Regarding idle, I suggest you read this, at least to the second reply.
Well, that it probably came from marketing, I can believe that.
But nevertheless, then marketing had a point for a change. There is less and less reason to read Slashdot, if you're a real computer nerd. And even less so why you could justify it even to yourself with a straight face as, say, valuable IT information you need to read at work.
Look, I started reading it in late 1999, though it would still be some time until I bothered to register. There was interesting stuff happening in computing. It actually mattered if the next version of program X could do Y. The Linux ecosystem, for example, was still just getting started and it mattered to know what's about to happpen in it. There were real downsides to either choice A or B and it was important to know what direction they're both taking.
Nowadays I can't even remember the last story which was of any real interest from either an IT or programming angle. The most interesting stories are in science, a bit of YRO, and the like. And even then there's a lot of bad journalism and corporate PR masquerading as either.
Slashdot has already become a kind of Digg for grown ups, so to speak. It's only of interest for a computer nerd, in as much as it's some obscure, mildly-intellectual news to read while waiting for the application server to reboot.
I'd say Idle was the next logical step. Sadly.
And to get back to what I was trying to say: well, I still like Reviews better than Idle. If we're going to have some filler to draw in the masses, well, Reviews sounds better to me. We have enough games nerds around to review anything from over-hyped major releases, to obscure text-mode indie games. So why not? And honestly, at least it would be something genuinely interesting to someone interested in games. A lot more so than the slashvertisments, PR masquerading as science ("scientists (funded by Mars) discovered that chocolate is good for you!"), and trolling masquerading as news.
Well, last time I read an analysis of the surrealistic attempt by MS to buy Yahoo, it apparently involved a patent actually. Some small company had come up with a ludicrious blanket patent on, basically, AdWords. If you automatically match keywords to serve an ad, congrats you infringe on it. Yahoo bought them. Yahoo apparently licensed it to Google, but refuses to license it to MS for any sum. So basically it's in a position to block anyone it wants to from entering the context-matched ads segment, and does just that.
So before we all go orgasmic about "OMG google is soo smart that they monopolized the context-matched ad space, and MS is so dumb that it can't even do that except in a few asian countries"... well, it's because basically MS is kept from entering that maket at all.
Anyway, that shitload of money offered for buying Yahoo, were apparently all about that patent. And Yang & Co would rather lose money for its shareholders, _and_ hand in the goose that lays golden eggs to Google, than let MS compete there. They practically offered to bow down and give Google their share of that market space, then let MS in at all.
Now I don't have any particular love for MS, nor any particular hatred for Google, but, seriously, isn't this exactly what the anti-trust laws were supposed to prevent? What I see there is a case of #1 and #2 in a market, colluding to keep #3 out of it. And everyone else, for that matter.
_If_ we decided that it's the ultimate evil to artificially raise trade barriers just to keep competitors out, if you're MS... shouldn't the same apply when Yahoo and Google do it? I mean, seriously, what's the difference?
Actually, if I understand the summary right, it says more like: well, we IT guys will teach the rest of the company too to be greener and more efficient and do more with less! And they'll listen to us! 'Cause we're smart and high-tech like that! And we have computers too!
Which, honestly, sounds to me like someone's wishful thinking and delusions of grandeur.
1. If IT is only 2% of a company's expenses, then they probably have some other stuff there which involves physics or chemistry. Like, you know, melting some steel, putting some serious amps through molten bauxite, or some tanks where all sorts of chemistry happens at high pressures and temperatures.
1.A. A lot of that is _hard_ to make more energy efficient. You can't, for example just cover a steel plant in thick thermal insulation, because then the air inside would reach a thousand degrees withing seconds. Or you can't melt steel with half the energy, because honestly there are some physical constants of the universe you'd need to change. Not saying it's impossible to come up with something better, but it isn't trivial stuff either. Partially because...
1.B. They do that already. Don't imagine that there isn't already a strong economic incentive to reduce your costs. In fact, it's the #1 thing you can promise, to get Wall Street to like you more. There are some smart engineers out there working on just that kind of stuff already.
1.C. Let's not kid ourselves, we may be smart guys and gals, but nobody knows _everything_. The idea that some guy sitting at the computer all day would also know enough to optimize an assembly line or cracking tower, just like that, if only someone would listen to him, are close to nil. It's a different domain. Chances are you, or your IT coleagues don't even know what that assembly line is like and how it works. You'd need to put years into just understanding that, and the science behind it, and, frankly, there are people more qualified than you there. We still _do_ produce other flavours of engineers, you know?
2. Well, I can't see many upper-level managers changing their processes just because the IT guy said so. Even _if_ the IT guy happens to be right. In a lot of places they're so caught up in their power games, and showing who's more important than who, that... well, to say the least, what makes you think they'd just give _you_ some of their power? Or better yet, give you power over them? Heh. Dream on.
Additionally, well, even as an RPG, I'd rather have something that's not yet another high fantasy setup. Honestly, I have nothing against Tolkien-rip-off settings as such, but God knows there's no need for every single bloody RPG to be yet another clone of the same setting. If you want to play a computer RPG in any other setting, well, there was Mass Effect, but nothing after it and nothing before it, all the way to KOTOR2. (Though thankfully Fallout 3 is coming soon.)
So even if you want to see it as a reskinned RPG, making it themed around creatures hunting for food instead of yet another dwarves-and-elves-and-magic theme, I'll call that borderline innovative in its own right. And most welcome anyway.
Well, I have played plenty of RPGs before, and this one also _plays_ quite differently from NWN2, Oblivion, Drakensang and whatnot. I see your point that there's a similar underlying mechanic, but it does have its own gameplay anyway.
Not exactly sure
on
Review: Spore
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
On one hand, true, I haven't seen a game review here before.
On the other hand, let's face it, Slashdot _is_ running out of newsworthy things for nerds. We have the _Idle_ section on the front page. You know, something as lame as what flames the Slashdot mods received per email. Honestly, filling the space with reviews instead sounds like a step _up_ to me. It _could_ be a genuine experiment in finding some better filler than Idle.
(Mind you, I'm not saying it _is_ so. Just that I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.)
On yet another hand, it _is_ one of the most (A) anticipated and (B) innovative games of the decade. Duly noted, it has a rather annoying and oppressive DRM, and it does miss the mark in a few categories anyway. But it does try to do something new, in a games industry which mostly just pumps out more clones of whatever sold well last year. I see no problem with giving it a fair review, much as the DRM trolls would rather see only "Spore sucks", wall to wall. Yes, the people must be warned about the DRM, but I see no problem with mentioning whether it's otherwise fun to play.
I don't think anyone is trying to kill the PC market as long as:
A) they're still publishing games for it, and
B) the one biggest money-printing license is PC-only. Seriously, WoW rakes in yearly income equal to some small countries GDP. And I don't mean that as just a figure of speech. _Literally_.
C) some of EA's own most lucrative franchises are on the PC. It's the likes of The Sims and EA Sports that end up subsidizing some of their games (which fail to break even), not the other way around.
Now if you're about to point out that their sports games are all ported to consoles too, and they've been trying hard to make The Sims themed games for the consoles too, you'd be correct. The days of PC _exclusive_ games, and for that matter of catering to small groups of insecure willy-wavers who need to feel tougher than the casual gamers, are gradually coming to an end. But that hardly equals killing PC gaming.
Wow, what a complete lack of critical thinking skills.
No, actually it seems to me like you're the one with the basic comprehension problem
Just because they are currently out-selling the competition is meaningless to this discussion. Without DRM they could/would be selling even more. Maybe LOTS more. That is the point.
Re-read the question in the summary, lemming. Basically a small group of trolls seems to think they're so important that, just because they posted a couple of negative reviews on Amazon, surely either the game will flop or EA will bow down and remove the DRM.
'Cause they're important like that. Someone gave them a browser, and _obviously_ now the rest of the world is listening to every word they say. Why, whole populations obviously drop everything they were doing, and purchase what Random Internet Troll #123456789 told them to buy, and stay away from what he told them to avoid. 'Cause he can post on the Intertubes, see. He's got DA POWA.
That last paragraph is sarcasm, btw.
It's a common delusion these days, sadly. It doesn't work that way.
And at any rate, the GP's post just shows that they failed to make it flop even on Amazon. You know, the site they flooded with those fanboy anti-review.
Could it have sold better? Maybe. But, at any rate, not to fulfill that prophecy that the game will surely be killed by those reviews, or EA will have to remove the DRM. You don't go, "hmm, where did we fail, and what can we fix?" for a game that's the #1 seller. As fanboy delusions of self importance go, that one is an "EPIC FAIL", to abuse that meme some more. Those reviews didn't give anyone even cause for worry, much less make EA bow down.
So, you, know, before accusing someone of lacking critical thinking skills, make sure that you do have them. Because the GP's post was right on target and plenty relevant to the question being asked. Yours is the irrelevant foaming at the mouth. Or were you one of those fanboys, and it's better to throw insults than to realize that the world doesn't revolve around your keyboard?
