I host some websites, some flash, some other stuff. I don't care how I get eyeballs, as long as people don't steal my content, I can make money from ads.
This guy is an idiot.
That may have been true when you actually had to actively install something to block the popup ads, then they could figure that you were a little more aware than the rest, pass you off as a geek that would be annoyed and not likely to click on their ads on principle.
Now popup blocking comes enabled out-of-the-box on at least IE and FireFox so everyone, even those not aware enough to care, have popup blocking installed and the methods at getting around that standard popup blocking are targetting them. If they get the geeks too, then who cares - they'll be the first to adopt the next generation of popup blocking. Eventually the cycle will continue.
It's no doubt that we would speak about Internet protocols a little differently had these guys not done what they did, but to me it seems like we'd just be saying some other acronym (does anyone really buy that they invented the idea of packets and it didn't come about until 1973?) They invented the basic scheme, but the real cleverness seems to have come as a result of the various exponential-backoff mechanisms and other complexities in today's implementation of TCP/IP, not the basic protocol they designed in the 70's.
Looking at the previous winners it's kind of hard to tell what the point of the Turing award is. In some cases it's given to researchers that have made very influential theoretical break-throughs and others that seem to have invented something that became popular. Maybe I'm just being sidetracked by what is essentially the old debate about whether "systems" research is true research since it's often difficult to comparatively evaluate alternatives.
I just like to see the award go to people that did something that no one else (or at least very few people) working at the time would have been likely to think of and I'm not sure this meets that criterion.
Or maybe it's a case of them being lazy and not bothering to support other browsers because they realize (correctly) that this will allow some 60-70% of users to access Hotmail. If you're not one of them then support other free email providers that do display correctly on your browser. Microsoft runs itself as a business (and I argue that's good...) and there's little reason for them to spend money catering to your wishes if there's no reason for them to...not to mention the fact that your argument can be reversed, as in Mozilla is trying to exclude MS fans by not displaying Hotmail's page correctly. Ludicrous and far-fetched? Yes, but only a little more than your claim.
I don't mean to flame, but Cyc is in some sense useless because information largely (if not completely) must be coded by humans. For a while most of what computers did had to be coded by people and then machine learning began to mature as a field and was able to improve basically everything. There are billions of connection in each person's brain so trying to replicate something like this by hand seems pretty tough.
What you want is something that can go out and read large corpora (the web for instance) and develop its own knowledge base and then reason using it. The DARPA project aims to do this on a limited scale, but that's where you have to start if you want to tackle the big project later. And if you can write a program that can pass my orgo exam or get a 1600 on the SATs I think that's pretty impressive.
The problem isn't that they don't know the keys, it's that there's no *easy* way to keep track of who they legitimately belong to. So they print key X, ship it to Best Buy where someone buys it and installs it, then he decides he wants to run Linux so he uninstalls it and sells his license to a friend who then forgets the key and contacts Microsoft. How is MS supposed to tell that guy is supposed to have access to a key?
better to search information, not pages
on
Better Search Engines
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Enhancements to normal search engines are great and will always be important, but better is to go beyond that to searching, indexing and retrieving actual information. Services like AskJeeves and company originally promised true question answering and other, more experimental, projects like UW's Know-It-All promise to operate over information, not webpages.
Perhaps these are just very generalized search engine enhancement...but I think it's a new way of thinking that will become very important over the next decade as facilitating technologies mature.
I live in a place with very few high-speed connections, hardly any Internet users, and a max of 1000 people are a toll-free call away - if I have to go tit-for-tat I'll never make any love to pay for what I take because no one will want to call anyone in my area.
In general, does a tit-for-tat model make sense when P2P introduces geographical or other dependencies? Does it make more sense to credit an open line rather than actually allowing someone to call using it? How do you prevent fraud in a system like that? (i.e. my phone is in iowa, you don't want to use it, i swear)
I think there is a very real danger of this only being contributed to by hardcore proponents of P2P and the danger in that is that no one will subjectively evaluate alternatives. The academic research seems to suggest that P2P isn't necessarily the best alternative and that something more centralized like Napster or really centralized like a client-server model but where anyone can upload/download is better in terms of overall cost...at least for legal stuff.
For this to be useful both sides must be presented well and P2P still win...if that doesn't happen then it's not worth much of anything.
