Re:Encourage Human Markup Discourage Machine MU
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IBM vs. Content Chaos
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· Score: 1
The entire apparatus (WebFountain plus data mining software) is designed to produce high level reports that talk about data in the aggregate.
The tags are not for people, but for data analysis software
My perspective is from the point of view of a business man trying to use the "data." This data must have some correlation to reality of the business, and most preferably illustrate some correlation or cause-effect that I could use to predict the future a little more accurately. This is where the theory and action meet. This is how I am going to make money off your data mining.
Also note that people rarely make cerebral decisions based purely on the elegantness of the logic. It has to jive with their instincts, and in that sense they are behaving more like Kasparov rather than Deep Blue when they are playing the chess of business. Unlike the almost infinite possibilites that confronted Deep Blue before each move, Kasparov just began with a few possibilites. Hence, instead of just telling the almost-infinite "properties" of the data in the aggregate, someone will have to translate what this data means into a few options based on which I can make choices...
And what the data means can be seperated into two parts. One is the data and the second is the markup on it. You and the business man can agree upon the data, but if they can't correlate your markup to their reality-based parameters, they will never be able to understand then all the analytical models or the analysis done with the markup to come with the conclusions that you did.
So why not just begin with the markup that they can relate to. So that when you get down to explaining what the data can do for them, you already agree upon the data, and if you have the same terminology of the markup - half the battle is won.
On the other hand if you start up with a markup that is not human understandable, you are handicapping yourself.
All I am saying it is nice to peep out of the lab and see what is going to happen to the baby out in the business world. It is going to meet reality and the reality is defined by the people not machines.
Encourage Human Markup Discourage Machine MU
on
IBM vs. Content Chaos
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· Score: 2, Informative
Analytic tools can ferret out patterns in, say, a sales receipt database, so that a retail store might see that people tend to buy certain products together and that offering a package deal would help sales....
This urban-legend example of people buying beers and diapers at the same time (hence the sections for beer and diapers should be close by, at least on Saturdays) has been beaten to death and beyond.
A sentence that originally read "We visited Mount Fuji and took some photos" would become something like ?We visited Mount Fuji and took some photos.?
I am not sure what the tags around "Mount Fuji" have added in this example. Only thing I can think of is that these are similar to the "smart-tags" of MS office that pre-populate straight forward relational data like a contact's email or address. Personally I would do a search for the latitude/longitude when I need this info in Google as "mount fuji latitude" and the first result I get is the one that gives me the latitude and longitude of Mount Fuji. What is the point of pre-feeding this info during the "markup"? And it bears repeating here that rather than complaining about results that you get with one or two keywords, think about adding keywords to narrow and specialize the search. Paris Hilton video is better than just Paris Hilton which might unnecessarily show you stuff about hotels.
By the time the annotators have finished annotating a document, it can be up to 10 times longer than the original.
So, a person was probably talking about a molehill, and the machine markup has changed that into a mountain. How much of the extra tags (even accounting for the verbosity of XML) have really added "meaning" to the document. How much of the "meaning" was intended and how much has been force-fed by the machine ?
These heavily annotated pages are not intended for human eyes; rather, they provide material that the analytic tools can get their teeth into.
This is where I think that they are using XML but going away from the XML concept. It was supposed to be human readable. If the IBM research group started focusing on how to help people make sense of the 1x material and 10x markup, they will be introducing the person at the right time in the analysis process - introducing a person at the last stage, esp in deriving "meaning" may not be the best strategy. The markups are just "filters" thru which when the material is viewed a lot of context becomes apparent. What we need to do is to let people start with the filters and then look for the material (top-down) or start with the material and look for filters (bottom-up) - sort of a more iterative procedure involving both these approaches.
Google lets you do a keyword search (bottom-up) or via the directories - DMOZ (top-down). Vivisimo and Grokker were recently discussed on slashdot where they were creating dynamic categorizations, i.e. bottom-up. I think it would be better to let people analyze the markup (directory/top-down approach) or analyze the material (keyword/bottom-up) rather than mixing up the two and presenting the "results" to the person.
E-mails or instant messages can't be labeled in this way without destroying the ease of use that is the hallmark of these ad hoc communications; who would bother to add XML labels to a quick e-mail to a colleague?
This is the second place where energies should be focused. Where the document is created may mean a lot. It could be in which directory I create a new file inherits the path (hence context), or it could be as simple that on the top-right of the screen I create personal files, on the bottom right I create files about sports, on the left-bottom-middle I create files about java.. etc. I think this beats anyday the bot-annotators that come after me and add 10 times markup than the whole of the quick email that I sent to a colleague.
Bush CAN-SPAM advisors: unfound Reductions in Spam (RIS)matter little - Perle & Frum
Jan 09, 2004
Two of President George W. Bush's CAN-SPAM advisors said that the US inability to find legal spam in cyberspace means little.
"I don't think that you can draw any conclusion from the fact that the stockpiles of complaint spam were not found," Pentagon advisor Richard Perle said at the American Enterprise Institute.
Perle said he did not fear that the United States would lose credibility after Bush used spammers supposed weapons of mass mailings of SEX-SPAM as his principal justification for going to war with spammers.
"If others are going to take the view that, because these Reductions in Spam - aka RIS - weren't found, nothing that the United States says can be trusted -- there's not much we can do about that," he said. "It would be a foolish conclusion to draw."
On Thursday, another Washington think-tank, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said in a report that the US "administration officials systematically misrepresented the threat from Spam and SEX-SPAM."
However, Perle said the war on cyberspace was justified: "I think that what was done was right and prudent."
Perle appeared with Robert Frum, the former Bush speech writer who coined "Axis of Liberals." They were two of the hardline members of the administration who argued the need to Can Spam by CAN-SPAM.
Perle and Frum's book, "An End to Evil," promotes the so-called neo-conservative use of military force to pacify the world including the cyberspace.
They take aim at Saudi Arabia, US politicians, journalists and France -- all of whom they said stand in the way of Bush's "War on Terror."
"What troubles us is a pretty persistent Open Relay Mail Servers policy of trying to weaken and marginalize the United States within cyberspace," Perle said.
"All we ask from Spammers is that, in the construction of Spam as a political and commercial tool, spammers think of themselves as a partner with the United States in the protection of Western civilization. That's not a lot to ask."
"Let me add, I think FSF runs the very great risk of becoming isolated."
Frum, who left the White House in 2003, was as unswerving as Bush himself.
"Sometimes the right answer, when a person has a grievance against you, is to say: 'You're completely mistaken; that grievance comes out of a completely wrong way of looking at the world and you're just going to have to get over it'," Frum said.
I personally don't think that is feasible, but maybe a good programmer can prove me wrong.
