There's little doubt among scientists these days that human beliefs (including political beliefs) are to a large degree the result of genetic factors. If you don't believe that, read Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate (and read his other books for good measure, they're all great).
At the same time, the NYT article is a disturbing mix of scientific fact and incoherent pop psychobabble. I was particularly nonplussed by the author's hypothesis as to how we form our party affiliations and then our political beliefs. The reality is surely far more complex. Consider, for example, the poll on the U.S. election in this week's Economist. Unfortunately you have to pay to see the article, so I'll repeat the results here:
If the election were held today, who would you vote for..?
Now perhaps there is an overall trend towards increasing liberalism in the country (good news, if so), but the conclusion that younger people tend to be more liberal is irresistable. This seems to belie the suggestion that people have innate affinities to Democrats or Republicans that cause them to bond with such people in their youth, forming their political beliefs as a result.
I can't shake the notion that we become cynical and thus more conservative as we get older, with the extent of our right or left-wing bent influenced by genetics, among other things. I can't believe that there are other factors that make us hang out with the blue or red crowd before attaching a specific ideology to our choice, since young people are so overwhelmingly liberal merely by virtue of their youth.
Yes, but I'm not suggesting that *all* TV move to a pay-per-view model. I'm just proposing that TV producers sell their archives on a pay-per-view basis. In other words, you can sit back, relax and watch the Beeb as much as you want without stressing about your monthly TV bill. And, you don't have to pay a license fee.
Instead, if you want to back to the archive and watch a old show, something that you can't do now for any price, you pay a small fee for the download. It is my firmly held conviction that this would generate loads of revenue, although I admittedly have no evidence for this whatsoever besides my own gut feeling, mainly based on the fact that I know I'd spend a lot of money on this service, were it available.
I don't why this would be a barrier to creating good content. In fact, this system should be a much more powerful motivator for content creators to focus on quality. People may be willing to sit their backsides on the couch and watch whatever crap happens to be on (viz.: the latest Nielsen ratings), but they are likely to exercise much more discretion if they have to reach into their wallet.
The poster's point was that he benefits from the BBC although he doesn't own a TV or (therefore) pay a license fee. The opposite is also true: if you own a TV but never watch BBC, you still pay the fee. I agree that this isn't a terrible system, as such things go, but it would clearly be better from an economic standpoint to have a more direct link between cost and benefit.
Sounds good all... except for that reality seems to suggest something different..
TV uses more and more advertising and less and less license fees.
If there is anythign that consumers hate, it is payign over and over for thigns they already payed for, and if they can get a 'flat fee' solution that is somewhat reasonable in price, they'll almost always take it over a per-view/per-byte/per-minute/per-whatever solution, you just have to look around to get that confirmed.
Isn't this a bit like some at the turn of the (20th) century saying that cars will never succeed, using the argument that horses and buggies are everywhere? At its heart, this is a technological issue. We don't currently have technology to deploy an efficient pay-per-whatever system, so all-you-can-eat solutions win out. But we're getting close in many ways to removing the friction from small pay-for-content transactions, at which point the clear economic advantages I mentioned start to kick in.
Since evryone agrees (well, does everyone? I know many peopel do tho), why not just accept that in fact the current system with license fees does in fact work well?
Don't fix it if it ain't broken.
I'm really surprised to see this kind of remark on Slashdot, as it smacks of Luddism. To wit:
Og: Hey Ung, let's stop foraging around in the savanna all day and start cultivating and eating our own crops.
Ung: But Og, hunting and gathering has served us well for a long time. If it ain't broke, don't fix it!
This is an old hobby horse of mine. I'm not a big fan of mandatary licensing fees, and the point made by parent (among others) is a good illustration of why.
I think the future of TV will involve less and less advertising and licensing fees. Instead, big content producers like the BBC will sell their archives on a pay-per-view basis. Yes, I know they are planning to offer them for free, but if they have any sense they'll bag the license fees and attach a small, reasonable price to each download.
Everyone agrees that the BBC makes great shows, so why shouldn't we cough up a quid or two when we download from their archives? This alone would let them finance future programming in spades, and a direct link between consumption and payment is a much better business model than wooly license fees linked to TV ownership.
B) Given the unfamiliarity of most posters here with 1980's cultural references (in fact, frequently with 1990's coultural references), I hardly think references to John Mitchell are going to go over well.
Couldn't agree more, particularly considering the aptness of the more modern equivalent:
I actually tried Visual Slick Edit for exactly this reason, but I wasn't particularly impressed. First of all, it doesn't let you import Visual Studio projects using the Eclipse plugin, which is a big problem for us since, as you have no doubt gathered, we are tainted Windows programmers. The standalone client isn't nearly as, umm, slick as Visual Studio or Eclipse, and in any case it couldn't parse MFC, although apparently they are working on this.
