Speak for yourself, it depends on the firewall. I use Sunbelt kerio firewall and I wouldn't go back to a 'non-firewalled' existence. It has an application monitor which allows to gracefully disable and block 'phone home' or other 'ping/contact company server' on applications and to see what your apps are really doing behind your back.
Many apps these days try to communicate to a company server if just to ping it and/or send data back. All behind your back. No one can be trusted when money and IP is involved.
"... slashdot is to have this big public wanking session with people getting together and making their own "insightful" comment on any random topic, whether they know anything about it or not."
Since when was learning or understanding wholly limited to those in the ivory tower? It's hard to take Linus at his word here, since linux usability and application compatability had been awful for a long time. I'm glad others in the linux community finally realized the point of eroding windows last incentive: Windows only apps.
You don't have to know everything to know enough to make insightful comments that add to the discussion, no one knows everything, and I'm sure there are many topics Linus is quite ignorant about and yet makes insightful comments on.
"One of the cornerstones of conservatism is the belief in personal responsibility, and that includes taking responsibility as a parent, not sitting back and blaming the entertainment industry like some junkie approportioning the blame for his actions onto society."
Yeah right, these are the same people who accuse others of being "enablers", i.e. the legalization of drugs for instance, and help for addicted users, etc. Just like every other human being conservatives just as hypocritical. "Personal responsibility" in the conservative contet of "pull yourself up by your bootstraps", is nonsense in this day and age. Everyone depends on someone else for their survival, their toys, their lifestyle, etc. Many people have not updated their understanding of how the environment has changed and still think in terms of a by-gone era.
... 'built into' the hardware to some extent, and by language, I mean you can translate raw machine code easily to other languages or 'plug' a compiler into a development machine and know what is going on and get an idea of how the machine is actually working, complete 3D visualization of the data flows, etc when you need it, while still coding from a higher abstract language, a real programming language (expert tool) should allow 'entry point' (i.e. layered access, to say assembly, etc) and manipulation within the language itself. Code needs to become 'adaptive', and not 'static' as it is now.
The biggest thing holding comp-sci back is the ability to know what your code and data is doing and where it is going overall from disk to controller, to memory, to cpu, wherever. I agree with the professor on assembly language, but the whole problem is that assembly is 'divorced' from the language itself, when it should be an intimate part of the language *when you need it*. One should be able to set a flag - if platform equals x, use assembly routine y (if multiplatoform) etc.
Data and computing have exact counterparts in the world of urban planning for waterways/sewage, or in electronics with enregy flows of energy in basic electronic circuits, whether one wants to admit it or not. I imagine the visualization tools for Electronic engineering or urban planning would shed some light on the horrible state of tools and compilers.
IMHO the major roadblock is the lack of hardware -- tool integration, they should really be co-developed, updated and integrated where needed.
"In short, training should not be easy or overly encouraged."
Ahh but in capitalist america, it's all a question of who benefits! Creating an oversupply to screw the highly trained in order to lower wages, is a genius idea from a business perspective.
Re:Hm-m-m-m...
on
Geekonomics
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
"... Bad software costs us 180 billion dollars a year? That would be about $600 per person in the US. Per year. I call bullshit."
I disagree. Add up all the time spent re-installing windows, cleaning PC's, deleting or countering spam, etc, etc. I think they are right on target, spam, spyware, buffer over-runs, worrying about your popular website being hacked and extorted by crime.
A few points:
1. Organized crime takes advantage and exploits / extorts companies (the kid who made the milliondollarhomepage was threatened with extortion). 2. The capacity for economic espionage is quite large. 3. Then there is 'just for kicks' aspect of causing havoc. 4. Bad people who don't like us attack our networks/software/etc. 5. Orwellian trojans (i.e. governments, criminals, or corporations of the world infecting your computer with rootkits, i.e. we already have one example: Sony).
Also corporations who are criminals such as Mediadefender, which was hacked
"Humans who aren't psychotic extend their sense of self to encapsulate their operating environment, their peers and their progeny, and we'll destroy ourselves to protect it because we have an expanded sense of self."