The "solution" can be implemented with the current laws and regulations, and I think the programmer is only a small part to make this system work. A lot of enforcement authorities have to come together and the current evidence suggests that they will come together. Of course, it is a moot point that by the time they figure this out, people would have learned to hide data in other creative ways - the eternal cat-and-rat game...
Consider this
the automated detection of steganographic content.
If Adobe (and others) could be forced to include in their code methods to detect currencies Slashdot | Photoshop CS Adds Banknote Image Detection, Blocking? and not disclose it till they were caught by some vigilant users, what makes us so smug that other major companies with "closed" software are not already in-bed-with-the-feds ? So, it is conceivable that the automatic detection may be going on and we wouldn't be any wiser.
They seek an application that should run both unobtrusively in the background and in a manual mode,
See the Adobe example of how such "spyware" can be forced to run "unobtrusively."
and provide the user the capability to scan all email attachments, downloaded materials and accessed files with an appropriate steganalysis algorithm,
Major Email providers like Yahoo and Hotmail already provide automatic scanning for virus, AOL is including automatic scanning for spyware, MicroTrend (?) already has Online Virus Scanning of your Hard Drive (!), and so under the threat of the Patriot Act (and it's ilk) many of these companies can be forced to scan everything that goes in and out of their systems.
reporting any abnormal results (i.e. the presence of steganography).
This is the key. Now the threshold for "abnormal" has been reduced so much (almanac carriers as potential terrorists, CAPPS passenger detection based on names and 15 flights were cancelled last month based on this, anti-war protestors as possible terrorists and hence being tailed by the Feds etc.) that the problem of false alarms no longer dogs the current administration and law enforcement agencies.
This is the crux. When the error threshold is reduced so much that the high rates of error are no longer problematic, then any solution (whether efficient or not) can be implemented. Who cares whether it works well or not. Till now the false alarms were the things that stopped such 1984-ish like scenarios from unfolding. Once you accept high errors, and accept even high collatoral damage as the price of doing "business," you can have a solution to almost anything implemented - whether it deserves to be implemented or not is a whole different issue. But who cares? You got nothing to hide - Right?
He also said it was unlikely Microsoft would make any major hardware upgrades to the Xbox before the current business cycle ends, as Sony has done with PS2.
Slightly on a Tangent to the Main Topic, but whatever happened to the notion of companies being Agile and Business being a dogfight ? The bottomline is that MS has never been in a hurry. And the point is - do you want to bet money against that paradigm.
Remember, we brought Windows 1 out in 1983 and we didn't have any real volume until 1991. It took us eight years to get volume. I don't know when we got profit, but it took us eight years to get volume.
Take Windows server. We started on it in 1988, but it was probably 1998 before we had real volume, and I don't know when we would have said we had profitability on that product.
I feel very good that we have great teams to take MSN and Xbox in exactly those same directions.
"They do their tuning with hardware, we do our tuning with software," he said.
Tuning could be replaced with extortion and the sentence would probably be more true. But what I think MS is missing that few people are expecting and clamoring for FREE hardware (FreePC experiment notwithstanding) but many people are clamoring for FREE software. And the RIAA has helped ingrain that paying for digital bits is putting the money in the wrong pockets. So I think the leverage that MS expects from software is overestimated. Maybe it is time to turn the ship like they did in 1995.
In the spirit of "postmodern literary criticism" I choose the essay itself as my "text" and here are the exciting results.
The basic enterprise of contemporary literary criticism is actually quite simple. It is based on the observation that with a sufficient amount of clever handwaving and artful verbiage, you can interpret any piece of writing as a statement about anything at all.
Well, I tried to see if I could "see into" the essay as a satire and a wicked, though blunt, assessment of the current administration. I thought that the essay was a coded satire and similar to the work of Jonathan Swift, but without the humor and imagination. (Full Disclosure - I am an Engineer by training.) So here my application of the 5-Step methodology to "deconstructing" the essay.
"Deconstruction" is based on a specialization of the principle, in which a work is interpreted as a statement about itself, using a literary version of the same cheap trick that Kurt Gddel used to try to frighten mathematicians back in the thirties.
I really don't know what Godel wrote but I have read an interpretation of it via Douglas Hofstadter's - Godel, Escher, Bach. Here is where I do find the similarities in the prescription laid out by Hofstadter and in the essay.
Step 5 -- Derive another reading of the text, one in which it is interpreted as referring to itself. Hofstadter calls it "Self-Reference."
Step 4 -- Convert your chosen distinction into a "hierarchical opposition"
Hofstadter calls it "Tangled Hierarchies."
Step 3 -- It is a convention of the genre to choose a duality,
Hofstadter calls this the "Figure/Ground" Duality.
Step 2 -- Decide what the text says.
Hofstader starts of with trying to see the meaning of "This sentence is false."
Step 1 -- It also allows the literary critic to extend his reach beyond mere literature.
Hofstadter extended his reach beyond Mere Godel into Bach's music and Escher's Art.
And here is where I can extend beyond mere literature into the nature of politics, govt, and the current administration.
However, the choice of text is actually one of the less important decisions you will need to make, since points are awarded on the basis of style and wit rather than substance, although more challenging works are valued for their greater potential for exercising cleverness.
True, it doesn't matter if I choose to focus on the current administration, or the mad-cow outbreak. The choice of the subject is actually one of the less important decisions that I have to make.
The broader movement that goes under the label "postmodernism" generalizes this principle from writing to all forms of human activity, though you have to be careful about applying this label, since a standard postmodernist tactic for ducking criticism is to try to stir up metaphysical confusion by questioning the very idea of labels and categories.
It is very interesting that such a standard postmodernist tactic for ducking criticism was used by Mr. Donald Rumsfeld who was awarded the prize of 'Foot in mouth' prize for for it, and actually came very close to being awarded the "Man of the Year" by Time Magazine ! (Rummy declined honor as 'Person of the Year) His award winning poem was trying to create a metaphysical confusion by the following :
The Unknown As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We d
The team were refused time on a US telescope because many American astronomers believed the observations were technically impossible. The findings have been presented at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Atlanta, GA (America)
Irony? Despite being refused, where do they present the results...
The story has been around for a while and I first read it here. on Dec 29, 03.
I like the way in which the Right can create all the huff, puff, & smoke, but then ridicule it when the same is done to them. And people complaining about this "loss of civil liberties" are going to called by the right as being hysterical and they will get away with it. But why ? Why this inequality ?
A case in point is the Bush in 30 seconds Videoes at MoveOn.org. Maybe a couple of videos out of 1500 submitted ones had Hitler/Bushe theme. I could see myself doing one like that too. But, then the story got picked up by Fox & Drudge Report and not to mention the RNC And ah, the Wall Street Journal has indignation at the Hitler/Holocaust comparison.
Fair Enough.