Anyway, I'll give it a try with CDT when I have a chance. I'm skeptical but we'll see.
I agree that MFC is a bit of a liability these days. I'd like to get away from it, but we need to settle on an alternative (and obviously the port of our 200,000+ lines will be no small undertaking).
Well this doesn't seem to be the world's most active thread, but just in case someone is reading this: what interested me most about CDT is the refactoring support. This is sorely missing in Visual Studio.
Does anyone know how this refactoring works? I presume that the environment needs to parse the source files in order to determine what to rename (as with Java). Does it use the GNU compiler for this? If so, can GNU handle MFC? Sounds a bit like worlds colliding to me...
It's important to understand that I am talking about an open plugin architecture, not a huge monolithic app that tries to do everything. There's no reason why you couldn't have a GAIM plugin and a Mozilla plugin, with interfaces the same or very close to what you use now. But they would share the same contact list, so you wouldn't have to keep synchronizing between a mess of separate applications. And your browser could maintain a single trusted identity that would span apps, so you jump between online applications without having to continually signon.
This is similar to what Yahoo is trying to do with their portal. The difference is that the processing is offloaded onto the client, where a much smarter browser handles tasks that are currently relegated to the server. This makes it much easier for innovation to take off since different vendors can compete jointly against the 800 lb gorillas.
Yes, Microsoft has and will continue to try to put something like this in place. But I am sceptical about whether they will be willing to put into place an open enough architecture for it to take off (thus threatening their operating system monopoly), and I am equally sceptical that a closed system will be widely accepted.
And yes, this is basically the promise of web services (and.Net if you want to take the 30,000 foot view). But XML is still used overwhelmingly for proprietary protocols designed for specific applications. What I'm talking about is an XML browser that will make it much easier to leverage open protocols.
The author undeniably makes one non-obvious and thought-provoking point: innovation in the web space has been stagnating for several years, and there is a huge opening for someone to step in and trump the current offerings.
Where he errs, IMHO, is in the assumption that innovation will be incremental. He seems to be implying that the most we can expect from the future of the web are some (gasp!) cool new CSS features.
I beg to differ. The future of the web will ride on the wave of two related trends, both of which have revolutionary rather than evolutionary implications:
Increased client computing capacity - back in the mid-90s it was all the average PC could handle to render a complex HTML page. Nowadays PCs are at least one order of magnitude faster, and a lot of the processing currently relegated to the server could be offloaded to the client. The reason that this hasn't yet occurred is that no browser has the appropriate plugin architecture. It is possible to develop plugins for major browsers, but there is no proper framework to integrate these plugins into a cohesive whole. Instead, an increasing number of networked apps are eschewing the web browser altogether in order to provide a better user experience (e.g. IM, P2P file sharing, online gaming, VoIP, etc.).
Nonetheless, most of these applications would be that much more valuable if they were integrated together. To achieve this, a platform is needed that permits inter-plugin communication: a shared data model, a high-level framework for UI development and way for plugins to exchange messages. Think Eclipse for networked apps instead of development tools and you'll be on the right track.
XML - for all the hue and cry, the only significant impact of XML on the web since its inception 6 years ago is RSS. RSS is certainly cool, but it's just one XML-based language, and the whole premise of XML is that it enables the creation of multiple vocabularies. So there's a huge opening for someone to create a browser that intelligently processes XML vocabularies. This would include managing the relevant XML schemas (perhaps using a centralized repository), rendering the XML in various ways (perhaps including HTML templates and autogenerated forms) and persistent storage/retrieval. This is basically the goal of RDF, but besides taking what I consider to be a number of unfortunate design decisions, the RDF designers have essentially ignored the need for a new browser architecture to make XML use on the web an attractive alternative to HTML.
None of this is easy, of course. But considering the potential rewards of owning the new new browser architecture, I have no fear whatsoever that innovation will stagnate just because Microsoft decides to take itself out of the game for a while.
Just out of curiosity, does anyone have any experience with embedding Firefox in another application? We are developing a "new generation web browser" that offers a hybrid interface: part native Windows/part HTML.
Currently we use MSHTML for the browser part, for the obvious reason that it is there for free on every user's machine. Nonetheless, I'd consider a switch if we could get something that is faster and more customizable. The annoying thing about MSHTML is that the only way to interact with it is through COM interfaces (need I say more?). It would be very sweet to have source code. Also, we are planning to port to Mac and Linux at some point, so we need to look at more portable rendering engines. I don't know if IE can be embedded on the Mac but even if it can... COM interfaces *under MacOS*!? Oh my good lord...
