Too many of the JS/DHTML toolkits have the "you must use our APIs for everything, including how you manipulate strings" disease. Some are cool, for example TIBET, which looks a lot like Smalltalk.
As far as I know, Tibet is the only Open Source project today which would be capable of making this happen
Would be if it were released. The tarball was taken offline during a rewrite to focus more on W3C standards support for app creation: XForms, XPath, XSLT, etc. But the Smalltalk capability has been there for years.
Wake me up when Client/SOA hits
on
The Best of Web 2.0
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
AJAX is used to enhance existing HTML forms / user interaction but the fundamental paradigm is still the same as "normal" web applications. Some key smells of this style;
Page reloads still happen frequently
It's possible (if you make the effort) to degrade gracefully to non-supporting browsers / browsers with JS turned off.
Session state still resides on the server.
In practice this is what everyone's doing right now, with varying degrees of success.
...
Client / SOA...
Some of the key smells with Client / SOA;
Page reloads are rare, if at all. The application tends to run in a single browser window.
It's practically impossible to degrade gracefully, without maintaining seperate code bases.
Session state is largely handled by the client.
Javascript and the browser are acting as a runtime in the same sense as the Java or.NET runtime.
It's going to require specialist developers
I don't think Web 2.0 is going to get really interesting until Client/SOA hits.
Previous record ratio: R0
New record ratio: R1=R0+X
Fund contains: $Z at noon GMT on day of new record
Winner receives: $Z * (X/(R0+X))
Compression program and decompression program are made open source.
Explanation
For an idea of why the C-Prize can solve the AI problem, if it is solvable, see Matthew Mahoney's comment [tinyurl.com] on it:
Matt Mahoney
Jun 17, 7:18 pm show options
Newsgroups: comp.compression
From: "Matt Mahoney"
Date: 17 Jun 2005 20:18:59 -0700
Local: Fri, Jun 17 2005 7:18 pm
Subject: Re: The C-Prize
Hutter's AIXI, http://www.idsia.ch/~marcus/ai/paixi.htm makes another
argument for the connection between compression and AI that is more
general than the Turing test. He proves that the optimal behavior of
an agent (an interactive system that receives a reward signal from an
unknown environment) is to guess that the environement is most likely
computed by the shortest possible program that is consistent with the
behavior observed so far. In other words, the most likely outcome for
any experiment is the one with the simplest explanation, where
"simplest" means the smallest program that could model what you
currently know about the universe.
He gives a formal proof, but it basically says that the only possible
distribution of the infinite set of programs (or strings) with nonzero
probability is one which favors shorter programs over longer ones.
Given any string of length n with probability p > 0, there are an
infinite set of strings longer than n, but only a finite number of
these can have probability higher than p.
-- Matt Mahoney
Matt Mahoney is the author of Text Compression as a Test for Artificial Intelligence which states:
It is shown that optimal text compression is a harder problem thanartificial intelligence as defined by Turing's (1950) imitation game; thus compression ratio on a standard benchmark corpuscould be used as an objective and quantitative alternative test for AI (Mahoney, 1999).
Since the government officials responsible for creating situations for bullying are refusing to compensate for damages caused by their malfaesance, the proper solution is to bully them.
The ultimate solution would be to bring back the old pre-Christian northern European tradition of single combat to the death but with rules that would allow some reasonable selective pressure:
Any voting adult may be challenged to formal combat to the death by a public notice 48 hours prior to the commencement of said combat.
If it has not already done so, a jury of community elders selected by the individuals involved conveins to attempt to mediate, not arbitrate, the dispute. If a resolution acceptable to the two parties is arrived at prior to the 48 hour time limit, then the challenge can be withdrawn.
During this time the jury also decides on a wilderness area within which the combat is to take place in the event no resolution is reached. The area is chosen to be large enough to allow strategy.
The formal combat begins with the two combatants entering opposites of the wilderness area, equipped with a 10 inch sword and 15 meters of strong cordage.
