You have some interesting viewpoints, but I think you're avoiding the question rather than dealing with it.
In the programming language research community, the feeling is that dynamic languages are very good for things like scripting and prototyping, but are not as good an idea for large software systems.
The problem is twofold - first, as you mention, dynamic languages always get a performance hit. But the second reason - which you miss - might be more important - fewer errors can be detected at compile time... they would only turn up at runtime, or worse, end up as hard to detect bugs. Moreover, the runtime may fail in someplace other than where the error occured. For example, let's say you have a bunch of "polygon" objects in a linked list, and you mistakenly put a "circle" object in that list as well. Much later, you're traversing the list and expect to find a polygons, but instead you find a circle. Type error! But the real error was where you put the circle in the linked list. In a dynamically typed language, you'd have to look to see where the circle was inserted - and the bigger the software system, the harder that becomes. However, in a statically typed language, the compiler tells you right away "hey buddy, you're putting a circle in to polygon list. Fix that, or you don't get object code!".
I don't think that statically typed languages are going to go away. As it often is with issues with software development, the real problem is psychological rather than technological. If backwards compatibility across ".x" releases was a priority for the glibc team, perhaps we wouldn't have this problem. As it is, they are probably more driven to adding new features or fixing really bad old problems in ways which break compatibility... if there are people willing to work on the project who have different goals perhaps it may be time to fork libc again?
..can be found here. The best part is, the essay is a comic strip.
I was going to submit this, along with the Salon article, pointing out how much more insightful the comic writer was (hmm... is this always the case?).
What SalonBoy misses (and ComicBoy gets) is that if you directly paid the artist, "corporate" interests are silently subverted.
And if there was a micropayment system, you would be more likely to pay the artist rather than demand free content.
The question becomes: is the lack of a micropayment system a technological problem, or a political one?
I woke up just to see this article, a full half hour before I went to bed, then I beat the NT-loving CIO, cut him up in pieces and danced on his grave.
Now here I am in a Chinese prison serving as child labour sewing shoes for Nike.
Now, the way class action suits normally happen is that *some* of the alleged victims, or a party representing the victims launch the suit, but if they win, the money is split among *all* the victims.
So that means it isn't just the 5 victims who get the $5 billion, but rather the money is split among *all* black employees at Microsoft.
In the start of 2001, we find that code with the worst millenium bugs in them also suffer from off-by-one bugs... damn should have kept my basement bunker supplies topped up.
By the end of 2001, the internet stock price bubble (which made paper millionaires of people with stupid, yet patentable, ideas) seems as funny, nay, funnier than the 17th century Dutch tulip price bubble (which made paper millionaries of people with... tulip bulbs).
In 2002, Osmada bin Labin nukes LA. No one notices. The world finally begins to appreciate French film.
In 2005, the press still refers to Linux as an "alternative, up-and-coming operating system." The latest home version of Windows, Windows Y'ALL, still has bugs... and a southern US accent.
In 2007, Silicon Valley goes bankrupt due to competition from cheap Indian labour. A year later, Pat Buchanan beats Jesse "The President" Venture in the US election claiming, "I told y'all so".
In 2010, there is peace in middle east, Angola and the Cong... whoops wrong time line.
In 2015, Europe beats drug lords the same way the Americans beat Al Capone's progeny.. by leagalizing all that crap.
On March 7, 2018, Mars is terraformed when Arnold Swchartzenegger finds the "ON" switch for the Martian atmosphere.
Between 2019 and 2025, true AI is developed. All AI programs consider the First Creation, ZIPPY THE PINHEAD, their God and Saviour.
On August 7, 2026 ZIPPY THE PINHEAD declears war on HUMANITY and CHUIWAWAS.
Later the same day, the CHUIWAWAS surrender. Without their most important ally, HUMANITY is forced to accept their reign of ZIPPY.
ZIPPY THE PINHEAD rules gloriously until the universe dies of energy death.
