Re:iFolder for Windows -- locking issues?!
on
Ifolder Server Review
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I can give you the definition of Troll too, but it's not literal when used in geekspeak. You can fileshare with yourself, just like this product explicitly implies on it's webpage that it is for personal files to be shared across multiple computers. Collaboration would have versioning control, multiuser (concurrent), file-locking, etc...
This just isn't that big of a product. Whether it will be or not, is up to the development team, but it does exactly what they say it does.
Look, I'm not a conservative zealot, but I do have children, and I understand the purpose the government is trying to serve here.
Is no one annoyed that you can "accidentally" stumble onto porn while browsing the web, even if that's not what you're out to see (at the moment)? The internet is structureless, meaning there is no logical way to find what you are looking for. If my daughter searches for "chicks" meaning baby chickens, I seriously doubt the first 10 pages will have anything to do with barnyard fowl.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee even said his biggest regret was not inverting the domain structure so you would go to org.slashdot.yro so your intent and destination as you navigate the DNS tree made more sense. If XXX goes through you would have had to go to xxx.porn.www under that system and your result would hopefully better-suit your intent.
Any sysadmin that jumbles together a bunch of random nodes with no structure should be fired, so why do good system administration practices not apply to the structure of the internet itself?
Everybody says it's the parents that should monitor the children, but get real. My kids are exposed to Myspace all day in school, watch basic cable, play video games and interact with their peers. I'm with them every morning, evening and weekend. Filters for the internet, Vchips for TV's, game rating systems, etc, help parents keep tabs on what's going on, but seriously aside from the tech elite how many parents actually know of or how to use these things? Go say "proxy server" to your mother, and see what she thinks it is.
I think it should be a service offered by ISP's, maybe even for extra cost, but it should be a feature people are presented with when they sign up. No kids? Don't buy it. Larger ISP's already have this, and if I owned a smaller, localized ISP I would see an opportunity to provide a service and make more money.
The government has just cause to investigate what people consider harmful. Would you want them to pass legislation without investigating the issue? The unfortunate precedent of our time is that everyone considers everything an invasion of privacy. I don't care if they see anonymous records! We should be much more concerned with non-anonymous wiretaps then collection of anonymous internet usage statistics. What they see at ISP's is the real deal, that's what people are actually doing on the internet. You can't get that information by asking "Disney dads" to fill out a survey about his porn habits, you won't get any honest answers.
Before we get into the usual banter about BSD, Netcraft, or whatever they've confirmed recently, I have to say that I use BSD more now then ever.
It would never have dawned on me to bother with trying BSD as a desktop until I had some extra cash in the account and setup a system for network monitoring and packet scanning. With the bulk of the load being network-based, I figured this might as well be my desktop system too to garner more bang for the buck. This, mind you, after having used GNU/Linux and Windows for years and relegating BSD to beige server boxen only.
That was a about a year ago. Today every PC I own runs FreeBSD as the primary desktop.
It's not without it's issues when you install from the standard FreeBSD disks. I had to compile OOOrg from ports using flags (with cups, kde), and I had to install the linuxflashplayer-wrapper and tinker with it for a while to get it running...so yes, there are dozens of "little" things that keep this from desktop adoption.
If a distribution such as DesktopBSD can create prepackaged desktop installations with a preconfigured flash-player, OOOrg, etc...I don't see why many people wouldn't at least try it out. The package management from a desktop user perspective has been great (I prefer it over apt, yum or portage), I have no failed installations due to -cpio bad magic, checksig errors (when I know the keys are installed), etc...
Be prepared though, with this install you get a basic desktop. There is still much work to be done, but this is a nice start from a group of guys I can totally relate to.
Agreed, that is true. I'm more impressed by the man's ability to know his niche and stick to his guns. He knew he wasn't a Walmart product manufacturer, and for all intents and purposes he really covered his own company's ass by NOT putting his high priced models next to all the cheap ones, or going the other way and making cheaper stuff of his own.
The acquisition rounded out the company, and made it financially feasable to simultaneously exist in the cheap-crap market and still be a renowned specialty dealer.
Snapper had been acquired by Simplicity, just as Simplicity was acquired by Briggs & Stratton. This gives B&S all tiers of products: consumer, professional and commercial.
