The number one distortion that the interests holding patents have foisted on the public debate is that being granted a patent constitutes an iron-clad certification of entitlement and enforcability. What a patent actually grants, so far as I can figure it out (any country where the lawyers alone are privileged with such insight falls short of functional democracy), is the right to impose litigation on parties engaged in purported infringements.
Besides, an infringement is not against a patent itself, but against the claims put forward in the patent, each of which can be struck down separately. It's almost a certainty that if these Microsoft patents were put through a concerted legal challenge, hundreds or thousands of claims contained within these patents would be struck down, through at great cost to the litigated parties.
Why didn't Microsoft pursue these patents years ago? Because the threat was worth more than the reality, and they might only get one chance to swing the mighty hammer with maximum FUD. I'd have to guess that Apache and Open Office are presently illuminated with countless red dots to the chest and groin. Prior art in the areas of virtual memory and file systems greatly favours BSD over Microsoft. I figure MS will have far better chance of success on technologies where their own patents were filed during the technology's primary gestation, not that their FUD at the outset will bother conceding this.
If a patent oriented Groklaw emerges from this challenge, the world might yet become a better place.
Saying the Wikipedia is an encyclopedia is like saying the Frankenstein creation is a man. The creature, made in the image of a man, with stolen nuggets of man flesh, was an articulate, lonely, bipedal, omnivorous tetrapod with an impulsive, revenge-centric morality.
Saying the Wikipedia strives to be encyclopedic in nature is not the same as saying the Wikipedia *is* an encyclopedia, which is different again from saying that the common perception (or desire) that Wikipedia strives to be, or *really is* an encyclopedia is in fact essential to what it has become (or fallen short of becoming), notwithstanding that it has never yet been such a thing.
At this stage in a single instance of a mostly unexpected phenomena (who at first believed it would become what it has on the premises of its construction?), the Wikipedia would be better served by close functional observation than a definitional corset.
A commercial encyclopedia serves the interests of its authors through their collaboration in the financial rewards. Those who choose to become stakeholders accept the strictures of that collaboration with the view that the strictures were devised toward the collective end of maximizing net gain (though game theory permits solutions where some stakeholders are served vastly better than others).
None of that applies for the Wikipedia. The Wikipedia has the visible trunk and folliage of an encyclopedia on the soil-nutrient exchange system of a giant underground fungus. What then is the purpose of *defining* Wikipedia as an encyclopedia? Because the chimps in the branches wish to believe it's a conventional tree?
I tend to view the Wikipedia as a sprawling commune of erudite monks and polymaths. For any question under the sun, you walk up to the appropriate voluable denizen and obtain a three-minute idiosyncratic ramble on the subject at hand. The quality and content of the article can range anywhere from drivel to world class. One can generally discern the difference rather easily by the nature of the references provided (or not provided), though the extremes meet: essoteric references are no easier to verify by the casual reader than no references at all. How many of us have interlibrary privileges with the Vatican archives?
What we ought to be doing is enhancing the practical mechanics of verifiability rather than primming the dinner jacket of encyclopedic.
I bet they would see half the total effect just by eliminating existing materials with poorly chosen fonts, uncomfortable line leading (a big complaint of mine), and improper line lengths (2.5 times of the width of the lower case alphabet represents the high end of what I find acceptable).
I get most of these effects just by increasing my browser font size. Just looking at half a dozen tabs I had open already, I've increased the font size for most of the articles I've read until a line of text ranges from five to nine words. The downside is that my scroll wheel is pulsing continuously, the bonus is that it helps me sit at a better distance from the monitor, saving both my back and my eyes. I can read most materials faster than I can debunk the nonsense contained. One word that slows me down a lot these days is "carbon". Whenever the word carbon is introduced, it usually signifies about a hundred conceptual errors per verbal flourish.
In fact I keep a list of words where the person writing and the person reading are rarely ever on the same page with a precise meaning. Examples: environment, pollution, simple, security, consensus, and change. If we could eliminate these words from polite discourse, I would probably be willing to dial up my reading speed another 50%.
I totally agree. When the credit reporting agencies give out bogus information about a person's credit worthiness because of false and unsubstantiated allegations placed on their credit record by shady entities, the credit reporting agency is commmitting an act of libel, and should be sued for it. Newspapers get sued all the time for printing false information of less import to the person concerned? When, exactly, did the credit reporting agencies cut themselves this giant loop-hole on the normal workings of libel law? And no, I don't agree than my SIN or other personal information constitutes my identity, and I have never signed any document with the credit agencies granting them my assent in this practice.
Back in the early 1980s I heard a story on my second co-op work term from a former Dow Chemical contractor about an incident I believe took place somewhere in Ontario. The Dow site operated a large generator of its own, and the generator was monitored by four VAXes running FFTs continuously to detect any unusual vibrations. One day the VAX cluster lit up a few warning lights, the control engineer inexplicably paniced, and despite much training to the contrary, pressed exactly the wrong big red button. The improper shutdown cracked or damaged the giant rotor.
To make things worse, I was told there was a industrial fatality in the aftermath when a panel was removed from a region of the generator that hadn't been properly depressurized. Then they determined that the required replacement rotor was too large to legally truck into Ontario over any public roadway from the U.S. based factory where it originated. I was told they ended up doing a very complex comedy-cops operation under cover of darkness with many scouts and radios, but they did finally get it up and running again, months later.
This was well before the internet so I wasn't able to check out any of the details at the time, and it was a fairly small (yet costly) accident as these things go. I was surprised at the use of VAXes for grinding FFTs, as they seemed rather underpowered in raw CPU relative to other solutions from that era, though maybe not at the time the generator was first commissioned.
Now, the real question will be whether or not you can convince consumers that the three minutes of coasting up to a red light or halted traffic is worth the 33 percent less gas and replacing your brake pads/cylinders less often.
I suppose it would be politically incorrect to introduce a chart of driver types ordered by coefficient of stupidity.
Quite often, as I perfectly time my "coasting" up to the change of the light from red to green, I see the roid-gater who passed me fifteen seconds earlier at a complete stop in the lane beside me. The roid-gater then hammers on the gas, accelerates madly, makes several abrupt lane changes, passes me again on an open stretch of road, and the cycle repeats when the roid-gater comes to a complete stop again at the next red light he didn't anticipate.
Eventually the roid-gater catches a green light by the laws of chance and zooms off into the distance, but I often spot him again at the service station with a hose in one hand and an overpriced vat of corn syrup in the other to replenish the mental and emotional energy drained by all those abrupt lane changes and implied "pull over or die" roid-gater death moves.
No-one ever coasts three minutes to a traffic light. The only time a driver has three minutes to study an upcoming traffic light is when the driver is already stopped at a red light. Coasting time is usefully limited to half a minute. Anything longer than that, you were coming to a stop anyway.
There are many situations where you can't see far enough down the road to anticipate anything regardless and our traffic lights (in North America) are rather stupidly designed so that when you finally do catch sight of the signal state, you still can't figure out your phase relationship precisely enough to make the correct decision. I've heard that some lights in Shanghai illuminate in a progression of concentric squares to indicate time remaining. I no longer doubt the Chinese will take over the world.
The painful situation is approaching a stale green light at highway speed knowing you are a little too far to make it. Do you hammer on the gas and risk the three-second 60 to zero bonk stop if you judged it badly, or brazen through the stale amber with a cop-attractive engine whine while someone's grandmother contemplates finally making that right turn as you blow through her focal plane, or sheepishly coast into toward a green light that hasn't changed yet? Sitting at a red light you could have made it through wastes more gas than speeding up to make the cycle, but not as much gas as speeding up and not making it, which is still less than speeding up, making it through, then plowing into another vehicle (gasoline cost in units of replacement vehicles).