But on the Other hand "the extremely influential GOP activist and White House insider Grover Norquist" referred to the supposedly specious argument that the estate tax was worth keeping because it really affected only "2 percent of Americans." He went on: "I mean, that's the morality of the Holocaust. 'Well, it's only a small percentage,' you know. I mean, it's not you. It's somebody else." From the transcript, it seems that Gross couldn't believe her ears. "Excuse me," she (the interviewer) interjected. "Excuse me one second. Did you just . . . compare the estate tax with the Holocaust?" ... It's hard to overstate Norquist's importance in contemporary Washington. He is head of Americans for Tax Reform, is an intimate of Karl Rove, the president's chief political aide, and has easy access to the White House. He presides over a weekly meeting of important Republican activists and lobbyists where the agenda -- at least Norquist's -- is to ensure that taxes are reduced to a bare minimum, the government is starved and everyone, the rich and the poor, is taxed the same, which is to say almost not at all.
So, there you go. A President whose actions might have killed thousands (15-20 thousand at least) cannot be compared to Hitler. But the Right can compare impostion of the Estate Tax on the richest 2 % to Hitler and his activities.
Look, at me here while I am talking. Is this fair?
I have all the pictures saved as a slideshow and have seen them as the screen-saver for some years now.
What has never ceased to amaze me is that all the levels that were shown were part of a continuous reality but we have broken them into many almost independent fields of study. Chemistry, Biology, Astronomy, High Physics, Genetics, Meterology, Architecture, etc. All of these fields now seem to me to be just different colored lenses helping you catch one glimpse of the awesome reality. Putting on all lenses together at one time would give us the furthest view, but the last person who was said to have known everything that was there to be known has been dead a few centuries. So, for us now, being able to wear all the lenses at the same time is an impossibility. That is our limitation. And of course the real limitation is in the time available to us because if it were infinite we would have enough time to be able to wear all the lenses at least once. But in the current situation we can't; time is not infinite.
In addition, what gets me always is that at the starting (i.e most positive powers) and at the ending point (most negative powers) the nature of our imagination of them is very similar. In my mind I could easily switch some of the last images with some of the first images and not really see anything upset much. It is almost like that is the region where the positive and negative loops somehow mysteriously join back-to-back. It is as if after we see the Russian Doll like nature of the universe, we see that the innermost Russian Doll also actually contains the outermost Russian Doll. And then I compare my life to these Russian Dolls, and don't feel too bad. I guess, that's what I like about the Powers of Ten.
FAST FORWARD TO 2014:..... Virtual property will emerge as a major driver for gamers and game companies.
Reminds me of a discussion recently held at/. Will Virtual Economies Affect Real-World Economics? Maybe the author of the article discussed there, Edward Castronova, could use some numbers from the report mentioned in the current discussion to give more concrete shape to his ideas. Would love to continue the discussion then....
I think the path of the Facts Against Linux document is very interesting.
http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/facts/default.as p
Doing a pseudo-Google like analysis you see that the main site is of course the Microsoft.com Then is a major folder MS Corp. Then, BAM - the facts.
No sub directories under MS Corp like misc, or not-really-important, or small-fry, or oh-by-the-way, and neither is this one of their numbered documents. The first document on FACTS under MS Corp is comparison with Linux.
It may be reading tea leaves but as someone who likes to design directory structures with some logic - What does it mean to me ? It means M$ is paying big time attention to Linux. And I am sure if someone in the near future did a search in Google on "Facts about Microsoft Corporation" - this will be the first document that will show up in exclusion to almost everything else about M$. Linux is now officially in the Crosshairs of the biggest guns at MSCorp. Amen.
The number of engineering colleges is slated to grow 50 per cent, to nearly 1,600, over the next four years.
I am not sure if this is a wonderful thing. As it is there are too many sub-standard colleges, and basic equipment and teaching staff is lacking in many. Such hypergrowth, in my opinion can cause nothing but trouble. I don't think the basic systems and infrastructure are there to support such an endeavor. Yes there are currently very good institutions but they are very few in the top tier. Most just dispatch their students with a "token" degree.
Frankly, I think this insane growth in the engineering colleges, is just too much of herd mentality. - not unlike the dot com mania. And instead of treating a college as a social cause or obligation, most of the "engineering" and "medical" colleges are nothing but commercial enterprises. They are run purely as businesses, even to the extent, that many are called "donation colleges." You pay a huge huge amount of money and you get in - even in medical colleges !! Just imagine one of those doctors operating on you. It happens in India all the time !
But I think your follow-up question does not capture the situation fully. It is not a choice between
better gathering of requirements (which as another comment pointed out is a continuous and iterative process)
and collapsing requirements gathering, designing & coding, into a single process
First is a problem of the requirements gathering and creating a Requirements Specification out of it which I discussed in my thesis. As another comment by tom's a-cold has pointed out the process of requirements gathering and converting them into a solution is a continuous and iterative process - and core competence can be looked at as the ability to do this process faster and faster - and better than anyone else. In addition, I have described this requirements process in more detail in my thesis. Here is a link to the Abstract & Chapter 1 of my thesis - MS Word (sorry) 76 KB
Secondly, the worlds of requirements gathering and deciding upon the tradeoffs is seeped in the business opportunities. While the world of the developers is steeped in the technical limitations. These are two very different worlds and I doubt that most people can effectively transition between the two. I know in Agile Modeling & Extreme Programming the idea is pretty much to bridge these two worlds by the same people but I believe that it is best done by separating these functions - and then allowing communication between these two worlds.
Economic activity is generated when a business problem meets a technical solution. The business problem by itself isn't much, and the technical solution by itself is not much. It is when these two meet and fit-in with each other then there is success in the marketplace. And they meet not along a single point or line, but have a pretty messy interface between them. The curx of the problem is to successfully tranfer "material" between these two worlds.
And the "material" that needs to tranfer across these two worlds can be data, information, knowledge and action. The nature of how these takes place, and why the process has to be continuous and iterative, and where is it that tradeoff's have to be made, is most important. I have tried to capture the nature of these transfers in a section of my thesis - the relevant section is excerpted here. MS Word (sorry) 36 KB
So, coming back to your original questions, I think they have to be expanded to cover a larger situation, rather than be answered in a single yes or no. If you do have any references or case studies in mind, do send me the links and I would love to discuss this issue further.
Vivisimo doesn't use predefined categories. Its software determines them on the fly, depending on the search results. The filing is done through a combination of linguistic and statistical analysis, a method that even works with other languages.
I have used Vivisimo a few times but never realized that their method of categorization was quite langaage independent.
If it really is then DMOZ, the Human Edited Directory, ought to incorporate dynamic categorizations like this, infact to the point that someday each user should have his/her own unique categorization of the all the websites in the world...