Actually you've made a pretty good argument that human beings ARE psychotic, they do not live in a rational manner. There ability to 'extend sense of self' is primtiive and quite limited, (religions, atheism vs theism, capitalism vs socialism, and on and on). If we count up all the wars and all the wasted energy on prejudice and ridiculous social status games, political idealogies, and 'us vs. them'. We could definitely have an argument that most people are in fact psychotic in some sense.
Philosophers attributed the madness of the world to limitations on peoples intelligence (i.e. they did wrong because they were ignorant and powerless (no intelligent enough) to change their environment to solve the problems of existence)
Consider mahciavelli for instance his estimation of most human beings is thus:
Of humanity we may generally say, they are fickle, hypocritical and greedy of gain -- Niccolo Machiavelli
We might add 'psychotic' to the list and miss a beat when it comes down to defining human behaviour.
Its funny because its NOT logical. Actually counter-intuitively it's funny because it is logical, from the properly considered context. There are different logics for different systems and contexts. There are reasons why we find things funny, and if there is a reason there is a logic behind the reasoning. In the area of humor, humor has it's own logic which has been studied and written about (go check amazon.com for many books on writing comedy). You've just never studied the structure of humor which takes into account the intent of the person. If you read any books on comedy and writing, you'll find there is a very logical and scientific structure to humor and why we consider things funny. Things are funny because they flout our expectations or take advantage of of built in biological and cultural programming.
It's not that it's 'illogical' it's that humor is taking advantage another system with a different logic (in regards to the minds expectations, social status, etc).
The truth is we play loosey goosey with the definition of "logic", most people don't have a very good understanding of it, nor a deep appreciation that different systems have different logics. The statement itself seems irrational, but the humor is very logical, when you realize different systems have different logic.
i.e. this is funny because x is not y, or x was expected to be z, but was in fact c.
Have you used Dragon naturally speaking 9? I mean something like that, except who's interface is opened up to the public... i.e. a dictation / word application, etc, you can 'get' conversation from dictation, when I'm speaking into DS9 I'm speaking into it like I'm conversing with someone. I imagine you could get 90% of what you need out of something like that.
Also if they needed real conversation I'm certain they could do a lot better then what they're doing (i.e. partner with possibly other call centers, etc)
The real problem is with inhousing it, is that there is no feedback of where you're going wrong from the users perspective which is critically important IMHO. Ultimately the real test is when your speech recognition engine can recognize slurs of speech and also be able to recognize individual differences and subtleties in voices that throw off recognition and for that you need a decent sample base as well in many varying environments.
I'd like to see speech recognition get to the point where it can pick out and decode the correct voice in a room of conversation.
"Start with how to force banks to quit being assholes and create a universal OPEN electronic payment system that has ZERO cost."
It's the perverse incentives of market economies that give rise to this kind of crap and why the banking industry needs to be regulated.
In canada Pay day loan shops (i.e. legal loan sharking) is quite the business I wish government would shut it down, these parasites do not add anything to the economy.
What exactly do you want to know? I don't have much yet and I'm not sure you'd even be able to understand it because it goes against the grain of conventional thinking.
That's not what I'm talking about, they're going about collecting voices the entirely wrong way. The setup is horrible and most importantly they are not setup for user feedback and ratings. In realtime, they need something like a "hot or not" for people to input their own voices and recite words, etc, and then have a rating system that plays it back for other users (i.e. play a sample of text or a sentence, while converting it to text, and vice versa) then have a way for people to rate it, infinitely faster.
"So depends who you are on how much it improves you productivity."
The biggest problem with text to speech is simply having to train the engine, I found Dragon Naturally speaking 9 not too bad, it's training it to recognize your own unique vocalizations that is the problem. I think text-to-speech and voice recognition is a project that demands wiki-pedia like sourcing of voices in different noisy environments nad using millions of samples of peoples voices to improve the alogorithms, I'm surprised no one at google has thought of this yet.
"Mass Effect is amazing in many people's eyes DESPITE it's shortcomings. That is a sign of a truely great game."
Actually no, it's a sign of a game that was released before it was time to release it and a rushed development.
God of War and God of War 2 had little anyone could complain about because the team actually took the time and busted their asses to make it the best it could be. The same cannot be said for mass effect.
"I agree that the parent / community plays an integral role in intellectual development. That being said, if a community does not place great importance on truth and consistently uses baseless arguments to critique well-founded theories in science (evolution, big bang, etc..) then why would any child in this environment that develops into an adult want a career in science?"
