From the article:
"Because these small [software] agents don't have a complete representation of the world, they are uncertain about their actions. So they learn to understand the probabilities of various things happening, they learn the preferences [of users] and costs of outcomes and, perhaps most important, they becoming self-aware."
I sure as hell hope they left out the lip-reading module.
The sound the phone makes upon taking a picture will be Anthony Hopkins in his Lecter voice doing that slurping sound after he says "I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti".
The lack of tech understanding in popular culture.
on
Daemon
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
The lack of writers everywhere, not just Hollywood (although the problem is acute there) - leads to a morass of bad fiction. Contemporary or even sci-fci. Who out there in Slashdot-dom could not tell when the spirit of Roddenberry and what TOS was trying to achieve left with his death, and the Paramount hacks took over?
It happened in TNG, and you could start to tell when the stories became character driven, and it became a soap opera in space. Will Deanna Troi hook up with Riker? Who the fuck cares?
Later, especially in Voyager (I admit, I stopped watching after DS9, and only saw a few episodes) really just became Buck Rogers in space. Action Adventure stories with daring escapes. Tech became an afterthought, and the goals that Roddenberry had of illustrating larger human condition themes? All lost to the ticking time bomb stories and who was learning a personal life lesson.
If Bond films are interested in going back to the basics, since they have ditched Q - then it would behoove them to start putting serious tech into those films. No more satellites controlled from a GUI laptop interface. And all over, Internet culture is pushing aside mainstream tv culture. The effects that tv had upon the Baby Boomers was profound, and studied by sociologists to death. Gen X (less so) and Gen Y and Busters will seriously be affected by the interactive nature of the net and how it works. No longer will we be happy being portrayed by Seth Green. We will want realistic portrayals of the reality of the world we live in. So far, outside of the South Park episode that mocked World of Warcraft (hilarious, yes) I haven't seen WoW or Guild Wars or any MMO mentioned in a popular feature film, or even YouTube used as a plot device, Twitter or even a realistic depiction of GPS technology. That will all change. The Bourne films started it, with grabbing a SIM card from a airport vendor and using it to dodge the CIA - we will see more savvy use of tech tips and tricks in the years to come used cogently by the screenwriters.
If they know anything, they should know their queue structures...
bool empty() - Returns True if empty, False if Full, and for 50,000 rubles you can insure that it always returns True!
int size() - When value exceeds 5 digits, FSB Process appears and imprisons all additional data to shorten queue length.
In Russian stack structures, they will not follow LIFO. Instead it will be Last In achieves resource starvation, First In gets out first.
Reverse Polish Notation will hereby be called Forward Russian Notation.
Ok, here is my obligatory rant against MIS degrees. MIS graduates make lousy technical writers. They don't really understand computing architecture or software architecture, and it's difficult to hire and retain people who do who can also write clearly, and it's even HARDER to find good editors.
Part of the problem is that if you are really good at tech writing, the allure of the secondary book market is too great. Why be on Microsoft's dime, which isn't probably very lucrative, when you could be publishing for Tim O'Reilley or SAMS? Why write solid O/S documentation, when you can write "The very super Windows Vista bible"?
Between DiskMon, FileMon and Process Explorer - there should be nothing that you cannot see. The new generation of viruses that steal thread handlers from other processes are nasty, but very very hard to detect.
Add in wireshark, as the cause of many a slow computer has been a ISP provided DNS server that has suddenly decided to take it's sweet ass time about answering queries for A and PTR records. Usually a by-product of being under some external load that you know nothing about (it could be backing up, etc).
DiskMon in particular will show you any files that are being sought by any process, an incredibly valuable resource.
Every workstation in our company has the SysInternals complete suite installed in the C: drive. The help desk has been trained to use it. It solves alot of problems.
To ameliorate your anxiety and lighten your mood, I have rewritten the end of 4.11 for your enjoyment.
(Scene: Tigh wades into the water, ostensibly to drift away in suicide.)