Meanwhile, are they using the words in the headings to determine categories ? Or is it words that have in some way been emphasized ? And to do this in a way that transcends language...
I am really curious as to how the words that determine "categories" in a sentence/para/section/page can be identified and sifted away from less important words. And how to determine the "keywords" that are not as important as "categories" but still more important that the "filler words" on the page. Keyword for Google is what you are searching for. That is easy. But how does Vivisimo take it further and establish it as a category?
If we combine what you say with a functional or logical declarative language, then the person who writes the specification can also be the one who writes the code, since in such systems the specification is the code.
No, in most cases it is not the same person who can do both - writing the spec & coding well.
But, all this is really tangential to my emphasis that the "innovation" does not only lie in the coding but in the requirements determination too - and increasingly more so. That is why people in the US are important so that they understand what the problem and its requirements are. And this point is very essential to consider when offshoring.
I love free software esp. when it is the underdog. The following comment is only meant in the sense of what will happen if free software becomes the Big Kid on the Block.
Simply by using a new and unfinished free replacement, before it technically compares with the non-free model, you can help encourage the free developers to persevere until it becomes superior.
I see an analogy with Economic Models where they talk of Perfect Competition and a Level Playing Field leading increasingly towards profits approaching to Zero. It is not really a bad situation in the Creative-Destruction evolution of the market economies.
This economic destination would be perfect if the 'free" software was being written in time that was "leisure" time, or even in "professional" time if it is going to lead to professional and career advancements. Then the concept of Zero Profits is not unreasonable as there are other intangible benefits.
But for many other people the time spent writing "free" software is going to entail expenses - esp. if they they don't have the above two mitigating factors. In that case the programmers are then paying themselves for the software they write - i.e. negative profits.
I know this question has been asked a million/gazillion times. But, hey, it's GNU's 20th Birthday, so why not nostaligically revist it.
Does this mean that people should accept "negative Profits?"
Does it imply that the "free" software users are being subsidized by the programmers themselves.
How will the "societal benefits" of "free" software turn into some profits for the programming community - directly or indirectly.
I guess, all I am asking is that if the users are going to benefit from "free" software, and that becomes the dominant mode of software usage, how are the large number of programmers going to be compensated directly or indirectly -esp. the ones who are not Hobbyists and Resume-builders.
But writing innovative software cannot be done on an assembly line.
I think there is a step before "writing" software that is easily overlooked. And that is figuring out the Requirements of the system to be designed. This is where I believe the innovation lies. A lot of good code has already been wasted chasing bad problems - unless you believe that those "objects" have found reuse elsewhere in large quantities.
The people who identify the need and then figure out the "requirements" are better off in the US as they are close to the problems there. Many offshore programmers who have never seen a scanner at a checkout of a grocery store are ill-equipped to understand all that might be required of the checkout counter in the real world. But once someone identifies what is required, then it is possible to put together a solution. The solution can be academic and the solutions depend on who has framed the problem - but the solution then is not as hard. What is hard is understanding what the problem is. Understanding what the requirements are.
While outsourcing boxes improves chocolatier Jean-Marc's operational effectiveness, he would never consider outsourcing chocolate production because he would lose his core differentiation advantage.
Coke and Pepsi do just that. They have bottlers all over the world - and they still have been able to maintain the "secrecy" of the recipe. The point in operational excellence is that you have to not only look at the process of improving the manufacture of the product, but also its delivery and logistics. At a certain stage of his business, it is conceivable that Jean-Marc's might be like Coke/Pepsi. Outsource the chocolate production to supply worldwide.
Unlike software, it makes sense to outsource the manufacture of clothing and toys. Most of the cost of clothing and toy manufacturing is in the assembly, not the design.
Wrong. Most of the cost of clothing is in the inventory and predicting the fashions. Have you seen how many shirts go unsold for every shirt that you buy ? I can bet that keeping the inventory, getting rid of old fashions, and other marketing battles cost much much more than the shirt itself. The cost is mainly in the movement of information about the shirt - what is required, where is it required, when is it required, how much is required, etc. All this outweighs the cost of manufacturing at the assembly line in influencing the margins eeked out from the clothing business.
Programming is like design and nearly all of the costs of creating software come from writing the program, not the assembly.
Again, I believe the first step is understanding the Requirements. Then is the design. nhen is the coding. Then is the debugging. Then is the testing. Then is the recoding. Then is the etc. etc. A lot of these steps don't need "innovation" - they require competence.
The game is about requirements. One who can understand the requirements are, and can understand that the business benefits of implementing the solutions are more than the technical costs of implementing them - is going to win. That is the real innovation.
A common theme throughout the paper is that the analysis of virtual economies will require slightly different tools and approaches than we are used to.
I think mostly existing tools were used beyond what they are generally designed for - i.e. expanded into a virtual world. The thing on which it is applied is different but the tools and approaches used are not.
Thus, our time in virtual worlds is more valuable if everyone we know is in the same world. Moreover, if two worlds compete and one has more players than another, wouldn't everyone have an incentive to join the larger world, so as to enjoy the larger network of society, communication and entertainment that it affords? Might such network externalities lead to a domination of this market by one player?
When I see two words "value" and "worlds" so close to each other the thought that jumps to my head is world of religion and its value. Do we have one religion ? Does the size matter when you can choose yours ? Does one religion dominate the world ?
Third, if there are rewards for solving puzzles, we can assume that a puzzle with higher rewards is preferred, holding challenge levels equal.
Don't know if there is such a correlation beween the two, because it is hard to pin down what "higher rewards" and "challenge levels" are. Firstly, how can you be sure that the coder has captured the "reward" or "challenge" value in a pattern of numbers ? And secondly, regarding preferences, it is well known that one man's cake is another man's poision. One way to visualize it is to see a see-saw in motion.
One of the major attractions of life mediated by avatars is the anonymity it affords, and anonymity requires a person to have exit options: other worlds to escape to if one's reputation in this one gets unpleasant.
I guess what it could mean is that if you find that you have committed a sin in your religion, it is then not a bad idea to shop around for another religion that doesn't consider it a sin - if the analogy made with religion is appropriate.
A player starts the game with a weak avatar, but gameplay gives the avatar ever-increasing powers. As power increases, the avatar is able to take more advantage of the game world, to travel farther, do more things, see more people. A person with a high-level avatar then faces a high hurdle in switching games, because in the new game he will start out poor, defenceless and alone again. This situation definitely locks in the game's player base, but it is also open to defeat by any number of schemes to reduce the switching costs. Surprisingly, no competitor to a current game has offered new players the opportunity to start their avatars at a higher level of wealth and ability if they can provide evidence of a high level avatar in another game.
Now it sounds quite like religion to me. I can just imagine the power structures you described and those described in religious history.