The Higgs-Boson "is one of the last particles we need to complete the standard model of physics," says Klabbers of the well-established model physicists use to explain the behaviors and properties of the smallest units of matter. Scientists have been seeking definitive evidence of the Higgs-Boson for 20 years.
Discovering the mass of the Higgs-Boson will, of course, shrink the Earth to the size of a pea, which is the fate of most type 13 planets.
Evolution works both ways. Just de-optimize them. Run a breeding program where the wasps that have a high failure rate of getting the roaches back to the nest are allowed to live while you kill off the wasps that are efficient.
As someone who has done his share of technologypolicypolitics, I can tell you that Congress and the government needs to be limited to issuing prizeawards for achievement of objectively defined milestones. Picking winners is bad enough in industrial policy but when you get Congress handing out money even indirectly through "top men" in grants for proposals, it is way too fraught with potential for institutionalizing the "search" for solutions rather than the achievement of solutions.
Make up lots of objective goals and make the prize awards really big because you can afford to since you're paying for results rather than mere proposals to achieve results.
Making the real achievers of objective goals rich beyond their wildest dreams will lead to far more effective R&D spending of those dollars than will handing them over to life-time bureaucrats.
Last June, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation put an exclamation point after "grand challenge" when it announced one of the richest in history. The Grand Challenges for Global Health pledged $436.6 million (including $31.6 million from British and Canadian sources) toward solving some of the world's worst health problems. Preliminary funds have been granted to 43 groups attacking 14 challenges.
Why is it that no one can see how much of an obscene mockery this use of the term "grand challenge" is?
The fact that no one understands the difference between awarding a prize for achieving X vs awarding a grant for a proposal for achieving X is illustrative of why technology policy fails miserably generation after generation.
Baron-Cohen's evidence for assortive mating being the cause of autism is actually weaker than is the evidence for immigration from India being the cause of autism.
Baron-Cohen's evidence is called "ecological correlation". As another poster has pointed out already, ecological correlations are subject to the "ecological fallacy". However, ecological correlations are a good way to do preliminary investigations into unknown sources of new pathologies. As anyone who has had to dignose a complex system knows, you start by gathering gross phenomenology about the system which is rather inexpensive, and then start teasing apart the various potential confounding variables as you find promising (but possibly deceptive) lines of research validated by the preliminary data.
We're at such a primitive state of understanding of the phenomenon of autism that there is intense disagreement as to whether there as actually been an explosive epidemic in autism over the last 20 years or whether there is simply an explosion in the number of social workers who are prone to make the diagnosis given the same kinds of problems they've always faced.
Without getting into the nuances of this debate we can simply say this:
If we behave as though there is a real explosion in the number of cases, we are acting wisely since the cost of being wrong is far less than is the cost of being wrong about there being no explosive epidemic.
Having said that, we have the first reason to discount Baron-Cohen's research:
While Baron-Cohen provides no data to back up the plausible sounding argument for why there might have been increased assortive mating among "nerds". Byrna Siegel makes the same argument. There are just as plausible arguments that assortive mating among "nerds" has decreased over the same time period -- not the least of which is the simple fact that nerds are working in male saturated environments where availability of mates is low, the cost of living is high and job stability is low. In other words, nerds are reproducing at a much lower aggregate rate than they used to, when they were living in more scattered, more gender balanced, more affordable and more inbred rural towns.
The second reason to discount Baron-Cohen's research is that he doesn't use the technique of "strong inference" which you really have to do when you're dealing with such a tenuously supported preliminary investigation. Strong inference means taking at least 2, preferably more, hypotheses and subjecting them to similar tests to see which of them wins in a rational comparison. There are lots of suspected ecological correlations out there -- mercury to autism, vaccination to autism, etc. and he doesn't compare the degree of his ecological correlation to the degree of these other ecological correlations. Note that what I'm not saying here that the ecological fallacy isn't in play here, nor am I saying that there might be better data supporting or refuting a given hypothesis (say, statistical case studies of individuals). What I am saying is that if you're going to use strong inference you need to apply similar tests to the different hypotheses and see which of them comes out on top so you can prioritize your subsequent research rationally.