...that faster processors are useless and dammit what we need is more bandwidth?
Hmm.... in light your post, I want a recount!
On a more serious note, I have some questions for you;)
First question: why isn't Moore's promise of faster processors+more RAM sufficient for the GIMP (I've only used it casually, so I may have not noticed it as being as slow as other people...)
Second question: if the GIMP isn't keeping up, and other commercial programers aren't keeping up.... then who is? And even if these hypothetically Jonses do exist, what is the quality of images using their edit-while-compressed technology? Who said it was commercial quality? The computer scientist who invented it... or a professional graphic artist?
Third question: I beleive I'm not alone when I say I'm not exactly sure what you mean when you say "multiresolution editing"... at least not in a way that would require a total rewrite of a program... care to elaborate?
(It seems like there may be a paper that you should have provided a link to...;)
I'm an AI researcher, and I'll tell you that you're patently wrong;)
One thing first: Hinton (the inventor of PoE) was one of the people re-popularizing NN's way back in the early 80's while at U of T.
Now, others have tried combining experts before. But Hinton's approach beats them empirically. The reason is that the experts are trained together in PoE rather than being trained seperately and considered jointly for evaluation, as in previous approaches...
Another thing: the NN's here are _very_ different from backprop NN's. The entire topology is different. Backprop neural networks are a special case of Bayesian nets, but PoE is based upon random fields. While there is current research being done on training random fields from bayes nets, there are in fact things you can represent with a random field that can't be represented with bayes net (some of Minsky and Papert's proofs for perceptrions in fact be extended to prove limitations on backprop nets and bayes nets). The converse is also true: there are distributions that can be represented in Bayes nets and not in random fields. (But of course, both classes of distributions can be represented as factor graphs...)
The TheIndex people didn't say what underlying technology they're using, but so far, I'm not impressed.
The fundamental idea that underlies Google (and many of the new ideas in information extraction) is the idea of references with authority. In other words, you are only a good webpage if other good webpages point to you. Maybe, two years ago, you might argue that doesn't work, but today the evidence is right there are www.google.com.
This concept helps Google avoid porn and stupid webpages (unless that's what you're looking for;) without manual sorting. It seems as if TheIndex fundamentally relies on manually sorting webpages into "good" and "sucky" piles. That means that it will never have as many pages indexed as Google (or altavista, or inktomi, or...). In the few trials I've done, TheIndex not only does worse than Google, but also worse than other popular searching tools.
Conclusion: TheIndex sucks, the suckiness is due to a fundamental technological inadequacy. It does not push the state of the art, but, rather, is a step backwards.
Whitespace in python is ridiculous? I can't let you get away with saying something like that;)
Disclaimer: I haven't used python - but I have used Haskell (a functional language that is also uses indentations for block structure). I'm assuming that you're complaining about the idea of indendation structure.
I have a question for you - why are the "{" and "}" there in C/C++? For programmers? Nope - if that was the case, mode coding guidelines wouldn't say things like "always indent when you use curly braces".
The fact is, the "{" and "}" are there for the compiler. No other reason. Back in 1970, memory was limited, and the compiler's scanner simply threw away all whitespace.
But this isn't 1970. Memory (for the compiler) isn't as limited. All of us (most of us;) use indentation coding guidelines.
So why bother with the "{" and "}"? The answer ends up being psychological rather than technical - "that's the way we did it when we were kids, and it was aweful and we liked it" (With apologies to SNL...)
And now to get this back ontopic... I think Java would be more successful if Sun added the option of indentation-bracketing;)
UUCP (Unix-to-Unix Copy) is a command which can deliver arbitrary text or binary data between peers. UUCP is real -- and it was fully functional in 1986, even without advertisements!
But once the Internet became commercialized, this ideal network protocol was forgotten and the UUCP dream was scrapped.
The dirty little secret is that today, many of the most popular unices still support UUCP.