To be more specific, my questions are:
How feasible is it to strip the "gunk" out of Firefox and just embed the rendering part and whatever else we need?
How much bigger will this make our setup program download?
How will this affect our memory consumption (early posts on this topic were not encouraging)?
The interesting thing about this story is not the potentially bloated valuation that Google will aim for. Did you think that people learn from their mistakes? Come on, now! The Google founders have the right to be billionaires too, dammit.
Much more relevant is the idea of using an online auction for the IPO. I guess this is common knowledge, but generally IPOs go through an investment bank like Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley, who feed the IPO shares to their valued customers for some artificially low price. Everyone makes money... unless, that is, you're not already rich.
I've felt for a long time that this is an affront to capitalism (yeah, I'm a capitalist... go ahead and mod me down). The only people who make big money did essentially nothing to earn it, besides the company founders who took big risk and make less than they could since the banks keep the price down to make sure they sell the whole float.
At the same time, we've been here before, as this Forbes article from early 2001 describes. Earlier efforts to make IPOs more efficient and democratic failed. It's not clear to me whether this was due to the coincidental collapse of the tech IPO market, or whether it was the result of a coordinate sabotage effort by the big investment banks. (Or maybe, just maybe those banks really do add some value by getting their big customers to serve as market makers).
Google has about as much market clout as I can imagine, so if they decide to go for it, this will serve as a good acid test. If the IPO goes off successfully as an online auction, this probably means that the earlier efforts were just bad timing. If it fails, I might smell a conspiracy.
I'm impressed. A couple of days I want onto Amazon to find books about Singular Value Decompositions (a mathematical technique that can be used for efficient statistical analysis of large groups of documents, among other things). I wasn't particularly surprised when it returned 0 results, since anyone who puts the term "Singular Value Decomposition" in their book's title obviously doesn't know much about marketing. Of course I don't actually give a damn if the term is in the title or not; I just want to know if the books talks about this technique.
I tried the search again today and got nearly 5,000 results, with the capability to actually look inside the book and see if the reference is useful to me. Very impressive indeed, patent or no patent.
Existing P2P clients look like what they are: free clients. They provide a user experience that is pitiful compared to professional client/server systems like the ones you mention. But this certainly doesn't mean that P2P systems have no advantages. I would cite two:
Infinitely scaleable infrastructure. This is going to become increasingly important as we move to video and lossless audio formats. Witness the BBC's plans to use P2P for distribution of its archives.
Use of a fat client that consumes XML instead of HTML. This has been a holy grail of the "semantic web" movement, and now it is sneaking in the backdoor in the form of P2P clients that communicate using XML metadata. This might sounds a little kooky, but the truth is that P2P clients can do a lot more than they currently do to organize and aggregrate data due to the fact that their data streams are structured.
The bottom line is that P2P clients don't currently offer the kind of experience that users are likely to pay for, but that is a self-fulfilling prophesy. You get what you pay for, after all.
Re:Where're the Semantics?
on
Practical RDF
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Perhaps I am playing devil's advocate here, but not intentionally. I really don't get it. Let's say I design a set of XML schemas using XSD, along the lines that you mention (i.e. places, documents, syndication, etc.). Each one has it's own namespace.
Why couldn't I just make an FOAF schema that pulls in the element types from the appropriate "component" schemas, qualifying the types with the correct namespaces?
It still strikes me that RDF is simply an alternative to XSD, and it's not clear to me why it is a better one.
Where're the Semantics?
on
Practical RDF
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I have to admit that I haven't been following RDF closely for a year or so, but I did spend a lot of time investigating the standardization effort from its inception (in like 1996... no joke). At the time I was struck by the appallingly obfuscated specification and syntax.
It seems like a lot of progress has been made since then, but personally I still don't see the point. If you buy into XML as the "lingua franca" of semantic data interchange, then great. I do too. But what exactly is RDF useful for? If we can agree on an XML schema for our data, we can exchange it directly without the need for yet another layer of abstraction on top of it.
The really hard part is agreeing on the schemas, and this has nothing to do with RDF. Having worked in one XML vocabulary standardization effort (Universal Business Language), I can only stress that the technical and political challenges of getting any group of individuals and companies to agree on any common data format are enormous. For example, it would be great if Amazon and B&N used the same schema for their book descriptions, but imagine trying to make this happen (particularly as they are likely to feel that the specificities of their formats represent some kind of competitive advantage).
So until proven wrong I continue to believe that RDF is nothing but smoke and mirrors. The easy stuff is done by XML right out of the box, and the hard stuff has nothing whatsoever to do with data structures and wire serialization formats.