(As water washes to his face, he has flashbacks of his life on Earth.)
[Muttering...]
"Oh...no... it can't be...."
(Cut to scene of Colonial Uniform with badge that reads 'Lt. Starbuck")
(As camera rides up, we see the usual khaki green flight suit has been replaced with a suede brown jacket. In it, fills DIRK BENEDICT.)
Starbuck: Dude, I am the real Starbuck. Got a cigar?
Tigh: No way, this can't be real! No!!!!
(Cut to scene of African American male wading up next to him in water. This man is played by TERRY CARTER)
CARTER: And you, soul brother, are not Colonel Tigh.
FADE TO BLACK
CUT BACK to TOM ZAREK, sitting at the council.
(Grabs crotch)
Zarek: I got your Apollo right here.
ROLL CREDITS
Steam allows you to get content online. They are leading the charge to remove boxes from shelves. Today there was mass chaos at some Circuit City stores, because their CEO ran that company into the ground and won the worst CEO of 2008 award - Philip Schoonover, possibly the worst businessman in retail history. And that's saying something.
Next up is Best Buy - do you really need to travel there to pick up a disk to have a game anymore? No.
Sony kinda gets it, you can download some games with a PS3 that are fun, esp. for little kids, without needing to go get something. Pretty soon all the consoles will realize the revenue stream in controlling the distribution channel for all software via broadband.
Do that, tie it to reasonable encryption keys, and alot of piracy will go away. PS3 games aren't up on piratebay for a reason, while Xbox games are. Just make it available, and make it easy - to the world, and the internet will take care of it. The loss of sales via the retail front won't be as bad as the suits fear, and mail-order is always available for the PC gamer living in an Igloo.
Good thing then that Michael Dell is at the helm of his ship again. Because when overall growth slows, market consolidation happens. And Mike is a bit more savvy than Ted Waitt, who came back too late and eventually had to sell Gateway to Acer. Maybe throwing in his ponytail to sweeten the deal.
But I don't think Dell will suffer the same fate.
AST and MicronPc got run. So... who is next....
Acer - Not likely
Alienware - hmmm
Apple - Ok, well that's a cheap shot, but hardly...
Asus - dunno how their books look
CyberPower PC - niche market player for gamers, so maybe...
Dell - I don't think so...
Everex - a bargain basement that ships with an Ubuntu knockoff... not looking good..
Falcon Northwest - In this world economy, anybody want to be in the custom high end gaming rig market? Not me.
Fujitsu - Powerhouse, lots of cash
Gigabyte - Margins on mobos?
HP - Well, Carly didn't sink it, so it still floats. Carly went on to sink the GOP, so yay!
HCL Infosystems - Indian firm, lots of national business
Hitachi - hahahah. no
Jetta INternational - How international can you be based in New Jersey?
Lenovo - probably buy one of these smaller players just for the factories
NEC Corp - hmmm. interesting. they may exit the laptop market.
Panasonic
Samsung
Sharp
Sony
Toshiba
TriGem
unisys
Velocity Micro
Vigor Gaming
WidowPC
---
Be interesting to see who on that list isn't with us in 2010.
Am I going to the Wikipedia page on France, and watching a video, complete with caption in *My* language, of France - like a mini-documentary or travel brochure or promo? Who produces that? Who edits it? Is there a standard narrator? Can we get that guy with the cool voice that does Frontline to do them all? Will they have any standards in how they are produced? How they are credited?
There is a fundamental and critical difference between Youtube, which is a Bazaar, and Wikipedia, which is a Cathedral - to brazenly steal Eric Raymond's title.
A video on say France is the authoritative video on the subject. Unlike say a picture, which may be used or copied with permission that may show a city or a map, videos require much more work. Will Oliver Stone get to do the video for George W Bush? Will it be like the BMW series with Clive Owen, having a bunch of guest directors? Can we have Marty Scorsese do the video for New York City?
Multimedia is cool, but it opens up alot of problems.