Snapper may not be in the commodity stores, but that's not because they are a boutique item. It is an intentional attempt to maintain a reputation of dignity among professionals.
From Simplicity Manufacturing's Website:
On July 4, 2004, Briggs & Stratton Corporation acquired Simplicity Manufacturing and its companies Snapper, Ferris Industries and Giant-Vac. The purchase represents Briggs & Stratton's first attempt to serve the lawn and garden industry directly. Briggs & Stratton believes this acquisition will allow it to build closer relationships with its OEM and retail customers from an operational, sales and marketing standpoint.
"Simplicity is a solid company with several compelling brands, a strong position in the retail dealer channel for outdoor power product, and superior product development capabilities," said John S. Shiely, Briggs & Stratton's Chairman, CEO and President. "This acquisition is another step in our strategy to present an even more compelling value proposition to consumers of our products and superior returns to our shareholders," he said.
Simplicity Manufacturing, Inc. Port Washington, WI
In other words, they already had the cheap crap to sell (B&S Mowers), and didn't want to compete with themselves with higher priced models that could go to specialty home improvement stores where they would move more quickly.
The author seems to have jumped the gun a bit on the install, since the NVIDIA issues were announced almost immediately after the release, and subsequently have been queued for immediate repair.
As for his comment that due to these issues it may not be the best starter disto, I agree, but only because Fedora is a testbed product, created to directly fill the void left by RedHat going to a subscription-only model for RHEL. CentOS is more stable by building RHEL from sources. In Fedoraland you take STABLE releases with a grain of salt.
My FC5 install went without a hitch this morning, and it let me create users after first boot (don't know why his didn't).
I actually like the new fonts and eye candy. The only visual *yawn* is that the Bluecurve icons are still there, and I've never been partial to them.
Compared to RHEL4 on the same system, FC5 is MUCH snapper, but I had my usual issues of smartd failing and having to use a PCMCIA wifi card instead of my built-in Intel (Thinkpad T43p).
Overall, the install worked and the system looks and responds great "right out of the box" (as well as any other distro or better).
Upon further reviewing my statement a sad realization occured to me. If they can't force people to watch the commercials with lame advertising contests, the only course of action will be to set 'product placement' at a premium. Imagine just before you find out 'who the killer is', the characters kick back and enjoy a refreshing bucket of KFC right in front of the cameras.
As much as many of you would like to think that Google "slipped this in" on purpose I have news. Google announced they shall do business in China, and will do whatever it takes to do so.
This is no intentional 'hack' of the system. It's a new content filter and there's going to be holes to be patched and creative solutions to be found for creative problems.
So before you go hail the Google dev team as being revolutionary, maybe you should consider they just missed the mark the first time around and have a lot of clean up to do with this "feature."
The real shame to this is that it will send OSS developers off to develop a new Outlook lookalike (as if PIM and Evolution weren't enough) resulting in a missed opportunity to really out-do what Microsoft has to offer in this realm.
How about a totally free server-based program where people can use a central client to read email, chat, make appointments, share calendars, swap files, manage document revisions, publish sales charts, manage project teams, maintain journals or blogs for employees, etc...
Unfortunately, linux will respond by trying to copycat instead of innovate.
Oh yeah, and OS X Mail isn't great either, but that's not holding them back. The real meat of the article is:
A lack of application support is also holding back Linux, according to the survey of over 3,300 users. This was cited as the most serious hurdle facing Linux on the desktop.
As a lifelong American citizen, can I please ask my fellow compatriots: What the hell happened to compromising?
Why are we no longer the "Benevolent Superpower?" So the world wants to share in our responsiblities with the DNS system and naming conventions. Is it really so different to accomplish this with an international panel as opposed to our organizations (which even still contain many international members).
Don't tell them to build their own DNS servers and break the entire nature of freedom for the net, besides what good are they with IPv4 and the core DNS naming conventions. Adding DNS servers with gibberish for localized areas isn't going to do anything positive for the maturing of this medium.