The third reason to discount Baron-Cohen's research is that he doesn't even provide hard numbers for the nerd-autism ecological correlation (this is giving him the benefit of the doubt that nerds aren't having their effective fertility destroyed by other ecological factors).
So what would happen if you tried to do a real, strong inference ecological study of autism comparing the various hypotheses against each to see which has the strongest ecological correlation?
You'd come to the conclusion that the place to look for the cause of autism's explosive increase over the last 20 years is in areas of high Finnish ancestry where something is impo
Terman's original definition of "Intelligence Quotient" is exactly as I computed it. The reason for the more nuanced definition based on normalized studies is not that Terman's definition was "invalid" but that the normalized measures are more accurate across a larger range of ages. Terman specifically used childhood developmental scores in his quotient, so my application was as good as Terman's and although the "huge spurt" in rate change reported by the critique of my math is a valid point I seriously doubt that the "huge spurt" is a "huge" problem for the conclusion which is that there has been a terrible drop in applied g-loaded skills.
It would be good to get a graph of this "huge spurt" from ages 8 to 12 so we could see about how erroneous the Terman definition of IQ is likely to be during these years.
A lot of work has been done on the power laws of (possibly misnamed) "scale free" networks. The simplest is the law that says the frequency of a symbol is inversely proportional to its rank of its frequency. In other words, the most frequently occuring entity is twice the second and three times the third... most frequently referenced symbols.
The most work on this, in the case of the WWW is the frequency with which pages are hyperlinked. A lot of work has been done on hyperlinking without access to the exhaustive database used by Google. I know that Google's business model started with rank ordering pages on their results by how often they were href'ed elsewhere so the data is there obviously and it wouldn't be a serious imposition on their proprietary information to publish analysis of the href power law.
Ironically, the real value in XMLHTTPRequest isn't that communication can be asynchronous. Form submissions, the previous way of handling server communication, were and still are asynchronous. XMLHTTPRequest actually makes it possible to support _synchronous_ calls and provides a single unified way to make either type of call.
Most writings on AJAX would have you believe that's enough -- make an asynchronous call, get an AJAX application. Unfortunately, as anyone who's done much programming with asychronous calls (aka threads) can tell you, making the call is the easy part -- it's coordinating the results that's hard. A simple real world example highlights "the sync problem".
The Sync Problem
Its a common client-side requirement to fetch a template containing static data along with dynamic data from a web service call, blend them into a single UI element, and then display that element in a portion of the user's currently displayed page. In this common case you've got two separate data sources meaning you have two separate calls whose results have to be blended only after both complete. When confronted with this reality most developers switch to making synchronous calls (taking advantage of XMLHTTPRequest's truly new feature to "cheat"). If you decide to hang in there and stay with the asynchronous call format that's great, but we've yet to see a single AJAX toolkit that offers you any kind of multiple-request coordination -- so you'll end up writing the synchronization logic yourself.
If you use TIBET its simple:
// set up two requests to make the async calls (you can have more if you like)
request1 = ServiceRequest.create(dc('async',true,'other','par ameters'));
request2 = ServiceRequest.create(dc('async',true,'some','para meters'));
// create a function to observe the completion signal we'll be sending below
response = function(aSignal) { alert('The requests are done'); };
// create an "And Join" saying both need to complete (TIBET also supports "Or Joins")
join = TPAndJoin.create('AllDone');
join.addObservation(request1);
join.addObservation(request2);
// tell our response function to observe the signal our join will send
response.observe(join, 'AllDone')
// activate the requests...TIBET handles the rest
request1.activate();
request2.activate();
Since TIBET was built before you could "cheat" via XMLHTTPRequest it's been designed to support asychronous event coordination from the start. TIBET uses event signaling and a set of types based on the Workflow Management Coalition's petri-net models for workflow event coordination to handle event synchronization. Because it uses events rather than XMLHTTPRequest callbacks you can use the previous example's pattern to join responses from both the server and the user since interactions with the user are asynchronous as well.