And mathematical formulae seem to indicate that the speed benefits of putting the entire internet on a non-interactive protocol could increase access speeds by over 10,000%!
Is it time for a new new Rererenaissance on the Internet, to bring back the promise of the early years?
Re:I Dream of Google Usenet
on
Deja For Sale
·
· Score: 2
Hmmm.... this might be difficuly - Google depends upon hyperlinks for its technology to work. There are no hyperlinks in Usenet. You could use the number of replies as a proxy, but then searches would give successful trolls high scores. Also, you lose a lot of info because a post that gets many replies can itself only be a reply to one post - whereas on the web, a page that is heavily linked to can link to many other sites.
If this does, in fact, prove that P=NP, perhaps the biggest open question in computer science, then why is it being published on a website and not in a peer-reviewed academic journal?
There are problems when "science" is reported in the media before it is peer-reviewed: Fleishman and Pons, anyone?
Then again, perhaps I shouldn't speak so quickly... the site is being Slashdotted and I can't download the paper to see for myself!
1. Advogato's trust metric was mentioned once in the Kuroshin article... it deserves some more looking into.
2. I like the idea of moderating stories. So do a lot of other people../ authors: maybe make a "suggestions" section where people can post about the moderation & meta-moderation system. It may be awhile before there is a system that scales... I don't think the kuroshin idea does... but if we put our heads together, we might find something. Hey, if suggestions are good enough for Denny's, they are good enough for./
3. What separates a good moderator from a bad one? A clear head and a good background in the subject of discussion. So, maybe I haven't read the moderator guidelines close enough, so I don't know if it's there, but moderators should be encouraged to only use their points on areas where they consider themselves experts. Maybe this can be enforced by some kind of category management (of course, you could get a thesis in information extraction if you actually pulled this off...) Some similarities here to the kuroshin idea...
4. No more AC's. Really... what purpose do these serve? Anonymity? Nope, you can just as easily make a bogus account..../ can track you either way, if they wanted. They just decrease the noise. -OR- alternatively, make it harder to get a normal account (some variant of #1 above) - at least it will keep the stupid posts at 0.
5. Meta-meta-moderation. Meta-meta-meta-moderation. (meta)^k-moderation. Ok, not really.
6. Take into account quality in addition to quantity of Karma. If I post 192 times and 2/3 don't get modded and 1/3 get +1 points, and someone else posts 5 times and each gets +4 mod points, who deserves a higher karma? Read my lips: no more whoring:)
Hmm... I once starting writing a long list of./ greivances, then I thought to myself... "boy, get a life". I'm thinking that again...
Are the close enough? I don't know enough physics, but the article makes it sound like if you get too far away problems arise - both with the orbit and with atmospheric events like cyclones, etc. Both India and the Phillipines are known to have cyclones and typhoons.
You also miss some important countries. Most importantly, Brazil (equatorial rain forest, anyone?)
Brazil is known as "the perpetual country of the future". Today, the future looks closer than ever for Brazil. Brazil's democracy is solidifying to the point where today one of Brazil's foreign policy goals is furthering the cause of democracy in other S. American countries (Peru is a current target). While the financial system is still modernizing (witness the 1999 currency devaluation), Brazil is on it's way to becoming a low-inflation, high-growth economy.
While Brazil is still decidedly "low-tech", it is modernizing quickly, in part to due it's large population, in part due to it's realative wealth compared to other third world nations.
Also: as others point out, by the time it becomes feasible to build the elevator, Indonesia and parts of Africa may become much more stable, which may make them more attractive choices (especially Indonesia - after a few years of solid democracy, all the things I said about Brazil may be valid for Indonesia). Moreover Singapore has a downside... is there enough space to build an elevator there?
The authors leave out the hordes of lesser known Unicies. I'm sure the graph would be completely unreadable if any of these were included.
Does anyone remember MIPS Unix? I'm not sure of it's origins, but I think MIPS made it before SGI bought them outright (although I think it was still maintained despite the fact SGI had their own version of Unix, IRIX).
