I think the article (for those two lazy to RTF) boils down to the ideas:
Yes, computers are quickly improving their chess ratings, and this will probably continue
Yes, overall, humans aren't improving chess playing skill as quickly, HOWEVER
... this won't mean computers will be able to consistently beat humans, because humans are basically understanding the ways that computers are playing better, and can counteract.
For example, the only time a computer ever beat the world champion was 1997 Deep Blue vs Kasparov. Every other time has been either human win or a draw, and htere have several more attempts since then.
Maybe computers are playing faster, or thinking more moves ahead. But maybe there is not really any "substance" in their style of play?
Recent operating system polls on the sites www.matrix.com and www.dunkindonuts.com also showed strong percentages for linux.
Sadly, the commonest response in the OS poll taken on www.wideworldofsports.com was: "What's Linux?"
The second-best response was: "What's an operating system?"
"We want a single platform," one of them said. "We're trying to get there using the carrot, or blackmail, or rewards, or whatever you call it.""
Their methods sound similar to Microsoft's methods for increasing their Market share in the first place.
If they achieve this, they will be teaching kids to conform more, and don't exercise individual choice so much. Is this what we want in our education? It's almost like the OS equivalent of school uniforms.
Standards are important to computing, but if there is one place where it's safe to spend time playing with a variety of standards, it's in the sandbox of education.
Re:So let me get this straight...
on
Flavor vs. Flavour
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Yes, but it was Linus. When god speaks, you listen. And when he makes a joke, the whole world should stop and listen. Anything he says has "(Score: 6, Linus)" after it.
Seriously, is this an example of hero-worship gone too far?
I work at QANTAS (Australia's largest Airline), and we're using Oracle alot, but not using Linux anywhere - we are basically a Solaris shop. The next major changes to our software infrastructure involve commiting more fully to Oracle. That may involve switching to Linux for servers, but probably not for desktops - they will stay as Win NT 4.0.
Now, I think Linux is technically great, and I hate the business practices of Microsoft. However, experience at QANTAS says that for us, Linux is not really any threat to Microsoft, it is much more dangerous to Sun. If we switch over to Linux here, we'll be doing Sun out of business, and Microsoft is unscathed. How is that good for the world?
Adoption of Linux on the desktop is a much bigger threat to Microsoft, and much harder to achieve because of inertia.
The name "HomeSec" reminds me of a few similar terms from George Orwell's important (and never more appropriate) book, 1984.
Most government departments actually are designed to achieve the opposite of their names. For example, the "Department of Homeland Security" is in fact designed to control the level of insecurity that people feel. Likewise, the ministry of defence is really about offence, and in 1984 the Ministry of Information is about disinformation and so on.
In the book, the language was controlled to the point of creating new terms like IngSoc, MiniPax (ministry of peace, really designed to perpetuate war), and Double-plus good.
The whole point here is to justify the actions of the government. Because it becomes alot easier to justify removing civil rights when there is the perceived threat of some common enemy.
For the average consumer, when you buy software, there is an unwritten expectation that it will actually work. That's why until now Microsoft have not dared to charge for updates, after all the bugs should not be there in the first place.
So in order to maintain a reasonably consistent revenue stream, Microsoft have organized their product line to maximize how often they can charge you. Their product branding strategy has been to create a "completely new" edition of windows every few years. They want it to look like Windows 95, 98, 98SE, ME, 2000, XP are all different products so you have to pay a separate licence fee each time. But the reality is the functionality has not changed, only the stability has improved (slightly) and there have usually been a few extra heavily-marketed features that no one wanted (how about those fruity xp themes?)
So now they've decided to make it official, they will charge money directly for the update itself, which saves them from maintaining the lie of packaging the updates in the form of yet another "Windows XYZ".
All of these spamming techniques seem to involve visual tricks, because the rendered HTML is viewed in a very different way to a human than the plain text would be seen by the filter. Things like zero-height fonts, or white-on-white text, or just using one big image etc. etc.
So how about this: I think every single one of these tricks would be defeated by using this process for filtering spam:
1. Render the html to an image (not on the screen, just behind the scenes)
2. Feed the image into OCR
3. Then scan the OCR text for spam
Sure OCR is not perfect, but since these techniques are imprecise already, maybe it would work well.
Although I guess processing power is a limiting factor, but maybe someday this will be worth doing.
There's a relationship between asteroid size and predicted frequency of impact.
10m - every 1-5 years
100m - every 1000 years
1km - every 100,000 years
The Tunguska blast of 1908 was a roughly 100m asteroid, hitting land.
If it had been an ocean impact, it would have produced significant tsunamis.
On the remote chance it had landed right on top of a large city, then the city would be completely gone.
A 1km asteroid would wipe out a moderate US state, or create tsunamis that travel to most of the globe.
Either way it would affect the climate due to dust clouds.
The observational population census for Earth crossing objects is only complete for objects in the 8-kilometre diameter range (such as 1627 Ivor) or larger.