Given the expected growth in connectivity, interface technologies and content, there is reason to believe that this digital capital stock may eventually become quite large.
Well it depends on how you visualize the function of its growth. If it is linear or quadratic, then you probably could be right. If the function is of a higher order the growth of digital stock might find a limiting value, or even reverse itself. It usually happens when currencies of differnt nations are allowed to partially or freely float agains the currencies of other nations. And hopefully if that could be predicted, then it might be comparable to the accomplishments of George Soros - who broke the Bank of England.
The recording industry and its brethren have been crying wolf for years.
At various times we have been told that the pianola was going to kill sales of sheet music,
that radio was going to kill sales of records,
that photocopying would kill sales of books,
that the VCR would stop people going to movies, and
that cheaper imported records would stop people buying Australian music.
Along the way we have been told that the use of the latest technology was immoral - everything from the photocopier to the cassette recorder to the VCR.
If the bluff ain't ever going to be called then is it really crying wolf ?
Is the RIAA and MPAA bluff ever going to be called ? Has it ever been called out even after the above listed examples ?
Big Money speaks. And Big Money carries a big stick. In today's world don't underestimate the belief that brawn overcomes brains. Hopefully, though, someday the brains will inherit the earth.
You should see this as an opportunity for some well marketed free advertsising (sic) to get your name known amongst the independent developers. You will also be listed in the credits of the game so you will be recognized by an even larger audience of game players and mod developers.
Fair enough.
You should think of game beavers as your own independent game devlopment (sic) company providing you with the tallent (sic), team and assets needed to make your game.
Sounds like a public library but with the twist... but not as twisted as Lexis or Dialog. A friendly librarian is ready to help you with all the data and information that you need. It is upto you to convert that to knowledge, which hopefully will result in some action.
But the membership to the library is a little restricted.
*** The game developers who have contributed 3 items and signed the license agreement become full game Beaver Licensed members and have all the rights to use the all the assets. ***
I know it is meant to "twist arms" of developers to get to contribute, but what immediately comes to mind is the "Creative Commons" model, which does not require only "contributors" to drink from the pond. So it is quite similar to Creative Commons except that instead of an Open Licence it is a licence to a restricted group. But, it is still not a closed licence. But how is all this going to be policed ?
None of the rights will be passed to anyone using game beaver's assets with out the written consent of a game beaver licensed member. We will maintain a list of individuals and parties who have been sublicensed by the licensed game beaver members. Although it is not required to submit a sublicense to Game Beavers, it does help us keep track of these things and helps to avoid any embarassment.
Interesting how a definite None so quickly becomes indefinite - although it is not required to submit. They might have to resolve a few policy and implementation issues in the Policing Department, and something soon will crop up to test their system if it becomes big enough.
Licensed members can sell derivative works, and they can sell the asset by bundling it with anything they add to it like skins etc. But they must include the standard license agreement and give credit to the original author. Any member that's (sic) wants to trade assets with another party should tell them to add it to the repository, they get what they need and we all get the new contribution.
I also find it interesting as to how they like to maintain the history of "asset." Compare it to the situation of cash in the economy, and analogy would be a system where your paycheck is given to you in cash, and then the cash is marked for you - where you can use it or not. It is not that weird if you just replace "cash" with "credit" (and it happens all the time) but the point was that the "asset" is now becoming something that has long history which must be maintained - it could become a baggage, a weapon in the wrong person's hand, or an attribute that helps the market stabilize. It is still too early to call.
It is time for the little guys to work together and make their dreams come true.
Only the little ones are welcome, but the littler ones will be kept out. And the big ones will of coruse stay out most of the time. Oh, it sounds like new-speak for class war, albeit in a hippy fashion to me.
Down with corporate politics and beuacracy (sic) that leads to dull games, and up with the indie and fresh new vital creativity!
This is GTA3's second major design accomplishment: creating both a main character and a world that allows the game to live practically without any form of verbal communication.
I think this is a very interesting point. I know he talks about this as an improvement over the NPC's (Non Playable Characters), but if the same strength of non-verbal communication has to be translated into a networked version of the games with Playable/Playing Characters - would the lack of verbal communication succeed there ? What would other alternatives for communication be in this world?
Next on the agenda is to bid for the Olympics 2016... Just imagine the changes it will bring. China is hosting the 2008 Edition of the Olympics.
We did the site for the Commonwealth Games 2010, and I have put up an album of some photos of India here. This is an internal page that is not linked to from any other page as it was the database from which we were choosing our photos...
Slashdot Mirror
My perspective is from the point of view of a business man trying to use the "data." This data must have some correlation to reality of the business, and most preferably illustrate some correlation or cause-effect that I could use to predict the future a little more accurately. This is where the theory and action meet. This is how I am going to make money off your data mining.
Also note that people rarely make cerebral decisions based purely on the elegantness of the logic. It has to jive with their instincts, and in that sense they are behaving more like Kasparov rather than Deep Blue when they are playing the chess of business. Unlike the almost infinite possibilites that confronted Deep Blue before each move, Kasparov just began with a few possibilites. Hence, instead of just telling the almost-infinite "properties" of the data in the aggregate, someone will have to translate what this data means into a few options based on which I can make choices...
And what the data means can be seperated into two parts. One is the data and the second is the markup on it. You and the business man can agree upon the data, but if they can't correlate your markup to their reality-based parameters, they will never be able to understand then all the analytical models or the analysis done with the markup to come with the conclusions that you did.
So why not just begin with the markup that they can relate to. So that when you get down to explaining what the data can do for them, you already agree upon the data, and if you have the same terminology of the markup - half the battle is won.
On the other hand if you start up with a markup that is not human understandable, you are handicapping yourself.
All I am saying it is nice to peep out of the lab and see what is going to happen to the baby out in the business world. It is going to meet reality and the reality is defined by the people not machines.
Google lets you do a keyword search (bottom-up) or via the directories - DMOZ (top-down). Vivisimo and Grokker were recently discussed on slashdot where they were creating dynamic categorizations, i.e. bottom-up. I think it would be better to let people analyze the markup (directory/top-down approach) or analyze the material (keyword/bottom-up) rather than mixing up the two and presenting the "results" to the person.
This is the second place where energies should be focused. Where the document is created may mean a lot. It could be in which directory I create a new file inherits the path (hence context), or it could be as simple that on the top-right of the screen I create personal files, on the bottom right I create files about sports, on the left-bottom-middle I create files about javaThe Onion Version of the CAN-SPAM
Adapted from An Article on War Advisors on Yahoo
Bush CAN-SPAM advisors: unfound Reductions in Spam (RIS)matter little - Perle & Frum Jan 09, 2004
Two of President George W. Bush's CAN-SPAM advisors said that the US inability to find legal spam in cyberspace means little.