PS: Don't get me wrong. I don't like DRM one bit. But zealot delusions of self-importance are an even sadder spectacle, from where I stand. Had it merely tried to inform about DRM, it would have counted as a noble goal and effort. But delusions of self-importance like in the summary (""Will an anti-DRM flash mob that's determined to give EA's latest sim game Spore a rock bottom rating on Amazon.com sink the game, or will Spore evolve and shed the DRM? Is this the beginning of the end for DRM-laden games?") are just freaking sad. Anyone deranged enough to think that, needs a life ASAP.
1. A game that basically plays itself would be freaking boring for most people. You've basically described Sim City, but without actually placing the houses or streets or managing the budget. Seriously, think a Sim City where all you can do is throw tornadoes and whatnot at a city and hope that the people take the hint and build it like you want it to. It's at most freeware game material.
2. Occasionally intervening negates the whole science aspect just as badly. If a deity up there in the sky decides that sheep should have longer legs by personally throwing lightning at short legged ones, what you have in the end is still ID, not natural selection. You just replaced it by something that's just as unscientific, only now it's (A) with less gameplay, and (B) a stupid and inefficient way to do things for a deity.
3. Occasionally intervening sounds good until you realize what a boring janitor job that is. Evolution happens at large scales and large populations. Do you want to personally inspect 1000 sheep to decide which one deserves a lightning strike? (And that's realistically a very very low number.) Then do it again? And again? Congrats, instead of playing a deity, now you're playing a shepher's apprentice.
4. Accelerating mutations isn't necessarily a good thing. For evolution to even work at all, you need enough stability for the mutant population to edge-out the others or be edged-out, over a long time. If every other sheep born has a different mutation, and different enough to be noticed by the player, the species just diverges fast and it becomes 1000 different species competing and soon running out of compatible partners.
5. We're still far from simulating a realistic and self-contained ecosystem. I've seen a few simulations and they tended to fly off the hook pretty fast.
6. Exactly what is your achievement as a player there? E.g., in Spore I can set a goal for myself like "make a race of Kilrathi and take over the planet/galaxy by military might." What would be the goal and achievement in your version? So I drag the temperature down and see what animals happen to result. It could be sheep with thicker wool, or it could be yeti, or I could have a mass extinction event. Uh, ok. Now what?
What variables would I even have to play with to get evolution to produce sentient felines? And how do I know I don't get sentient parrots instead? I.e., _can_ I set any such goals for myself and realistically achieve them?
7. It sounds like a recipe for frustration. RL evolution is a mess of dead ends, extinctions, etc. What if the same happens to the species that you put all that work into guiding down a certain path?
E.g., the first species to reach, in Spore terms, tribal stage on Earth, were the Neanderthals. They had ritual burial, were self-conscious enough to use (primitive) jewellery, used fire, skinned animals, built elaborate shelters, had work specialization and possibly some primitive trade to support those specialized crafters, built crude musical instruments, and... went the way of the Dodo.
So if that happens in the game, now what? Watch the game playing itself some more until it produces another sentient species?
Neither. This strategy will result in more people discovering that Amazon ratings are simply manipulated by both corporate shills or advocate shills, devaluing the ratings system itself.
Bingo.
The waking call for me was when I stumbled upon the preorder page for Gothic 3, mostly out of sheer surprise that it existed already and it showed an unrealistically close release date. Back then it wasn't even in _alpha_. Even the official site and press releases had nothing more than a couple of "look what the engine can do" screenshots. There was no information about the story, the world, or anything. And again, nobody had a playable demo yet. Probably not even the devs, yet. So it seemed way premature to even have a preorder page.
Well, a few fanboys had already taken upon themselves to post glowing reviews. If you listened to them, it was the greatest game ever. Superb gameplay, the best fantasy story since Tolkien himself, no bugs, the best graphics ever, etc.
Needless to say, when the game was released a year later, it was nothing like that. I suppose the other categories are subjective, but let's just say that the "no bugs" part was waay off the mark. And the "a hamster can kill godzilla if it hits first, because it'll then keep interrupting the other" gameplay way at least for me a huge turnoff.
I can't remember the exact games, but I remember I looked at another couple of yet unreleased games the same day, out of morbid curiosity. Yep, you guessed, the fanboys or maybe shills (take your pick) had already written tons of glowing reviews.
So anyone who takes the Amazon ratings as anything more than comedy relief, is bound to have a bit of the surprise sooner or later. Probably sooner.
Mind you:
1. The situation isn't Amazon-only, nor games-only. When you give zealots, fanboys, trolls, and shills, who already exist to force their opinions and views upon everyone else, a forum whose purpose is just that... well, what did anyone expect?
2. Even without that, the amount of sheer stupidity in user reviews online is either hillarious or worth losing faith in humanity. I haven't yet decided which. (And I mean, seriously, stuff like, for a soundproofed Sennheiser headset, where the whole _point_ is that they massively dampen outside noises, someone hat taken the time to write a review to the effect of, "OMG, they're crap! If you put them on, you can't hear anything else, not even the doorbell or phone! Stay away from them!" And that's actually one of the milder examples of online stupidity.)
3. The whole point about tastes is that they're subjective. What may be TEH GRATEST GAME EVAR;) for me, might be the most boring thing ever for you. I can see a point in trusting a reviewer or forum member who you've already established that he has the same tastes as you. Or maybe taking a reputable source and taking just the facts and ignoring his opinions of them. (E.g., "ok, he hated it because it's turn based, I like turn based, sound interesting.") But trusting some random guy online to tell one what to buy? Why? How stupid is that?
So, on the whole, that yet another group of zealots has taken it upon itself to pollute that already-polluted resource... well, it's a bit like spitting down the hole of an outhouse. Amusing, but won't make the contents any worse than they already were.
Hopefully, this will result in Amazon cracking down on shill reviewers, and modifying the system so that those who attempt to game the system in either the positive or negative direction have a substantially reduced score.
I'm not opposed to the idea, but I'd wonder about how would it work. How do you distinguish between, basically:
A. Some hypothetical corporate shill, giving everything from company X top marks just because he was paid to.
B. Jenny Gamer who likes to play with dolls, bought The Sims because it sounded just like that, and genuinely liked it. And then bought the 7
Sure. Version 2 is usually better than version 1. Version 1 has to come first.
Yes, but it doesn't have to leave the lab. If anyone actually deploys a V1 product in a situation where you can know in advance that it's worse than nothing, and only causes some settlements to pay, then that guy is a dumbass or, in some cases, malicious. Plain and simpple.
E.g., let's say I invent the first flying car. That's V1. It even works about 99% of the time, which is pretty damned good. Or is it? If you're going to buy _that_ and take the 1% risk to probably lose your life each trip, then you'd be a dumbass. You'd first wait until V2 works better than that, wouldn't you?
Discussing shortcomings is one thing, rejecting out of hand is another (which you personally might not be doing). i've observed a trend (in the US, at least) toward anything we do/think about doing to thwart terrorists being met with kneejerk cries of invasion of privacy and abuse of authority. Sure, humans can and will muck up/abuse anything. My objection to these reflexive responses is that they seem to be based on politics: Bush is evil and stupid, Bush is the gov't ergo, Gov't is evil and stupid. i agree with the first part, but i try to be objective about the rest. Which is not to say i agree with everything (or even most of) what he's done.
Considering some of the things the Bush government did, I'd say that such concerns aren't entirely paranoid. It's the first western government since WW2 to ignore Habeas Corpus, use torture, politicize state departments by handing jobs based on ideology and party affiliation, argue that the constitution is just a piece of paper and doesn't apply to the government, etc, etc, etc. And in regards the discussion at hand, to restrict travel and harass its own citizens based on false positive and coincidences. We're talking the same government who tried data-mining grocery bills to find terrorists, ffs. (And if the underlying "arab = probably terrorist" idea isn't disturbing you yet...)
I think being at least a little circumspection is just healthy.
That's not to say that _all_ the USA government does is evil, but there is reason to at least use your brains about new things they come up with.
But, anyway, my concerns with this technology, and I see of many other posters, are centered more around whether it's possible at all. The claim to accurately find a terrorist based on his shadow in a low-res sat image (let's just say that lens size and distance put an objective cap on the resolution there, as in, just physics), is a bloody incredible claim, and big claims need big evidence.
The right has gone with "we have to DO something, anything is something, so let's do that!"
Unfortunately, "we have to do something, this is something, so let's do this", is a textbook fallacy. I can see why people would rage against that kind of a justification, because it really is that stupid. Or maybe malicious and hoping you're stupid (enough to swallow that.) Up to you to decide which.
i was thinking of some sort of heuristic method. Audio database says 'sounds like a duck'. Camera says 'looks like a duck'. X ray says 'has the bones of a goose'. He's flying from Tulsa to Austin (not LA NYC or DC), so with 2/3 we can let this one pass.