There's this thing called *compartmentalization* which everyone does, which makes it quite irrelevant. Over the entire history of humanity the majority of scientists have been theistic, and whether their religious beliefs was more a function of IQ and logic, rather then the belief itself. Take catholics vs. Protestants, the pope's acceptance of evolution vs. Protestent YEC denouncement of it.
The fact of the matter is religion/philosophy is deeply embedded in the psyche biologically and to think we'd get rid of it in a world of war, death, poverty and suffering is hopelessly naive.
The fact of the matter is: Religious people out-breed secular ones at an enormous rate. One only has to look at the demographic trends to know that the enlightenment does not produce people who want to breed. Their emphasis on self and lack of responsibility.
The fact of the matter is, the market itself, increasing competitiveness and the squeezing of the middle class has a lot to do with the decline in birthrates and the escapism to religion from the stress of work and life.
"I'd rather spend my time actually reading the info than trying to find it."
I agree also, the fact is copyright has a lot to do with why all books are not online (the fear factor). I'm glad more and more books are coming online and are in e-book format. But relevancy vs. time becomes an issue when you have so much data, even when using google.
"That's right...the era of custom chips has to be ended here"
I wish people would stop saying this, the real-estate budget for transisters, memory bandwidth and a lot of other things get in the way of "have the cpu all do it". There's a reason custom chips have cornered the market ever since 3Dfx and the other first generation 3D cards from 10 years or so ago. Since no matter how fast a CPU is, you can't compete with the degree of specialization (not to mention experience) a company designing custom chips has.
Just where pray tell are you going to get the monster memory bandwidth needed that modern graphics cards have? I swear I have to wonder what some people are smoking... Memory bandwidth is just as important as IPC or whatever else helps a cpu comput more instructions per clock.
"It might sound a bit funny but will convey the meaning. Thus, all the translation software needs is a dictionary and some rules about converting word order in sentences."
You're obviously not a linguist, the truth is most words are poorly defined and conceptualized and many words contain compound definitions of other words whose conceptualization was very vague or badly concieved.
I do research on languages and most dictionaries themselves are atrocious. They key to understanding languages is to know is that the words are not importat as the concepts and definitions, and knowing where those concepts came from, so you can reconceptualize it's true function and meaning, many of which are universal.
All languages have a geometry, once you understand this, it makes learning languages that much easier. I'm in the process of writing a book about it (far from finished) because it's something I've been able to know and understand innately since the time I was young (that all words are in fact geometric data-shapes).
"And how would we measure that? Adding content != adding value"
We could say the same re-releases of the same movie on a new format by corporations. The truth is, copyrights and "intellectual property" is a bunch of bullshit and needs to be strictly regulated.
Real property was designed to solve problems of distrbution, scarcity, and living together in peace. Intellectual property is dangerous because in order to protect it, invasion of privacy, civil liberties and curtailment of freedom is necessary to 'maximize profit'.
"Flat pricing just means that someone like me - who isn't downloading movies all day - is helping pay the bills of people who are."
Which is bullshit since most ISP's advertise "unlimited" access AND bandwidth. You're not "paying for the other user" according to CONTRACT. Sorry buddy. I just find it hypocritical to accuse another customer of "paying for him", when the company is itself at fault for false advertising and advertising bandwidth it doesn't have.
My ISP advertise full unlimited unrestricted bandwidth for a monthly price per month, if it can't handle that, that's not my problem THAT is what I payed for *in the contract*.
The problem is a game on the net is exposed statistically to millions of people at any given time, it's no surprise that game companies can't deal with "Zerging effect" (i.e. a term from starcraft where one masses units and over-runs the enemy).
Game companies neither have: 1) The talent or 2) The resources, to deal with this number of people effectively. Not to mention that, it only takes a few geniuses to post or sell their cheats online for them to spread to everyone else who's interested in them.
"Paranoid? I grew up in a communist state. I hate to think I've escaped to one, too...."
No state is safe, all states are wholly dependent on the economic conditions and the culture. If the people of the USA start becoming insane... anything's possible.
"Tape has been used for eons for back-up, but I think that HDD will overtake that role as their prices will be forced to go way down."