There are distinct loss terms from driving too fast (quadratic drag term, compensated by getting where you want to go by the time you wanted to get there), not supplying enough gas at low RPM (engines run most efficiently at low RPM with the throttle wide-open), supplying too much gas at high RPM, idling in congestion that could have been avoided, and just about any use of the brake pedal (mildly compensated, at best, by the increased life expectancy of the truly stupid who share the roadway).
It takes a lot of anticipation to keep yourself within the efficient zones, at very little cost of not getting there as fast as the idiot next to you, but some loss of opportunity to demonstrate your true virility. In America, guns equal freedom, cars equal virility. For most of the drivers out there, it's not about getting from A to B, it's all about achieving personal expression through a two ton shell of metal.
That was a good post, but I don't understand your premise whatsoever. There seems to be two tactics at work here: arbitrary line drawing, and the belief that if you can't make everyone happy the best compromise is to make everyone unhappy. I read that post by Joel long ago, and I just read it again. I don't think he could have done a better job in the space devoted to it.
My one criticism of Joel was passing himself the "get out of jail free" card. Before I get started, I should warn you that if you are one of those rare people who knows about internationalization, you are going to find my entire discussion a little bit oversimplified. This is a fair disclaimer, but it makes it impossible to judge where Joel was simplifying deliberately and where he simplified because he didn't know any better. The correction would be for Joel to state "I'm going to simplify issues X, Y, and Zed". Then mistakes in the middle of the alphabet would be entirely his own. Just as there is no such thing as a string without a coding system, there is no such thing as a useful disclaimer that doesn't specify precisely what it disclaims. It amused me to see Joel invoke the ASCII standard of accountability.
Concerning the claim that Joel has made the same mistake [over again], this same claim comes up all the time concerning address arithmetic. How much existing code is portable to a 128 bit address size? We're sure to need this by 2050. Or perhaps not. People tend to neglect the observation that we're talking about a doubly exponential progression in codespace: (2^2^3)^2^N, with the values N=0,1,2,3,4 plausible in photolithographic solid state. On the current progression, for N=5 transistors would need to be subatomic. As far as the present transition from 32 bits to 64 bits of address space, it makes sense that operating systems and file systems are 64-bit native, while 99% of user space applications continue to run in less time and space compiled for 32 bits. Among the growing sliver of applications that do run better in 64-bits are a few applications of especially high importance.
I worked extensively with CJK languages in the early 1990s, and my opinion at the time was that UCS-4 primarily catered to the SETI crowd, and potentially, belligerent Mandarins in mainland China. I recall more argument at the time about Korean, which is a syllabic script masquerading as ideographic blocks.
I've always had a lot of trouble understanding the opposition to Han unification. Many distinctions in the origins of the English language were lost in the adoption of ASCII, such as the ae ligature and the old-English thorn (which causes many Hollywood sets to feature "Ye old saloon").
... Unicode now encodes far more [Han] characters than any other standard, and far more than were listed in any dictionary, with many more being processed for inclusion as fast as the scholars can agree on their identities.
Some characters used only in names are not included in Unicode. This is not a form of cultural imperialism, as is sometimes feared. These characters are generally not included in their national character sets either.
And all this fits quite nicely in UCS-2 as advocated by Joel.
A slight difference in rendering characters might be considered a serious problem if it changes the meaning or reflects the wrong cultural tradition. Besides a simple nuisance like Japanese text looking like Chinese, names might be displayed with a different glyph -- the same character in the sense of encoding but a different character in the view of the users. This rendering problem is often employed to criticize Westerners for not being aware o
In many government agencies, a large percentage of the new people in upper management are hoplophobes. They've never served in the military or lived in an area where gun ownership is common and accepted. They've probably never touched a firearm in their whole life. From http://www.wordspy.com/words/hoplophobia.asp
Never heard of hoplophobia? Most people haven't. The made-up word to describe people who fear guns hasn't caught on. Not even longtime gun enthusiasts are familiar with the term.
"We lead the state in sales, but we've never heard that," said Norman Van Wagenen, whose family has been in the firearms business in Provo since 1958.
The Utah Shooting Sports Council is trying to get hoplophobia into the local vernacular as well as the often bitter gun rights debate.
Just the other week I was chased down the local bike trail by a juvenile pit bull who was snapping joyfully at my heels, all in good spirits, no doubt, while the owner who was 50m down the trail from the dog when he engaged me stood around and did nothing to recall or control the animal. I'm sure he was about to tell me that if only I had the experience of cradling a pit bull puppy in my loving arms, I would no longer suffer the anguish of pibuphobia.
On the contrary, if the average dog owner is representative of the average gun owner, my irrationality knows no bounds.
The design of the human eye with aggressive edge and motions detectors in the periphery makes it difficult to concentrate on the fovial cone required to read, comprehend, and assimilate textual content while any Flash ad is "flashing" on the margins of the screen cleavage and lucre. I've had Flash disabled on my system since the mid-nineties. Easiest recapture of ten IQ points ever. Unfortunately, even with Flash disabled I still can't function at my peak in the early evening after drinking half a bottle of wine with dinner, and it would take far more than half a bottle of wine to enjoy most Flash content, so I can't win either way.
The entire credit industry is complicit in the design of the credit-card as an open invitation to replay attacks. Then this distract our attention from the fact that this horrendous credential is being compromised exactly in the manner the design dictates while telling us that it's *our* identities that are under fire. Let's get this straight: my indentity remains secure, it's only my credit-card credential is additionally compromised with every use.
The central problem here is the architecture of the human brain. We're programmed to function within status hierarchies. The banks have cleverly positioned themselves within the equation that credit equals status. This move serves to bypass normal human scepticism, so one time after another, in the all-too-predictable aftermath of one of the stupidest replay protocols ever devised, we sit around and debate the weaknesses of WEP, rather than point the finger where credit is due.
The antics and corruption of the IOC is well publicized for anyone who cares to familiarize themselves with the situation, and the antics will continue as long as the money continues to flow. Where does the money come from? The people who watch and attend the Olympics, or endorse the companies who sponsor the Olympics by consuming those brands. It's no different than spam lovers. Spam only exists because there is a segment of the population who choose to consume the services that spam offers, to buy the products, and otherwise provide the spammers with a lucrative income stream. No only is the IOC corrupt, it also protects trademarks it never should have been entitled to in the first place by abusive practices. The five rings they can keep. The term "Olympics" itself has been in the public domain for several thousand years as far as I'm concerned. The people who support the Olympics financially are no better than the people who buy products from spam kings and perpetuate the dubious business practices in that domain. I wouldn't want to enter into a significant wager about the ethics level of the average IOC member against the ethics level of the average spam king.
You raised a good point. When I read TFA a week ago, it said she lied to obtain a low-level secretarial job she probably knew was entirely capable of doing with or without the degree. From that point on, she was promoted on competence, until she had reached a level where the integrity question couldn't be sidestepped once it came to light.
But here's the question: is her breach of integrity on the original job application any worse than students who take out student loans and then fail to pay them back according to the terms of the loan, despite the capability to do so? Lying to the bank is OK, lying on your job application form isn't?