As I was saying, I have nothing against that kind of a composite method. But, again, whether it actually works or not, depends on how it's implemented and on what data those heuristics were trained. But I'm not claiming a priori that it _must_ end up implemented badly.
I'm just approaching it with a dose of skepticism. I'd like to see someone do the maths and do a controlled trial first. _If_ it works, fine. If not, not.
Entirely too many things these days are basically hand-waved as magic tech, just because it involves a computer. It's smart computer stuff, therefore it has to be right. You can see
I can very easily believe that a tracker _can_ infer things like "it's a man, favours his right foot, probably hurt his left leg, probably tired". That's sane.
And yes, probably by the shadow or gait too. Why not?
What I'm somewhat skeptical about is that they can say "ah, it's Abdallah ibn Jihad, we found him" with any degree of accuracy. You'd need a hideous degree of accuracy in those variables, to be able to sort 6 _billion_ degrees of favouring one's right foot. Basically that you could say, "hmm, he favours his right foot more than Moraelin, but less than Twitter, it can only be Abdallah. Call the CIA, we got him."
Or briefer:
Your gait isn't so much like a fingerprint.
Yet these guys propose to do exactly that: use it as a fingerprint. They want to look at someone's shadow from a sat image and say, "yep, that one is Abdallah ibn Jihad, we found him."
And that I doubt. It seems to me you just agreed there too.
i think it's better to try something and see how it works than to reject it because it might have the same problems as another system. Pay some settlements and try something else.
Fund research and development, yes. By all means. But also do some simple maths before actually doing it. If the maths says it doesn't work yet, don't be a dumbass, basically.
If you ended up paying settlements over something that you could have calculated on a napkin that it doesn't work... well... you have to ask yourself why.
Again, it has nothing to do with the Nirvana fallacy. Most things just have a minimum threshold below which they're useless. They don't have to be _perfect_, they just have to be above that threshhold. E.g., you wouldn't trust a statistic that has a, say, 40% degree of confidence, because the chances of it being bogus are higher than those of it actually having a point. E.g., you wouldn't go on a two-engine plane if the engines have a 95% chance of working, because then 1 in every 400 flights would have both engines die. And no airline would want it either, because, frankly, they don't even recoup the cost of the airplane in 400 flights. E.g., you wouldn't drive your car if it had only 99% chance of getting you to the destination in one piece. Etc.
And sometimes "if at first you don't succeed, try and try again" is just a dumb idea. E.g., in skydiving;)
And at any rate, heck, is there a problem with discussing the potential shortcomings here? I mean, best case scenario, the researchers have already thought of that and are working on a solution. Worst case scenario, someone goes "duh" and starts working on a solution. Sounds like win-win to me.
What if we had several systems working together? Databases, IDs, face recognition, x-rays, gait analysis and so on working together? Could that cut down on the false positives? Systems that prevent the specific act (like reinforced doors) are fine, but i think it's worth the (some) effort to catch them on the ground.
Theoretically everything is possible, but it depends. Sometimes using 5 flawed systems is actually worse than using just one.
At any rate, I have nothing against that idea. But, again, I'd expect someone to first prove that that composite thing delivers a usable degree of accuracy, and a small controlled trial, before it's used as more than a cute tech demo.
What are the security people at the airports suggesting?
I don't think many of them are also savvy enough about these techniques to make a meaningful suggestion. Different domains, really. They complained about the hideous number of false positives, but I don't think I've read any actual suggestion from them as to how to improve the algorithm.
Who said anything about liberals?
The rant about Obama and paranoia must have confused me.
Bullshit and strawmen, whether intentional or not. The objections to false positives have more to do with statistics, than with slippery slopes or anything else.
E.g., let's say I have a system which can look at photos from the security cameras, and tell you if a face or gait in the crowd matches a terrorist profile with 99% accuracy. (Which is actually a lot higher than what most of these snake oil systems get.) The problem in that case isn't that it lets 1% of the terrorists go. It's that it also creates 1% false positives out of people who aren't, for just one terrorist's photo. Apply that to just one airport, say the JFK, with its almost 60,000 passengers per day. If you get exactly one photo of each passenger, that's 600 false positives per day, in just one airport, for just one terrorist. But more likely you'll have everyone caught by several cameras during their trip to the airport, so the number multiplies accordingly.
Now feed it a database of several tens of thousands of known criminals, suspects, etc, and watch the number of false positives explode. Given that accuracy, just 100 photos are enough to match a majority of the passengers at one point or another.
At some point you can simply swamp the security with false positives, to the point where it's worse than useless.
And it's not just a hypothetical scenario, it's what airport security people themselves have said about previous trials with face recognition system. That they're crap and worse than useless. Would you accuse those too of being paranoid and slippery-slope types, or just accept that they probably know their job enough to know when a gizmo isn't helping it?
So basically spare me the bullshit about "nirvana fallacies" and "paranoid liberals". Learn what the real problem is, before talking out the arse about.
Yes, but that still doesn't answer his objections.
Let's say you've got nothing to hide, are on the database, then you get an abcess in your foot. I had one, for example, thanks to some retarded shoes which did that much damage and it got infected. Next thing I knew, my walking style could belong in a "ministry of funny walks" sketch, except for me it was more painful than funny.
Would I suddenly be outside the database, and thus a suspect, in that scenario? Or what if they entered a criminal in the database when he had a similar injury, and then I have a similar injury two years later and suddenly I look like the re-appearance of Abdallah ibn Jihad, wanted for arson, genocide and jay-walking in East Bumfuckistan and Elbonia? (Made up name, btw. Means IIRC slave of Allah, son of jihad, or enough to get your average anti-terrrist spook get his panties in a knot by itself.)
It's not like you can choose when you'll have such an injury.
What is the degree of confidence in such an identification, anyway? How fine you can slice a gait and still leave room for normal daily variations? (E.g., account for stuff like today I'm feeling chippy and walk a lot livelier, while yesterday was a shitty day and my walk probably reflected that. E.g., today I walk on grass in the woods, yesterday I was walking on wet concrete, and a month ago I was walking on sand at the beach.) As they say, "if you're one in a million, there are 6000 exactly like you." Will it be able to positively identify said Abdallah ibn Jihad, even when he's walking uphill through the snow with a pebble in his boot, or will it be more like "it's one of 6000 people, one of which is Abdallah ibn Jihad"? Again, that's the number if it could positively and unerringly distinguish between one million different gaits.
Don't tell anyone, but we're doing the public beta stress test, so the publisher can know how many players per server he can expect. There've been some bugs and balance problems found, though, so they might push back the actual release for another billion years. Although the publisher is calling it good enough and might shove it out the door as it is.
Well, they come in 1/3 and 2/3 because we're using the wrong unites for them, basically. If we were using a unit that's 1/3 of the proton charge instead, I'll call it a Moraelin, the quarks would come in 1M and 2M flavours. Which is actually quite palatable. Of course, the the proton would be +3M and the electron would be -3M.
Well, I don't think it's necessarily that simple. There are plenty of diseases that outright kill.
Probably the most obvious example is the bubonic plague, a.k.a., the Black Death. It eventually killed all 3 types of hosts involved in plague outbreaks:
- the rats (which were eventually replaced by a different and more robust species of rat, as, yes, the old one almost went extinct),
- the flea (the bacteria essentially plug its stomach, so it ends up perpetually hungry, sucking blood until it barfs it right back and infests a new host. Eventually it starves to death.)
- the humans
Early outbreaks of the Black Death killed 80% of the infected people and massively depopulated Europe. Nowadays you'd only have about 50% chance to die of it. Our immune system did evolve somewhat.
But if you combine it with other factors, e.g., a changing climate or whatever, and it could have driven a less resourceful species extinct. As I was saying, the black rats that were the co-hosts in those outbreaks did go pretty much extinct.
The bacterium itself, well, essentially the immense majority of those which caused such an outbreak, eventually died together with its hosts. You'd think that would be a very strong evolutionary pressure to evolve into something less suicidal. Essentially each outbreak ended up in a near wipe-out of the bacteria population. You have an advantage if you don't do that, no? But said evolution towards more benign versions just didn't happen. The humans evolved to have better chances of survival, but the bacterium seems to have stayed just as nasty as ever.
Basically what I'm saying is that there is no divine plan to save you, so to speak. The bacterium doesn't know whether it's heading towards extinction together with its hosts. As long as there are still _some_ available hosts, it didn't go extinct yet, and it can continue just as well.
Additionally, some bacteria can infect more than one host, or can survive decently in the ground without a host. For the latter, even killing all hosts immediately, still isn't really a problem. The former killing one of the hosts isn't much of an impediment either, as long as other hosts can survive (or breed faster than they're killed.)
So for example a hypothetical disease which could infest both dinosaurs and mammals, but only killed dinosaurs, could jolly well keep doing so ad infinitum.