I was banned from/. for a month for posting this but I'll post it again, and again, and again, since it seems to really piss off the kind of folks who need to be exposed for the frauds they are:
Basically the main story was about a non-conventional fusion technology purportedly capable of burning hydrogen-1 and boron-11, which is a highly desirable fuel cycle since it produces no neutrons at all. My response was to detail my experience with a project to try to achieve the same fusion cycle, called p-B11 ("p" standing for "protium" or hydrogen-1 as opposed to "deuterium" which is hydrogen-2). Since this history involves some information that the tokamak afficionados find enormously embarrassing, they linked to a post of mine made to the Stormfrot forum where I stated my opinion of Jewish complicity in the failure of the fusion program. Then the block occurred. I did file a complaint with slashdot's editor but no action was taken. I find it all too predictable that people can credit Jews with nuclear technology projects over which they had disproportionate influence and everyone nods their heads in righteous agreement but if anyone assigns blame for failure of such programs not only is he a social pariah -- he's blocked from posting.
Back when the cold fusion brouhaha hit, I ran across an intriguing idea of achieving p-B11 (p=proteum=Hydrogen-1 and B11 =Boron-11) fusion using artificial ball lightning, called the Plasmak. No adequate explanation of ball-lightning has yet been concocted resuling in reproducible free-floating plasmoids, and the guy (Paul Koloc) doing the work seemed to have a somewhat plausible idea. (And he did have background with the Spheromak group at the University of Maryland.) Most importantly there were actual photographs of these plasmoids floating in the open air without continuous power input! So I looked into it seriously for a while. During this time I also ran across others who were looking into a variety of p-B11 technologies including one of the founders of the US Tokamak program, Robert W. Bussard with his resurrection of Philo Farnsworth's inertial electrostatic confinement device sometimes called the Farnsworth Fusor.
Given:
all the foment in the air.
the fact that the Tokamak was to fusion as the Shuttle was to cheap access to space.
...as the, then, Chairman of the Coalition for Science and Commerce (that had been successful in passing the Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990, requiring NASA to buy commercial launch services whenever possible) I decided to go around to the various fusion contenders and come up with a set of about 10 milestones they all agreed would be worthy of prize awards, and came up with some legislation that would have awarded a series of $100M prizes, each for acheivement of one of those milestones.
This was 1992.
I never got very far with this legislation myself but about 3 years later, Bussard decided to submit this legislation -- with a kicker:
In IT I've met smart and dumb: blacks, Hispanics, Asian Indians, Amerindians, Inuits, Japanese, Chinese and Arabs.
So what does this say about the distribution of talent between races?
It means that the probability that someone in IT of a given race is either smart or dumb -- given no other information about them -- is neither 0 nor is it 1!
Thank you Martin Luther King, Jr. for leading me see this profound truth.
Off-world mining is not likely to produce economic copper even for local use due to the creation of ores via very slow hydrothermal processes that occur uniquely on the Earth. Moreover the platinum and rare earth group metals of the asteroids people talk so much about is also not formed into economically recoverable ores.
Finding substitute materials/techniques is possible but currently speculative. There should be a heavy tax placed on the extraction of hydrothermal ores and the tax money put to prize awards for the creation of substitute materials.
Computational AI. There are strong arguments that AIXI is the most intelligent unbiased agent possible in the sense that AIXI behaves optimally in any computable environment.
This is the reason I set up the following definition of the C-Prize:
Let anyone submit a program that produces, with no inputs, one of the
major natural language corpora as output.
S = size of uncompressed corpus
P = size of program outputting the uncompressed corpus
R = S/P (the compression ratio).