If we divide the core DNS system using an international medium, can we not simply "cut out" any group that does not adhere to guidelines set forth by the panel? And if the "shit does hit the fan" and someone doesn't listen, we could build our own internet (we have it already) that's even better then the old one! Why not move into that realm in case of emergency?
I don't understand why we have to have total control. The US involvement in the creation of the internet led to this global phenomenon, now let's make it truly global. Besides, if it's part of the UN can you imagine the impact of an internet embargo against a nation (haven't quite worked out the details, but cool in theory)?
I'm not going to rant on GW, Iraq, Energy Conservation or anything like that, this isn't the place for it. But why is it we ask so much of the international community then crap over something like this when it comes to sharing?
So what if the industry stays away from it? One of iPod/vPod/ITMS strengths is in 'x-casting', whether it be audio/video or what have you. That will make it more of an amateur review platform, make it very low quality with very realistic views, and make it immensly more popular then anything the bigwigs have to offer just for the sake of it being somewhat "underground."
Not to mention the vPod-casts in this arena that I've found so far are *free*, with RSS Feeds to keep me posted as to when it's been updated.
I can see that the industry's "product" will never be offered through ITMS and they have to interest in high-volume inexpensive distribution (just rent a movie in a hotel room if you want to see their prime business model $$$).
So in the mean time, relax. Sex may sell, but in the realm of vPod it can also be free or very inexpensive to satisfy those natural urges. And the fact that it plays music and TV shows as well, gives you ample opportunity to cuddle with yourself while basking in the afterglow.
This whole argument can be summed up by Crow T. Trollbot's iTunes/RIAA comment:
"What does it do?"
"It lays golden eggs."
"Do we own the goose?"
"No, but we get half the eggs as long as the goose uses our nest."
"We ain't got to do nuthin' and we still get half the eggs?"
"Yep."
"But we don't own the goose."
"Nope."
"I say we kill it!"
- Crow T. Trollbot
That just proves to me that he completely understands the user space of MySQL.
Thousands of webmasters and home-based coders don't want a competitor to Oracle, we want something that gets he job done quickly, efficiently and affordably.
This idea that every product has to become a behemoth and compete for world domination is the stake through the heart of many a project. Being content with distributing in bulk to an extremely thankful user-base is what it's all about as far as I'm concerned with MySQL. This ensures that most open-source projects will continue to be MySQL oriented, LAMP will continue to dominate the OSS Content Management Services market, and for those that determine it's just not "good enough" for what they want to do there are plenty of alernatives to expand your feature set.
K.I.S.S. is what MySQL has always been about, and I give the guy props for admitting they'll never have the desire nor ability to compete with Oracle.
You really have to wonder who comes up with this information. That's not even a believable story yet it gets replicated and gives Microsoft another 5 minutes of exposure all over the blog media.
Wasn't it just last week we were talking about how Microsoft was going to begin hyping their products using a paid blogger 'grassroots' campaign?
You don't suppose a bullshit story like this that ends up on someone's blog could simply be testing the waters to see how effective the online rumor mill is, do you?
I think it's awfully interesting that Microsoft has begun announcing tiny feature announcements one by one in a nice string of succession throughout the month of April.
And slashdot's just eating it up!
They wouldn't be, say, announcing one feature plan at a time for the next 30 day to steal some of Apple's thunder while rolling out OS X Tiger would they?
Not a friendly entity like Microsoft?!?!
The Turing Tests are not rediculous. What do you think the ALICE bot really does? PATTERN RECOGNITION. It's a simple abstraction of taking a statement and attempting to provide a legible and coherent response.
The ALICE bot is in no real way associated with artificial intelligence. It is a simple if/then sequence using XML tables. Download the source for yourself.
Scientists have already agreed that the premise behind ALICE is not so far off of how humans "chit chat" with a series of prefabricated statements and responses based on the conditions of the statement.
But if you can teach a computer to recognize intricacies in speech patterns and respond appropriately: the computer has accepted outside input, processed what was said, formulated a response and replied to the individual based on a set of conditions drawn from the original statement.
Imagery pattern recognition is also a great goal to attain, but the ALICE group shows us how habitual the human mind becomes over time. If you ask me about the weather and it's raining, chances are I won't even stop to think about it. The sentance will flow straight from my senses to the console, having answered that question a million times and knowing my little subset of responses.