The successful people they're counting are the college graduates of at least 10 to 20 years ago. College attendance began its explosion during this time and that leads to the percentage decrease because the number of Ivy admissions hasn't increased in kind. With so many more people attending other colleges and Ivys not keeping their proportion, it's no wonder that more good people that end up in high positions in corporate America having come from other colleges.
The majority of kids attending Ivys might come from rich families but I would argue this is much different than 50 years ago when the majority came from families that were both rich and had high status. Admission has become tough, even for legacies (well, unless there isn't a building named after your dad) so a lot of the kids being groomed to take over the family empire are more likely to not get into an Ivy and are more likely to not want to go even if they could. Ivys have become a lot dorkier in recent years.
Having attended both an Ivy and non-Ivys I can say that the difference is that the non-Ivys tend to be more practical, teaching things employers actually want to know. Ivys are about theory and thinking...which is what learning should be about, even if not as useful right out of college.
Without a large number of widely used tools out there that make use of semantic information there won't be that much content designed for them...and without content designed for them the tools won't exist and certainly won't be widely used. Currently it's more of an academic exercise - if we somehow knew what all this information on the web actually was, what could we do with it? More interesting it seems then are approaches at bypassing the markup by hand and do something equivalent automatically.
I had the opportunity to work for a company that collected tons of this information from their consumer side and used it extensively for speech recognition training data in their research department. It seemed like every talk I attended by a member of this group was started by the speaker playing an excerpt of one of the more humorous or frustrated callers.
Customer> I can't believe they have me talking to a f#$king machine!
System> I'm sorry, I don't understand what you said. Did you want information about your bill?
Customer> No! I want to talk to a f$#king person!
The moral: If you curse at a machine be prepared to be laughed at by people for years to come. Of course you probably don't know them and they've all signed NDA's...
Recently I read something about pilots not really needing the windows in the cockpit because because basically everything can be done with instruments. This makes me wonder if the laser really blinded the pilots or if it somehow blinded their instruments. Any thoughts on how a laser beam would affect whatever instruments are used in planes these days? It seems if the instruments were operational then this in the worst case would be like flying through low-level clouds because as the plane got closer to the ground the laser beam could no longer track the plane because it would be blocked by objects on the ground...unless this guy had a direct line of site to the runway.
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I host some websites, some flash, some other stuff. I don't care how I get eyeballs, as long as people don't steal my content, I can make money from ads. This guy is an idiot.
That may have been true when you actually had to actively install something to block the popup ads, then they could figure that you were a little more aware than the rest, pass you off as a geek that would be annoyed and not likely to click on their ads on principle.
Now popup blocking comes enabled out-of-the-box on at least IE and FireFox so everyone, even those not aware enough to care, have popup blocking installed and the methods at getting around that standard popup blocking are targetting them. If they get the geeks too, then who cares - they'll be the first to adopt the next generation of popup blocking. Eventually the cycle will continue.
It's no doubt that we would speak about Internet protocols a little differently had these guys not done what they did, but to me it seems like we'd just be saying some other acronym (does anyone really buy that they invented the idea of packets and it didn't come about until 1973?) They invented the basic scheme, but the real cleverness seems to have come as a result of the various exponential-backoff mechanisms and other complexities in today's implementation of TCP/IP, not the basic protocol they designed in the 70's.
Looking at the previous winners it's kind of hard to tell what the point of the Turing award is. In some cases it's given to researchers that have made very influential theoretical break-throughs and others that seem to have invented something that became popular. Maybe I'm just being sidetracked by what is essentially the old debate about whether "systems" research is true research since it's often difficult to comparatively evaluate alternatives.
I just like to see the award go to people that did something that no one else (or at least very few people) working at the time would have been likely to think of and I'm not sure this meets that criterion.
Or maybe it's a case of them being lazy and not bothering to support other browsers because they realize (correctly) that this will allow some 60-70% of users to access Hotmail. If you're not one of them then support other free email providers that do display correctly on your browser. Microsoft runs itself as a business (and I argue that's good...) and there's little reason for them to spend money catering to your wishes if there's no reason for them to...not to mention the fact that your argument can be reversed, as in Mozilla is trying to exclude MS fans by not displaying Hotmail's page correctly. Ludicrous and far-fetched? Yes, but only a little more than your claim.