Previous record ratio: R0
New record ratio: R1=R0+X
Fund contains: $Z at noon GMT on day of new record
Winner receives: $Z * (X/(R0+X))
Compression program and decompression program are made open source.
Explanation
For an idea of why the C-Prize can solve the AI problem, if it is solvable, see Matthew Mahoney's comment on it:
Matt Mahoney
Jun 17, 7:18 pm show options
Newsgroups: comp.compression
From: "Matt Mahoney"
Date: 17 Jun 2005 20:18:59 -0700
Local: Fri, Jun 17 2005 7:18 pm
Subject: Re: The C-Prize
Hutter's AIXI, http://www.idsia.ch/~marcus/ai/paixi.htm makes another
argument for the connection between compression and AI that is more
general than the Turing test. He proves that the optimal behavior of
an agent (an interactive system that receives a reward signal from an
unknown environment) is to guess that the environement is most likely
computed by the shortest possible program that is consistent with the
behavior observed so far. In other words, the most likely outcome for
any experiment is the one with the simplest explanation, where
"simplest" means the smallest program that could model what you
currently know about the universe.
He gives a formal proof, but it basically says that the only possible
distribution of the infinite set of programs (or strings) with nonzero
probability is one which favors shorter programs over longer ones.
Given any string of length n with probability p > 0, there are an
infinite set of strings longer than n, but only a finite number of
these can have probability higher than p.
It is shown that optimal text compression is a harder problem thanartificial intelligence as defined by Turing's (1950) imitation game; thus compression ratio on a standard benchmark corpuscould be used as an objective and quantitative alternative test for AI (Mahoney, 1999).
Now a big question here is whether it might be possible to create a verifiably unbiased AI without making the compression program open source. In any case I don't think it is wise to trust any AI that hasn't at least gone through a compression competition with other purportedly unbiased AI's compressing an open source corpus.
The big problem with these linear recording systems is they're too susceptible to being side-tracked by scratches that run tangential to the tracks. A holographic form of storage could avoid this.
At some point you have to stop worrying so much about storage capacity and start worrying about how robust your storage medium is.
Of course, the guys who sell DVD's for a living may like the idea that people find themselves having to buy new copies of the stuff they already bought (because it is encrypted and they can't make backup copies).
if were to average all the genetics of each individual race, you would find that they are more similar to each other then difference you find between humans due to natural variation. It is pretty conclusive that humans all descend from the same few thousand people.
Likewise, if you were to average all the genetics of each individual sex, you would find that they are more similar to each other than the difference you find between members of the same sex due to natural variation. It is pretty conclusive that there are no significant gender differences.
Indeed, virtually any taxonomy you choose within a species will come up with similar statements and that includes subspecies which are considered distinct enough to deserve special protection as endangered.
Since current orthodoxy is "Out of Africa" any data which is inconsistent with this orthodoxy must be explained in a way that is consistent with the orthodoxy. This is quite similar to much of the activity of intelligent design theorists.
"The argument for recombination is based on the observation that the pattern of polymorphism in mtDNA is incompatible with a single genealogical tree and unique mutations."
The fact is that the mitochondrial DNA data is consistent with multiple matrilines as well as. Lots of people have hung their hat on the Out of Africa hypothesis but that doesn't mean their intepretation of the DNA evidence is gospel.
Slashdot Mirror
From Harry Feucks' blog:
Would be if it were released. The tarball was taken offline during a rewrite to focus more on W3C standards support for app creation: XForms, XPath, XSLT, etc. But the Smalltalk capability has been there for years.Let anyone submit an open source program that produces, with no inputs, one of the major natural language corpora as output.
S = size of uncompressed corpus
P = size of program outputting the uncompressed corpus
R = S/P (the compression ratio).
Award monies in a manner similar to the M-Prize:
Previous record ratio: R0
New record ratio: R1=R0+X
Fund contains: $Z at noon GMT on day of new record
Winner receives: $Z * (X/(R0+X))
Compression program and decompression program are made open source.