I was wondering whether someone would make this point. You're right that indexing MP3s isn't entirely trivial, and there is scope for innovation.
But I still stick by my original point. As a matter of fact, I wrote a program that deduces title and artist information from MP3 filenames in two days, and it works amazingly well. I hardly think that Google's page rank technology could be implemented in this timeframe!
I disagreed with pretty much the entire article, but one point in particular stood out: the assertion that Google is destined to dominate a world where copyrighted content can be legally distributed. This shows deep ignorance on the part of the author as to the reasons for Google's current success.
Specifically, the problem of indexing the web is an extremely thorny one. There is a massive amount of content, almost none of which has any structure whatsoever, and much of which is of dubious interest (i.e. it's total crap). The page rank system used by Google is simply brilliant and deserves all the accolades heaped on it.
Indexing a bunch of MP3s is a much, much simpler problem. As the author of the article points out, Napster had this pretty much nailed years ago. So Google's technical advantage is definitely questionable. What about its deep pockets, market presence, etc.? Sure, this indicates that Google might be a contender in this theoretical new market, but there are a couple of other companies out there with brands, deep pockets, etc. Say IBM, or eBay, or Amazon, or Microsoft, or Yahoo, or... okay, you get the point.
To me this article is a perfect example of attracting attention by taking a superficially intriguing stance, basing it on today's much-hyped company to gain topical interest. Upon examination, the conclusions of the article don't hold water.
I think Shirky's writing on "social software" is brilliant, but I have a lot of issues with his arguments regarding micropayments.
It seems the crux of his argument is that the web has led to such a cornucopia of free content that the "mental transaction cost" (i.e. effort you spend agonizing over your purchasing decision) alone makes paid content too expensive, no matter how low the nominal price is.
There are a number of flaws with this reasoning, but the most serious one to me is that it neglects the observable network effects that govern things like micropayment. Right now there is nothing even close to a universally accepted and broadly used micropayment system. So it's definitely true that in many cases, as a content creator, I have the choice between being free or being totally ignored.
The lack of a popular micropayment system is therefore a sort of self-fulfilling prophesy. As long as it doesn't exist, there will be a lot of free content and thus less reason to pay for content. But these types of systems have a "magical" way of suddenly achieving critical mass and taking over the world. Consider the Internet itself: it's been around for decades but usage only exploded when it reached a certain threshold a few years ago.
I believe that at some point some kind of incredibly easy-to-use micropayment system will suddenly hit critical mass, and all at once there'll be a whole lot less free content to choose from (incidently a very positive effect as far as I'm concerned, since I believe a little bit of capitalism will vastly improve the overall web experience). Things won't be free anymore, but they'll be a lot more variety (especially with regard to specialized content) and higher quality. Is this a surprise? Creative people have to eat too, so obviously they'll be more motivated if they can actually make web content their primary money-earning activity.
And I don't believe that people will balk at spending less-than-a-dollar prices for individual bits of content anymore than they beat their brow at the cash register before picking up a copy of the National Enquirer or Cosmo, reading it on the bus on the way home and then tossing it.
So I guess every filmmaker out there is too busy making a cookie-cutter sequel to spend time on an innovative medium-budget film!? You might be surprised at how many would-be producers and directors are out there.
And for the record I quite enjoyed T3.:-)
Consider the Film Industry
on
Razor Blade Games?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I see a lot of parallels between video game development and the film industry. As the market has become larger and more global, consumer expectations have risen accordingly. The result is that the biggest moneyspinners in the future are likely to be "blockbuster" games written by larger companies with big budgets and teams (this trend is already abundantly clear).
To me this is good news for gamers. True, it will result in a lot of lowest common denominator crap. But this analogy suggests a lot of positive aspects as well. For one, I personally happen to like blockbuster movies, and I'm glad that the market is such that someone can justify spending $300 mio or so on the LOTR trilogy (to name just one example).
At the same time, there is space for the little guy in the film industry to some extent. Innovative filmmakers can still make a name for themselves on a superlow budget (e.g. Clerks. In my view this applies even more to the gaming world, where a clever idea can be a huge hit without requiring dozens of programmers and designers to implement (consider Tetris).
Anything that makes really stunning high-budget output possible is more than fine by me.
I strongly dispute the idea that a candidate must be geriatric in order to govern effectively. And I can't even imagine why you would claim that "she probably wants to become the second pregnant governor". Presumably any woman who isn't postmenopausal is suspect in any position of authority?
I think one of the most debilitating things about the American political system (and most others) is that so much emphasis is placed on a candidate's age. Of course, all other things being equal, I would prefer to have a candidate who is more experienced and poised, and therefore older. But all things are most assuredly not equal, and there are plenty of other factors that should be given equal weight (particularly the candidate's policies, which you seem to disregard entirely).