Why did MIT require that degree in the first place when it clearly didn't impact her ability to perform the work? Institutuional degree-ism is obnoxious enough to cause a lot of people to consider lying for justice. The problem is, any lie opens the integrity issue, and the most successful you become, the harder the boomerang smacks you upside the head.
I lie on web forms routinely. My income level? Blow goats. Some 'requirements' aren't worth honouring.
This is key to understanding the global warming scenario. We are changing the atmosphere by adding roughly one part in 10,000 of a relatively inert gas that serves as a vital feed stock to all plant life on the planet.
And then we go around making this out to be a giant calamity because the earth is thermally balanced on a knife edge where 1 part in 10,000 change in atmospheric composition can potentially melt the ice caps and flood some large percentage of coastal land masses (which would then become new habitat for the fishes we've been trying to wipe out).
In all likelihood, if we had any clue in how to go about it, the thermal balance could be tipped back the other direction by manipulating global cloud cover by some fraction of a percent, or some other minor change in global albedo which is well within human engineering capability.
However, the precautionary principle reads: "if you screw up, at any cost, stuff the genie back into the bottle" completely ignoring that the enterprise of stuffing the genie back into the bottle could have equally severe effects as the screw-up you are trying to reverse.
The good thing about the earth's precarious thermal balance is that there is almost certainly any number of interventions that could potentially reset the balance point. Whether we can gain control over any of these interventions remains to be seen. Probably not if we spend the next thirty years trying to sock the carbon back under the carpet.
Maybe this is a case where we should confront the risk directly and make the best of it. That's how life functions on this planet, as it always has. As mammals, we're very proud of our ability to regulate our body temperatures. If the earth's thermal balance is so precarious, and we plan to live here for any significant length of time, we're going to need to come to terms with the fact that the earth itself also requires active regulation.
Is anyone else puzzled that the climate scientists have complete faith in the climate models that predict the warming effect (granted there is no great reason to suspect otherwise), but not an iota enough faith in the models to confirm that any proposed human intervention in, say, global cloud cover, would reverse this effect?
If only I could get a look at the user-agent strings to see how many of the "all praise consistency" crowd have posted their comments under Firefox. Those of you who did should feel a small twinge of moral ambiguity the next time you open a page under tabbed browsing. Microsoft only came out with tabbed browsing when choice put their back to the wall. I was reading the other day that ninety odd percent of the world's food production is confined to twenty odd species of plant and animal. While we're on the subject of restricting choice for the greater good, I hear that arranged marriage offers many practical efficiencies.
It's far worse than that. Corporations have a legal obligation to maximize profits for their shareholders. Moreover, the interests of the party currently holding the shares is placed above the interests of the future party who purchases those shares, and management compensation is likewise tied to short term success, so corporations also have an inbuilt incentive to slash product costs in the short term, declare windfall profits (while the current exec suite and shareholders cash out), despite any long term repercussions in customer loyalty. When those repercussions accrue to overwhelming proportions, 30% of the workforce gets it in the neck, the company hangs out an "under new management sign" and the cycle repeats.
Occassionally, when an entire industry segment reaches the state of maximal corruption (usually well timed to the new technology event horizon), the entire segment sinks into its own filth hole, as happened to the thermal fax paper industry. Given the behaviour of the industry thus far, there should be a $50 landfill tax on every ink jet sold.
When the average consumer desktop has a flat panel able to display three to four letter-sized pages at 150 dpi (6 to 8 million pixels) it will be sad times for the print industry. People tend to forget that the story about the boy who calls wolf ends with a real wolf. On present trends, that day will arrive in six to eight years. Watch the corruption in the print industry crescendo in 2012 at the end of the 13'th Baktun.
We're so used to the learned helplessness tied to our instant gratification culture that we hardly even remark on excessive claims such as this one. There's a little box marked x in the window frame. Click on it. If you survive the momentary frission of gratification denied, Adobe and Apple and Viacom and other powers of mind control can't force anything upon you at all.
If high-powered, pulsed microwaves were the cause of the disappearance of honey bees you wouldn't have found a single bee within miles of a radar dish and the disappearance would have gotten started around the end of World War II.
When I'm riding the ferry and the captain blows the horn, my conversation is disrupted for 30 seconds. If I'm riding in the car with the windows half down and the car whistles, conversation is nearly impossible for the whole trip. If loud noise interferred with conversation, all conversation in the Pacific Northwest would have ended the day Mt St Helens blew up. But it's nice you can conclude so much without having to consider the mechanism involved. Save us all a lot of useless careful thought.
4. America incarcerates 2m people, of which the vast majority are male, and the largest single slice of the pie, by far, is black males, heavily bulked out by a war on drugs the administration is quite content to continue losing.
Of everything Microsoft, Word is the worst prison. Wordstar under CP/M on my Osborne Z80 never crashed. How hard can it be? I recently came up with a metaphor for using Microsoft Word: it's a lot like golf. You want to format something, you pull out what appears to be an appropriate iron (from a golf bag with 3000 clubs), then you take a whack at the ball and see what happens. Did the ball move as expected, or wind up in the long grass? How long is the grass? Too long, take a Mulligan, press ^Z, and give it another swing, watch the sand fly. The only feature Word lacks is the score card at the end of the round: seven balls lost mysterious font change, snowman on what at first appeared to be an easy headline alignment, etc. That doesn't even count how many times the lights went out unexpectedly and you played a hole over again (the much vaunted document recovery). I'd like to see Tiger play a round with Clippy the Caddy. Tink, tink. "Why don't you putt with a three iron?" Putting letters onto a page: how hard can it be?
Quite funny to perfect this now, with thermal considerations already dominating chip design costs. A nice little bit of space saving if it pans out for the super-compact, low-power cellphone market. For any other application, pretty much worthless. It might have some applications at the high end to increase supercompting bandwidth for systems where the half the cost is the cooling system. After the planet runs out of refinable bauxite, some prime locations with fat connections to the hydro grid would become available for server centers based on this technology.
I was involved in a very early effort to develop a pinyin based IME. Think 4.77Mhz. It worked quite well, in fact. Good dictionaries are hard to come by. Back then, not easy at all. In fact, we liberated data quite freely from any resource we could obtain. I made it a policy that each dictionary term had to come from at least two independent sources (sources unlikely to have stolen from each other). The singletons had to be manually reviewed by a qualified linguist. It's like that old saying: stealing from one source is plagiarism, stealing from multiple sources is research.
Eventually I found an extremely effective compression method (the IME portion of our system fit into 128K including dictionary) using a hash table approach. Collisions in the hash table generated spurious terms. The spurious terms that conflicted with legitimate terms were suppressed by a "phantom dictionary". The rest of the phantoms were allowed to remain. These only came up for pinyin bigrams (almost always bigrams) that were non-productive in the stock dictionary. The user supplied dictionary took priority over the system dictionary (and the phantoms it contained) so conflicts didn't arise.
Because of the way the hash table was constructed, our dictionary generated an exponentially increasing number of phantoms with increasing phrase length. By the time you got to four character phrases, the phantoms vastly outnumbered the legitimate vocabulary. Note that our system distinguished 8000 hanzi characters for the input system, so the space of possible four character phrases was up in the trillions, and the phantoms were extremely sparse by that metric, and never seen in the wild.
Any competitor who had decided to enumerate our dictionary (I could have suggested several practical ways to achieve this) would have ended up with barrels of nonsense, unless they also devoted the resources, as we had, to "research" rather than plagiarise.