Now I'm not saying that this is necessarily how the dinosaurs died out. Just that evolution works in perverse and mysterious ways.
Well, what I see there is that someone put together a distro, most likely by ripping off another distro like Red Hat or whatnot. (At a quick loo, I don't see them giving credit to any, but in China it could just as well mean that they didn't believe that putting their name on someone else's work is wrong. Or maybe they did build it from scratch, after all.) At any rate it's not necessarily some big achievement or effort. And probably only because he was paid to do so. I don't see any contributed kernel patches or even utilities or anything.
Bah, you had 512 KB cache and you thought _you_ had it bad? Bah, in my day we had 8 bits for the whole family, and they had to last us a whole week! And we had to load the programs into it with a wheelbarrow, and it was uphill both ways through the snow! And we _liked_ it.
Well, more seriously, if you started at the 512 KB cache Celerons, you're hardly in a position to call anyone a "youngin". Even the age of Celerons without any cache at all is less than a decade ago.
If you want a more proper "back in my days" story, catch this: I started on my parents ZX-81 computer with 1 KB RAM. Yes, RAM, not cache. You could upgrade it to IIRC 16 KB, but that was an extra module you have to buy, and dad hadn't.
It did have an 8KB ROM with BASIC, but the Sinclair BASIC was infamously slow. It also didn't help that the CPU was a 3.25 MHz (yes, M, not G) 8 bit affair. But the machine "cleverly" used some of the CPU signals for screen refresh. (We were not quite in the age of GPUs yet.) So you could either have the full 3.25 MHz or have it only during the blank bands below and under the image, or about 20% of the time. That latter mode was aptly called the "SLOW" mode. Effectively it was like working on a 0.65 MHz Z80.
Here I must also add that we're talking Zilog MHz, not 6510 ones. Those of you who had a C64, you might remember that it only had 1MHz, so no big deal. Well, it was because a Z80 did less per clock (but normally had more of them per second) than the 6510. If I remember the timings right, you could pretty much translate four Z80 cycles to one 6510 cycle, though the Z80 did have a few more tricks up its sleeve to make it run slightly faster than that. E.g., a lot more registers. At any rate, trust me, an effective 0.65 MHz worth of Z80 CPU was quite aptly called "SLOW" mode.
I got interested pretty quickly in how I can write something that runs faster, and my dad dumped a bunch of Intel and Zilog manuals on me and told me to try assembly. Except that machine didn't have enough RAM to actually run an assembler.
Welcome to the the world of writing those programs on paper and manually converting to hex. I had made my own neatly organized notebook, so I could quickly find the hex codes for any given opcode and operand combination. And if you wanted to write the equivalent of a loop or an "if"? Count the bytes and use a relative jump, boy.
Of course, there was no such thing as a debugger or protected mode on that thing. If you had counted the bytes wrong and took a jump off a cliff instead of to your intended destination, the machine would typically just lock up.
Oh yes, and it also had a very slow cassette interface, not hard drives like your Celerons, or even a floppy like those C64s.
Mind you, I don't feel much nostalgia about those days. But just saying, if you want "back in my day" willy waving, that's what a real "back in my day" story sounds like;)
And actually I'm sure someone out there has a better story, possibly along the lines of, "you had cassettes and a whole 3.25 MHz CPU? You don't know how good you had it! Well I got to program an ENIAC by manually rewiring a switchboard!" Heck, both my parents got to enter programs via front panel switches occasionally, which makes even my entering hex by keyboard and with some minimal editing capabilities, seem actually pretty comfortable.
Well, that they'll come up with even more ludicrious crap, they already did, after all. But now you have a court decision and precedent that some kinds of crap are against the law, and thus null and void. Just rewording it yet again won't make it any more legal than it was the first time around.
So, technically, at some point it doesn't matter what they write there. If it's not legal and was ruled as such, you can ignore it anyway. And there's a finite domain of bullshit they can claim, so each such court decision narrows it down some more.
And yes, it happened before. There are already court decisions that some of the things in EULAs aren't even worth the space they take on the CD, but they're written anyway. Apparently hoping that you'll believe it anyway. And in all fairness, some people do.
E.g., around here they already decided long ago that the first sale doctrine does apply, and, for example, no EULA can forbid you to resell your old software. But I've yet to see some EULA which doesn't go the "it was licensed, not bought, so we don't have to comply with consumer rights laws. You don't have any rights. 'Cause we just said so." route.
Heck, Microsoft itself tried to argue that, basically, see, actually its software is sold after all, when India told them to pay the license tax if it's licensed.
And the copyright law loophole that brought us all the "license" stupidity (see, you make a copy into RAM to run it, and if you make a copy you need a license on our terms) has been closed long ago.
Methinks we probably need stiffer penalties for trying to override the laws. As it is, there's very little disincentive, and at any rate it obviously doesn't work. There are millions of EULAs are written that, essentially, claim they're exempt from the law. We'll know we have the right disincentive when that stops.
But again, once it was decided that it's unenforceable, it doesn't matter if they write it some more in even more draconian and restrictive language. You can ignore it anyway.
Add to that the attitude of the Chinese to keep everything in their own hands and to build everything they think they need but don't have yet, and you have a winner for Open Source. There is only one problem: get them to open up their code. I have the feeling they won't do that when real breakthroughs are made.
You mean the same Chinese which (or at least a majority of) prefer the foreign DVD format to the home-grown codec, just because there's an endless supply of pirated/counterfeit Hollywood movies?
If in China all the Loongson boxes come preloaded with Red Flag Linux, the population there will become used to that. Remember: a lot of them haven't used a PC that often, and certainly not in their own homes.
You mean the same which hadn't used a DVD before, but didn't need much to decide they'd rather have a huge supply of foreign movies, than the patriotic/revisionist-history crap their government pumps out? Sorry, it never works the way you describe, unless you can _really_ keep the tightest possible fist on the market and control what everyone uses. And they can't. Nobody really can, but in China it doesn't look like they even try too hard.
On the whole, I'm sorry, but while the attitude of the government might be what you describe, I haven't seen any information which points that-a-way for the common man. The average chinese probably couldn't give a crap about all that.
And I certainly haven't heard of any major Linux or F/OSS contributions from that part of the world. On the contrary, I hear about mass-piracy of Windows stuff. So if they're that fond of Linux and home-grown stuff, they sure know how to keep that a secret.
So basically don't be blindsided by some ideal about exotic oriental wise people. They're just people like you and me and your neighbours. Between what works, and what's a good stick-it-to-the-corporate-oppressors, everything-by-the-people-for-the-people chest thumping, I expect 99% of them to choose the former. Same as here. Even if their government would rather they focus on the latter, instead of on government failures. In fact, probably partially _because_ the government would rather they do the latter.
Actually there's a thing that both CPU and OS fanboys fail to understand: it's the apps that matter, silly. The hardware and even OS are just a necessary evil to run that software.
The problem is having _software_ for it which doesn't suck, covers enough of the problem space, etc.
The Dragon CPU doesn't have an Intel-compatible ISA, so it doesn't automatically inherit all the Intel-only apps. It's based on the (unlicensed) Mips III ISA. The lack of a license is also why they don't advertise it as such.
But the cavalier attitude to IP is also what will bite them in the arse. When both are free as in, you can get them burned on a blank for (next to nothing), there isn't all that much reason to go with Linux ports instead of buying Windows and Office. Both do the same thing, but one of them has all the years of FUD behind it, and apparent incentives like "but everyone else uses Word and Excel, what if they send me something that doesn't work well in OOo?" or "but maybe if I learn to use Word, I can find a better job where they use that" or "but will I be able to play the latest pirated games on that?" (Even the "run them in Wine" doesn't exactly work on a non-intel architecture, because, as the recursive acronym goes, "Wine Is Not an Emulator.")
I've been saying it for a long time: piracy isn't some grand revenge against the big foreign corporations. Piracy only serves to kill the cheaper, but good enough, alternatives. If the choice were "do I buy AutoCAD for the equivalent of 6 years of Chinese average wage, or get a local alternative for 1% of that" (or even a F/OSS one) the choice might be very different than when both are free (as in stolen beer;) The big foreign corporation, regardless of what BSA tells you, hasn't actually lost anything there. That Chinese kid making some graphics for a mod wouldn't have paid thousands of dollars on AutoCAD, because he doesn't have those thousands of dollars anyway. But he might have been more interested in some alternatives which may have less features, but are cheap and local, or outright free. Piracy only serves to kill those possible alternatives.
And I'm not saying that as a personal rant against piracy, but because I believe that it's one reason why the Dragon will be stillborn no matter how good the silicon is. When the question comes, "but does this local Dragon computer run all that new pirated software?", the Dragon loses anyway.