An effective leader of a complex organization like the California government is going to surround his/herself with advisors anyway, so it is hardly necessary (or possible) for them to have years of experience with every imaginable issue. Tell me that Arnie (or Dubya for that matter), at 56 years old, has a vice-like grip on all the issues facing the state. Much more important is that the candidate has his/her head in the right place and sets the overall direction that is best for the state.
In business, it is rare but definitely not unknown for a CEO to be in his/her 20s (consider Michael Dell, Steve Jobs and... that other guy). It takes an exceptional individual to achieve this, but why shouldn't the same exceptional individuals be given their shot in politics?
Reading the interview I didn't know anything about Georgy other than the fact that she is a woman dubbed "The Geek Candidate" by/. I found her views to be extremely sensible (surprising so, in fact), and discovering afterwards that she is young and good-looking did nothing to change my mind.
This is definitely true. At the same time, the results of statistical natural language processing are surprisingly good. Really this should not be so surprising, since they function in a way similar to the human brain. A neural network like the brain is designed to deduce a complex function from training data. I believe strongly that the best way to get intelligent(-seeming) behavior out of machines is to mirror this process.
Artificial neural nets are one way to do this, but statistical methods are more or less analogous and have the advantage of being highly optimizable. Personally I don't understand the details, but Very Smart Mathematicians have found ways to optimize models like Singular Value Decompositions (SVDs) so that they can be calculated orders of magnitude faster than models that cannot be represent as formally using mathematics.
The bottom line is that statistical methods are probably the way that we will end up producing brain-like behavior on computers, and the fact that there are promising results already is heartening. Yes, for truly intelligent behavior a lot of domain knowledge will also be needed, as you point out. But I don't see any reason why the extraction and mapping of this knowledge couldn't also be achieved with large training corpora and statistical methods, rather than hand-crafting.
The same statistically methods that are applied to syntax (phrase structure) are equally effective when applied to morphology (word structure). In this case the unit of processing would be N-graphs (sets of N letters) rather than N-grams. All languages are inflected to some degree, so I think that a morphological component of this type should be part of any serious statisical translation system.
I must really be brainwashed because I use the style shown above for C++, but in Java I place the braces on the same line as the previous statement. What your Dad said might be true, but I've never grep'ed for the control structure of a program and I've never wanted to. I just follow the conventions of the language and environment that I am working in.
Slashdot Mirror
At the same time, the NYT article is a disturbing mix of scientific fact and incoherent pop psychobabble. I was particularly nonplussed by the author's hypothesis as to how we form our party affiliations and then our political beliefs. The reality is surely far more complex. Consider, for example, the poll on the U.S. election in this week's Economist. Unfortunately you have to pay to see the article, so I'll repeat the results here:
If the election were held today, who would you vote for..?
18-24: Bush: 24, Kerry: 65
25-44: Bush: 40, Kerry: 48
45-64: Bush: 47, Kerry: 45
65+: Bush: 46, Kerry: 43
Now perhaps there is an overall trend towards increasing liberalism in the country (good news, if so), but the conclusion that younger people tend to be more liberal is irresistable. This seems to belie the suggestion that people have innate affinities to Democrats or Republicans that cause them to bond with such people in their youth, forming their political beliefs as a result.
I can't shake the notion that we become cynical and thus more conservative as we get older, with the extent of our right or left-wing bent influenced by genetics, among other things. I can't believe that there are other factors that make us hang out with the blue or red crowd before attaching a specific ideology to our choice, since young people are so overwhelmingly liberal merely by virtue of their youth.
Instead, if you want to back to the archive and watch a old show, something that you can't do now for any price, you pay a small fee for the download. It is my firmly held conviction that this would generate loads of revenue, although I admittedly have no evidence for this whatsoever besides my own gut feeling, mainly based on the fact that I know I'd spend a lot of money on this service, were it available.
I don't why this would be a barrier to creating good content. In fact, this system should be a much more powerful motivator for content creators to focus on quality. People may be willing to sit their backsides on the couch and watch whatever crap happens to be on (viz.: the latest Nielsen ratings), but they are likely to exercise much more discretion if they have to reach into their wallet.
The poster's point was that he benefits from the BBC although he doesn't own a TV or (therefore) pay a license fee. The opposite is also true: if you own a TV but never watch BBC, you still pay the fee. I agree that this isn't a terrible system, as such things go, but it would clearly be better from an economic standpoint to have a more direct link between cost and benefit.