Nor was it possible to copy our dictionary directly in its compressed format, as the hash function was tied to a hardware dongle. I never heard that the algorithm embedded in the dongle was ever cracked directly, but I do know that the vendor's recommended algorithm for feeding the dongle was awful, and failed most of my statistical tests. We beefed up the routine until many (but far from all) of the statistical tests for randomness were satisified, and then ran the device ten times overspec to get the performance we required. Fun times.
A funny story is that our software was listed as "cracked" on some hacker site because some l33t dude had removed the code to test for the presence of a functioning dongle, and the message we displayed "where's your dongle?" (OK, it wasn't quite like that) without noticing that with the dongle absent, the pinyin input method used white noise as the dictionary hash function, and produced nothing but chicken soup for the hanzi output text. To successfully change the hash function and maintain the dictionary compression ratio, you had to solve a bipartite graph matching problem and then recompute the phantom table, and none of that code shipped with the product.
In this era, with the amount of data you can scrape off the internet on a the barest whim, I'm a bit shocked that anyone still stoops to our tried and true "research" methodologies from the mid eighties. My involvement ended around 1991 as it became apparent that Windows 3.x was going to take over the world. My joy in life at that time was writing bug-free code, and I didn't see any way to achieve that the way the world was turning. If someone tapped me on the shoulder and woke me up after my fifteen year snooze, I could probably suggest many fascinating IME features I had planned back then that still haven't been implemented, though I haven't checked on this in a long while. We already had simplified/classical, Mandarin/Cantonese working from a single dictionary. It wasn't proper dialectic Cantonese though, that was something I wished to do, but never completed. We did all this pre Unicode, so we had to invent our own Unicode, too. Anyone need a first edition Unicode standard? I think I've got three.
He waves his hands in the air and says that profitability doesn't matter.
This is the kind of sentiment that begets bad analogies to help drive the point home. It was a good article. What was so hard to understand?
I'm sure that cute polar bear cub in Germany is putting on weight at the same pace as a steriod injecting high school senior. The point is, Microsoft's mits are getting bigger while its nads are shrinking. Looking at profits in an aging company is like trying to judge someone's fitness with a bathroom scale and never doing a blubber check. Is the profit muscle, or fat?
It's possible in the business world to mass profits while your vitals are failing. At this point Microsoft is a powerful, aging 300lb middle linebacker with stiff knees that doesn't know whether the play is going up the left side or the right side.
What Graham is saying is that the football field in the computer industry was historically ten yards wide and everyone feared the fridge in the middle. Now the field is getting wider, and Microsoft is playing out its career in the CFL, but it hasn't figured this out yet because the NFL buyout (desktop applications) was so lucrative. Now Microsoft finds itself lined up toe-to-toe against Linux in the middle, Apple wide right, and Google wide left. Occassionally Microsoft manages to get an arm around someone and the stretcher comes in. Apart from that, the chains continue to advance, and not in Microsoft's favour. The opposition is now moving the ball at will, and the game doesn't end in 60 minutes. Google is getting to the point where it can lower a shoulder and break tackles in open field. If it decides to become that kind of player, the sidelines might constrict again. One can only hope that Google doesn't at some point decide that prudent ball control doesn't involve driving four yards up the middle, down after down. Enough with the NFL already. The only entertainment value that ever had was stretcher bingo.
Which reminds me, TSN is reporting that Alan Eagleson was secretly pardoned by the Canadian Board of Parole at the earliest opportunity after serving just 4 months of an 18 month sentence. Does that suck like the FTC or what?
As a Canadian, I cycle through most of the same sites. Add "Not Even Wrong", SciTechDaily, aldaily, edge.opg, and until quite recently Wired. I tried to read Lubos once or twice, I just can't do it. Something bad happened to Wired after the ownership changed. aldaily and edge.org are not what they used to be, either. Hate the new three-column format at the NYTimes. I read half as much content there since that style change. If I'm super bored and listless, I click on the lower left link on CNN and read about the ten tightest buns in college sports. Somehow I think CNN would know.
For a moment there I thought "The Register" was listed under the heading "For actually thinking". Good thing I wasn't drinking milk at the time. Mostly I read the Inquirer instead, despite their green-eyed malice toward the Wikipedia, 500 stories a year about stock photography, and another 300 stories a year about Wikipedia repeatedly declaring stock photography "non-notable", and an unrelated 200 stories a year about Sony's incompetence, if Shannon hasn't died recently, or Pamela hasn't been outed. Stories about the incompetence of HPaq, however, receive my undivided attention.
Scratch CTV. Never visit there. I prefer to get my water-insoluable fiber content from the hockey coverage at slam.canoe.ca. For a couple of seasons, I'd kill time when I was out of sorts watching Rick Mercer video from his site at CBC.
If the link is still there, this was one of the truly good ones. Right now I'm on a codec-impaired Fedora Core system so I can't check it myself. On my Feisty Fawn beta crash-box, X refused to start. No soup for me.
I believe in a traditional family. Week of Feb 14, 2005.
If you're American, don't take offense. There's usually a whole segment of a Mercer episode devoted to offending Americans. This segment is not that one. I think the difference between Canadian humour and American humor is that Americans mock failure, while Canadians mock failure rebranded as success. If it hadn't been for Hurricane W. half of New Orleans might still be there, but then I digress.
In any case, Mercer has a few sharp words to direct towards "Tradition, Mark II". That's what I like. Speaking of chimps, I'll trawl edge.org or sciencedaily for six months for one good Sapolsky.
No one has ever demonstrated the global environment is "overstressed". We've predicted changes that might make a life a little less comfortable for one of the few species that remains entirely comfortable. But mother nature never put "comfort" on the menu in the first place. Every motile organism that ever lived began life by swimming away from its excrement, until levels of the excrement changed the local environment and then the organism begins to adapt to the nature consequence of its own success. Humans have followed the same game plan up until now that every other species has followed.
Did the cyanobacteria producing oxygen in the Siderian age give a damn about their toxic waste stream? And let's be clear here: oxygen is far more toxic to the environment that carbon-dioxide. The difference, like a bad marriage you can't function without, is that we're plenty acclimated by now to oxygen's toxic effects, except for that little detail that cancer hasn't been beaten (not yet, anyway).
The world's genetic bank proliferates designs during periods of relative stability, then prunes the non-performing accounts during periods of more rapid change. This can be defined as "overstressed", if you wish, by the same logic that every minor downturn in the national economy results in public wailing and gnashing; but equally well, could simply be viewed as the natural order of things. For every GM that puts 30,000 employees on the used car lot, a Google springs up to replace it.
I believe that mother nature is very far from having exhausted her last trick. The downside is that some of those tricks might come at humanity's expense, so we project our own stress about our own comfort onto the planet to make ourselves feel better. While we might seriously compromise our standard of living by destroying organisms that contribute to our quality of life, the planet itself would be quite comfortable spending a hundred million years or two mending its fences, following a well established three-billion-year tradition.
The problem with your remark is that there is no evidence to the contrary. God might have created the world 10,000 years ago exactly in accordance of our present scientific view of what the world was like 10,000 years ago. Or five minutes ago, or five seconds ago, or five seconds from now. There is no scientific evidence that the world has existed for any specified length of time. What we actually have with the theory of evolution is a least-complexity explanation of the various phenomena we observe. This least-complexity explanation posits a multi-billion year timeline to the effect that the universe presently appears as if such a time frame unfolded. This claim does not stand in contradiction to the claim that God created the earth 10,000 years ago in exact accordance to what our least-complexity explanation (the theory of evolution) suggests the world looked like at that time.