And China has already had a similar experiment with their own DVD-alternative. Regardess of what other merits or disadvantages it may have, it just can't compete with something which plays all those thousands of pirated Hollywood DVDs. When you don't pay the DVD license "tax" anyway because you pirate those movies (or buy them from a counterfeiter which doesn't), the lack of those royalties on the local brewed codec becomes irrelevant.
To be entirely fair, though, I don't think it's the teachers' job to teach them all possible figures of speech. That time spent together _is_ limited, if apparently large, and there are a lot of subjects which are more important than knowing the exact meaning of "I hate to hold you hostage." If you have the extra hours to teach them every single figure of speech, I'd rather you use that to teach them some extra physics instead. Or maths. Or whatever.
Plus, would you like to be the teacher who uses that phrase in class? Especially in the terrorism hysteria in the USA?
I mean, I can just see it, "Officer, she threatened to hold mah li'l Jimmy hostage. Mah li'l Jimmy was so affraid. Mah daddy always said, 'son', he said, 'them bastards that take hostages ain't no good people.' And I don't want no bad people near mah li'l Jimmy."
I mean, it's bad enough that one techie understood it wrong. You don't want to bet your career on the fact that none of the tens of little illiterates will misunderstand you.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, that it probably came from marketing, I can believe that.
But nevertheless, then marketing had a point for a change. There is less and less reason to read Slashdot, if you're a real computer nerd. And even less so why you could justify it even to yourself with a straight face as, say, valuable IT information you need to read at work.
Look, I started reading it in late 1999, though it would still be some time until I bothered to register. There was interesting stuff happening in computing. It actually mattered if the next version of program X could do Y. The Linux ecosystem, for example, was still just getting started and it mattered to know what's about to happpen in it. There were real downsides to either choice A or B and it was important to know what direction they're both taking.
Nowadays I can't even remember the last story which was of any real interest from either an IT or programming angle. The most interesting stories are in science, a bit of YRO, and the like. And even then there's a lot of bad journalism and corporate PR masquerading as either.
Slashdot has already become a kind of Digg for grown ups, so to speak. It's only of interest for a computer nerd, in as much as it's some obscure, mildly-intellectual news to read while waiting for the application server to reboot.
I'd say Idle was the next logical step. Sadly.
And to get back to what I was trying to say: well, I still like Reviews better than Idle. If we're going to have some filler to draw in the masses, well, Reviews sounds better to me. We have enough games nerds around to review anything from over-hyped major releases, to obscure text-mode indie games. So why not? And honestly, at least it would be something genuinely interesting to someone interested in games. A lot more so than the slashvertisments, PR masquerading as science ("scientists (funded by Mars) discovered that chocolate is good for you!"), and trolling masquerading as news.
Well, last time I read an analysis of the surrealistic attempt by MS to buy Yahoo, it apparently involved a patent actually. Some small company had come up with a ludicrious blanket patent on, basically, AdWords. If you automatically match keywords to serve an ad, congrats you infringe on it. Yahoo bought them. Yahoo apparently licensed it to Google, but refuses to license it to MS for any sum. So basically it's in a position to block anyone it wants to from entering the context-matched ads segment, and does just that.
So before we all go orgasmic about "OMG google is soo smart that they monopolized the context-matched ad space, and MS is so dumb that it can't even do that except in a few asian countries"... well, it's because basically MS is kept from entering that maket at all.
Anyway, that shitload of money offered for buying Yahoo, were apparently all about that patent. And Yang & Co would rather lose money for its shareholders, _and_ hand in the goose that lays golden eggs to Google, than let MS compete there. They practically offered to bow down and give Google their share of that market space, then let MS in at all.
Now I don't have any particular love for MS, nor any particular hatred for Google, but, seriously, isn't this exactly what the anti-trust laws were supposed to prevent? What I see there is a case of #1 and #2 in a market, colluding to keep #3 out of it. And everyone else, for that matter.
_If_ we decided that it's the ultimate evil to artificially raise trade barriers just to keep competitors out, if you're MS... shouldn't the same apply when Yahoo and Google do it? I mean, seriously, what's the difference?
Actually, if I understand the summary right, it says more like: well, we IT guys will teach the rest of the company too to be greener and more efficient and do more with less! And they'll listen to us! 'Cause we're smart and high-tech like that! And we have computers too!
Which, honestly, sounds to me like someone's wishful thinking and delusions of grandeur.
1. If IT is only 2% of a company's expenses, then they probably have some other stuff there which involves physics or chemistry. Like, you know, melting some steel, putting some serious amps through molten bauxite, or some tanks where all sorts of chemistry happens at high pressures and temperatures.
1.A. A lot of that is _hard_ to make more energy efficient. You can't, for example just cover a steel plant in thick thermal insulation, because then the air inside would reach a thousand degrees withing seconds. Or you can't melt steel with half the energy, because honestly there are some physical constants of the universe you'd need to change. Not saying it's impossible to come up with something better, but it isn't trivial stuff either. Partially because...
1.B. They do that already. Don't imagine that there isn't already a strong economic incentive to reduce your costs. In fact, it's the #1 thing you can promise, to get Wall Street to like you more. There are some smart engineers out there working on just that kind of stuff already.
1.C. Let's not kid ourselves, we may be smart guys and gals, but nobody knows _everything_. The idea that some guy sitting at the computer all day would also know enough to optimize an assembly line or cracking tower, just like that, if only someone would listen to him, are close to nil. It's a different domain. Chances are you, or your IT coleagues don't even know what that assembly line is like and how it works. You'd need to put years into just understanding that, and the science behind it, and, frankly, there are people more qualified than you there. We still _do_ produce other flavours of engineers, you know?
2. Well, I can't see many upper-level managers changing their processes just because the IT guy said so. Even _if_ the IT guy happens to be right. In a lot of places they're so caught up in their power games, and showing who's more important than who, that... well, to say the least, what makes you think they'd just give _you_ some of their power? Or better yet, give you power over them? Heh. Dream on.
Additionally, well, even as an RPG, I'd rather have something that's not yet another high fantasy setup. Honestly, I have nothing against Tolkien-rip-off settings as such, but God knows there's no need for every single bloody RPG to be yet another clone of the same setting. If you want to play a computer RPG in any other setting, well, there was Mass Effect, but nothing after it and nothing before it, all the way to KOTOR2. (Though thankfully Fallout 3 is coming soon.)
So even if you want to see it as a reskinned RPG, making it themed around creatures hunting for food instead of yet another dwarves-and-elves-and-magic theme, I'll call that borderline innovative in its own right. And most welcome anyway.
Well, I have played plenty of RPGs before, and this one also _plays_ quite differently from NWN2, Oblivion, Drakensang and whatnot. I see your point that there's a similar underlying mechanic, but it does have its own gameplay anyway.
On one hand, true, I haven't seen a game review here before.
On the other hand, let's face it, Slashdot _is_ running out of newsworthy things for nerds. We have the _Idle_ section on the front page. You know, something as lame as what flames the Slashdot mods received per email. Honestly, filling the space with reviews instead sounds like a step _up_ to me. It _could_ be a genuine experiment in finding some better filler than Idle.
(Mind you, I'm not saying it _is_ so. Just that I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.)
On yet another hand, it _is_ one of the most (A) anticipated and (B) innovative games of the decade. Duly noted, it has a rather annoying and oppressive DRM, and it does miss the mark in a few categories anyway. But it does try to do something new, in a games industry which mostly just pumps out more clones of whatever sold well last year. I see no problem with giving it a fair review, much as the DRM trolls would rather see only "Spore sucks", wall to wall. Yes, the people must be warned about the DRM, but I see no problem with mentioning whether it's otherwise fun to play.
I don't think anyone is trying to kill the PC market as long as:
A) they're still publishing games for it, and
B) the one biggest money-printing license is PC-only. Seriously, WoW rakes in yearly income equal to some small countries GDP. And I don't mean that as just a figure of speech. _Literally_.
C) some of EA's own most lucrative franchises are on the PC. It's the likes of The Sims and EA Sports that end up subsidizing some of their games (which fail to break even), not the other way around.
Now if you're about to point out that their sports games are all ported to consoles too, and they've been trying hard to make The Sims themed games for the consoles too, you'd be correct. The days of PC _exclusive_ games, and for that matter of catering to small groups of insecure willy-wavers who need to feel tougher than the casual gamers, are gradually coming to an end. But that hardly equals killing PC gaming.
No, actually it seems to me like you're the one with the basic comprehension problem
Re-read the question in the summary, lemming. Basically a small group of trolls seems to think they're so important that, just because they posted a couple of negative reviews on Amazon, surely either the game will flop or EA will bow down and remove the DRM.
'Cause they're important like that. Someone gave them a browser, and _obviously_ now the rest of the world is listening to every word they say. Why, whole populations obviously drop everything they were doing, and purchase what Random Internet Troll #123456789 told them to buy, and stay away from what he told them to avoid. 'Cause he can post on the Intertubes, see. He's got DA POWA.