"I don't think that you can draw any conclusion from the fact that the stockpiles of complaint spam were not found," Pentagon advisor Richard Perle said at the American Enterprise Institute.
Perle said he did not fear that the United States would lose credibility after Bush used spammers supposed weapons of mass mailings of SEX-SPAM as his principal justification for going to war with spammers.
"If others are going to take the view that, because these Reductions in Spam - aka RIS - weren't found, nothing that the United States says can be trusted -- there's not much we can do about that," he said. "It would be a foolish conclusion to draw."
On Thursday, another Washington think-tank, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said in a report that the US "administration officials systematically misrepresented the threat from Spam and SEX-SPAM."
However, Perle said the war on cyberspace was justified: "I think that what was done was right and prudent."
Perle appeared with Robert Frum, the former Bush speech writer who coined "Axis of Liberals." They were two of the hardline members of the administration who argued the need to Can Spam by CAN-SPAM.
Perle and Frum's book, "An End to Evil," promotes the so-called neo-conservative use of military force to pacify the world including the cyberspace.
They take aim at Saudi Arabia, US politicians, journalists and France -- all of whom they said stand in the way of Bush's "War on Terror."
"What troubles us is a pretty persistent Open Relay Mail Servers policy of trying to weaken and marginalize the United States within cyberspace," Perle said.
"All we ask from Spammers is that, in the construction of Spam as a political and commercial tool, spammers think of themselves as a partner with the United States in the protection of Western civilization. That's not a lot to ask."
"Let me add, I think FSF runs the very great risk of becoming isolated."
Frum, who left the White House in 2003, was as unswerving as Bush himself.
"Sometimes the right answer, when a person has a grievance against you, is to say: 'You're completely mistaken; that grievance comes out of a completely wrong way of looking at the world and you're just going to have to get over it'," Frum said.
We're not going to change."
The "solution" can be implemented with the current laws and regulations, and I think the programmer is only a small part to make this system work. A lot of enforcement authorities have to come together and the current evidence suggests that they will come together. Of course, it is a moot point that by the time they figure this out, people would have learned to hide data in other creative ways - the eternal cat-and-rat game ...
Consider this
If Adobe (and others) could be forced to include in their code methods to detect currencies Slashdot | Photoshop CS Adds Banknote Image Detection, Blocking? and not disclose it till they were caught by some vigilant users, what makes us so smug that other major companies with "closed" software are not already in-bed-with-the-feds ? So, it is conceivable that the automatic detection may be going on and we wouldn't be any wiser.
See the Adobe example of how such "spyware" can be forced to run "unobtrusively."
Major Email providers like Yahoo and Hotmail already provide automatic scanning for virus, AOL is including automatic scanning for spyware, MicroTrend (?) already has Online Virus Scanning of your Hard Drive (!), and so under the threat of the Patriot Act (and it's ilk) many of these companies can be forced to scan everything that goes in and out of their systems.
This is the key. Now the threshold for "abnormal" has been reduced so much (almanac carriers as potential terrorists, CAPPS passenger detection based on names and 15 flights were cancelled last month based on this, anti-war protestors as possible terrorists and hence being tailed by the Feds etc.) that the problem of false alarms no longer dogs the current administration and law enforcement agencies.
This is the crux. When the error threshold is reduced so much that the high rates of error are no longer problematic, then any solution (whether efficient or not) can be implemented. Who cares whether it works well or not. Till now the false alarms were the things that stopped such 1984-ish like scenarios from unfolding. Once you accept high errors, and accept even high collatoral damage as the price of doing "business," you can have a solution to almost anything implemented - whether it deserves to be implemented or not is a whole different issue. But who cares? You got nothing to hide - Right?
Slightly on a Tangent to the Main Topic, but whatever happened to the notion of companies being Agile and Business being a dogfight ? The bottomline is that MS has never been in a hurry. And the point is - do you want to bet money against that paradigm.
Some juicy quotes from Steve Ballmer in April 2003
Tuning could be replaced with extortion and the sentence would probably be more true. But what I think MS is missing that few people are expecting and clamoring for FREE hardware (FreePC experiment notwithstanding) but many people are clamoring for FREE software. And the RIAA has helped ingrain that paying for digital bits is putting the money in the wrong pockets. So I think the leverage that MS expects from software is overestimated.
Maybe it is time to turn the ship like they did in 1995.
In the spirit of "postmodern literary criticism" I choose the essay itself as my "text" and here are the exciting results.
Well, I tried to see if I could "see into" the essay as a satire and a wicked, though blunt, assessment of the current administration. I thought that the essay was a coded satire and similar to the work of Jonathan Swift, but without the humor and imagination. (Full Disclosure - I am an Engineer by training.) So here my application of the 5-Step methodology to "deconstructing" the essay.
I really don't know what Godel wrote but I have read an interpretation of it via Douglas Hofstadter's - Godel, Escher, Bach. Here is where I do find the similarities in the prescription laid out by Hofstadter and in the essay.
And here is where I can extend beyond mere literature into the nature of politics, govt, and the current administration.
True, it doesn't matter if I choose to focus on the current administration, or the mad-cow outbreak. The choice of the subject is actually one of the less important decisions that I have to make.
It is very interesting that such a standard postmodernist tactic for ducking criticism was used by Mr. Donald Rumsfeld who was awarded the prize of 'Foot in mouth' prize for for it, and actually came very close to being awarded the "Man of the Year" by Time Magazine ! (Rummy declined honor as 'Person of the Year) His award winning poem was trying to create a metaphysical confusion by the following :
Irony? Despite being refused, where do they present the results ...
The story has been around for a while and I first read it here. on Dec 29, 03.
I like the way in which the Right can create all the huff, puff, & smoke, but then ridicule it when the same is done to them. And people complaining about this "loss of civil liberties" are going to called by the right as being hysterical and they will get away with it. But why ? Why this inequality ?
So, there you go. A President whose actions might have killed thousands (15-20 thousand at least) cannot be compared to Hitler. But the Right can compare impostion of the Estate Tax on the richest 2 % to Hitler and his activities.
Look, at me here while I am talking. Is this fair?
I have all the pictures saved as a slideshow and have seen them as the screen-saver for some years now.
What has never ceased to amaze me is that all the levels that were shown were part of a continuous reality but we have broken them into many almost independent fields of study. Chemistry, Biology, Astronomy, High Physics, Genetics, Meterology, Architecture, etc. All of these fields now seem to me to be just different colored lenses helping you catch one glimpse of the awesome reality. Putting on all lenses together at one time would give us the furthest view, but the last person who was said to have known everything that was there to be known has been dead a few centuries. So, for us now, being able to wear all the lenses at the same time is an impossibility. That is our limitation. And of course the real limitation is in the time available to us because if it were infinite we would have enough time to be able to wear all the lenses at least once. But in the current situation we can't; time is not infinite.