Amusingly, to me at least, the average scientist is more in the wrong on this point than the average creationist. A least-complexity explanation is not equivalent to an assertion that the explanation actually took place. If God happens to have an extremely solopsistic sense of humor, it still wouldn't make evolution incorrect as the least-complexity reduction of God's little fit of wool-pulling on humanity at large to create a world complete with fossils, hypothetical genetic lineages, and receding galaxies.
After all, the super rich can't stand to own anything that looks really new. It's like that in universes everywhere. Hey, Slarty, I need a universe ASAP, 10,000 years tops, but make it look old, really old. Fossils, major extinctions, contintents that mesh together, all that shit. And pay attention to detail this time. Those mice are smarter than you think.
Slashdot Mirror
The number one distortion that the interests holding patents have foisted on the public debate is that being granted a patent constitutes an iron-clad certification of entitlement and enforcability. What a patent actually grants, so far as I can figure it out (any country where the lawyers alone are privileged with such insight falls short of functional democracy), is the right to impose litigation on parties engaged in purported infringements.
Besides, an infringement is not against a patent itself, but against the claims put forward in the patent, each of which can be struck down separately. It's almost a certainty that if these Microsoft patents were put through a concerted legal challenge, hundreds or thousands of claims contained within these patents would be struck down, through at great cost to the litigated parties.
Why didn't Microsoft pursue these patents years ago? Because the threat was worth more than the reality, and they might only get one chance to swing the mighty hammer with maximum FUD. I'd have to guess that Apache and Open Office are presently illuminated with countless red dots to the chest and groin. Prior art in the areas of virtual memory and file systems greatly favours BSD over Microsoft. I figure MS will have far better chance of success on technologies where their own patents were filed during the technology's primary gestation, not that their FUD at the outset will bother conceding this.
If a patent oriented Groklaw emerges from this challenge, the world might yet become a better place.
Saying the Wikipedia is an encyclopedia is like saying the Frankenstein creation is a man. The creature, made in the image of a man, with stolen nuggets of man flesh, was an articulate, lonely, bipedal, omnivorous tetrapod with an impulsive, revenge-centric morality.
Saying the Wikipedia strives to be encyclopedic in nature is not the same as saying the Wikipedia *is* an encyclopedia, which is different again from saying that the common perception (or desire) that Wikipedia strives to be, or *really is* an encyclopedia is in fact essential to what it has become (or fallen short of becoming), notwithstanding that it has never yet been such a thing.
At this stage in a single instance of a mostly unexpected phenomena (who at first believed it would become what it has on the premises of its construction?), the Wikipedia would be better served by close functional observation than a definitional corset.
A commercial encyclopedia serves the interests of its authors through their collaboration in the financial rewards. Those who choose to become stakeholders accept the strictures of that collaboration with the view that the strictures were devised toward the collective end of maximizing net gain (though game theory permits solutions where some stakeholders are served vastly better than others).
None of that applies for the Wikipedia. The Wikipedia has the visible trunk and folliage of an encyclopedia on the soil-nutrient exchange system of a giant underground fungus. What then is the purpose of *defining* Wikipedia as an encyclopedia? Because the chimps in the branches wish to believe it's a conventional tree?
I tend to view the Wikipedia as a sprawling commune of erudite monks and polymaths. For any question under the sun, you walk up to the appropriate voluable denizen and obtain a three-minute idiosyncratic ramble on the subject at hand. The quality and content of the article can range anywhere from drivel to world class. One can generally discern the difference rather easily by the nature of the references provided (or not provided), though the extremes meet: essoteric references are no easier to verify by the casual reader than no references at all. How many of us have interlibrary privileges with the Vatican archives?
What we ought to be doing is enhancing the practical mechanics of verifiability rather than primming the dinner jacket of encyclopedic.
I bet they would see half the total effect just by eliminating existing materials with poorly chosen fonts, uncomfortable line leading (a big complaint of mine), and improper line lengths (2.5 times of the width of the lower case alphabet represents the high end of what I find acceptable).
I get most of these effects just by increasing my browser font size. Just looking at half a dozen tabs I had open already, I've increased the font size for most of the articles I've read until a line of text ranges from five to nine words. The downside is that my scroll wheel is pulsing continuously, the bonus is that it helps me sit at a better distance from the monitor, saving both my back and my eyes. I can read most materials faster than I can debunk the nonsense contained. One word that slows me down a lot these days is "carbon". Whenever the word carbon is introduced, it usually signifies about a hundred conceptual errors per verbal flourish.
In fact I keep a list of words where the person writing and the person reading are rarely ever on the same page with a precise meaning. Examples: environment, pollution, simple, security, consensus, and change. If we could eliminate these words from polite discourse, I would probably be willing to dial up my reading speed another 50%.
I totally agree. When the credit reporting agencies give out bogus information about a person's credit worthiness because of false and unsubstantiated allegations placed on their credit record by shady entities, the credit reporting agency is commmitting an act of libel, and should be sued for it. Newspapers get sued all the time for printing false information of less import to the person concerned? When, exactly, did the credit reporting agencies cut themselves this giant loop-hole on the normal workings of libel law? And no, I don't agree than my SIN or other personal information constitutes my identity, and I have never signed any document with the credit agencies granting them my assent in this practice.
Back in the early 1980s I heard a story on my second co-op work term from a former Dow Chemical contractor about an incident I believe took place somewhere in Ontario. The Dow site operated a large generator of its own, and the generator was monitored by four VAXes running FFTs continuously to detect any unusual vibrations. One day the VAX cluster lit up a few warning lights, the control engineer inexplicably paniced, and despite much training to the contrary, pressed exactly the wrong big red button. The improper shutdown cracked or damaged the giant rotor.
To make things worse, I was told there was a industrial fatality in the aftermath when a panel was removed from a region of the generator that hadn't been properly depressurized. Then they determined that the required replacement rotor was too large to legally truck into Ontario over any public roadway from the U.S. based factory where it originated. I was told they ended up doing a very complex comedy-cops operation under cover of darkness with many scouts and radios, but they did finally get it up and running again, months later.
This was well before the internet so I wasn't able to check out any of the details at the time, and it was a fairly small (yet costly) accident as these things go. I was surprised at the use of VAXes for grinding FFTs, as they seemed rather underpowered in raw CPU relative to other solutions from that era, though maybe not at the time the generator was first commissioned.
I suppose it would be politically incorrect to introduce a chart of driver types ordered by coefficient of stupidity.
Quite often, as I perfectly time my "coasting" up to the change of the light from red to green, I see the roid-gater who passed me fifteen seconds earlier at a complete stop in the lane beside me. The roid-gater then hammers on the gas, accelerates madly, makes several abrupt lane changes, passes me again on an open stretch of road, and the cycle repeats when the roid-gater comes to a complete stop again at the next red light he didn't anticipate.
Eventually the roid-gater catches a green light by the laws of chance and zooms off into the distance, but I often spot him again at the service station with a hose in one hand and an overpriced vat of corn syrup in the other to replenish the mental and emotional energy drained by all those abrupt lane changes and implied "pull over or die" roid-gater death moves.
No-one ever coasts three minutes to a traffic light. The only time a driver has three minutes to study an upcoming traffic light is when the driver is already stopped at a red light. Coasting time is usefully limited to half a minute. Anything longer than that, you were coming to a stop anyway.
There are many situations where you can't see far enough down the road to anticipate anything regardless and our traffic lights (in North America) are rather stupidly designed so that when you finally do catch sight of the signal state, you still can't figure out your phase relationship precisely enough to make the correct decision. I've heard that some lights in Shanghai illuminate in a progression of concentric squares to indicate time remaining. I no longer doubt the Chinese will take over the world.