That last paragraph is sarcasm, btw.
It's a common delusion these days, sadly. It doesn't work that way.
And at any rate, the GP's post just shows that they failed to make it flop even on Amazon. You know, the site they flooded with those fanboy anti-review.
Could it have sold better? Maybe. But, at any rate, not to fulfill that prophecy that the game will surely be killed by those reviews, or EA will have to remove the DRM. You don't go, "hmm, where did we fail, and what can we fix?" for a game that's the #1 seller. As fanboy delusions of self importance go, that one is an "EPIC FAIL", to abuse that meme some more. Those reviews didn't give anyone even cause for worry, much less make EA bow down.
So, you, know, before accusing someone of lacking critical thinking skills, make sure that you do have them. Because the GP's post was right on target and plenty relevant to the question being asked. Yours is the irrelevant foaming at the mouth. Or were you one of those fanboys, and it's better to throw insults than to realize that the world doesn't revolve around your keyboard?
PS: Don't get me wrong. I don't like DRM one bit. But zealot delusions of self-importance are an even sadder spectacle, from where I stand. Had it merely tried to inform about DRM, it would have counted as a noble goal and effort. But delusions of self-importance like in the summary (""Will an anti-DRM flash mob that's determined to give EA's latest sim game Spore a rock bottom rating on Amazon.com sink the game, or will Spore evolve and shed the DRM? Is this the beginning of the end for DRM-laden games?") are just freaking sad. Anyone deranged enough to think that, needs a life ASAP.
Well, the problem with that idea are many:
1. A game that basically plays itself would be freaking boring for most people. You've basically described Sim City, but without actually placing the houses or streets or managing the budget. Seriously, think a Sim City where all you can do is throw tornadoes and whatnot at a city and hope that the people take the hint and build it like you want it to. It's at most freeware game material.
2. Occasionally intervening negates the whole science aspect just as badly. If a deity up there in the sky decides that sheep should have longer legs by personally throwing lightning at short legged ones, what you have in the end is still ID, not natural selection. You just replaced it by something that's just as unscientific, only now it's (A) with less gameplay, and (B) a stupid and inefficient way to do things for a deity.
3. Occasionally intervening sounds good until you realize what a boring janitor job that is. Evolution happens at large scales and large populations. Do you want to personally inspect 1000 sheep to decide which one deserves a lightning strike? (And that's realistically a very very low number.) Then do it again? And again? Congrats, instead of playing a deity, now you're playing a shepher's apprentice.
4. Accelerating mutations isn't necessarily a good thing. For evolution to even work at all, you need enough stability for the mutant population to edge-out the others or be edged-out, over a long time. If every other sheep born has a different mutation, and different enough to be noticed by the player, the species just diverges fast and it becomes 1000 different species competing and soon running out of compatible partners.
5. We're still far from simulating a realistic and self-contained ecosystem. I've seen a few simulations and they tended to fly off the hook pretty fast.
6. Exactly what is your achievement as a player there? E.g., in Spore I can set a goal for myself like "make a race of Kilrathi and take over the planet/galaxy by military might." What would be the goal and achievement in your version? So I drag the temperature down and see what animals happen to result. It could be sheep with thicker wool, or it could be yeti, or I could have a mass extinction event. Uh, ok. Now what?
What variables would I even have to play with to get evolution to produce sentient felines? And how do I know I don't get sentient parrots instead? I.e., _can_ I set any such goals for myself and realistically achieve them?
7. It sounds like a recipe for frustration. RL evolution is a mess of dead ends, extinctions, etc. What if the same happens to the species that you put all that work into guiding down a certain path?
E.g., the first species to reach, in Spore terms, tribal stage on Earth, were the Neanderthals. They had ritual burial, were self-conscious enough to use (primitive) jewellery, used fire, skinned animals, built elaborate shelters, had work specialization and possibly some primitive trade to support those specialized crafters, built crude musical instruments, and... went the way of the Dodo.
So if that happens in the game, now what? Watch the game playing itself some more until it produces another sentient species?
Bingo.
The waking call for me was when I stumbled upon the preorder page for Gothic 3, mostly out of sheer surprise that it existed already and it showed an unrealistically close release date. Back then it wasn't even in _alpha_. Even the official site and press releases had nothing more than a couple of "look what the engine can do" screenshots. There was no information about the story, the world, or anything. And again, nobody had a playable demo yet. Probably not even the devs, yet. So it seemed way premature to even have a preorder page.
Well, a few fanboys had already taken upon themselves to post glowing reviews. If you listened to them, it was the greatest game ever. Superb gameplay, the best fantasy story since Tolkien himself, no bugs, the best graphics ever, etc.
Needless to say, when the game was released a year later, it was nothing like that. I suppose the other categories are subjective, but let's just say that the "no bugs" part was waay off the mark. And the "a hamster can kill godzilla if it hits first, because it'll then keep interrupting the other" gameplay way at least for me a huge turnoff.
I can't remember the exact games, but I remember I looked at another couple of yet unreleased games the same day, out of morbid curiosity. Yep, you guessed, the fanboys or maybe shills (take your pick) had already written tons of glowing reviews.
So anyone who takes the Amazon ratings as anything more than comedy relief, is bound to have a bit of the surprise sooner or later. Probably sooner.
Mind you:
1. The situation isn't Amazon-only, nor games-only. When you give zealots, fanboys, trolls, and shills, who already exist to force their opinions and views upon everyone else, a forum whose purpose is just that... well, what did anyone expect?
2. Even without that, the amount of sheer stupidity in user reviews online is either hillarious or worth losing faith in humanity. I haven't yet decided which. (And I mean, seriously, stuff like, for a soundproofed Sennheiser headset, where the whole _point_ is that they massively dampen outside noises, someone hat taken the time to write a review to the effect of, "OMG, they're crap! If you put them on, you can't hear anything else, not even the doorbell or phone! Stay away from them!" And that's actually one of the milder examples of online stupidity.)
3. The whole point about tastes is that they're subjective. What may be TEH GRATEST GAME EVAR ;) for me, might be the most boring thing ever for you. I can see a point in trusting a reviewer or forum member who you've already established that he has the same tastes as you. Or maybe taking a reputable source and taking just the facts and ignoring his opinions of them. (E.g., "ok, he hated it because it's turn based, I like turn based, sound interesting.") But trusting some random guy online to tell one what to buy? Why? How stupid is that?
So, on the whole, that yet another group of zealots has taken it upon itself to pollute that already-polluted resource... well, it's a bit like spitting down the hole of an outhouse. Amusing, but won't make the contents any worse than they already were.
I'm not opposed to the idea, but I'd wonder about how would it work. How do you distinguish between, basically:
A. Some hypothetical corporate shill, giving everything from company X top marks just because he was paid to.
B. Jenny Gamer who likes to play with dolls, bought The Sims because it sounded just like that, and genuinely liked it. And then bought the 7
Yes, but it doesn't have to leave the lab. If anyone actually deploys a V1 product in a situation where you can know in advance that it's worse than nothing, and only causes some settlements to pay, then that guy is a dumbass or, in some cases, malicious. Plain and simpple.
E.g., let's say I invent the first flying car. That's V1. It even works about 99% of the time, which is pretty damned good. Or is it? If you're going to buy _that_ and take the 1% risk to probably lose your life each trip, then you'd be a dumbass. You'd first wait until V2 works better than that, wouldn't you?
Considering some of the things the Bush government did, I'd say that such concerns aren't entirely paranoid. It's the first western government since WW2 to ignore Habeas Corpus, use torture, politicize state departments by handing jobs based on ideology and party affiliation, argue that the constitution is just a piece of paper and doesn't apply to the government, etc, etc, etc. And in regards the discussion at hand, to restrict travel and harass its own citizens based on false positive and coincidences. We're talking the same government who tried data-mining grocery bills to find terrorists, ffs. (And if the underlying "arab = probably terrorist" idea isn't disturbing you yet...)
I think being at least a little circumspection is just healthy.
That's not to say that _all_ the USA government does is evil, but there is reason to at least use your brains about new things they come up with.
But, anyway, my concerns with this technology, and I see of many other posters, are centered more around whether it's possible at all. The claim to accurately find a terrorist based on his shadow in a low-res sat image (let's just say that lens size and distance put an objective cap on the resolution there, as in, just physics), is a bloody incredible claim, and big claims need big evidence.
Unfortunately, "we have to do something, this is something, so let's do this", is a textbook fallacy. I can see why people would rage against that kind of a justification, because it really is that stupid. Or maybe malicious and hoping you're stupid (enough to swallow that.) Up to you to decide which.
As I was saying, I have nothing against that kind of a composite method. But, again, whether it actually works or not, depends on how it's implemented and on what data those heuristics were trained. But I'm not claiming a priori that it _must_ end up implemented badly.
I'm just approaching it with a dose of skepticism. I'd like to see someone do the maths and do a controlled trial first. _If_ it works, fine. If not, not.