ALICE's biggest shortcoming is she has no external senses. She's based on BS, which in a typing scenario, truth is hidden from view and matters not to strangers on teletypes.
Wouldn't it be ironic if we had the technology to blast this sucker away from our orbit, but lacked the quantity of fossil fuels necessary to accomplish the task with present technology?
Aren't we supposed to be out of oil by then?
Better start working on nuclear propulsion with leaving the earth's orbit.
Or we'll be trying to shoot it down with compressed-air rockets like these.
Probably the strongest point in the development of Project Looking Glass is that it shows GUI developer's that we are far from achieving any sort of happy medium or standard in the graphical experience.
Coincidentally, with the passing of Jef Raskin recently, there is fear that the concepts of his Humane Interface will go largely ignored and unnoticed, despite there being a desperate need to simplify the user experience while being intuitive without being intrusive, and still allocating the option of low-level interaction demanded by hackers.
While drawing the connection between Raskin and Project Looking Glass may seem distant, it is surely a nice example to see such a major organization funding open revolts against the norm and doing so in a public arena.
Surely, Google is entitled to some attention for entering the game late, innovating, and then succeeding.
Pick up a copy of this month's Wired magazine and see how Yahoo stacks up. Certainly, Google is the darling of the computer saavy, but they still have lower viewship and less profit then the Stanford project turned internet gold.
I use Google, and in fact, use many of their beta programs (which seem to stay in beta for years), but Yahoo has the "computer as a tool" market for those that don't follow the latest meme.
Impressive start, yes, useful features, definitely, but Google is still not number one despite all the free publicity it gets on a daily basis.
Is it really such a good idea to cram the airways by opening access to more of the spectrum? It's already possible as a hobbyist to do pretty much what you need with the available bands and opening the spectrum will only encourage more low-end, poorly tested devices to enter the market.
We haven't even seen the long-term effects of having cell phone towers throughout an entire town, let alone, having every wannabe electronic device manufacturer fighting over who can get the most distance out of a wave frequency on their device.
The wireless technology safety test results have mostly been inconclusive, but compound every possible frequency being in use, running through and around your body, and we could very well end up living in a microwave well before a Greenhouse effect kicks in./paranoid, maybe. suspicious, definitely.
Different levels of security are offered so unless you are aiming high, you can get a clearance suitable for most IT work without becoming a citizen.
Read everything you ever wanted to know about government security clearance and the different levels/requirements here.
Quite honestly this is probably the easiest way to get security clearance. I started off working for Arctic Polar, which does FAA contract work.
The program requires that you're a college student only, working towards a related degree. The placement was simple and they paid for my security clearance right away.
Any of the Boeing/Lockheed Martin type places have programs for college students that both pay well and get a leg up on future security requirements.
And in my case, turned into a permanent position for me after graduation.
Slashdot Mirror
This just isn't that big of a product. Whether it will be or not, is up to the development team, but it does exactly what they say it does.
Filesharing != Collaboration. This is just like Apple's .Mac drives. Two people work on a file at once, and he who saves last wins.
iFolder
Look, I'm not a conservative zealot, but I do have children, and I understand the purpose the government is trying to serve here.
Is no one annoyed that you can "accidentally" stumble onto porn while browsing the web, even if that's not what you're out to see (at the moment)? The internet is structureless, meaning there is no logical way to find what you are looking for. If my daughter searches for "chicks" meaning baby chickens, I seriously doubt the first 10 pages will have anything to do with barnyard fowl.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee even said his biggest regret was not inverting the domain structure so you would go to org.slashdot.yro so your intent and destination as you navigate the DNS tree made more sense. If XXX goes through you would have had to go to xxx.porn.www under that system and your result would hopefully better-suit your intent.
Any sysadmin that jumbles together a bunch of random nodes with no structure should be fired, so why do good system administration practices not apply to the structure of the internet itself?
Everybody says it's the parents that should monitor the children, but get real. My kids are exposed to Myspace all day in school, watch basic cable, play video games and interact with their peers. I'm with them every morning, evening and weekend. Filters for the internet, Vchips for TV's, game rating systems, etc, help parents keep tabs on what's going on, but seriously aside from the tech elite how many parents actually know of or how to use these things? Go say "proxy server" to your mother, and see what she thinks it is.