The painful situation is approaching a stale green light at highway speed knowing you are a little too far to make it. Do you hammer on the gas and risk the three-second 60 to zero bonk stop if you judged it badly, or brazen through the stale amber with a cop-attractive engine whine while someone's grandmother contemplates finally making that right turn as you blow through her focal plane, or sheepishly coast into toward a green light that hasn't changed yet? Sitting at a red light you could have made it through wastes more gas than speeding up to make the cycle, but not as much gas as speeding up and not making it, which is still less than speeding up, making it through, then plowing into another vehicle (gasoline cost in units of replacement vehicles).
There are distinct loss terms from driving too fast (quadratic drag term, compensated by getting where you want to go by the time you wanted to get there), not supplying enough gas at low RPM (engines run most efficiently at low RPM with the throttle wide-open), supplying too much gas at high RPM, idling in congestion that could have been avoided, and just about any use of the brake pedal (mildly compensated, at best, by the increased life expectancy of the truly stupid who share the roadway).
It takes a lot of anticipation to keep yourself within the efficient zones, at very little cost of not getting there as fast as the idiot next to you, but some loss of opportunity to demonstrate your true virility. In America, guns equal freedom, cars equal virility. For most of the drivers out there, it's not about getting from A to B, it's all about achieving personal expression through a two ton shell of metal.
My one criticism of Joel was passing himself the "get out of jail free" card. Before I get started, I should warn you that if you are one of those rare people who knows about internationalization, you are going to find my entire discussion a little bit oversimplified. This is a fair disclaimer, but it makes it impossible to judge where Joel was simplifying deliberately and where he simplified because he didn't know any better. The correction would be for Joel to state "I'm going to simplify issues X, Y, and Zed". Then mistakes in the middle of the alphabet would be entirely his own. Just as there is no such thing as a string without a coding system, there is no such thing as a useful disclaimer that doesn't specify precisely what it disclaims. It amused me to see Joel invoke the ASCII standard of accountability.
Concerning the claim that Joel has made the same mistake [over again], this same claim comes up all the time concerning address arithmetic. How much existing code is portable to a 128 bit address size? We're sure to need this by 2050. Or perhaps not. People tend to neglect the observation that we're talking about a doubly exponential progression in codespace: (2^2^3)^2^N, with the values N=0,1,2,3,4 plausible in photolithographic solid state. On the current progression, for N=5 transistors would need to be subatomic. As far as the present transition from 32 bits to 64 bits of address space, it makes sense that operating systems and file systems are 64-bit native, while 99% of user space applications continue to run in less time and space compiled for 32 bits. Among the growing sliver of applications that do run better in 64-bits are a few applications of especially high importance.
I worked extensively with CJK languages in the early 1990s, and my opinion at the time was that UCS-4 primarily catered to the SETI crowd, and potentially, belligerent Mandarins in mainland China. I recall more argument at the time about Korean, which is a syllabic script masquerading as ideographic blocks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul
I've always had a lot of trouble understanding the opposition to Han unification. Many distinctions in the origins of the English language were lost in the adoption of ASCII, such as the ae ligature and the old-English thorn (which causes many Hollywood sets to feature "Ye old saloon").
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)
And all this fits quite nicely in UCS-2 as advocated by Joel.
Just the other week I was chased down the local bike trail by a juvenile pit bull who was snapping joyfully at my heels, all in good spirits, no doubt, while the owner who was 50m down the trail from the dog when he engaged me stood around and did nothing to recall or control the animal. I'm sure he was about to tell me that if only I had the experience of cradling a pit bull puppy in my loving arms, I would no longer suffer the anguish of pibuphobia.
On the contrary, if the average dog owner is representative of the average gun owner, my irrationality knows no bounds.
The design of the human eye with aggressive edge and motions detectors in the periphery makes it difficult to concentrate on the fovial cone required to read, comprehend, and assimilate textual content while any Flash ad is "flashing" on the margins of the screen cleavage and lucre. I've had Flash disabled on my system since the mid-nineties. Easiest recapture of ten IQ points ever. Unfortunately, even with Flash disabled I still can't function at my peak in the early evening after drinking half a bottle of wine with dinner, and it would take far more than half a bottle of wine to enjoy most Flash content, so I can't win either way.
The entire credit industry is complicit in the design of the credit-card as an open invitation to replay attacks. Then this distract our attention from the fact that this horrendous credential is being compromised exactly in the manner the design dictates while telling us that it's *our* identities that are under fire. Let's get this straight: my indentity remains secure, it's only my credit-card credential is additionally compromised with every use.
The central problem here is the architecture of the human brain. We're programmed to function within status hierarchies. The banks have cleverly positioned themselves within the equation that credit equals status. This move serves to bypass normal human scepticism, so one time after another, in the all-too-predictable aftermath of one of the stupidest replay protocols ever devised, we sit around and debate the weaknesses of WEP, rather than point the finger where credit is due.
The antics and corruption of the IOC is well publicized for anyone who cares to familiarize themselves with the situation, and the antics will continue as long as the money continues to flow. Where does the money come from? The people who watch and attend the Olympics, or endorse the companies who sponsor the Olympics by consuming those brands. It's no different than spam lovers. Spam only exists because there is a segment of the population who choose to consume the services that spam offers, to buy the products, and otherwise provide the spammers with a lucrative income stream. No only is the IOC corrupt, it also protects trademarks it never should have been entitled to in the first place by abusive practices. The five rings they can keep. The term "Olympics" itself has been in the public domain for several thousand years as far as I'm concerned. The people who support the Olympics financially are no better than the people who buy products from spam kings and perpetuate the dubious business practices in that domain. I wouldn't want to enter into a significant wager about the ethics level of the average IOC member against the ethics level of the average spam king.
You raised a good point. When I read TFA a week ago, it said she lied to obtain a low-level secretarial job she probably knew was entirely capable of doing with or without the degree. From that point on, she was promoted on competence, until she had reached a level where the integrity question couldn't be sidestepped once it came to light.
But here's the question: is her breach of integrity on the original job application any worse than students who take out student loans and then fail to pay them back according to the terms of the loan, despite the capability to do so? Lying to the bank is OK, lying on your job application form isn't?
Why did MIT require that degree in the first place when it clearly didn't impact her ability to perform the work? Institutuional degree-ism is obnoxious enough to cause a lot of people to consider lying for justice. The problem is, any lie opens the integrity issue, and the most successful you become, the harder the boomerang smacks you upside the head.
I lie on web forms routinely. My income level? Blow goats. Some 'requirements' aren't worth honouring.
This is key to understanding the global warming scenario. We are changing the atmosphere by adding roughly one part in 10,000 of a relatively inert gas that serves as a vital feed stock to all plant life on the planet.
And then we go around making this out to be a giant calamity because the earth is thermally balanced on a knife edge where 1 part in 10,000 change in atmospheric composition can potentially melt the ice caps and flood some large percentage of coastal land masses (which would then become new habitat for the fishes we've been trying to wipe out).
In all likelihood, if we had any clue in how to go about it, the thermal balance could be tipped back the other direction by manipulating global cloud cover by some fraction of a percent, or some other minor change in global albedo which is well within human engineering capability.
However, the precautionary principle reads: "if you screw up, at any cost, stuff the genie back into the bottle" completely ignoring that the enterprise of stuffing the genie back into the bottle could have equally severe effects as the screw-up you are trying to reverse.