Explanation For an idea of why the C-Prize can solve the AI problem, if it is solvable, see Matthew Mahoney's comment [tinyurl.com] on it:
Matt Mahoney is the author of Text Compression as a Test for Artificial Intelligence which states: (Mahoney is also a competitor who has some winnings from The Calgary Corpus Compression Challenge.)Now, who might fund something like the C-Prize?
Say "Cheese", Harry.
The ultimate solution would be to bring back the old pre-Christian northern European tradition of single combat to the death but with rules that would allow some reasonable selective pressure:
Any voting adult may be challenged to formal combat to the death by a public notice 48 hours prior to the commencement of said combat.
If it has not already done so, a jury of community elders selected by the individuals involved conveins to attempt to mediate, not arbitrate, the dispute. If a resolution acceptable to the two parties is arrived at prior to the 48 hour time limit, then the challenge can be withdrawn.
During this time the jury also decides on a wilderness area within which the combat is to take place in the event no resolution is reached. The area is chosen to be large enough to allow strategy.
The formal combat begins with the two combatants entering opposites of the wilderness area, equipped with a 10 inch sword and 15 meters of strong cordage.
No observers. No rules within the combat area.
One emerges alive.
Discovering the mass of the Higgs-Boson will, of course, shrink the Earth to the size of a pea, which is the fate of most type 13 planets.
Evolution works both ways. Just de-optimize them. Run a breeding program where the wasps that have a high failure rate of getting the roaches back to the nest are allowed to live while you kill off the wasps that are efficient.
When filling out your tax returns?
Make up lots of objective goals and make the prize awards really big because you can afford to since you're paying for results rather than mere proposals to achieve results.
Making the real achievers of objective goals rich beyond their wildest dreams will lead to far more effective R&D spending of those dollars than will handing them over to life-time bureaucrats.
PS: A big problem is exemplified by a USA Today article about prize awards for technical achievement
Why is it that no one can see how much of an obscene mockery this use of the term "grand challenge" is?The fact that no one understands the difference between awarding a prize for achieving X vs awarding a grant for a proposal for achieving X is illustrative of why technology policy fails miserably generation after generation.
Baron-Cohen's evidence is called "ecological correlation". As another poster has pointed out already, ecological correlations are subject to the "ecological fallacy". However, ecological correlations are a good way to do preliminary investigations into unknown sources of new pathologies. As anyone who has had to dignose a complex system knows, you start by gathering gross phenomenology about the system which is rather inexpensive, and then start teasing apart the various potential confounding variables as you find promising (but possibly deceptive) lines of research validated by the preliminary data.
We're at such a primitive state of understanding of the phenomenon of autism that there is intense disagreement as to whether there as actually been an explosive epidemic in autism over the last 20 years or whether there is simply an explosion in the number of social workers who are prone to make the diagnosis given the same kinds of problems they've always faced.
Without getting into the nuances of this debate we can simply say this:
If we behave as though there is a real explosion in the number of cases, we are acting wisely since the cost of being wrong is far less than is the cost of being wrong about there being no explosive epidemic.
Having said that, we have the first reason to discount Baron-Cohen's research:
While Baron-Cohen provides no data to back up the plausible sounding argument for why there might have been increased assortive mating among "nerds". Byrna Siegel makes the same argument. There are just as plausible arguments that assortive mating among "nerds" has decreased over the same time period -- not the least of which is the simple fact that nerds are working in male saturated environments where availability of mates is low, the cost of living is high and job stability is low. In other words, nerds are reproducing at a much lower aggregate rate than they used to, when they were living in more scattered, more gender balanced, more affordable and more inbred rural towns.
