gun, but it's a gun case and a couple of empty shells, to the effect that AdTI can be bought for astroturfing.
What's really compelling, I think, is that a tobacco company apparently acted in a more moral fashion than Microsoft by refusing to use a fundamentally dishonest PR tactic.
That's an extremely narrow definition of success.
All of the killer apps I mention *could be* rewritten with glitzy, rich client experience interfaces, but that would add nothing of value in proportion to the original service's value, and those service's current popularity means that a rich client experience just isn't needed.
If it existed, people would use it, but those services aren't failing for lack of a rich client experience. You're talking about icing, not cake.
We've had the opportunity and the ability to deliver "rich client experience in the browser" for five years (Flash, Java, DHTML, ActiveX), and users/execs haven't demanded it yet. Why do you think anything will change?
The killer app of the web is distributed services, not interfaces. Porn, Ebay, Amazon, online banking and bill payment, media channels, not Office knockoffs or Flash games. The need for richer client experiences is in developer's minds, not users.
At work, I set up a document scanning function for our BAR system (Business Approval Request)--everything that's submitted must include documentation, which is often a paper quote or invoice.
We bought an HP Scanjet with sheet feeder for about $200 (sorry, don't remember the exact model), and use Paperport to scan the documents to a network folder named for the person requesting the scan (the executive assistant does it). We save in 300 dpi TIFF files in 1 bit color (B+W), which are small (8.5" x 11" comes out around 50K), and extremely clear and legible, and can be printed out again at almost the same quality. The scanning is pretty fast, and it includes batches. The only slow part is that PaperPort (which comes with the scanner) scans to MAX files, which need to be saved as TIFFs.
In my case, no problem. I repartitioned according to the existing scheme and did a clean install of FC2, which worked fine, and had no problems booting WinXP.
It's not spying if it's 1) automated, and 2) aggregated, meaning that only code parses your email (as it already does for spam and virus control), and that it doesn't connect you to the ad directly, only the fact that an ad presented in response to keywords X, Y, and Z got a click-through.
I thought it added credibility to Tanenbaum's recounting of the interview, insofar as he was acknowledging the simple fact that Linus wrote Linux without expressing any solidarity with him. It wasn't a case of academics and hackers closing ranks against a hostile interviewer, it was a competitor acknowledging that no wrongdoing had occurred.
It's on the order of Michael Cowpland's acknowledging that Microsoft's undocumented APIs were no threat and no hindrance in the development of WordPerfect because they were just for internal plumbing and of no benefit to someone writing an app on top of them.
And I'm still at 1,000 MB.
I'm not sure that this is an appropriate marketing response to Lycos and others. Past a certain point, the numbers become effectively meaningless for users, meaning nothing other than "a whole lot of storage space". I would concentrate on searchability and that patented, slick Google interface.
And I would add the other things that Yahoo has, like a complete address book (currently it only accepts email addresses). Calendaring would be nice, too.
I think that it was exactly Simon's point that Ehrlich wasn't taking into account all those other factors, while Simon was, which is why Simon was right. Ehrlich was considering strictly Malthusian factors (exponential population growth plus limited resources).
The bet was between David Ehrlich (the doomsayer in question) and Julian Simon (the statistician who invented the airline's practice of overbooking flights and then paying people to get off the plane, in order to ensure maximal occupancy).
From here:
The md5sums came out correct for me, and gpg verifies that it has a good signature from "Fedora Project ".