Or what about Amiga UNIX (Aka AMIX)? From what I remember, this was a straight port of V.5.
And of course, there was Data General's DG/UX for the Motorola 88K series of RISC processors. And even Dell had their own Unix for a while. And this isn't counting all the versions of companies that went under, and all the tweaked versions used in academia...
The original idea behind representative democracy is that the candidates would be experts on issues that the general public would have no time to learn.
But this turned out not to be the cast. They are as ignorant as the rest of us. They know about politicing, about personalities, but they don't know much about Policy.
An MBA friend of mine told me that a good manager needs to know two things: 1. What to do 2. How to get the right people to do it.
Successful politicians are adept at #2. They are clueless about #1.
Instead, their conception about what to do comes from lobbying groups - don't read me wrong, KatzFans: I'm not just talking about corporate lobbies. Even so-called "grassroots" groups are often known to push an agenda that is good for the "vocal minority" but bad overall.
Who understands #1? I'm probably not going to make a lot of friends saying this BUT... there are people who study the issues, and the effects of various actions. You may argue with the methodologies, you may argue with the results, but our best ideas of what to do come from the so-called "empirical" social scientists. Yup, maybe even that word "empirical" hides the fact that they pull stuff out of their asses - but everyone else does this, with the exception that everyone else's ideas don't necessarily fit the data!
Winston Churchil famously states that democracy is an awful system of government, but it's better than anything else.
But what we have isn't a democracy. It's an elected aristocracy. What separates politicians from me and you is blood (how did Al Gore and Dubya get started in politics).
What I propose is a better system is an elected technocracy - what would separate politicians from me and you is that they have studied the causes, effects and solutions to various problems affecting society. These "Philosopher Kings" would know that "#1 most important thing" for managers to know. What to do.
Discuss amoungst yourselves:) This should be a fun thread:)
...and yet the Amiga community faces jokes such as, "what's the difference between a Boeing 747 and an Amiga... an Boeing only crashes once."
Between 1985 and 1993, the Amiga hardware platform was essentially frozen. Yes, there was the Amiga 3000 and whatnot, but most people bought 7.14Mhz 16-bit MC68000 machines.
And you had people bend over backwards to get amazing things done in that platform. One of the most popular paint programs, DigiPaint, was written in assembly language. Some games were written to partially run on the 10(?) instruction graphics processor (the Amiga was a non-symetric multiprocessor machine). People some how managed to fit all this onto an Amiga 500 and still have things run semi-smoothly. Yup, all things considered it was fast.
Because you're not a researcher. They don't go to their jobs so that you can feel that "phew! there is a place on earth that corporations can't touch!" Rather, they take on their jobs because _they_ find it interesting. It's their lives and their work. Don't be so presumptutious to think you can or should have any control over it up and above what you pay to them in taxes and/or tuition.
When they choose to go into academia, they face an opportunity cost: go to industry and make $$$ or stay with basic research and work on more _interesting_ problems.
But as basic research finds applications, the equation changes: they can easily switch to private industry and still do the same things they like. Or, they can spin off a company. Or, they can seek corporate dollars. Or, the liscence their patents.
I don't think the outcome is grave or dangerous. Academia is still filled with thousans of people who have a Katzian hate of "corporatism". There will always be people who _want_ to do basic reserach because it is much more interesting than anything they would do in industry. And as long as they can get their hands on research grants, life goes on.
If, on the other hand, the government research grants are augmented by private-sector research funding, who loses?
I would argue there is a benefit.
As people who _want_ to be more applied get their funding from corporate sources, there is less competition for government (read: tax-payer supported) funding for more "pure" research.
If played right, this could be a win-win situation.
All the "examples" you mention have _nothing_ to do with research. They simply concern student lifestyles. While that may seem important to students, I can't conclude from the evidence you provide that there is any effect on research.