The second reason to discount Baron-Cohen's research is that he doesn't use the technique of "strong inference" which you really have to do when you're dealing with such a tenuously supported preliminary investigation. Strong inference means taking at least 2, preferably more, hypotheses and subjecting them to similar tests to see which of them wins in a rational comparison. There are lots of suspected ecological correlations out there -- mercury to autism, vaccination to autism, etc. and he doesn't compare the degree of his ecological correlation to the degree of these other ecological correlations. Note that what I'm not saying here that the ecological fallacy isn't in play here, nor am I saying that there might be better data supporting or refuting a given hypothesis (say, statistical case studies of individuals). What I am saying is that if you're going to use strong inference you need to apply similar tests to the different hypotheses and see which of them comes out on top so you can prioritize your subsequent research rationally.
The third reason to discount Baron-Cohen's research is that he doesn't even provide hard numbers for the nerd-autism ecological correlation (this is giving him the benefit of the doubt that nerds aren't having their effective fertility destroyed by other ecological factors).
So what would happen if you tried to do a real, strong inference ecological study of autism comparing the various hypotheses against each to see which has the strongest ecological correlation?
You'd come to the conclusion that the place to look for the cause of autism's explosive increase over the last 20 years is in areas of high Finnish ancestry where something is impo
Terman's original definition of "Intelligence Quotient" is exactly as I computed it. The reason for the more nuanced definition based on normalized studies is not that Terman's definition was "invalid" but that the normalized measures are more accurate across a larger range of ages. Terman specifically used childhood developmental scores in his quotient, so my application was as good as Terman's and although the "huge spurt" in rate change reported by the critique of my math is a valid point I seriously doubt that the "huge spurt" is a "huge" problem for the conclusion which is that there has been a terrible drop in applied g-loaded skills.
It would be good to get a graph of this "huge spurt" from ages 8 to 12 so we could see about how erroneous the Terman definition of IQ is likely to be during these years.
The most work on this, in the case of the WWW is the frequency with which pages are hyperlinked. A lot of work has been done on hyperlinking without access to the exhaustive database used by Google. I know that Google's business model started with rank ordering pages on their results by how often they were href'ed elsewhere so the data is there obviously and it wouldn't be a serious imposition on their proprietary information to publish analysis of the href power law.
Ironically, the real value in XMLHTTPRequest isn't that communication can be asynchronous. Form submissions, the previous way of handling server communication, were and still are asynchronous. XMLHTTPRequest actually makes it possible to support _synchronous_ calls and provides a single unified way to make either type of call.
Most writings on AJAX would have you believe that's enough -- make an asynchronous call, get an AJAX application. Unfortunately, as anyone who's done much programming with asychronous calls (aka threads) can tell you, making the call is the easy part -- it's coordinating the results that's hard. A simple real world example highlights "the sync problem".
The Sync Problem
Its a common client-side requirement to fetch a template containing static data along with dynamic data from a web service call, blend them into a single UI element, and then display that element in a portion of the user's currently displayed page. In this common case you've got two separate data sources meaning you have two separate calls whose results have to be blended only after both complete. When confronted with this reality most developers switch to making synchronous calls (taking advantage of XMLHTTPRequest's truly new feature to "cheat"). If you decide to hang in there and stay with the asynchronous call format that's great, but we've yet to see a single AJAX toolkit that offers you any kind of multiple-request coordination -- so you'll end up writing the synchronization logic yourself.
If you use TIBET its simple:
Since TIBET was built before you could "cheat" via XMLHTTPRequest it's been designed to support asychronous event coordination from the start. TIBET uses event signaling and a set of types based on the Workflow Management Coalition's petri-net models for workflow event coordination to handle event synchronization. Because it uses events rather than XMLHTTPRequest callbacks you can use the previous example's pattern to join responses from both the server and the user since interactions with the user are asynchronous as well.Basically the main story was about a non-conventional fusion technology purportedly capable of burning hydrogen-1 and boron-11, which is a highly desirable fuel cycle since it produces no neutrons at all. My response was to detail my experience with a project to try to achieve the same fusion cycle, called p-B11 ("p" standing for "protium" or hydrogen-1 as opposed to "deuterium" which is hydrogen-2). Since this history involves some information that the tokamak afficionados find enormously embarrassing, they linked to a post of mine made to the Stormfrot forum where I stated my opinion of Jewish complicity in the failure of the fusion program. Then the block occurred. I did file a complaint with slashdot's editor but no action was taken. I find it all too predictable that people can credit Jews with nuclear technology projects over which they had disproportionate influence and everyone nods their heads in righteous agreement but if anyone assigns blame for failure of such programs not only is he a social pariah -- he's blocked from posting.