The detection completeness for 1 kilometre range is estimated to be in the region of 12%.
That's an interesting statistic for gauging the success of Linux.
I tried to find other more general stats like say the market share of Linux and so on. They are very hard to find for various reasons. But here is one that's as good as any (especially since we win!):
Linux vs Microsoft.
Alot of people are saying there's nothing wrong with this, if you spend time earning credits why shouldn't you be able to sell it in real life, etc, etc.
The problem is it weakens the game. Because now when you meet that High-Level Jedi master with the double-ended lightsabre, how do you know it's not just a newbie with a trust fund, who decided to take a crack at "that new star wars game" but didn't want to go through the effort of earning anything himself in SWG anymore than he does in real life?
It's better to keep the game world and the real world from spilling over into each other as far as resources and wealth, to maintain the internal consistency of the game world.
My point is still valid. Any GUI app whose name starts with gn is probably using the gnome framework, and any GUI app starting with K is probably using the KDE framework. But that fact the we as users need to even think about this distinction means Linux is being split into two separate incompatible groups.
Okay this may be a little off-topic, but Gnumeric is a perfect example of what this comment is about.
I'm concerned that so open source apps written these days have names that demonstrate their affiliation with a particular desktop. Having names that begin with "gn" of "K" is a kind of flag waving that shows which desktop application framework was used (gnome or KDE). Ideally the user should be able to (and usually can) run apps using either framework on any desktop. But when the name has "gn" for example, are they saying "well yes you could probably run it in KDE but it's a gnome app so maybe you're better off running it in gnome..." Why is their so much tribalism? I think it's an important step in the maturity of Linux or Open Source in general to get to a point where the particular implementation (gnome or KDE) of any given layer (the desktop) has NO impact on other layers (the application) and so the title of the app should not even need to provide any hint of affiliation with a particular brand of in another layer.
Happy Birthday Gnumeric, looks like a great program. But as a user I don't think I should need to know about it's internal implementation thanks.
Even though computer PC hardware has been sufficient for most applications (other than games / video editing etc) for quite a few years now, Microsoft and Intel have been constantly trying to justify more upgrades of both hardware and software to the user. Now along comes this:
Beyond changing the appearance and control of Windows, the system will also require a new generation of computer hardware, not only replacing the computer logic board but also peripherals like mice, keyboards and video cards
Like most new Windows features, I don't see anything in this that the consumer actually wants, I think it is just a way to force yet another upgrade on us.
SCO - Source code's ours!
IBM - I'm being mugged.
Linux - Let's ignore the nuisance use of extortion.
MS - Monopoly secured. Money stashed. Mess sidestepped.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, computers are quickly improving their chess ratings, and this will probably continue
Yes, overall, humans aren't improving chess playing skill as quickly, HOWEVER
... this won't mean computers will be able to consistently beat humans, because humans are basically understanding the ways that computers are playing better, and can counteract.
For example, the only time a computer ever beat the world champion was 1997 Deep Blue vs Kasparov. Every other time has been either human win or a draw, and htere have several more attempts since then.
Maybe computers are playing faster, or thinking more moves ahead. But maybe there is not really any "substance" in their style of play?
But how do you ensure they are competitive? If you let the market roam free, then here's a fairly strong counter-example.
Sadly, the commonest response in the OS poll taken on www.wideworldofsports.com was: "What's Linux?"
The second-best response was: "What's an operating system?"
Their methods sound similar to Microsoft's methods for increasing their Market share in the first place.
If they achieve this, they will be teaching kids to conform more, and don't exercise individual choice so much. Is this what we want in our education? It's almost like the OS equivalent of school uniforms.
Standards are important to computing, but if there is one place where it's safe to spend time playing with a variety of standards, it's in the sandbox of education.
Seriously, is this an example of hero-worship gone too far?
"Who the HELL wants to hear actors talk?" H.M. Warner, Warner Brothers, 1927
Is this article just the online equivalent?
Now, I think Linux is technically great, and I hate the business practices of Microsoft. However, experience at QANTAS says that for us, Linux is not really any threat to Microsoft, it is much more dangerous to Sun. If we switch over to Linux here, we'll be doing Sun out of business, and Microsoft is unscathed. How is that good for the world?
Adoption of Linux on the desktop is a much bigger threat to Microsoft, and much harder to achieve because of inertia.
Most government departments actually are designed to achieve the opposite of their names. For example, the "Department of Homeland Security" is in fact designed to control the level of insecurity that people feel. Likewise, the ministry of defence is really about offence, and in 1984 the Ministry of Information is about disinformation and so on.
In the book, the language was controlled to the point of creating new terms like IngSoc, MiniPax (ministry of peace, really designed to perpetuate war), and Double-plus good.