The answer to your question is that investigative journalism is still a needed skill, and still worth paying for. Presentation is entirely secondary to journalism, again going back to your assertion that the entire question is wrong: it is.
In fact, it fails to distinguish between being a publisher and being a journalist. Publishers can use Java applets to teach or illustrate educational points, and again - this has nothing to do with journalism as a profession.
We conflate these ideas because so many people who call themselves "journalists" are nothing of the sort. They are tv reporters who make phone calls. Most local news is just taken off the AP wire, or maybe culled from the web. It's broadcasting, it's bullshit, and more and more, it's infotainment.
Newspaper reporters, real reporting simply needs to migrate from printed paper to online. Most of the beat reporters, the guys and gals who dig up stories, chase leads, do the Woodward and Bernstein shtick - they still have a place - a valuable place - in society. For them, the web is even better, as they can mix media. Use an applet to make a map during an invasion, drill down into local reports, even get into designing news user interfaces, something that cnn.com likes to do.
The real problem in the United States is that investigative reporting, digging around, doing follow-up, attributing sources, getting people to go on record - is hard work and nobody wants to do it. The fluffers of news need to find other work. The Bush administration cowed most hardline journalists. 60 Minutes and Frontline are just as home on the web as they are on tv, even more so. But now they compete in an arena where they don't have a monopoly, so they must be worth something independent of CBS or PBS - and they still need REAL journalists.
What we are seeing now is that there are too many newspapers in the world, and so it's just consolidation to the best ones. When I moved to Denver I never read anything local, it was all shit. I read the NYT online. Denver is a shit town for journalism.
The C in John C. Dvorak stands for curmudgeon. Other than Chaos Manor of Jerry Pournelle fame in Byte, I can't think of another columnist less deserving of the tenure that this fat dope has enjoyed.
His contribution to tech has been what, exactly? A keyboard layout that was rejected?
There once was an old man of Esser,
Whose employment prospects grew lesser and lesser,
It at last grew so small
He had no job skills at all,
And now he's a college professor.
My my... how positively non-British of the BBC. How crass.... how american.
Simply take a screwdriver, remove the encasement, lift the platters gently from the drive, and place them with tongs in the fireplace, carefully sliding the fender aside. Once the platters are completely cooked, pull your finger out and head to the pub to get pissed.
The midget in the back seat of the Lincoln crawls in your basement window at night, and takes inventory of your firmware revisions on all your hardware.
He then runs to the forest to find out what updates you might need.
Don't talk to him, it sounds like he's talking backwards.
Months later, Aragon's lawyer gave him some bad news. The Secret Service had cracked Butler's crypto and knew more about the hacker than Aragon didâ"which meant Aragon would probably never be offered a deal, even if he wanted one.
The USS cracked the Whole Disk Encryption of Max Butler.
Now reading about this guy, does Max Butler seem like the kind of guy who is going to keep his WDE password on his PDA?
No, I didn't think so either.
So, what kind would he be likely to use? dm-crypt under Linux? Commercial PGP? Scramdisk? TrueCrypt?
I think more WDE is backdoored than any of us suspect, and my takeaway from that line is that the commercial products aren't to be trusted.
This is like saying that spammers spell the death of IRC. Or spammers spell the death of Usenet. In the case of both, moderators were the answer.
In the case of Twitter, trust lists and a trust rating system would solve all the issues within a few weeks.
Also, wouldn't the phish have triggered most new browsers anti-phish code? Twitter could probably expand it's use of SSL, that would take care of several problems as well.
Slashdot Mirror
And a CGI animated Pris.
From the article: "Because these small [software] agents don't have a complete representation of the world, they are uncertain about their actions. So they learn to understand the probabilities of various things happening, they learn the preferences [of users] and costs of outcomes and, perhaps most important, they becoming self-aware."
I sure as hell hope they left out the lip-reading module.
The sound the phone makes upon taking a picture will be Anthony Hopkins in his Lecter voice doing that slurping sound after he says "I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti".