I think it should be a service offered by ISP's, maybe even for extra cost, but it should be a feature people are presented with when they sign up. No kids? Don't buy it. Larger ISP's already have this, and if I owned a smaller, localized ISP I would see an opportunity to provide a service and make more money.
The government has just cause to investigate what people consider harmful. Would you want them to pass legislation without investigating the issue? The unfortunate precedent of our time is that everyone considers everything an invasion of privacy. I don't care if they see anonymous records! We should be much more concerned with non-anonymous wiretaps then collection of anonymous internet usage statistics. What they see at ISP's is the real deal, that's what people are actually doing on the internet. You can't get that information by asking "Disney dads" to fill out a survey about his porn habits, you won't get any honest answers.
Before we get into the usual banter about BSD, Netcraft, or whatever they've confirmed recently, I have to say that I use BSD more now then ever.
It would never have dawned on me to bother with trying BSD as a desktop until I had some extra cash in the account and setup a system for network monitoring and packet scanning. With the bulk of the load being network-based, I figured this might as well be my desktop system too to garner more bang for the buck. This, mind you, after having used GNU/Linux and Windows for years and relegating BSD to beige server boxen only.
That was a about a year ago. Today every PC I own runs FreeBSD as the primary desktop.
It's not without it's issues when you install from the standard FreeBSD disks. I had to compile OOOrg from ports using flags (with cups, kde), and I had to install the linuxflashplayer-wrapper and tinker with it for a while to get it running...so yes, there are dozens of "little" things that keep this from desktop adoption.
If a distribution such as DesktopBSD can create prepackaged desktop installations with a preconfigured flash-player, OOOrg, etc...I don't see why many people wouldn't at least try it out. The package management from a desktop user perspective has been great (I prefer it over apt, yum or portage), I have no failed installations due to -cpio bad magic, checksig errors (when I know the keys are installed), etc...
Be prepared though, with this install you get a basic desktop. There is still much work to be done, but this is a nice start from a group of guys I can totally relate to.
Agreed, that is true. I'm more impressed by the man's ability to know his niche and stick to his guns. He knew he wasn't a Walmart product manufacturer, and for all intents and purposes he really covered his own company's ass by NOT putting his high priced models next to all the cheap ones, or going the other way and making cheaper stuff of his own. The acquisition rounded out the company, and made it financially feasable to simultaneously exist in the cheap-crap market and still be a renowned specialty dealer.
Snapper may not be in the commodity stores, but that's not because they are a boutique item. It is an intentional attempt to maintain a reputation of dignity among professionals.
From Simplicity Manufacturing's Website:
In other words, they already had the cheap crap to sell (B&S Mowers), and didn't want to compete with themselves with higher priced models that could go to specialty home improvement stores where they would move more quickly.
The author seems to have jumped the gun a bit on the install, since the NVIDIA issues were announced almost immediately after the release, and subsequently have been queued for immediate repair.
As for his comment that due to these issues it may not be the best starter disto, I agree, but only because Fedora is a testbed product, created to directly fill the void left by RedHat going to a subscription-only model for RHEL. CentOS is more stable by building RHEL from sources. In Fedoraland you take STABLE releases with a grain of salt.
My FC5 install went without a hitch this morning, and it let me create users after first boot (don't know why his didn't).
I actually like the new fonts and eye candy. The only visual *yawn* is that the Bluecurve icons are still there, and I've never been partial to them.
Compared to RHEL4 on the same system, FC5 is MUCH snapper, but I had my usual issues of smartd failing and having to use a PCMCIA wifi card instead of my built-in Intel (Thinkpad T43p).
Overall, the install worked and the system looks and responds great "right out of the box" (as well as any other distro or better).
Upon further reviewing my statement a sad realization occured to me. If they can't force people to watch the commercials with lame advertising contests, the only course of action will be to set 'product placement' at a premium. Imagine just before you find out 'who the killer is', the characters kick back and enjoy a refreshing bucket of KFC right in front of the cameras.