Of Plasmaks and Prizes (Score:1, Offtopic) by Baldrson (78598) *
on Saturday November 05, @10:43AM (#13958456)
(http://www.geocities.com/jim_bowery | Last Journal: Wednesday July 21, @04:12AM)
Back when the cold fusion brouhaha hit, I ran across an intriguing idea of achieving p-B11 (p=proteum=Hydrogen-1 and B11 =Boron-11) fusion using artificial ball lightning, called the Plasmak. No adequate explanation of ball-lightning has yet been concocted resuling in reproducible free-floating plasmoids, and the guy (Paul Koloc) doing the work seemed to have a somewhat plausible idea. (And he did have background with the Spheromak group at the University of Maryland.) Most importantly there were actual photographs of these plasmoids floating in the open air without continuous power input! So I looked into it seriously for a while. During this time I also ran across others who were looking into a variety of p-B11 technologies including one of the founders of the US Tokamak program, Robert W. Bussard with his resurrection of Philo Farnsworth's inertial electrostatic confinement device sometimes called the Farnsworth Fusor.
Given:
This was 1992.
I never got very far with this legislation myself but about 3 years later, Bussard decided to submit this legislation -- with a kicker:
For a review of Peter Turney's group's accomplishment see "AI Breakthrough or the Mismeasure of Machine?"
So what does this say about the distribution of talent between races?
It means that the probability that someone in IT of a given race is either smart or dumb -- given no other information about them -- is neither 0 nor is it 1!
Thank you Martin Luther King, Jr. for leading me see this profound truth.
Finding substitute materials/techniques is possible but currently speculative. There should be a heavy tax placed on the extraction of hydrothermal ores and the tax money put to prize awards for the creation of substitute materials.
The only thing that will lower launch costs, other than the threat of loss of something like the cold war is incentives for private enterprise.
The profound danger of a biased AI here is quite avoidable. The theoretic problem of unbiased AI has been formally solved by Marcus Hutter with AIXI:
This is the reason I set up the following definition of the C-Prize:
Matt Mahoney is the author of Text Compression as a Test for Artificial Intelligence which states:
(Mahoney is also a competitor who has some winnings from The Calgary Corpus Compression Challenge.)
Now a big question here is whether it might be possible to create a verifiably unbiased AI without making the compression program open source. In any case I don't think it is wise to trust any AI that hasn't at least gone through a compression competition with other purportedly unbiased AI's compressing an open source corpus.
Now, who might fund something like the C-Prize?
Well, here's a suggestion:
Since:
At some point you have to stop worrying so much about storage capacity and start worrying about how robust your storage medium is.
Of course, the guys who sell DVD's for a living may like the idea that people find themselves having to buy new copies of the stuff they already bought (because it is encrypted and they can't make backup copies).
Likewise, if you were to average all the genetics of each individual sex, you would find that they are more similar to each other than the difference you find between members of the same sex due to natural variation. It is pretty conclusive that there are no significant gender differences.
Indeed, virtually any taxonomy you choose within a species will come up with similar statements and that includes subspecies which are considered distinct enough to deserve special protection as endangered.
Since current orthodoxy is "Out of Africa" any data which is inconsistent with this orthodoxy must be explained in a way that is consistent with the orthodoxy. This is quite similar to much of the activity of intelligent design theorists.
Innan and Nordborg
The fact is that the mitochondrial DNA data is consistent with multiple matrilines as well as. Lots of people have hung their hat on the Out of Africa hypothesis but that doesn't mean their intepretation of the DNA evidence is gospel.