There may be another revolution in hard drive technology if they keep pushing new head designs, i.e. "non-mechanical" heads (i.e. light/lasers/etc), how feasible and cost effective this is, is up in the air.
Slashdot Mirror
"Personal firewalls suck..."
Speak for yourself, it depends on the firewall. I use Sunbelt kerio firewall and I wouldn't go back to a 'non-firewalled' existence. It has an application monitor which allows to gracefully disable and block 'phone home' or other 'ping/contact company server' on applications and to see what your apps are really doing behind your back.
Many apps these days try to communicate to a company server if just to ping it and/or send data back. All behind your back. No one can be trusted when money and IP is involved.
"... slashdot is to have this big public wanking session with people getting together and making their own "insightful" comment on any random topic, whether they know anything about it or not."
Since when was learning or understanding wholly limited to those in the ivory tower? It's hard to take Linus at his word here, since linux usability and application compatability had been awful for a long time. I'm glad others in the linux community finally realized the point of eroding windows last incentive: Windows only apps.
You don't have to know everything to know enough to make insightful comments that add to the discussion, no one knows everything, and I'm sure there are many topics Linus is quite ignorant about and yet makes insightful comments on.
"One of the cornerstones of conservatism is the belief in personal responsibility, and that includes taking responsibility as a parent, not sitting back and blaming the entertainment industry like some junkie approportioning the blame for his actions onto society."
Yeah right, these are the same people who accuse others of being "enablers", i.e. the legalization of drugs for instance, and help for addicted users, etc. Just like every other human being conservatives just as hypocritical. "Personal responsibility" in the conservative contet of "pull yourself up by your bootstraps", is nonsense in this day and age. Everyone depends on someone else for their survival, their toys, their lifestyle, etc. Many people have not updated their understanding of how the environment has changed and still think in terms of a by-gone era.
... 'built into' the hardware to some extent, and by language, I mean you can translate raw machine code easily to other languages or 'plug' a compiler into a development machine and know what is going on and get an idea of how the machine is actually working, complete 3D visualization of the data flows, etc when you need it, while still coding from a higher abstract language, a real programming language (expert tool) should allow 'entry point' (i.e. layered access, to say assembly, etc) and manipulation within the language itself. Code needs to become 'adaptive', and not 'static' as it is now.
The biggest thing holding comp-sci back is the ability to know what your code and data is doing and where it is going overall from disk to controller, to memory, to cpu, wherever. I agree with the professor on assembly language, but the whole problem is that assembly is 'divorced' from the language itself, when it should be an intimate part of the language *when you need it*. One should be able to set a flag - if platform equals x, use assembly routine y (if multiplatoform) etc.
Data and computing have exact counterparts in the world of urban planning for waterways/sewage, or in electronics with enregy flows of energy in basic electronic circuits, whether one wants to admit it or not. I imagine the visualization tools for Electronic engineering or urban planning would shed some light on the horrible state of tools and compilers.
IMHO the major roadblock is the lack of hardware -- tool integration, they should really be co-developed, updated and integrated where needed.
"In short, training should not be easy or overly encouraged."
Ahh but in capitalist america, it's all a question of who benefits! Creating an oversupply to screw the highly trained in order to lower wages, is a genius idea from a business perspective.
"... Bad software costs us 180 billion dollars a year? That would be about $600 per person in the US. Per year. I call bullshit."
I disagree. Add up all the time spent re-installing windows, cleaning PC's, deleting or countering spam, etc, etc. I think they are right on target, spam, spyware, buffer over-runs, worrying about your popular website being hacked and extorted by crime.
A few points:
1. Organized crime takes advantage and exploits / extorts companies (the kid who made the milliondollarhomepage was threatened with extortion).
2. The capacity for economic espionage is quite large.
3. Then there is 'just for kicks' aspect of causing havoc.
4. Bad people who don't like us attack our networks/software/etc.
5. Orwellian trojans (i.e. governments, criminals, or corporations of the world infecting your computer with rootkits, i.e. we already have one example: Sony).
Also corporations who are criminals such as Mediadefender, which was hacked
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/01/interview-with.html
"Humans who aren't psychotic extend their sense of self to encapsulate their operating environment, their peers and their progeny, and we'll destroy ourselves to protect it because we have an expanded sense of self."