The lack of writers everywhere, not just Hollywood (although the problem is acute there) - leads to a morass of bad fiction. Contemporary or even sci-fci. Who out there in Slashdot-dom could not tell when the spirit of Roddenberry and what TOS was trying to achieve left with his death, and the Paramount hacks took over?
It happened in TNG, and you could start to tell when the stories became character driven, and it became a soap opera in space. Will Deanna Troi hook up with Riker? Who the fuck cares?
Later, especially in Voyager (I admit, I stopped watching after DS9, and only saw a few episodes) really just became Buck Rogers in space. Action Adventure stories with daring escapes. Tech became an afterthought, and the goals that Roddenberry had of illustrating larger human condition themes? All lost to the ticking time bomb stories and who was learning a personal life lesson.
If Bond films are interested in going back to the basics, since they have ditched Q - then it would behoove them to start putting serious tech into those films. No more satellites controlled from a GUI laptop interface. And all over, Internet culture is pushing aside mainstream tv culture. The effects that tv had upon the Baby Boomers was profound, and studied by sociologists to death. Gen X (less so) and Gen Y and Busters will seriously be affected by the interactive nature of the net and how it works. No longer will we be happy being portrayed by Seth Green. We will want realistic portrayals of the reality of the world we live in. So far, outside of the South Park episode that mocked World of Warcraft (hilarious, yes) I haven't seen WoW or Guild Wars or any MMO mentioned in a popular feature film, or even YouTube used as a plot device, Twitter or even a realistic depiction of GPS technology. That will all change. The Bourne films started it, with grabbing a SIM card from a airport vendor and using it to dodge the CIA - we will see more savvy use of tech tips and tricks in the years to come used cogently by the screenwriters.
I suspect that when I am in my eighties, I will have much less desire to communicate with the world or check the news on a minute by minute basis.
Dude, you so know that you will be going on l33t guild raids playing World of Warcraft 6, which will feature mega instances with 500 v 500 fights.
If they know anything, they should know their queue structures... bool empty() - Returns True if empty, False if Full, and for 50,000 rubles you can insure that it always returns True!
int size() - When value exceeds 5 digits, FSB Process appears and imprisons all additional data to shorten queue length.
In Russian stack structures, they will not follow LIFO. Instead it will be Last In achieves resource starvation, First In gets out first. Reverse Polish Notation will hereby be called Forward Russian Notation.
Ok, here is my obligatory rant against MIS degrees. MIS graduates make lousy technical writers. They don't really understand computing architecture or software architecture, and it's difficult to hire and retain people who do who can also write clearly, and it's even HARDER to find good editors.
Part of the problem is that if you are really good at tech writing, the allure of the secondary book market is too great. Why be on Microsoft's dime, which isn't probably very lucrative, when you could be publishing for Tim O'Reilley or SAMS? Why write solid O/S documentation, when you can write "The very super Windows Vista bible"?
Between DiskMon, FileMon and Process Explorer - there should be nothing that you cannot see. The new generation of viruses that steal thread handlers from other processes are nasty, but very very hard to detect.
Add in wireshark, as the cause of many a slow computer has been a ISP provided DNS server that has suddenly decided to take it's sweet ass time about answering queries for A and PTR records. Usually a by-product of being under some external load that you know nothing about (it could be backing up, etc).
DiskMon in particular will show you any files that are being sought by any process, an incredibly valuable resource.
Every workstation in our company has the SysInternals complete suite installed in the C: drive. The help desk has been trained to use it. It solves alot of problems.
To ameliorate your anxiety and lighten your mood, I have rewritten the end of 4.11 for your enjoyment.
(Scene: Tigh wades into the water, ostensibly to drift away in suicide.)
(As water washes to his face, he has flashbacks of his life on Earth.)
[Muttering...] "Oh...no... it can't be...." (Cut to scene of Colonial Uniform with badge that reads 'Lt. Starbuck")
(As camera rides up, we see the usual khaki green flight suit has been replaced with a suede brown jacket. In it, fills DIRK BENEDICT.)