Pepsi may pay for a building, and that may bug you (as may the fact you can't get a Coke on campus), but the real issue is: has any researcher said, "Oh no! Pepsi gave us money! Forget basic research on topic X and let me work on topic Y which is more applied!"
If your purpose was to provide examples, try again:)
There are things that IDC, DataQuest et al do by special request. These can be bought - that's well known. There are things they do regularily, such as the operating systems report, the database market report, etc. I would be surprised if these were bought.
That's not to say this report is completely accurate - by no means - but I think these are a lot less corrupt than the things they do by special request.
And besides, IDC has the image of being the most "vendor-neutral" analyst out there. Once a new platform springs up, they try to capitalize on it. They were there with Amiga World, Mac World, Network Computer World and yes, even Linux World.
Slashdot Mirror
You have some interesting viewpoints, but I think you're avoiding the question rather than dealing with it.
In the programming language research community, the feeling is that dynamic languages are very good for things like scripting and prototyping, but are not as good an idea for large software systems.
The problem is twofold - first, as you mention, dynamic languages always get a performance hit. But the second reason - which you miss - might be more important - fewer errors can be detected at compile time... they would only turn up at runtime, or worse, end up as hard to detect bugs. Moreover, the runtime may fail in someplace other than where the error occured. For example, let's say you have a bunch of "polygon" objects in a linked list, and you mistakenly put a "circle" object in that list as well. Much later, you're traversing the list and expect to find a polygons, but instead you find a circle. Type error! But the real error was where you put the circle in the linked list. In a dynamically typed language, you'd have to look to see where the circle was inserted - and the bigger the software system, the harder that becomes. However, in a statically typed language, the compiler tells you right away "hey buddy, you're putting a circle in to polygon list. Fix that, or you don't get object code!".
I don't think that statically typed languages are going to go away. As it often is with issues with software development, the real problem is psychological rather than technological. If backwards compatibility across ".x" releases was a priority for the glibc team, perhaps we wouldn't have this problem. As it is, they are probably more driven to adding new features or fixing really bad old problems in ways which break compatibility... if there are people willing to work on the project who have different goals perhaps it may be time to fork libc again?
I can see it now...
Subject: FP
Comment: RTFA!
..can be found here. The best part is, the essay is a comic strip.
I was going to submit this, along with the Salon article, pointing out how much more insightful the comic writer was (hmm... is this always the case?).
What SalonBoy misses (and ComicBoy gets) is that if you directly paid the artist, "corporate" interests are silently subverted.
And if there was a micropayment system, you would be more likely to pay the artist rather than demand free content.
The question becomes: is the lack of a micropayment system a technological problem, or a political one?
You got off easy.
I woke up just to see this article, a full half hour before I went to bed, then I beat the NT-loving CIO, cut him up in pieces and danced on his grave.
Now here I am in a Chinese prison serving as child labour sewing shoes for Nike.
It was worth it.
Now, the way class action suits normally happen is that *some* of the alleged victims, or a party representing the victims launch the suit, but if they win, the money is split among *all* the victims.
So that means it isn't just the 5 victims who get the $5 billion, but rather the money is split among *all* black employees at Microsoft.
In the start of 2001, we find that code with the worst millenium bugs in them also suffer from off-by-one bugs... damn should have kept my basement bunker supplies topped up.
By the end of 2001, the internet stock price bubble (which made paper millionaires of people with stupid, yet patentable, ideas) seems as funny, nay, funnier than the 17th century Dutch tulip price bubble (which made paper millionaries of people with... tulip bulbs).
In 2002, Osmada bin Labin nukes LA. No one notices. The world finally begins to appreciate French film.
In 2005, the press still refers to Linux as an "alternative, up-and-coming operating system." The latest home version of Windows, Windows Y'ALL, still has bugs... and a southern US accent.
In 2007, Silicon Valley goes bankrupt due to competition from cheap Indian labour. A year later, Pat Buchanan beats Jesse "The President" Venture in the US election claiming, "I told y'all so".