In addition, what gets me always is that at the starting (i.e most positive powers) and at the ending point (most negative powers) the nature of our imagination of them is very similar. In my mind I could easily switch some of the last images with some of the first images and not really see anything upset much. It is almost like that is the region where the positive and negative loops somehow mysteriously join back-to-back. It is as if after we see the Russian Doll like nature of the universe, we see that the innermost Russian Doll also actually contains the outermost Russian Doll. And then I compare my life to these Russian Dolls, and don't feel too bad. I guess, that's what I like about the Powers of Ten.
Thanks !
I took your snowball and added a little snow on it of my own ....
Facts about Microsoft Corporation.
This hyperlink leads to the "Facts about Microsoft Corporation"
Once again, the URL in plain text is ... http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/facts/default.asp
Reminds me of a discussion recently held at /. Will Virtual Economies Affect Real-World Economics? Maybe the author of the article discussed there, Edward Castronova, could use some numbers from the report mentioned in the current discussion to give more concrete shape to his ideas. Would love to continue the discussion then ....
I think the path of the Facts Against Linux document is very interesting.
Doing a pseudo-Google like analysis you see that the main site is of course the Microsoft.com Then is a major folder MS Corp. Then, BAM - the facts.
No sub directories under MS Corp like misc, or not-really-important, or small-fry, or oh-by-the-way, and neither is this one of their numbered documents. The first document on FACTS under MS Corp is comparison with Linux.
It may be reading tea leaves but as someone who likes to design directory structures with some logic - What does it mean to me ? It means M$ is paying big time attention to Linux. And I am sure if someone in the near future did a search in Google on "Facts about Microsoft Corporation" - this will be the first document that will show up in exclusion to almost everything else about M$. Linux is now officially in the Crosshairs of the biggest guns at MSCorp. Amen.
I am not sure if this is a wonderful thing. As it is there are too many sub-standard colleges, and basic equipment and teaching staff is lacking in many. Such hypergrowth, in my opinion can cause nothing but trouble. I don't think the basic systems and infrastructure are there to support such an endeavor. Yes there are currently very good institutions but they are very few in the top tier. Most just dispatch their students with a "token" degree.
Frankly, I think this insane growth in the engineering colleges, is just too much of herd mentality. - not unlike the dot com mania. And instead of treating a college as a social cause or obligation, most of the "engineering" and "medical" colleges are nothing but commercial enterprises. They are run purely as businesses, even to the extent, that many are called "donation colleges." You pay a huge huge amount of money and you get in - even in medical colleges !! Just imagine one of those doctors operating on you. It happens in India all the time !
Ooops
Here are the correct links:
Here is a link to the Abstract & Chapter 1 of my thesis - MS Word (sorry) 339 KB
I have tried to capture the nature of these transfers in a section of my thesis - the relevant section is excerpted here. MS Word (sorry) 22 KB http://www.bubbleui.com/thesis/DATA%20INFO%20KNOWL EGE%20summary%20from%20thesis.doc
The answer as you well know is - "not often."
But I think your follow-up question does not capture the situation fully. It is not a choice between
First is a problem of the requirements gathering and creating a Requirements Specification out of it which I discussed in my thesis. As another comment by tom's a-cold has pointed out the process of requirements gathering and converting them into a solution is a continuous and iterative process - and core competence can be looked at as the ability to do this process faster and faster - and better than anyone else. In addition, I have described this requirements process in more detail in my thesis. Here is a link to the Abstract & Chapter 1 of my thesis - MS Word (sorry) 76 KB
Secondly, the worlds of requirements gathering and deciding upon the tradeoffs is seeped in the business opportunities. While the world of the developers is steeped in the technical limitations. These are two very different worlds and I doubt that most people can effectively transition between the two. I know in Agile Modeling & Extreme Programming the idea is pretty much to bridge these two worlds by the same people but I believe that it is best done by separating these functions - and then allowing communication between these two worlds.
Economic activity is generated when a business problem meets a technical solution. The business problem by itself isn't much, and the technical solution by itself is not much. It is when these two meet and fit-in with each other then there is success in the marketplace. And they meet not along a single point or line, but have a pretty messy interface between them. The curx of the problem is to successfully tranfer "material" between these two worlds.
And the "material" that needs to tranfer across these two worlds can be data, information, knowledge and action. The nature of how these takes place, and why the process has to be continuous and iterative, and where is it that tradeoff's have to be made, is most important. I have tried to capture the nature of these transfers in a section of my thesis - the relevant section is excerpted here. MS Word (sorry) 36 KB
So, coming back to your original questions, I think they have to be expanded to cover a larger situation, rather than be answered in a single yes or no. If you do have any references or case studies in mind, do send me the links and I would love to discuss this issue further.
I have used Vivisimo a few times but never realized that their method of categorization was quite langaage independent.
If it really is then DMOZ, the Human Edited Directory, ought to incorporate dynamic categorizations like this, infact to the point that someday each user should have his/her own unique categorization of the all the websites in the world ...
Meanwhile, are they using the words in the headings to determine categories ? Or is it words that have in some way been emphasized ? And to do this in a way that transcends language ...
I am really curious as to how the words that determine "categories" in a sentence/para/section/page can be identified and sifted away from less important words. And how to determine the "keywords" that are not as important as "categories" but still more important that the "filler words" on the page. Keyword for Google is what you are searching for. That is easy. But how does Vivisimo take it further and establish it as a category?
No, in most cases it is not the same person who can do both - writing the spec & coding well.
Writing the Spec is done on the language of $$c$$CCC$ while that of code is done in the 101010111. Two different systems altogether. I once took a fanciful approach to explain how different these two worlds are. They are very very different.
But, all this is really tangential to my emphasis that the "innovation" does not only lie in the coding but in the requirements determination too - and increasingly more so. That is why people in the US are important so that they understand what the problem and its requirements are. And this point is very essential to consider when offshoring.
I love free software esp. when it is the underdog. The following comment is only meant in the sense of what will happen if free software becomes the Big Kid on the Block.
I see an analogy with Economic Models where they talk of Perfect Competition and a Level Playing Field leading increasingly towards profits approaching to Zero. It is not really a bad situation in the Creative-Destruction evolution of the market economies.
This economic destination would be perfect if the 'free" software was being written in time that was "leisure" time, or even in "professional" time if it is going to lead to professional and career advancements. Then the concept of Zero Profits is not unreasonable as there are other intangible benefits.
But for many other people the time spent writing "free" software is going to entail expenses - esp. if they they don't have the above two mitigating factors. In that case the programmers are then paying themselves for the software they write - i.e. negative profits.
I know this question has been asked a million/gazillion times. But, hey, it's GNU's 20th Birthday, so why not nostaligically revist it.