Actually you've made a pretty good argument that human beings ARE psychotic, they do not live in a rational manner. There ability to 'extend sense of self' is primtiive and quite limited, (religions, atheism vs theism, capitalism vs socialism, and on and on). If we count up all the wars and all the wasted energy on prejudice and ridiculous social status games, political idealogies, and 'us vs. them'. We could definitely have an argument that most people are in fact psychotic in some sense.
Philosophers attributed the madness of the world to limitations on peoples intelligence (i.e. they did wrong because they were ignorant and powerless (no intelligent enough) to change their environment to solve the problems of existence)
Consider mahciavelli for instance his estimation of most human beings is thus:
Of humanity we may generally say, they are fickle, hypocritical and greedy of gain -- Niccolo Machiavelli
We might add 'psychotic' to the list and miss a beat when it comes down to defining human behaviour.
It's not that it's 'illogical' it's that humor is taking advantage another system with a different logic (in regards to the minds expectations, social status, etc).
The truth is we play loosey goosey with the definition of "logic", most people don't have a very good understanding of it, nor a deep appreciation that different systems have different logics. The statement itself seems irrational, but the humor is very logical, when you realize different systems have different logic.
i.e. this is funny because x is not y, or x was expected to be z, but was in fact c.
... of search engines like google.
Not to mention the ease of leaking/bribing information today when combined with google, cam cell phones, etc.
Have you used Dragon naturally speaking 9? I mean something like that, except who's interface is opened up to the public... i.e. a dictation / word application, etc, you can 'get' conversation from dictation, when I'm speaking into DS9 I'm speaking into it like I'm conversing with someone. I imagine you could get 90% of what you need out of something like that.
Also if they needed real conversation I'm certain they could do a lot better then what they're doing (i.e. partner with possibly other call centers, etc)
The real problem is with inhousing it, is that there is no feedback of where you're going wrong from the users perspective which is critically important IMHO. Ultimately the real test is when your speech recognition engine can recognize slurs of speech and also be able to recognize individual differences and subtleties in voices that throw off recognition and for that you need a decent sample base as well in many varying environments.
I'd like to see speech recognition get to the point where it can pick out and decode the correct voice in a room of conversation.
"Start with how to force banks to quit being assholes and create a universal OPEN electronic payment system that has ZERO cost."
It's the perverse incentives of market economies that give rise to this kind of crap and why the banking industry needs to be regulated.
In canada Pay day loan shops (i.e. legal loan sharking) is quite the business I wish government would shut it down, these parasites do not add anything to the economy.
"a squiz"?
What exactly do you want to know? I don't have much yet and I'm not sure you'd even be able to understand it because it goes against the grain of conventional thinking.
That's not what I'm talking about, they're going about collecting voices the entirely wrong way. The setup is horrible and most importantly they are not setup for user feedback and ratings. In realtime, they need something like a "hot or not" for people to input their own voices and recite words, etc, and then have a rating system that plays it back for other users (i.e. play a sample of text or a sentence, while converting it to text, and vice versa) then have a way for people to rate it, infinitely faster.
"So depends who you are on how much it improves you productivity."
The biggest problem with text to speech is simply having to train the engine, I found Dragon Naturally speaking 9 not too bad, it's training it to recognize your own unique vocalizations that is the problem. I think text-to-speech and voice recognition is a project that demands wiki-pedia like sourcing of voices in different noisy environments nad using millions of samples of peoples voices to improve the alogorithms, I'm surprised no one at google has thought of this yet.
"Mass Effect is amazing in many people's eyes DESPITE it's shortcomings. That is a sign of a truely great game."
Actually no, it's a sign of a game that was released before it was time to release it and a rushed development.
God of War and God of War 2 had little anyone could complain about because the team actually took the time and busted their asses to make it the best it could be. The same cannot be said for mass effect.
"I agree that the parent / community plays an integral role in intellectual development. That being said, if a community does not place great importance on truth and consistently uses baseless arguments to critique well-founded theories in science (evolution, big bang, etc..) then why would any child in this environment that develops into an adult want a career in science?"
There's this thing called *compartmentalization* which everyone does, which makes it quite irrelevant. Over the entire history of humanity the majority of scientists have been theistic, and whether their religious beliefs was more a function of IQ and logic, rather then the belief itself. Take catholics vs. Protestants, the pope's acceptance of evolution vs. Protestent YEC denouncement of it.