Starbuck: Dude, I am the real Starbuck. Got a cigar?
Tigh: No way, this can't be real! No!!!!
(Cut to scene of African American male wading up next to him in water. This man is played by TERRY CARTER)
CARTER: And you, soul brother, are not Colonel Tigh.
FADE TO BLACK
CUT BACK to TOM ZAREK, sitting at the council.
(Grabs crotch) Zarek: I got your Apollo right here.
ROLL CREDITS
Steam allows you to get content online. They are leading the charge to remove boxes from shelves. Today there was mass chaos at some Circuit City stores, because their CEO ran that company into the ground and won the worst CEO of 2008 award - Philip Schoonover, possibly the worst businessman in retail history. And that's saying something.
Next up is Best Buy - do you really need to travel there to pick up a disk to have a game anymore? No.
Sony kinda gets it, you can download some games with a PS3 that are fun, esp. for little kids, without needing to go get something. Pretty soon all the consoles will realize the revenue stream in controlling the distribution channel for all software via broadband.
Do that, tie it to reasonable encryption keys, and alot of piracy will go away. PS3 games aren't up on piratebay for a reason, while Xbox games are. Just make it available, and make it easy - to the world, and the internet will take care of it. The loss of sales via the retail front won't be as bad as the suits fear, and mail-order is always available for the PC gamer living in an Igloo.
Good thing then that Michael Dell is at the helm of his ship again. Because when overall growth slows, market consolidation happens. And Mike is a bit more savvy than Ted Waitt, who came back too late and eventually had to sell Gateway to Acer. Maybe throwing in his ponytail to sweeten the deal.
But I don't think Dell will suffer the same fate.
AST and MicronPc got run. So... who is next....
Acer - Not likely
Alienware - hmmm
Apple - Ok, well that's a cheap shot, but hardly...
Asus - dunno how their books look
CyberPower PC - niche market player for gamers, so maybe...
Dell - I don't think so...
Everex - a bargain basement that ships with an Ubuntu knockoff... not looking good..
Falcon Northwest - In this world economy, anybody want to be in the custom high end gaming rig market? Not me.
Fujitsu - Powerhouse, lots of cash
Gigabyte - Margins on mobos?
HP - Well, Carly didn't sink it, so it still floats. Carly went on to sink the GOP, so yay!
HCL Infosystems - Indian firm, lots of national business
Hitachi - hahahah. no
Jetta INternational - How international can you be based in New Jersey?
Lenovo - probably buy one of these smaller players just for the factories
NEC Corp - hmmm. interesting. they may exit the laptop market.
Panasonic
Samsung
Sharp
Sony
Toshiba
TriGem
unisys
Velocity Micro
Vigor Gaming
WidowPC
---
Be interesting to see who on that list isn't with us in 2010.
...video editor
Am I going to the Wikipedia page on France, and watching a video, complete with caption in *My* language, of France - like a mini-documentary or travel brochure or promo? Who produces that? Who edits it? Is there a standard narrator? Can we get that guy with the cool voice that does Frontline to do them all? Will they have any standards in how they are produced? How they are credited?
There is a fundamental and critical difference between Youtube, which is a Bazaar, and Wikipedia, which is a Cathedral - to brazenly steal Eric Raymond's title.
A video on say France is the authoritative video on the subject. Unlike say a picture, which may be used or copied with permission that may show a city or a map, videos require much more work. Will Oliver Stone get to do the video for George W Bush? Will it be like the BMW series with Clive Owen, having a bunch of guest directors? Can we have Marty Scorsese do the video for New York City?
Multimedia is cool, but it opens up alot of problems.
The answer to your question is that investigative journalism is still a needed skill, and still worth paying for. Presentation is entirely secondary to journalism, again going back to your assertion that the entire question is wrong: it is.
In fact, it fails to distinguish between being a publisher and being a journalist. Publishers can use Java applets to teach or illustrate educational points, and again - this has nothing to do with journalism as a profession.