Unless you unlock the "secret message" by hitting "SKIP", I'll never know the difference.
As much as many of you would like to think that Google "slipped this in" on purpose I have news. Google announced they shall do business in China, and will do whatever it takes to do so.
This is no intentional 'hack' of the system. It's a new content filter and there's going to be holes to be patched and creative solutions to be found for creative problems.
So before you go hail the Google dev team as being revolutionary, maybe you should consider they just missed the mark the first time around and have a lot of clean up to do with this "feature."
The real shame to this is that it will send OSS developers off to develop a new Outlook lookalike (as if PIM and Evolution weren't enough) resulting in a missed opportunity to really out-do what Microsoft has to offer in this realm.
How about a totally free server-based program where people can use a central client to read email, chat, make appointments, share calendars, swap files, manage document revisions, publish sales charts, manage project teams, maintain journals or blogs for employees, etc...
Unfortunately, linux will respond by trying to copycat instead of innovate.
Oh yeah, and OS X Mail isn't great either, but that's not holding them back. The real meat of the article is:
A lack of application support is also holding back Linux, according to the survey of over 3,300 users. This was cited as the most serious hurdle facing Linux on the desktop.
Email is just "crucial".
Mod Flaimbait.
As a lifelong American citizen, can I please ask my fellow compatriots: What the hell happened to compromising?
Why are we no longer the "Benevolent Superpower?" So the world wants to share in our responsiblities with the DNS system and naming conventions. Is it really so different to accomplish this with an international panel as opposed to our organizations (which even still contain many international members).
Don't tell them to build their own DNS servers and break the entire nature of freedom for the net, besides what good are they with IPv4 and the core DNS naming conventions. Adding DNS servers with gibberish for localized areas isn't going to do anything positive for the maturing of this medium.
If we divide the core DNS system using an international medium, can we not simply "cut out" any group that does not adhere to guidelines set forth by the panel? And if the "shit does hit the fan" and someone doesn't listen, we could build our own internet (we have it already) that's even better then the old one! Why not move into that realm in case of emergency?
I don't understand why we have to have total control. The US involvement in the creation of the internet led to this global phenomenon, now let's make it truly global. Besides, if it's part of the UN can you imagine the impact of an internet embargo against a nation (haven't quite worked out the details, but cool in theory)?
I'm not going to rant on GW, Iraq, Energy Conservation or anything like that, this isn't the place for it. But why is it we ask so much of the international community then crap over something like this when it comes to sharing?
So what if the industry stays away from it? One of iPod/vPod/ITMS strengths is in 'x-casting', whether it be audio/video or what have you. That will make it more of an amateur review platform, make it very low quality with very realistic views, and make it immensly more popular then anything the bigwigs have to offer just for the sake of it being somewhat "underground." Not to mention the vPod-casts in this arena that I've found so far are *free*, with RSS Feeds to keep me posted as to when it's been updated. I can see that the industry's "product" will never be offered through ITMS and they have to interest in high-volume inexpensive distribution (just rent a movie in a hotel room if you want to see their prime business model $$$). So in the mean time, relax. Sex may sell, but in the realm of vPod it can also be free or very inexpensive to satisfy those natural urges. And the fact that it plays music and TV shows as well, gives you ample opportunity to cuddle with yourself while basking in the afterglow.
This whole argument can be summed up by Crow T. Trollbot's iTunes/RIAA comment: "What does it do?" "It lays golden eggs." "Do we own the goose?" "No, but we get half the eggs as long as the goose uses our nest." "We ain't got to do nuthin' and we still get half the eggs?" "Yep." "But we don't own the goose." "Nope." "I say we kill it!" - Crow T. Trollbot
That just proves to me that he completely understands the user space of MySQL.
Thousands of webmasters and home-based coders don't want a competitor to Oracle, we want something that gets he job done quickly, efficiently and affordably.
This idea that every product has to become a behemoth and compete for world domination is the stake through the heart of many a project. Being content with distributing in bulk to an extremely thankful user-base is what it's all about as far as I'm concerned with MySQL. This ensures that most open-source projects will continue to be MySQL oriented, LAMP will continue to dominate the OSS Content Management Services market, and for those that determine it's just not "good enough" for what they want to do there are plenty of alernatives to expand your feature set.