Sounds good all... except for that reality seems to suggest something different.. TV uses more and more advertising and less and less license fees. If there is anythign that consumers hate, it is payign over and over for thigns they already payed for, and if they can get a 'flat fee' solution that is somewhat reasonable in price, they'll almost always take it over a per-view/per-byte/per-minute/per-whatever solution, you just have to look around to get that confirmed.
Isn't this a bit like some at the turn of the (20th) century saying that cars will never succeed, using the argument that horses and buggies are everywhere? At its heart, this is a technological issue. We don't currently have technology to deploy an efficient pay-per-whatever system, so all-you-can-eat solutions win out. But we're getting close in many ways to removing the friction from small pay-for-content transactions, at which point the clear economic advantages I mentioned start to kick in.
Since evryone agrees (well, does everyone? I know many peopel do tho), why not just accept that in fact the current system with license fees does in fact work well?
Don't fix it if it ain't broken.
I'm really surprised to see this kind of remark on Slashdot, as it smacks of Luddism. To wit:
Og: Hey Ung, let's stop foraging around in the savanna all day and start cultivating and eating our own crops.
Ung: But Og, hunting and gathering has served us well for a long time. If it ain't broke, don't fix it!
I think the future of TV will involve less and less advertising and licensing fees. Instead, big content producers like the BBC will sell their archives on a pay-per-view basis. Yes, I know they are planning to offer them for free, but if they have any sense they'll bag the license fees and attach a small, reasonable price to each download.
Everyone agrees that the BBC makes great shows, so why shouldn't we cough up a quid or two when we download from their archives? This alone would let them finance future programming in spades, and a direct link between consumption and payment is a much better business model than wooly license fees linked to TV ownership.
Couldn't agree more, particularly considering the aptness of the more modern equivalent:
Wormtongue = John Ashcroft
Anyway, I'll give it a try with CDT when I have a chance. I'm skeptical but we'll see.
I agree that MFC is a bit of a liability these days. I'd like to get away from it, but we need to settle on an alternative (and obviously the port of our 200,000+ lines will be no small undertaking).
Does anyone know how this refactoring works? I presume that the environment needs to parse the source files in order to determine what to rename (as with Java). Does it use the GNU compiler for this? If so, can GNU handle MFC? Sounds a bit like worlds colliding to me...
This is similar to what Yahoo is trying to do with their portal. The difference is that the processing is offloaded onto the client, where a much smarter browser handles tasks that are currently relegated to the server. This makes it much easier for innovation to take off since different vendors can compete jointly against the 800 lb gorillas.
Yes, Microsoft has and will continue to try to put something like this in place. But I am sceptical about whether they will be willing to put into place an open enough architecture for it to take off (thus threatening their operating system monopoly), and I am equally sceptical that a closed system will be widely accepted.
And yes, this is basically the promise of web services (and .Net if you want to take the 30,000 foot view). But XML is still used overwhelmingly for proprietary protocols designed for specific applications. What I'm talking about is an XML browser that will make it much easier to leverage open protocols.
Where he errs, IMHO, is in the assumption that innovation will be incremental. He seems to be implying that the most we can expect from the future of the web are some (gasp!) cool new CSS features.
I beg to differ. The future of the web will ride on the wave of two related trends, both of which have revolutionary rather than evolutionary implications:
- Increased client computing capacity - back in the mid-90s it was all the average PC could handle to render a complex HTML page. Nowadays PCs are at least one order of magnitude faster, and a lot of the processing currently relegated to the server could be offloaded to the client. The reason that this hasn't yet occurred is that no browser has the appropriate plugin architecture. It is possible to develop plugins for major browsers, but there is no proper framework to integrate these plugins into a cohesive whole. Instead, an increasing number of networked apps are eschewing the web browser altogether in order to provide a better user experience (e.g. IM, P2P file sharing, online gaming, VoIP, etc.).
- XML - for all the hue and cry, the only significant impact of XML on the web since its inception 6 years ago is RSS. RSS is certainly cool, but it's just one XML-based language, and the whole premise of XML is that it enables the creation of multiple vocabularies. So there's a huge opening for someone to create a browser that intelligently processes XML vocabularies. This would include managing the relevant XML schemas (perhaps using a centralized repository), rendering the XML in various ways (perhaps including HTML templates and autogenerated forms) and persistent storage/retrieval. This is basically the goal of RDF, but besides taking what I consider to be a number of unfortunate design decisions, the RDF designers have essentially ignored the need for a new browser architecture to make XML use on the web an attractive alternative to HTML.