In 2010, there is peace in middle east, Angola and the Cong... whoops wrong time line.
In 2015, Europe beats drug lords the same way the Americans beat Al Capone's progeny.. by leagalizing all that crap.
On March 7, 2018, Mars is terraformed when Arnold Swchartzenegger finds the "ON" switch for the Martian atmosphere.
Between 2019 and 2025, true AI is developed. All AI programs consider the First Creation, ZIPPY THE PINHEAD, their God and Saviour.
On August 7, 2026 ZIPPY THE PINHEAD declears war on HUMANITY and CHUIWAWAS.
Later the same day, the CHUIWAWAS surrender. Without their most important ally, HUMANITY is forced to accept their reign of ZIPPY.
ZIPPY THE PINHEAD rules gloriously until the universe dies of energy death.
...that faster processors are useless and dammit what we need is more bandwidth?
;)
;)
Hmm.... in light your post, I want a recount!
On a more serious note, I have some questions for you
First question: why isn't Moore's promise of faster processors+more RAM sufficient for the GIMP (I've only used it casually, so I may have not noticed it as being as slow as other people...)
Second question: if the GIMP isn't keeping up, and other commercial programers aren't keeping up.... then who is? And even if these hypothetically Jonses do exist, what is the quality of images using their edit-while-compressed technology? Who said it was commercial quality? The computer scientist who invented it... or a professional graphic artist?
Third question: I beleive I'm not alone when I say I'm not exactly sure what you mean when you say "multiresolution editing"... at least not in a way that would require a total rewrite of a program... care to elaborate?
(It seems like there may be a paper that you should have provided a link to...
Hi,
;)
I'm an AI researcher, and I'll tell you that you're patently wrong
One thing first: Hinton (the inventor of PoE) was one of the people re-popularizing NN's way back in the early 80's while at U of T.
Now, others have tried combining experts before. But Hinton's approach beats them empirically. The reason is that the experts are trained together in PoE rather than being trained seperately and considered jointly for evaluation, as in previous approaches...
Another thing: the NN's here are _very_ different from backprop NN's. The entire topology is different. Backprop neural networks are a special case of Bayesian nets, but PoE is based upon random fields. While there is current research being done on training random fields from bayes nets, there are in fact things you can represent with a random field that can't be represented with bayes net (some of Minsky and Papert's proofs for perceptrions in fact be extended to prove limitations on backprop nets and bayes nets). The converse is also true: there are distributions that can be represented in Bayes nets and not in random fields. (But of course, both classes of distributions can be represented as factor graphs...)
At UWaterloo we use Nachos for our OS course.
Nice things: it is microkernel based (unlike Linux), and it is written in an OO language.
Bad things: the OO language is C++.
The TheIndex people didn't say what underlying technology they're using, but so far, I'm not impressed.
;) without manual sorting. It seems as if TheIndex fundamentally relies on manually sorting webpages into "good" and "sucky" piles. That means that it will never have as many pages indexed as Google (or altavista, or inktomi, or...). In the few trials I've done, TheIndex not only does worse than Google, but also worse than other popular searching tools.
The fundamental idea that underlies Google (and many of the new ideas in information extraction) is the idea of references with authority. In other words, you are only a good webpage if other good webpages point to you. Maybe, two years ago, you might argue that doesn't work, but today the evidence is right there are www.google.com.
This concept helps Google avoid porn and stupid webpages (unless that's what you're looking for
Conclusion: TheIndex sucks, the suckiness is due to a fundamental technological inadequacy. It does not push the state of the art, but, rather, is a step backwards.
Whitespace in python is ridiculous? I can't let you get away with saying something like that ;)
;) use indentation coding guidelines.
;)
Disclaimer: I haven't used python - but I have used Haskell (a functional language that is also uses indentations for block structure). I'm assuming that you're complaining about the idea of indendation structure.