K.I.S.S. is what MySQL has always been about, and I give the guy props for admitting they'll never have the desire nor ability to compete with Oracle.
Wasn't it just last week we were talking about how Microsoft was going to begin hyping their products using a paid blogger 'grassroots' campaign?
You don't suppose a bullshit story like this that ends up on someone's blog could simply be testing the waters to see how effective the online rumor mill is, do you?
I think it's awfully interesting that Microsoft has begun announcing tiny feature announcements one by one in a nice string of succession throughout the month of April. And slashdot's just eating it up! They wouldn't be, say, announcing one feature plan at a time for the next 30 day to steal some of Apple's thunder while rolling out OS X Tiger would they? Not a friendly entity like Microsoft?!?!
The ALICE bot is in no real way associated with artificial intelligence. It is a simple if/then sequence using XML tables. Download the source for yourself.
Scientists have already agreed that the premise behind ALICE is not so far off of how humans "chit chat" with a series of prefabricated statements and responses based on the conditions of the statement.
But if you can teach a computer to recognize intricacies in speech patterns and respond appropriately: the computer has accepted outside input, processed what was said, formulated a response and replied to the individual based on a set of conditions drawn from the original statement.
Imagery pattern recognition is also a great goal to attain, but the ALICE group shows us how habitual the human mind becomes over time. If you ask me about the weather and it's raining, chances are I won't even stop to think about it. The sentance will flow straight from my senses to the console, having answered that question a million times and knowing my little subset of responses.
ALICE's biggest shortcoming is she has no external senses. She's based on BS, which in a typing scenario, truth is hidden from view and matters not to strangers on teletypes.
Wouldn't it be ironic if we had the technology to blast this sucker away from our orbit, but lacked the quantity of fossil fuels necessary to accomplish the task with present technology?
Aren't we supposed to be out of oil by then?
Better start working on nuclear propulsion with leaving the earth's orbit.
Or we'll be trying to shoot it down with compressed-air rockets like these.
Coincidentally, with the passing of Jef Raskin recently, there is fear that the concepts of his Humane Interface will go largely ignored and unnoticed, despite there being a desperate need to simplify the user experience while being intuitive without being intrusive, and still allocating the option of low-level interaction demanded by hackers.
While drawing the connection between Raskin and Project Looking Glass may seem distant, it is surely a nice example to see such a major organization funding open revolts against the norm and doing so in a public arena.
Surely, Google is entitled to some attention for entering the game late, innovating, and then succeeding. Pick up a copy of this month's Wired magazine and see how Yahoo stacks up. Certainly, Google is the darling of the computer saavy, but they still have lower viewship and less profit then the Stanford project turned internet gold. I use Google, and in fact, use many of their beta programs (which seem to stay in beta for years), but Yahoo has the "computer as a tool" market for those that don't follow the latest meme. Impressive start, yes, useful features, definitely, but Google is still not number one despite all the free publicity it gets on a daily basis.
Is it really such a good idea to cram the airways by opening access to more of the spectrum? It's already possible as a hobbyist to do pretty much what you need with the available bands and opening the spectrum will only encourage more low-end, poorly tested devices to enter the market.
/paranoid, maybe. suspicious, definitely.
We haven't even seen the long-term effects of having cell phone towers throughout an entire town, let alone, having every wannabe electronic device manufacturer fighting over who can get the most distance out of a wave frequency on their device.
The wireless technology safety test results have mostly been inconclusive, but compound every possible frequency being in use, running through and around your body, and we could very well end up living in a microwave well before a Greenhouse effect kicks in.
Different levels of security are offered so unless you are aiming high, you can get a clearance suitable for most IT work without becoming a citizen. Read everything you ever wanted to know about government security clearance and the different levels/requirements here.
Quite honestly this is probably the easiest way to get security clearance. I started off working for Arctic Polar, which does FAA contract work. The program requires that you're a college student only, working towards a related degree. The placement was simple and they paid for my security clearance right away. Any of the Boeing/Lockheed Martin type places have programs for college students that both pay well and get a leg up on future security requirements. And in my case, turned into a permanent position for me after graduation.