The whole point here is to justify the actions of the government. Because it becomes alot easier to justify removing civil rights when there is the perceived threat of some common enemy.
http://stommel.tamu.edu/~baum/reid/book1/book/node 32.html
So in order to maintain a reasonably consistent revenue stream, Microsoft have organized their product line to maximize how often they can charge you. Their product branding strategy has been to create a "completely new" edition of windows every few years. They want it to look like Windows 95, 98, 98SE, ME, 2000, XP are all different products so you have to pay a separate licence fee each time. But the reality is the functionality has not changed, only the stability has improved (slightly) and there have usually been a few extra heavily-marketed features that no one wanted (how about those fruity xp themes?)
So now they've decided to make it official, they will charge money directly for the update itself, which saves them from maintaining the lie of packaging the updates in the form of yet another "Windows XYZ".
All of these spamming techniques seem to involve visual tricks, because the rendered HTML is viewed in a very different way to a human than the plain text would be seen by the filter. Things like zero-height fonts, or white-on-white text, or just using one big image etc. etc.
So how about this: I think every single one of these tricks would be defeated by using this process for filtering spam:
1. Render the html to an image (not on the screen, just behind the scenes)
2. Feed the image into OCR
3. Then scan the OCR text for spam
Sure OCR is not perfect, but since these techniques are imprecise already, maybe it would work well.
Although I guess processing power is a limiting factor, but maybe someday this will be worth doing.
10m - every 1-5 years
100m - every 1000 years
1km - every 100,000 years
The Tunguska blast of 1908 was a roughly 100m asteroid, hitting land.
If it had been an ocean impact, it would have produced significant tsunamis.
On the remote chance it had landed right on top of a large city, then the city would be completely gone.
A 1km asteroid would wipe out a moderate US state, or create tsunamis that travel to most of the globe. Either way it would affect the climate due to dust clouds.
The observational population census for Earth crossing objects is only complete for objects in the 8-kilometre diameter range (such as 1627 Ivor) or larger. The detection completeness for 1 kilometre range is estimated to be in the region of 12%.
(further reading is here)
Maybe it's worthwhile upping the budget so we can track all of them down to 1km ?
I tried to find other more general stats like say the market share of Linux and so on. They are very hard to find for various reasons. But here is one that's as good as any (especially since we win!): Linux vs Microsoft.
The problem is it weakens the game. Because now when you meet that High-Level Jedi master with the double-ended lightsabre, how do you know it's not just a newbie with a trust fund, who decided to take a crack at "that new star wars game" but didn't want to go through the effort of earning anything himself in SWG anymore than he does in real life?
It's better to keep the game world and the real world from spilling over into each other as far as resources and wealth, to maintain the internal consistency of the game world.
My point is still valid. Any GUI app whose name starts with gn is probably using the gnome framework, and any GUI app starting with K is probably using the KDE framework. But that fact the we as users need to even think about this distinction means Linux is being split into two separate incompatible groups.
I'm concerned that so open source apps written these days have names that demonstrate their affiliation with a particular desktop. Having names that begin with "gn" of "K" is a kind of flag waving that shows which desktop application framework was used (gnome or KDE).
Ideally the user should be able to (and usually can) run apps using either framework on any desktop. But when the name has "gn" for example, are they saying "well yes you could probably run it in KDE but it's a gnome app so maybe you're better off running it in gnome..."
Why is their so much tribalism? I think it's an important step in the maturity of Linux or Open Source in general to get to a point where the particular implementation (gnome or KDE) of any given layer (the desktop) has NO impact on other layers (the application) and so the title of the app should not even need to provide any hint of affiliation with a particular brand of in another layer.
Happy Birthday Gnumeric, looks like a great program. But as a user I don't think I should need to know about it's internal implementation thanks.
With the way nanotechnology is going, things might soon be almost indestructible.
You got me, I confess.
It was meant to be Open Source comedy wasn't it? Or at least, hopefully the copyright has expired by now...
Rumor has it MP3.com recently laid off 40 people, roughly 15%.
When: May 08 2003
Maybe people just find Kazaa to be so much better.
Apparently in Uzbekistan it means "Please fondle my buttocks."
You don't want to know what it means in Tajhikstan.
Beta Ogg Vorbis Firmware For The Neuros
Is it just me, or does it seem a bit wierd the fact that we understand what this sentence means...
Beyond changing the appearance and control of Windows, the system will also require a new generation of computer hardware, not only replacing the computer logic board but also peripherals like mice, keyboards and video cards
Like most new Windows features, I don't see anything in this that the consumer actually wants, I think it is just a way to force yet another upgrade on us.
SCO - Source code's ours!
IBM - I'm being mugged.
Linux - Let's ignore the nuisance use of extortion.
MS - Monopoly secured. Money stashed. Mess sidestepped.
Sorry about that, and thanks for the correction. Oh well, and I was so proud of getting the punctuation correct. D'Oh!
So machines are more efficient, but we'd prefer to have real humans in space? How do we resolve this conflict?
Easy, we combine them: Uploads!