None of this is easy, of course. But considering the potential rewards of owning the new new browser architecture, I have no fear whatsoever that innovation will stagnate just because Microsoft decides to take itself out of the game for a while.Nonetheless, most of these applications would be that much more valuable if they were integrated together. To achieve this, a platform is needed that permits inter-plugin communication: a shared data model, a high-level framework for UI development and way for plugins to exchange messages. Think Eclipse for networked apps instead of development tools and you'll be on the right track.
Currently we use MSHTML for the browser part, for the obvious reason that it is there for free on every user's machine. Nonetheless, I'd consider a switch if we could get something that is faster and more customizable. The annoying thing about MSHTML is that the only way to interact with it is through COM interfaces (need I say more?). It would be very sweet to have source code. Also, we are planning to port to Mac and Linux at some point, so we need to look at more portable rendering engines. I don't know if IE can be embedded on the Mac but even if it can... COM interfaces *under MacOS*!? Oh my good lord...
To be more specific, my questions are:
I've felt for a long time that this is an affront to capitalism (yeah, I'm a capitalist... go ahead and mod me down). The only people who make big money did essentially nothing to earn it, besides the company founders who took big risk and make less than they could since the banks keep the price down to make sure they sell the whole float.
At the same time, we've been here before, as this Forbes article from early 2001 describes. Earlier efforts to make IPOs more efficient and democratic failed. It's not clear to me whether this was due to the coincidental collapse of the tech IPO market, or whether it was the result of a coordinate sabotage effort by the big investment banks. (Or maybe, just maybe those banks really do add some value by getting their big customers to serve as market makers).
Google has about as much market clout as I can imagine, so if they decide to go for it, this will serve as a good acid test. If the IPO goes off successfully as an online auction, this probably means that the earlier efforts were just bad timing. If it fails, I might smell a conspiracy.
I tried the search again today and got nearly 5,000 results, with the capability to actually look inside the book and see if the reference is useful to me. Very impressive indeed, patent or no patent.
- Infinitely scaleable infrastructure. This is going to become increasingly important as we move to video and lossless audio formats. Witness the BBC's plans to use P2P for distribution of its archives.
- Use of a fat client that consumes XML instead of HTML. This has been a holy grail of the "semantic web" movement, and now it is sneaking in the backdoor in the form of P2P clients that communicate using XML metadata. This might sounds a little kooky, but the truth is that P2P clients can do a lot more than they currently do to organize and aggregrate data due to the fact that their data streams are structured.
The bottom line is that P2P clients don't currently offer the kind of experience that users are likely to pay for, but that is a self-fulfilling prophesy. You get what you pay for, after all.Why couldn't I just make an FOAF schema that pulls in the element types from the appropriate "component" schemas, qualifying the types with the correct namespaces?
It still strikes me that RDF is simply an alternative to XSD, and it's not clear to me why it is a better one.
It seems like a lot of progress has been made since then, but personally I still don't see the point. If you buy into XML as the "lingua franca" of semantic data interchange, then great. I do too. But what exactly is RDF useful for? If we can agree on an XML schema for our data, we can exchange it directly without the need for yet another layer of abstraction on top of it.
The really hard part is agreeing on the schemas, and this has nothing to do with RDF. Having worked in one XML vocabulary standardization effort (Universal Business Language), I can only stress that the technical and political challenges of getting any group of individuals and companies to agree on any common data format are enormous. For example, it would be great if Amazon and B&N used the same schema for their book descriptions, but imagine trying to make this happen (particularly as they are likely to feel that the specificities of their formats represent some kind of competitive advantage).
So until proven wrong I continue to believe that RDF is nothing but smoke and mirrors. The easy stuff is done by XML right out of the box, and the hard stuff has nothing whatsoever to do with data structures and wire serialization formats.
Also you might want to check out MusicBrainz. This worked really well for my collection.
But I still stick by my original point. As a matter of fact, I wrote a program that deduces title and artist information from MP3 filenames in two days, and it works amazingly well. I hardly think that Google's page rank technology could be implemented in this timeframe!
Specifically, the problem of indexing the web is an extremely thorny one. There is a massive amount of content, almost none of which has any structure whatsoever, and much of which is of dubious interest (i.e. it's total crap). The page rank system used by Google is simply brilliant and deserves all the accolades heaped on it.
Indexing a bunch of MP3s is a much, much simpler problem. As the author of the article points out, Napster had this pretty much nailed years ago. So Google's technical advantage is definitely questionable. What about its deep pockets, market presence, etc.? Sure, this indicates that Google might be a contender in this theoretical new market, but there are a couple of other companies out there with brands, deep pockets, etc. Say IBM, or eBay, or Amazon, or Microsoft, or Yahoo, or... okay, you get the point.
To me this article is a perfect example of attracting attention by taking a superficially intriguing stance, basing it on today's much-hyped company to gain topical interest. Upon examination, the conclusions of the article don't hold water.