The good thing about the earth's precarious thermal balance is that there is almost certainly any number of interventions that could potentially reset the balance point. Whether we can gain control over any of these interventions remains to be seen. Probably not if we spend the next thirty years trying to sock the carbon back under the carpet.
Maybe this is a case where we should confront the risk directly and make the best of it. That's how life functions on this planet, as it always has. As mammals, we're very proud of our ability to regulate our body temperatures. If the earth's thermal balance is so precarious, and we plan to live here for any significant length of time, we're going to need to come to terms with the fact that the earth itself also requires active regulation.
Is anyone else puzzled that the climate scientists have complete faith in the climate models that predict the warming effect (granted there is no great reason to suspect otherwise), but not an iota enough faith in the models to confirm that any proposed human intervention in, say, global cloud cover, would reverse this effect?
If only I could get a look at the user-agent strings to see how many of the "all praise consistency" crowd have posted their comments under Firefox. Those of you who did should feel a small twinge of moral ambiguity the next time you open a page under tabbed browsing. Microsoft only came out with tabbed browsing when choice put their back to the wall. I was reading the other day that ninety odd percent of the world's food production is confined to twenty odd species of plant and animal. While we're on the subject of restricting choice for the greater good, I hear that arranged marriage offers many practical efficiencies.
It's far worse than that. Corporations have a legal obligation to maximize profits for their shareholders. Moreover, the interests of the party currently holding the shares is placed above the interests of the future party who purchases those shares, and management compensation is likewise tied to short term success, so corporations also have an inbuilt incentive to slash product costs in the short term, declare windfall profits (while the current exec suite and shareholders cash out), despite any long term repercussions in customer loyalty. When those repercussions accrue to overwhelming proportions, 30% of the workforce gets it in the neck, the company hangs out an "under new management sign" and the cycle repeats.
Occassionally, when an entire industry segment reaches the state of maximal corruption (usually well timed to the new technology event horizon), the entire segment sinks into its own filth hole, as happened to the thermal fax paper industry. Given the behaviour of the industry thus far, there should be a $50 landfill tax on every ink jet sold.
When the average consumer desktop has a flat panel able to display three to four letter-sized pages at 150 dpi (6 to 8 million pixels) it will be sad times for the print industry. People tend to forget that the story about the boy who calls wolf ends with a real wolf. On present trends, that day will arrive in six to eight years. Watch the corruption in the print industry crescendo in 2012 at the end of the 13'th Baktun.
We're so used to the learned helplessness tied to our instant gratification culture that we hardly even remark on excessive claims such as this one. There's a little box marked x in the window frame. Click on it. If you survive the momentary frission of gratification denied, Adobe and Apple and Viacom and other powers of mind control can't force anything upon you at all.
If high-powered, pulsed microwaves were the cause of the disappearance of honey bees you wouldn't have found a single bee within miles of a radar dish and the disappearance would have gotten started around the end of World War II.
When I'm riding the ferry and the captain blows the horn, my conversation is disrupted for 30 seconds. If I'm riding in the car with the windows half down and the car whistles, conversation is nearly impossible for the whole trip. If loud noise interferred with conversation, all conversation in the Pacific Northwest would have ended the day Mt St Helens blew up. But it's nice you can conclude so much without having to consider the mechanism involved. Save us all a lot of useless careful thought.
4. America incarcerates 2m people, of which the vast majority are male, and the largest single slice of the pie, by far, is black males, heavily bulked out by a war on drugs the administration is quite content to continue losing.
http://www.hrw.org/backgrounder/usa/incarceration
I agree with you. The men do spend more time.
Of everything Microsoft, Word is the worst prison. Wordstar under CP/M on my Osborne Z80 never crashed. How hard can it be? I recently came up with a metaphor for using Microsoft Word: it's a lot like golf. You want to format something, you pull out what appears to be an appropriate iron (from a golf bag with 3000 clubs), then you take a whack at the ball and see what happens. Did the ball move as expected, or wind up in the long grass? How long is the grass? Too long, take a Mulligan, press ^Z, and give it another swing, watch the sand fly. The only feature Word lacks is the score card at the end of the round: seven balls lost mysterious font change, snowman on what at first appeared to be an easy headline alignment, etc. That doesn't even count how many times the lights went out unexpectedly and you played a hole over again (the much vaunted document recovery). I'd like to see Tiger play a round with Clippy the Caddy. Tink, tink. "Why don't you putt with a three iron?" Putting letters onto a page: how hard can it be?
Quite funny to perfect this now, with thermal considerations already dominating chip design costs. A nice little bit of space saving if it pans out for the super-compact, low-power cellphone market. For any other application, pretty much worthless. It might have some applications at the high end to increase supercompting bandwidth for systems where the half the cost is the cooling system. After the planet runs out of refinable bauxite, some prime locations with fat connections to the hydro grid would become available for server centers based on this technology.
I was involved in a very early effort to develop a pinyin based IME. Think 4.77Mhz. It worked quite well, in fact. Good dictionaries are hard to come by. Back then, not easy at all. In fact, we liberated data quite freely from any resource we could obtain. I made it a policy that each dictionary term had to come from at least two independent sources (sources unlikely to have stolen from each other). The singletons had to be manually reviewed by a qualified linguist. It's like that old saying: stealing from one source is plagiarism, stealing from multiple sources is research.
Eventually I found an extremely effective compression method (the IME portion of our system fit into 128K including dictionary) using a hash table approach. Collisions in the hash table generated spurious terms. The spurious terms that conflicted with legitimate terms were suppressed by a "phantom dictionary". The rest of the phantoms were allowed to remain. These only came up for pinyin bigrams (almost always bigrams) that were non-productive in the stock dictionary. The user supplied dictionary took priority over the system dictionary (and the phantoms it contained) so conflicts didn't arise.
Because of the way the hash table was constructed, our dictionary generated an exponentially increasing number of phantoms with increasing phrase length. By the time you got to four character phrases, the phantoms vastly outnumbered the legitimate vocabulary. Note that our system distinguished 8000 hanzi characters for the input system, so the space of possible four character phrases was up in the trillions, and the phantoms were extremely sparse by that metric, and never seen in the wild.
Any competitor who had decided to enumerate our dictionary (I could have suggested several practical ways to achieve this) would have ended up with barrels of nonsense, unless they also devoted the resources, as we had, to "research" rather than plagiarise.
Nor was it possible to copy our dictionary directly in its compressed format, as the hash function was tied to a hardware dongle. I never heard that the algorithm embedded in the dongle was ever cracked directly, but I do know that the vendor's recommended algorithm for feeding the dongle was awful, and failed most of my statistical tests. We beefed up the routine until many (but far from all) of the statistical tests for randomness were satisified, and then ran the device ten times overspec to get the performance we required. Fun times.
A funny story is that our software was listed as "cracked" on some hacker site because some l33t dude had removed the code to test for the presence of a functioning dongle, and the message we displayed "where's your dongle?" (OK, it wasn't quite like that) without noticing that with the dongle absent, the pinyin input method used white noise as the dictionary hash function, and produced nothing but chicken soup for the hanzi output text. To successfully change the hash function and maintain the dictionary compression ratio, you had to solve a bipartite graph matching problem and then recompute the phantom table, and none of that code shipped with the product.