We conflate these ideas because so many people who call themselves "journalists" are nothing of the sort. They are tv reporters who make phone calls. Most local news is just taken off the AP wire, or maybe culled from the web. It's broadcasting, it's bullshit, and more and more, it's infotainment.
Newspaper reporters, real reporting simply needs to migrate from printed paper to online. Most of the beat reporters, the guys and gals who dig up stories, chase leads, do the Woodward and Bernstein shtick - they still have a place - a valuable place - in society. For them, the web is even better, as they can mix media. Use an applet to make a map during an invasion, drill down into local reports, even get into designing news user interfaces, something that cnn.com likes to do.
The real problem in the United States is that investigative reporting, digging around, doing follow-up, attributing sources, getting people to go on record - is hard work and nobody wants to do it. The fluffers of news need to find other work. The Bush administration cowed most hardline journalists. 60 Minutes and Frontline are just as home on the web as they are on tv, even more so. But now they compete in an arena where they don't have a monopoly, so they must be worth something independent of CBS or PBS - and they still need REAL journalists.
What we are seeing now is that there are too many newspapers in the world, and so it's just consolidation to the best ones. When I moved to Denver I never read anything local, it was all shit. I read the NYT online. Denver is a shit town for journalism.
The C in John C. Dvorak stands for curmudgeon. Other than Chaos Manor of Jerry Pournelle fame in Byte, I can't think of another columnist less deserving of the tenure that this fat dope has enjoyed.
His contribution to tech has been what, exactly? A keyboard layout that was rejected?
And on that list, only Sun is sinking. (You know that will be the byline in every traderag when it happens.)
The rest of the selections are idiotic.
It sounds like.... The Crimson Permanent Assurance!
There once was an old man of Esser,
Whose employment prospects grew lesser and lesser,
It at last grew so small
He had no job skills at all,
And now he's a college professor.
I have a image of Osama in a cave, yelling at his minions:
"this fucking version of PHP isn't compatible with PhPBB!"
"who fucking bogarted my O'Reilley book! Off with your head!"
My my... how positively non-British of the BBC. How crass.... how american.
Simply take a screwdriver, remove the encasement, lift the platters gently from the drive, and place them with tongs in the fireplace, carefully sliding the fender aside. Once the platters are completely cooked, pull your finger out and head to the pub to get pissed.
The midget in the back seat of the Lincoln crawls in your basement window at night, and takes inventory of your firmware revisions on all your hardware.
He then runs to the forest to find out what updates you might need.
Don't talk to him, it sounds like he's talking backwards.
Months later, Aragon's lawyer gave him some bad news. The Secret Service had cracked Butler's crypto and knew more about the hacker than Aragon didâ"which meant Aragon would probably never be offered a deal, even if he wanted one.
The USS cracked the Whole Disk Encryption of Max Butler.
Now reading about this guy, does Max Butler seem like the kind of guy who is going to keep his WDE password on his PDA?
No, I didn't think so either.
So, what kind would he be likely to use? dm-crypt under Linux? Commercial PGP? Scramdisk? TrueCrypt?
I think more WDE is backdoored than any of us suspect, and my takeaway from that line is that the commercial products aren't to be trusted.
Buy stock in Caterpillar because we're going to be digging a bunch of holes around the country.
This is the kind of device Hunter S. Thompson would have stuck under his house.
This is like saying that spammers spell the death of IRC. Or spammers spell the death of Usenet. In the case of both, moderators were the answer.
In the case of Twitter, trust lists and a trust rating system would solve all the issues within a few weeks.
Also, wouldn't the phish have triggered most new browsers anti-phish code? Twitter could probably expand it's use of SSL, that would take care of several problems as well.
You are correct, I conflated the terms.
Here:
http://www.informationweek.com/news/windows/operatingsystems/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=M5E5UC51GCZZAQSNDLPSKH0CJUNN2JVN?articleID=212700410&_requestid=77696