Mmmm...
I don't mean to flame, but Cyc is in some sense useless because information largely (if not completely) must be coded by humans. For a while most of what computers did had to be coded by people and then machine learning began to mature as a field and was able to improve basically everything. There are billions of connection in each person's brain so trying to replicate something like this by hand seems pretty tough.
What you want is something that can go out and read large corpora (the web for instance) and develop its own knowledge base and then reason using it. The DARPA project aims to do this on a limited scale, but that's where you have to start if you want to tackle the big project later. And if you can write a program that can pass my orgo exam or get a 1600 on the SATs I think that's pretty impressive.
The problem isn't that they don't know the keys, it's that there's no *easy* way to keep track of who they legitimately belong to. So they print key X, ship it to Best Buy where someone buys it and installs it, then he decides he wants to run Linux so he uninstalls it and sells his license to a friend who then forgets the key and contacts Microsoft. How is MS supposed to tell that guy is supposed to have access to a key?
Perhaps these are just very generalized search engine enhancement...but I think it's a new way of thinking that will become very important over the next decade as facilitating technologies mature.
I live in a place with very few high-speed connections, hardly any Internet users, and a max of 1000 people are a toll-free call away - if I have to go tit-for-tat I'll never make any love to pay for what I take because no one will want to call anyone in my area. In general, does a tit-for-tat model make sense when P2P introduces geographical or other dependencies? Does it make more sense to credit an open line rather than actually allowing someone to call using it? How do you prevent fraud in a system like that? (i.e. my phone is in iowa, you don't want to use it, i swear)
I think there is a very real danger of this only being contributed to by hardcore proponents of P2P and the danger in that is that no one will subjectively evaluate alternatives. The academic research seems to suggest that P2P isn't necessarily the best alternative and that something more centralized like Napster or really centralized like a client-server model but where anyone can upload/download is better in terms of overall cost...at least for legal stuff.
For this to be useful both sides must be presented well and P2P still win...if that doesn't happen then it's not worth much of anything.
The successful people they're counting are the college graduates of at least 10 to 20 years ago. College attendance began its explosion during this time and that leads to the percentage decrease because the number of Ivy admissions hasn't increased in kind. With so many more people attending other colleges and Ivys not keeping their proportion, it's no wonder that more good people that end up in high positions in corporate America having come from other colleges.
The majority of kids attending Ivys might come from rich families but I would argue this is much different than 50 years ago when the majority came from families that were both rich and had high status. Admission has become tough, even for legacies (well, unless there isn't a building named after your dad) so a lot of the kids being groomed to take over the family empire are more likely to not get into an Ivy and are more likely to not want to go even if they could. Ivys have become a lot dorkier in recent years.
Having attended both an Ivy and non-Ivys I can say that the difference is that the non-Ivys tend to be more practical, teaching things employers actually want to know. Ivys are about theory and thinking...which is what learning should be about, even if not as useful right out of college.
Without a large number of widely used tools out there that make use of semantic information there won't be that much content designed for them...and without content designed for them the tools won't exist and certainly won't be widely used. Currently it's more of an academic exercise - if we somehow knew what all this information on the web actually was, what could we do with it? More interesting it seems then are approaches at bypassing the markup by hand and do something equivalent automatically.
I had the opportunity to work for a company that collected tons of this information from their consumer side and used it extensively for speech recognition training data in their research department. It seemed like every talk I attended by a member of this group was started by the speaker playing an excerpt of one of the more humorous or frustrated callers. Customer> I can't believe they have me talking to a f#$king machine! System> I'm sorry, I don't understand what you said. Did you want information about your bill? Customer> No! I want to talk to a f$#king person! The moral: If you curse at a machine be prepared to be laughed at by people for years to come. Of course you probably don't know them and they've all signed NDA's...
Recently I read something about pilots not really needing the windows in the cockpit because because basically everything can be done with instruments. This makes me wonder if the laser really blinded the pilots or if it somehow blinded their instruments. Any thoughts on how a laser beam would affect whatever instruments are used in planes these days? It seems if the instruments were operational then this in the worst case would be like flying through low-level clouds because as the plane got closer to the ground the laser beam could no longer track the plane because it would be blocked by objects on the ground...unless this guy had a direct line of site to the runway.