It seems the crux of his argument is that the web has led to such a cornucopia of free content that the "mental transaction cost" (i.e. effort you spend agonizing over your purchasing decision) alone makes paid content too expensive, no matter how low the nominal price is.
There are a number of flaws with this reasoning, but the most serious one to me is that it neglects the observable network effects that govern things like micropayment. Right now there is nothing even close to a universally accepted and broadly used micropayment system. So it's definitely true that in many cases, as a content creator, I have the choice between being free or being totally ignored.
The lack of a popular micropayment system is therefore a sort of self-fulfilling prophesy. As long as it doesn't exist, there will be a lot of free content and thus less reason to pay for content. But these types of systems have a "magical" way of suddenly achieving critical mass and taking over the world. Consider the Internet itself: it's been around for decades but usage only exploded when it reached a certain threshold a few years ago.
I believe that at some point some kind of incredibly easy-to-use micropayment system will suddenly hit critical mass, and all at once there'll be a whole lot less free content to choose from (incidently a very positive effect as far as I'm concerned, since I believe a little bit of capitalism will vastly improve the overall web experience). Things won't be free anymore, but they'll be a lot more variety (especially with regard to specialized content) and higher quality. Is this a surprise? Creative people have to eat too, so obviously they'll be more motivated if they can actually make web content their primary money-earning activity.
And I don't believe that people will balk at spending less-than-a-dollar prices for individual bits of content anymore than they beat their brow at the cash register before picking up a copy of the National Enquirer or Cosmo, reading it on the bus on the way home and then tossing it.
And for the record I quite enjoyed T3. :-)
To me this is good news for gamers. True, it will result in a lot of lowest common denominator crap. But this analogy suggests a lot of positive aspects as well. For one, I personally happen to like blockbuster movies, and I'm glad that the market is such that someone can justify spending $300 mio or so on the LOTR trilogy (to name just one example).
At the same time, there is space for the little guy in the film industry to some extent. Innovative filmmakers can still make a name for themselves on a superlow budget (e.g. Clerks. In my view this applies even more to the gaming world, where a clever idea can be a huge hit without requiring dozens of programmers and designers to implement (consider Tetris).
Anything that makes really stunning high-budget output possible is more than fine by me.
I think one of the most debilitating things about the American political system (and most others) is that so much emphasis is placed on a candidate's age. Of course, all other things being equal, I would prefer to have a candidate who is more experienced and poised, and therefore older. But all things are most assuredly not equal, and there are plenty of other factors that should be given equal weight (particularly the candidate's policies, which you seem to disregard entirely).
An effective leader of a complex organization like the California government is going to surround his/herself with advisors anyway, so it is hardly necessary (or possible) for them to have years of experience with every imaginable issue. Tell me that Arnie (or Dubya for that matter), at 56 years old, has a vice-like grip on all the issues facing the state. Much more important is that the candidate has his/her head in the right place and sets the overall direction that is best for the state.
In business, it is rare but definitely not unknown for a CEO to be in his/her 20s (consider Michael Dell, Steve Jobs and... that other guy). It takes an exceptional individual to achieve this, but why shouldn't the same exceptional individuals be given their shot in politics?
Reading the interview I didn't know anything about Georgy other than the fact that she is a woman dubbed "The Geek Candidate" by /. I found her views to be extremely sensible (surprising so, in fact), and discovering afterwards that she is young and good-looking did nothing to change my mind.
Artificial neural nets are one way to do this, but statistical methods are more or less analogous and have the advantage of being highly optimizable. Personally I don't understand the details, but Very Smart Mathematicians have found ways to optimize models like Singular Value Decompositions (SVDs) so that they can be calculated orders of magnitude faster than models that cannot be represent as formally using mathematics.
The bottom line is that statistical methods are probably the way that we will end up producing brain-like behavior on computers, and the fact that there are promising results already is heartening. Yes, for truly intelligent behavior a lot of domain knowledge will also be needed, as you point out. But I don't see any reason why the extraction and mapping of this knowledge couldn't also be achieved with large training corpora and statistical methods, rather than hand-crafting.
The same statistically methods that are applied to syntax (phrase structure) are equally effective when applied to morphology (word structure). In this case the unit of processing would be N-graphs (sets of N letters) rather than N-grams. All languages are inflected to some degree, so I think that a morphological component of this type should be part of any serious statisical translation system.
I must really be brainwashed because I use the style shown above for C++, but in Java I place the braces on the same line as the previous statement. What your Dad said might be true, but I've never grep'ed for the control structure of a program and I've never wanted to. I just follow the conventions of the language and environment that I am working in.