Entirely too many things these days are basically hand-waved as magic tech, just because it involves a computer. It's smart computer stuff, therefore it has to be right. You can see
That may be so, but that's not what they propose.
I can very easily believe that a tracker _can_ infer things like "it's a man, favours his right foot, probably hurt his left leg, probably tired". That's sane.
And yes, probably by the shadow or gait too. Why not?
What I'm somewhat skeptical about is that they can say "ah, it's Abdallah ibn Jihad, we found him" with any degree of accuracy. You'd need a hideous degree of accuracy in those variables, to be able to sort 6 _billion_ degrees of favouring one's right foot. Basically that you could say, "hmm, he favours his right foot more than Moraelin, but less than Twitter, it can only be Abdallah. Call the CIA, we got him."
Or briefer:
Yet these guys propose to do exactly that: use it as a fingerprint. They want to look at someone's shadow from a sat image and say, "yep, that one is Abdallah ibn Jihad, we found him."
And that I doubt. It seems to me you just agreed there too.
Fund research and development, yes. By all means. But also do some simple maths before actually doing it. If the maths says it doesn't work yet, don't be a dumbass, basically.
If you ended up paying settlements over something that you could have calculated on a napkin that it doesn't work... well... you have to ask yourself why.
Again, it has nothing to do with the Nirvana fallacy. Most things just have a minimum threshold below which they're useless. They don't have to be _perfect_, they just have to be above that threshhold. E.g., you wouldn't trust a statistic that has a, say, 40% degree of confidence, because the chances of it being bogus are higher than those of it actually having a point. E.g., you wouldn't go on a two-engine plane if the engines have a 95% chance of working, because then 1 in every 400 flights would have both engines die. And no airline would want it either, because, frankly, they don't even recoup the cost of the airplane in 400 flights. E.g., you wouldn't drive your car if it had only 99% chance of getting you to the destination in one piece. Etc.
And sometimes "if at first you don't succeed, try and try again" is just a dumb idea. E.g., in skydiving ;)
And at any rate, heck, is there a problem with discussing the potential shortcomings here? I mean, best case scenario, the researchers have already thought of that and are working on a solution. Worst case scenario, someone goes "duh" and starts working on a solution. Sounds like win-win to me.
Theoretically everything is possible, but it depends. Sometimes using 5 flawed systems is actually worse than using just one.
At any rate, I have nothing against that idea. But, again, I'd expect someone to first prove that that composite thing delivers a usable degree of accuracy, and a small controlled trial, before it's used as more than a cute tech demo.
I don't think many of them are also savvy enough about these techniques to make a meaningful suggestion. Different domains, really. They complained about the hideous number of false positives, but I don't think I've read any actual suggestion from them as to how to improve the algorithm.
The rant about Obama and paranoia must have confused me.
Bullshit and strawmen, whether intentional or not. The objections to false positives have more to do with statistics, than with slippery slopes or anything else.
E.g., let's say I have a system which can look at photos from the security cameras, and tell you if a face or gait in the crowd matches a terrorist profile with 99% accuracy. (Which is actually a lot higher than what most of these snake oil systems get.) The problem in that case isn't that it lets 1% of the terrorists go. It's that it also creates 1% false positives out of people who aren't, for just one terrorist's photo. Apply that to just one airport, say the JFK, with its almost 60,000 passengers per day. If you get exactly one photo of each passenger, that's 600 false positives per day, in just one airport, for just one terrorist. But more likely you'll have everyone caught by several cameras during their trip to the airport, so the number multiplies accordingly.
Now feed it a database of several tens of thousands of known criminals, suspects, etc, and watch the number of false positives explode. Given that accuracy, just 100 photos are enough to match a majority of the passengers at one point or another.
At some point you can simply swamp the security with false positives, to the point where it's worse than useless.
And it's not just a hypothetical scenario, it's what airport security people themselves have said about previous trials with face recognition system. That they're crap and worse than useless. Would you accuse those too of being paranoid and slippery-slope types, or just accept that they probably know their job enough to know when a gizmo isn't helping it?
So basically spare me the bullshit about "nirvana fallacies" and "paranoid liberals". Learn what the real problem is, before talking out the arse about.
Yes, but that still doesn't answer his objections.
Let's say you've got nothing to hide, are on the database, then you get an abcess in your foot. I had one, for example, thanks to some retarded shoes which did that much damage and it got infected. Next thing I knew, my walking style could belong in a "ministry of funny walks" sketch, except for me it was more painful than funny.
Would I suddenly be outside the database, and thus a suspect, in that scenario? Or what if they entered a criminal in the database when he had a similar injury, and then I have a similar injury two years later and suddenly I look like the re-appearance of Abdallah ibn Jihad, wanted for arson, genocide and jay-walking in East Bumfuckistan and Elbonia? (Made up name, btw. Means IIRC slave of Allah, son of jihad, or enough to get your average anti-terrrist spook get his panties in a knot by itself.)
It's not like you can choose when you'll have such an injury.
What is the degree of confidence in such an identification, anyway? How fine you can slice a gait and still leave room for normal daily variations? (E.g., account for stuff like today I'm feeling chippy and walk a lot livelier, while yesterday was a shitty day and my walk probably reflected that. E.g., today I walk on grass in the woods, yesterday I was walking on wet concrete, and a month ago I was walking on sand at the beach.) As they say, "if you're one in a million, there are 6000 exactly like you." Will it be able to positively identify said Abdallah ibn Jihad, even when he's walking uphill through the snow with a pebble in his boot, or will it be more like "it's one of 6000 people, one of which is Abdallah ibn Jihad"? Again, that's the number if it could positively and unerringly distinguish between one million different gaits.
Well, that much is pretty much obvious. That's how evolution happens.
Don't tell anyone, but we're doing the public beta stress test, so the publisher can know how many players per server he can expect. There've been some bugs and balance problems found, though, so they might push back the actual release for another billion years. Although the publisher is calling it good enough and might shove it out the door as it is.
Well, they come in 1/3 and 2/3 because we're using the wrong unites for them, basically. If we were using a unit that's 1/3 of the proton charge instead, I'll call it a Moraelin, the quarks would come in 1M and 2M flavours. Which is actually quite palatable. Of course, the the proton would be +3M and the electron would be -3M.
Well, I don't think it's necessarily that simple. There are plenty of diseases that outright kill.
Probably the most obvious example is the bubonic plague, a.k.a., the Black Death. It eventually killed all 3 types of hosts involved in plague outbreaks:
- the rats (which were eventually replaced by a different and more robust species of rat, as, yes, the old one almost went extinct),
- the flea (the bacteria essentially plug its stomach, so it ends up perpetually hungry, sucking blood until it barfs it right back and infests a new host. Eventually it starves to death.)
- the humans
Early outbreaks of the Black Death killed 80% of the infected people and massively depopulated Europe. Nowadays you'd only have about 50% chance to die of it. Our immune system did evolve somewhat.
But if you combine it with other factors, e.g., a changing climate or whatever, and it could have driven a less resourceful species extinct. As I was saying, the black rats that were the co-hosts in those outbreaks did go pretty much extinct.
The bacterium itself, well, essentially the immense majority of those which caused such an outbreak, eventually died together with its hosts. You'd think that would be a very strong evolutionary pressure to evolve into something less suicidal. Essentially each outbreak ended up in a near wipe-out of the bacteria population. You have an advantage if you don't do that, no? But said evolution towards more benign versions just didn't happen. The humans evolved to have better chances of survival, but the bacterium seems to have stayed just as nasty as ever.
Basically what I'm saying is that there is no divine plan to save you, so to speak. The bacterium doesn't know whether it's heading towards extinction together with its hosts. As long as there are still _some_ available hosts, it didn't go extinct yet, and it can continue just as well.
Additionally, some bacteria can infect more than one host, or can survive decently in the ground without a host. For the latter, even killing all hosts immediately, still isn't really a problem. The former killing one of the hosts isn't much of an impediment either, as long as other hosts can survive (or breed faster than they're killed.)
So for example a hypothetical disease which could infest both dinosaurs and mammals, but only killed dinosaurs, could jolly well keep doing so ad infinitum.
Now I'm not saying that this is necessarily how the dinosaurs died out. Just that evolution works in perverse and mysterious ways.
Well, what I see there is that someone put together a distro, most likely by ripping off another distro like Red Hat or whatnot. (At a quick loo, I don't see them giving credit to any, but in China it could just as well mean that they didn't believe that putting their name on someone else's work is wrong. Or maybe they did build it from scratch, after all.) At any rate it's not necessarily some big achievement or effort. And probably only because he was paid to do so. I don't see any contributed kernel patches or even utilities or anything.
But yeah, in the end we'll have to wait and see.
Bah, you had 512 KB cache and you thought _you_ had it bad? Bah, in my day we had 8 bits for the whole family, and they had to last us a whole week! And we had to load the programs into it with a wheelbarrow, and it was uphill both ways through the snow! And we _liked_ it.