I guess, all I am asking is that if the users are going to benefit from "free" software, and that becomes the dominant mode of software usage, how are the large number of programmers going to be compensated directly or indirectly -esp. the ones who are not Hobbyists and Resume-builders.
I think there is a step before "writing" software that is easily overlooked. And that is figuring out the Requirements of the system to be designed. This is where I believe the innovation lies. A lot of good code has already been wasted chasing bad problems - unless you believe that those "objects" have found reuse elsewhere in large quantities.
The people who identify the need and then figure out the "requirements" are better off in the US as they are close to the problems there. Many offshore programmers who have never seen a scanner at a checkout of a grocery store are ill-equipped to understand all that might be required of the checkout counter in the real world. But once someone identifies what is required, then it is possible to put together a solution. The solution can be academic and the solutions depend on who has framed the problem - but the solution then is not as hard. What is hard is understanding what the problem is. Understanding what the requirements are.
Coke and Pepsi do just that. They have bottlers all over the world - and they still have been able to maintain the "secrecy" of the recipe. The point in operational excellence is that you have to not only look at the process of improving the manufacture of the product, but also its delivery and logistics. At a certain stage of his business, it is conceivable that Jean-Marc's might be like Coke/Pepsi. Outsource the chocolate production to supply worldwide.
Wrong. Most of the cost of clothing is in the inventory and predicting the fashions. Have you seen how many shirts go unsold for every shirt that you buy ? I can bet that keeping the inventory, getting rid of old fashions, and other marketing battles cost much much more than the shirt itself. The cost is mainly in the movement of information about the shirt - what is required, where is it required, when is it required, how much is required, etc. All this outweighs the cost of manufacturing at the assembly line in influencing the margins eeked out from the clothing business.
Again, I believe the first step is understanding the Requirements. Then is the design. nhen is the coding. Then is the debugging. Then is the testing. Then is the recoding. Then is the etc. etc. A lot of these steps don't need "innovation" - they require competence.
The game is about requirements. One who can understand the requirements are, and can understand that the business benefits of implementing the solutions are more than the technical costs of implementing them - is going to win. That is the real innovation.
I think mostly existing tools were used beyond what they are generally designed for - i.e. expanded into a virtual world. The thing on which it is applied is different but the tools and approaches used are not.
When I see two words "value" and "worlds" so close to each other the thought that jumps to my head is world of religion and its value. Do we have one religion ? Does the size matter when you can choose yours ? Does one religion dominate the world ?
Don't know if there is such a correlation beween the two, because it is hard to pin down what "higher rewards" and "challenge levels" are. Firstly, how can you be sure that the coder has captured the "reward" or "challenge" value in a pattern of numbers ? And secondly, regarding preferences, it is well known that one man's cake is another man's poision. One way to visualize it is to see a see-saw in motion.
I guess what it could mean is that if you find that you have committed a sin in your religion, it is then not a bad idea to shop around for another religion that doesn't consider it a sin - if the analogy made with religion is appropriate.
Now it sounds quite like religion to me. I can just imagine the power structures you described and those described in religious history.
Well it depends on how you visualize the function of its growth. If it is linear or quadratic, then you probably could be right. If the function is of a higher order the growth of digital stock might find a limiting value, or even reverse itself. It usually happens when currencies of differnt nations are allowed to partially or freely float agains the currencies of other nations. And hopefully if that could be predicted, then it might be comparable to the accomplishments of George Soros - who broke the Bank of England.
Crying Wolf for years ? Crying wolf implies that someday your bluff will be called. Remember the Story of the Boy Who Cried Wolf ?
If the bluff ain't ever going to be called then is it really crying wolf ?
Is the RIAA and MPAA bluff ever going to be called ? Has it ever been called out even after the above listed examples ?
Big Money speaks. And Big Money carries a big stick. In today's world don't underestimate the belief that brawn overcomes brains. Hopefully, though, someday the brains will inherit the earth.
- was a strange mix of negative comments -- horrific near-slave working conditions in China, coupled with...
- no S-video output? Cause if it had the S-video connection, I'd be in there!
He said.- Maybe, in the end, it's enough to be aware of what's happening behind the scenes
- as we enjoy this cornucopia of bargains.
Dicken's said.- It was the best of times
- It was the worst of times.
Well said.It is an interesting "business model" and so here are a few of my observations. There was a discussion recently on Business Models at /.
The "business" proposition is:
Fair enough.
Sounds like a public library but with the twist ... but not as twisted as Lexis or Dialog. A friendly librarian is ready to help you with all the data and information that you need. It is upto you to convert that to knowledge, which hopefully will result in some action.
But the membership to the library is a little restricted.
I know it is meant to "twist arms" of developers to get to contribute, but what immediately comes to mind is the "Creative Commons" model, which does not require only "contributors" to drink from the pond. So it is quite similar to Creative Commons except that instead of an Open Licence it is a licence to a restricted group. But, it is still not a closed licence. But how is all this going to be policed ?
Interesting how a definite None so quickly becomes indefinite - although it is not required to submit. They might have to resolve a few policy and implementation issues in the Policing Department, and something soon will crop up to test their system if it becomes big enough.
I also find it interesting as to how they like to maintain the history of "asset." Compare it to the situation of cash in the economy, and analogy would be a system where your paycheck is given to you in cash, and then the cash is marked for you - where you can use it or not. It is not that weird if you just replace "cash" with "credit" (and it happens all the time) but the point was that the "asset" is now becoming something that has long history which must be maintained - it could become a baggage, a weapon in the wrong person's hand, or an attribute that helps the market stabilize. It is still too early to call.
Only the little ones are welcome, but the littler ones will be kept out. And the big ones will of coruse stay out most of the time. Oh, it sounds like new-speak for class war, albeit in a hippy fashion to me.
Peace, Love and Hugs ...
I think this is a very interesting point. I know he talks about this as an improvement over the NPC's (Non Playable Characters), but if the same strength of non-verbal communication has to be translated into a networked version of the games with Playable/Playing Characters - would the lack of verbal communication succeed there ? What would other alternatives for communication be in this world?
India is going to host the Commonwealth Games 2010 (72 Countries, including Canada) in New Delhi, after having won over Hamilton's (Canada)desire to do the same. The hosting of the games is going to bring about some major and positive changes to Delhi, and the Sports program in India. And one of the selling points was that the Bid Committee said India should have a chance to demonstrate the State of IT in India on the World Stage ...
Next on the agenda is to bid for the Olympics 2016 ... Just imagine the changes it will bring. China is hosting the 2008 Edition of the Olympics.
We did the site for the Commonwealth Games 2010, and I have put up an album of some photos of India here. This is an internal page that is not linked to from any other page as it was the database from which we were choosing our photos ...