The fact of the matter is religion/philosophy is deeply embedded in the psyche biologically and to think we'd get rid of it in a world of war, death, poverty and suffering is hopelessly naive.
The fact of the matter is: Religious people out-breed secular ones at an enormous rate. One only has to look at the demographic trends to know that the enlightenment does not produce people who want to breed. Their emphasis on self and lack of responsibility.
The fact of the matter is, the market itself, increasing competitiveness and the squeezing of the middle class has a lot to do with the decline in birthrates and the escapism to religion from the stress of work and life.
"I'd rather spend my time actually reading the info than trying to find it."
I agree also, the fact is copyright has a lot to do with why all books are not online (the fear factor). I'm glad more and more books are coming online and are in e-book format. But relevancy vs. time becomes an issue when you have so much data, even when using google.
"That's right...the era of custom chips has to be ended here"
I wish people would stop saying this, the real-estate budget for transisters, memory bandwidth and a lot of other things get in the way of "have the cpu all do it". There's a reason custom chips have cornered the market ever since 3Dfx and the other first generation 3D cards from 10 years or so ago. Since no matter how fast a CPU is, you can't compete with the degree of specialization (not to mention experience) a company designing custom chips has.
Just where pray tell are you going to get the monster memory bandwidth needed that modern graphics cards have? I swear I have to wonder what some people are smoking... Memory bandwidth is just as important as IPC or whatever else helps a cpu comput more instructions per clock.
"It might sound a bit funny but will convey the meaning. Thus, all the translation software needs is a dictionary and some rules about converting word order in sentences."
You're obviously not a linguist, the truth is most words are poorly defined and conceptualized and many words contain compound definitions of other words whose conceptualization was very vague or badly concieved.
I do research on languages and most dictionaries themselves are atrocious. They key to understanding languages is to know is that the words are not importat as the concepts and definitions, and knowing where those concepts came from, so you can reconceptualize it's true function and meaning, many of which are universal.
All languages have a geometry, once you understand this, it makes learning languages that much easier. I'm in the process of writing a book about it (far from finished) because it's something I've been able to know and understand innately since the time I was young (that all words are in fact geometric data-shapes).
I have thanks, otherwise I would not be with them and it says ** unlimited bw **, sorry you got stuck with a miser of a provider.
"And how would we measure that? Adding content != adding value"
We could say the same re-releases of the same movie on a new format by corporations. The truth is, copyrights and "intellectual property" is a bunch of bullshit and needs to be strictly regulated.
Real property was designed to solve problems of distrbution, scarcity, and living together in peace. Intellectual property is dangerous because in order to protect it, invasion of privacy, civil liberties and curtailment of freedom is necessary to 'maximize profit'.
IP is just one more step towards a fascist state.
"Flat pricing just means that someone like me - who isn't downloading movies all day - is helping pay the bills of people who are."
Which is bullshit since most ISP's advertise "unlimited" access AND bandwidth. You're not "paying for the other user" according to CONTRACT. Sorry buddy. I just find it hypocritical to accuse another customer of "paying for him", when the company is itself at fault for false advertising and advertising bandwidth it doesn't have.
My ISP advertise full unlimited unrestricted bandwidth for a monthly price per month, if it can't handle that, that's not my problem THAT is what I payed for *in the contract*.
The problem is a game on the net is exposed statistically to millions of people at any given time, it's no surprise that game companies can't deal with "Zerging effect" (i.e. a term from starcraft where one masses units and over-runs the enemy).
Game companies neither have: 1) The talent or 2) The resources, to deal with this number of people effectively. Not to mention that, it only takes a few geniuses to post or sell their cheats online for them to spread to everyone else who's interested in them.
"Paranoid? I grew up in a communist state. I hate to think I've escaped to one, too...."
No state is safe, all states are wholly dependent on the economic conditions and the culture. If the people of the USA start becoming insane... anything's possible.
"Tape has been used for eons for back-up, but I think that HDD will overtake that role as their prices will be forced to go way down."
There may be another revolution in hard drive technology if they keep pushing new head designs, i.e. "non-mechanical" heads (i.e. light/lasers/etc), how feasible and cost effective this is, is up in the air.