Well, more seriously, if you started at the 512 KB cache Celerons, you're hardly in a position to call anyone a "youngin". Even the age of Celerons without any cache at all is less than a decade ago.
If you want a more proper "back in my days" story, catch this: I started on my parents ZX-81 computer with 1 KB RAM. Yes, RAM, not cache. You could upgrade it to IIRC 16 KB, but that was an extra module you have to buy, and dad hadn't.
It did have an 8KB ROM with BASIC, but the Sinclair BASIC was infamously slow. It also didn't help that the CPU was a 3.25 MHz (yes, M, not G) 8 bit affair. But the machine "cleverly" used some of the CPU signals for screen refresh. (We were not quite in the age of GPUs yet.) So you could either have the full 3.25 MHz or have it only during the blank bands below and under the image, or about 20% of the time. That latter mode was aptly called the "SLOW" mode. Effectively it was like working on a 0.65 MHz Z80.
Here I must also add that we're talking Zilog MHz, not 6510 ones. Those of you who had a C64, you might remember that it only had 1MHz, so no big deal. Well, it was because a Z80 did less per clock (but normally had more of them per second) than the 6510. If I remember the timings right, you could pretty much translate four Z80 cycles to one 6510 cycle, though the Z80 did have a few more tricks up its sleeve to make it run slightly faster than that. E.g., a lot more registers. At any rate, trust me, an effective 0.65 MHz worth of Z80 CPU was quite aptly called "SLOW" mode.
I got interested pretty quickly in how I can write something that runs faster, and my dad dumped a bunch of Intel and Zilog manuals on me and told me to try assembly. Except that machine didn't have enough RAM to actually run an assembler.
Welcome to the the world of writing those programs on paper and manually converting to hex. I had made my own neatly organized notebook, so I could quickly find the hex codes for any given opcode and operand combination. And if you wanted to write the equivalent of a loop or an "if"? Count the bytes and use a relative jump, boy.
Of course, there was no such thing as a debugger or protected mode on that thing. If you had counted the bytes wrong and took a jump off a cliff instead of to your intended destination, the machine would typically just lock up.
Oh yes, and it also had a very slow cassette interface, not hard drives like your Celerons, or even a floppy like those C64s.
Mind you, I don't feel much nostalgia about those days. But just saying, if you want "back in my day" willy waving, that's what a real "back in my day" story sounds like ;)
And actually I'm sure someone out there has a better story, possibly along the lines of, "you had cassettes and a whole 3.25 MHz CPU? You don't know how good you had it! Well I got to program an ENIAC by manually rewiring a switchboard!" Heck, both my parents got to enter programs via front panel switches occasionally, which makes even my entering hex by keyboard and with some minimal editing capabilities, seem actually pretty comfortable.
Well, that they'll come up with even more ludicrious crap, they already did, after all. But now you have a court decision and precedent that some kinds of crap are against the law, and thus null and void. Just rewording it yet again won't make it any more legal than it was the first time around.
So, technically, at some point it doesn't matter what they write there. If it's not legal and was ruled as such, you can ignore it anyway. And there's a finite domain of bullshit they can claim, so each such court decision narrows it down some more.
And yes, it happened before. There are already court decisions that some of the things in EULAs aren't even worth the space they take on the CD, but they're written anyway. Apparently hoping that you'll believe it anyway. And in all fairness, some people do.
E.g., around here they already decided long ago that the first sale doctrine does apply, and, for example, no EULA can forbid you to resell your old software. But I've yet to see some EULA which doesn't go the "it was licensed, not bought, so we don't have to comply with consumer rights laws. You don't have any rights. 'Cause we just said so." route.
Heck, Microsoft itself tried to argue that, basically, see, actually its software is sold after all, when India told them to pay the license tax if it's licensed.
And the copyright law loophole that brought us all the "license" stupidity (see, you make a copy into RAM to run it, and if you make a copy you need a license on our terms) has been closed long ago.
Methinks we probably need stiffer penalties for trying to override the laws. As it is, there's very little disincentive, and at any rate it obviously doesn't work. There are millions of EULAs are written that, essentially, claim they're exempt from the law. We'll know we have the right disincentive when that stops.
But again, once it was decided that it's unenforceable, it doesn't matter if they write it some more in even more draconian and restrictive language. You can ignore it anyway.
You mean the same Chinese which (or at least a majority of) prefer the foreign DVD format to the home-grown codec, just because there's an endless supply of pirated/counterfeit Hollywood movies?
You mean the same which hadn't used a DVD before, but didn't need much to decide they'd rather have a huge supply of foreign movies, than the patriotic/revisionist-history crap their government pumps out? Sorry, it never works the way you describe, unless you can _really_ keep the tightest possible fist on the market and control what everyone uses. And they can't. Nobody really can, but in China it doesn't look like they even try too hard.
On the whole, I'm sorry, but while the attitude of the government might be what you describe, I haven't seen any information which points that-a-way for the common man. The average chinese probably couldn't give a crap about all that.
And I certainly haven't heard of any major Linux or F/OSS contributions from that part of the world. On the contrary, I hear about mass-piracy of Windows stuff. So if they're that fond of Linux and home-grown stuff, they sure know how to keep that a secret.
So basically don't be blindsided by some ideal about exotic oriental wise people. They're just people like you and me and your neighbours. Between what works, and what's a good stick-it-to-the-corporate-oppressors, everything-by-the-people-for-the-people chest thumping, I expect 99% of them to choose the former. Same as here. Even if their government would rather they focus on the latter, instead of on government failures. In fact, probably partially _because_ the government would rather they do the latter.
Actually there's a thing that both CPU and OS fanboys fail to understand: it's the apps that matter, silly. The hardware and even OS are just a necessary evil to run that software.
The problem is having _software_ for it which doesn't suck, covers enough of the problem space, etc.
The Dragon CPU doesn't have an Intel-compatible ISA, so it doesn't automatically inherit all the Intel-only apps. It's based on the (unlicensed) Mips III ISA. The lack of a license is also why they don't advertise it as such.
But the cavalier attitude to IP is also what will bite them in the arse. When both are free as in, you can get them burned on a blank for (next to nothing), there isn't all that much reason to go with Linux ports instead of buying Windows and Office. Both do the same thing, but one of them has all the years of FUD behind it, and apparent incentives like "but everyone else uses Word and Excel, what if they send me something that doesn't work well in OOo?" or "but maybe if I learn to use Word, I can find a better job where they use that" or "but will I be able to play the latest pirated games on that?" (Even the "run them in Wine" doesn't exactly work on a non-intel architecture, because, as the recursive acronym goes, "Wine Is Not an Emulator.")
I've been saying it for a long time: piracy isn't some grand revenge against the big foreign corporations. Piracy only serves to kill the cheaper, but good enough, alternatives. If the choice were "do I buy AutoCAD for the equivalent of 6 years of Chinese average wage, or get a local alternative for 1% of that" (or even a F/OSS one) the choice might be very different than when both are free (as in stolen beer;) The big foreign corporation, regardless of what BSA tells you, hasn't actually lost anything there. That Chinese kid making some graphics for a mod wouldn't have paid thousands of dollars on AutoCAD, because he doesn't have those thousands of dollars anyway. But he might have been more interested in some alternatives which may have less features, but are cheap and local, or outright free. Piracy only serves to kill those possible alternatives.
And I'm not saying that as a personal rant against piracy, but because I believe that it's one reason why the Dragon will be stillborn no matter how good the silicon is. When the question comes, "but does this local Dragon computer run all that new pirated software?", the Dragon loses anyway.
And China has already had a similar experiment with their own DVD-alternative. Regardess of what other merits or disadvantages it may have, it just can't compete with something which plays all those thousands of pirated Hollywood DVDs. When you don't pay the DVD license "tax" anyway because you pirate those movies (or buy them from a counterfeiter which doesn't), the lack of those royalties on the local brewed codec becomes irrelevant.
To be entirely fair, though, I don't think it's the teachers' job to teach them all possible figures of speech. That time spent together _is_ limited, if apparently large, and there are a lot of subjects which are more important than knowing the exact meaning of "I hate to hold you hostage." If you have the extra hours to teach them every single figure of speech, I'd rather you use that to teach them some extra physics instead. Or maths. Or whatever.
Plus, would you like to be the teacher who uses that phrase in class? Especially in the terrorism hysteria in the USA?
I mean, I can just see it, "Officer, she threatened to hold mah li'l Jimmy hostage. Mah li'l Jimmy was so affraid. Mah daddy always said, 'son', he said, 'them bastards that take hostages ain't no good people.' And I don't want no bad people near mah li'l Jimmy."
I mean, it's bad enough that one techie understood it wrong. You don't want to bet your career on the fact that none of the tens of little illiterates will misunderstand you.