In this era, with the amount of data you can scrape off the internet on a the barest whim, I'm a bit shocked that anyone still stoops to our tried and true "research" methodologies from the mid eighties. My involvement ended around 1991 as it became apparent that Windows 3.x was going to take over the world. My joy in life at that time was writing bug-free code, and I didn't see any way to achieve that the way the world was turning. If someone tapped me on the shoulder and woke me up after my fifteen year snooze, I could probably suggest many fascinating IME features I had planned back then that still haven't been implemented, though I haven't checked on this in a long while. We already had simplified/classical, Mandarin/Cantonese working from a single dictionary. It wasn't proper dialectic Cantonese though, that was something I wished to do, but never completed. We did all this pre Unicode, so we had to invent our own Unicode, too. Anyone need a first edition Unicode standard? I think I've got three.
He waves his hands in the air and says that profitability doesn't matter.
This is the kind of sentiment that begets bad analogies to help drive the point home. It was a good article. What was so hard to understand?
I'm sure that cute polar bear cub in Germany is putting on weight at the same pace as a steriod injecting high school senior. The point is, Microsoft's mits are getting bigger while its nads are shrinking. Looking at profits in an aging company is like trying to judge someone's fitness with a bathroom scale and never doing a blubber check. Is the profit muscle, or fat?
It's possible in the business world to mass profits while your vitals are failing. At this point Microsoft is a powerful, aging 300lb middle linebacker with stiff knees that doesn't know whether the play is going up the left side or the right side.
What Graham is saying is that the football field in the computer industry was historically ten yards wide and everyone feared the fridge in the middle. Now the field is getting wider, and Microsoft is playing out its career in the CFL, but it hasn't figured this out yet because the NFL buyout (desktop applications) was so lucrative. Now Microsoft finds itself lined up toe-to-toe against Linux in the middle, Apple wide right, and Google wide left. Occassionally Microsoft manages to get an arm around someone and the stretcher comes in. Apart from that, the chains continue to advance, and not in Microsoft's favour. The opposition is now moving the ball at will, and the game doesn't end in 60 minutes. Google is getting to the point where it can lower a shoulder and break tackles in open field. If it decides to become that kind of player, the sidelines might constrict again. One can only hope that Google doesn't at some point decide that prudent ball control doesn't involve driving four yards up the middle, down after down. Enough with the NFL already. The only entertainment value that ever had was stretcher bingo.
Which reminds me, TSN is reporting that Alan Eagleson was secretly pardoned by the Canadian Board of Parole at the earliest opportunity after serving just 4 months of an 18 month sentence. Does that suck like the FTC or what?
http://www.tsn.ca/nhl/news_story/?ID=202955
200 findings of fact against, but no permanent smirch.
As a Canadian, I cycle through most of the same sites. Add "Not Even Wrong", SciTechDaily, aldaily, edge.opg, and until quite recently Wired. I tried to read Lubos once or twice, I just can't do it. Something bad happened to Wired after the ownership changed. aldaily and edge.org are not what they used to be, either. Hate the new three-column format at the NYTimes. I read half as much content there since that style change. If I'm super bored and listless, I click on the lower left link on CNN and read about the ten tightest buns in college sports. Somehow I think CNN would know.
s on=2
l 1 8134333.htm
For a moment there I thought "The Register" was listed under the heading "For actually thinking". Good thing I wasn't drinking milk at the time. Mostly I read the Inquirer instead, despite their green-eyed malice toward the Wikipedia, 500 stories a year about stock photography, and another 300 stories a year about Wikipedia repeatedly declaring stock photography "non-notable", and an unrelated 200 stories a year about Sony's incompetence, if Shannon hasn't died recently, or Pamela hasn't been outed. Stories about the incompetence of HPaq, however, receive my undivided attention.
Scratch CTV. Never visit there. I prefer to get my water-insoluable fiber content from the hockey coverage at slam.canoe.ca. For a couple of seasons, I'd kill time when I was out of sorts watching Rick Mercer video from his site at CBC.
If the link is still there, this was one of the truly good ones. Right now I'm on a codec-impaired Fedora Core system so I can't check it myself. On my Feisty Fawn beta crash-box, X refused to start. No soup for me.
http://www.cbc.ca/mercerreport/backissues.php?sea
I believe in a traditional family. Week of Feb 14, 2005.
If you're American, don't take offense. There's usually a whole segment of a Mercer episode devoted to offending Americans. This segment is not that one. I think the difference between Canadian humour and American humor is that Americans mock failure, while Canadians mock failure rebranded as success. If it hadn't been for Hurricane W. half of New Orleans might still be there, but then I digress.
In any case, Mercer has a few sharp words to direct towards "Tradition, Mark II". That's what I like. Speaking of chimps, I'll trawl edge.org or sciencedaily for six months for one good Sapolsky.
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/sapolsky.htm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/02/0702
But the system is already overstressed
No one has ever demonstrated the global environment is "overstressed". We've predicted changes that might make a life a little less comfortable for one of the few species that remains entirely comfortable. But mother nature never put "comfort" on the menu in the first place. Every motile organism that ever lived began life by swimming away from its excrement, until levels of the excrement changed the local environment and then the organism begins to adapt to the nature consequence of its own success. Humans have followed the same game plan up until now that every other species has followed.
Did the cyanobacteria producing oxygen in the Siderian age give a damn about their toxic waste stream? And let's be clear here: oxygen is far more toxic to the environment that carbon-dioxide. The difference, like a bad marriage you can't function without, is that we're plenty acclimated by now to oxygen's toxic effects, except for that little detail that cancer hasn't been beaten (not yet, anyway).
The world's genetic bank proliferates designs during periods of relative stability, then prunes the non-performing accounts during periods of more rapid change. This can be defined as "overstressed", if you wish, by the same logic that every minor downturn in the national economy results in public wailing and gnashing; but equally well, could simply be viewed as the natural order of things. For every GM that puts 30,000 employees on the used car lot, a Google springs up to replace it.
I believe that mother nature is very far from having exhausted her last trick. The downside is that some of those tricks might come at humanity's expense, so we project our own stress about our own comfort onto the planet to make ourselves feel better. While we might seriously compromise our standard of living by destroying organisms that contribute to our quality of life, the planet itself would be quite comfortable spending a hundred million years or two mending its fences, following a well established three-billion-year tradition.
The problem with your remark is that there is no evidence to the contrary. God might have created the world 10,000 years ago exactly in accordance of our present scientific view of what the world was like 10,000 years ago. Or five minutes ago, or five seconds ago, or five seconds from now. There is no scientific evidence that the world has existed for any specified length of time. What we actually have with the theory of evolution is a least-complexity explanation of the various phenomena we observe. This least-complexity explanation posits a multi-billion year timeline to the effect that the universe presently appears as if such a time frame unfolded. This claim does not stand in contradiction to the claim that God created the earth 10,000 years ago in exact accordance to what our least-complexity explanation (the theory of evolution) suggests the world looked like at that time.
Amusingly, to me at least, the average scientist is more in the wrong on this point than the average creationist. A least-complexity explanation is not equivalent to an assertion that the explanation actually took place. If God happens to have an extremely solopsistic sense of humor, it still wouldn't make evolution incorrect as the least-complexity reduction of God's little fit of wool-pulling on humanity at large to create a world complete with fossils, hypothetical genetic lineages, and receding galaxies.
After all, the super rich can't stand to own anything that looks really new. It's like that in universes everywhere. Hey, Slarty, I need a universe ASAP, 10,000 years tops, but make it look old, really old. Fossils, major extinctions, contintents that mesh together, all that shit. And pay attention to detail this time. Those mice are smarter than you think.