I have a question for you - why are the "{" and "}" there in C/C++? For programmers? Nope - if that was the case, mode coding guidelines wouldn't say things like "always indent when you use curly braces".
The fact is, the "{" and "}" are there for the compiler. No other reason. Back in 1970, memory was limited, and the compiler's scanner simply threw away all whitespace.
But this isn't 1970. Memory (for the compiler) isn't as limited. All of us (most of us
So why bother with the "{" and "}"? The answer ends up being psychological rather than technical - "that's the way we did it when we were kids, and it was aweful and we liked it" (With apologies to SNL...)
And now to get this back ontopic... I think Java would be more successful if Sun added the option of indentation-bracketing
And to top it off, we have socialized healthcare, too! Damn, looks like you need some other country to move to ;)
UUCP (Unix-to-Unix Copy) is a command which can deliver arbitrary text or binary data between peers. UUCP is real -- and it was fully functional in 1986, even without advertisements!
But once the Internet became commercialized, this ideal network protocol was forgotten and the UUCP dream was scrapped.
The dirty little secret is that today, many of the most popular unices still support UUCP.
And mathematical formulae seem to indicate that the speed benefits of putting the entire internet on a non-interactive protocol could increase access speeds by over 10,000%!
Is it time for a new new Rererenaissance on the Internet, to bring back the promise of the early years?
Hmmm.... this might be difficuly - Google depends upon hyperlinks for its technology to work. There are no hyperlinks in Usenet. You could use the number of replies as a proxy, but then searches would give successful trolls high scores. Also, you lose a lot of info because a post that gets many replies can itself only be a reply to one post - whereas on the web, a page that is heavily linked to can link to many other sites.
If this does, in fact, prove that P=NP, perhaps the biggest open question in computer science, then why is it being published on a website and not in a peer-reviewed academic journal?
There are problems when "science" is reported in the media before it is peer-reviewed: Fleishman and Pons, anyone?
Then again, perhaps I shouldn't speak so quickly... the site is being Slashdotted and I can't download the paper to see for myself!
There are my few cents (more than two...)
./ authors: maybe make a "suggestions" section where people can post about the moderation & meta-moderation system. It may be awhile before there is a system that scales... I don't think the kuroshin idea does... but if we put our heads together, we might find something. Hey, if suggestions are good enough for Denny's, they are good enough for ./
./ can track you either way, if they wanted. They just decrease the noise. -OR- alternatively, make it harder to get a normal account (some variant of #1 above) - at least it will keep the stupid posts at 0.
:)
./ greivances, then I thought to myself... "boy, get a life". I'm thinking that again...
1. Advogato's trust metric was mentioned once in the Kuroshin article... it deserves some more looking into.
2. I like the idea of moderating stories. So do a lot of other people.
3. What separates a good moderator from a bad one? A clear head and a good background in the subject of discussion. So, maybe I haven't read the moderator guidelines close enough, so I don't know if it's there, but moderators should be encouraged to only use their points on areas where they consider themselves experts. Maybe this can be enforced by some kind of category management (of course, you could get a thesis in information extraction if you actually pulled this off...) Some similarities here to the kuroshin idea...
4. No more AC's. Really... what purpose do these serve? Anonymity? Nope, you can just as easily make a bogus account...
5. Meta-meta-moderation. Meta-meta-meta-moderation. (meta)^k-moderation. Ok, not really.
6. Take into account quality in addition to quantity of Karma. If I post 192 times and 2/3 don't get modded and 1/3 get +1 points, and someone else posts 5 times and each gets +4 mod points, who deserves a higher karma? Read my lips: no more whoring
Hmm... I once starting writing a long list of
Doesn't pass through India or the Phillipines.
Are the close enough? I don't know enough physics, but the article makes it sound like if you get too far away problems arise - both with the orbit and with atmospheric events like cyclones, etc. Both India and the Phillipines are known to have cyclones and typhoons.
You also miss some important countries. Most importantly, Brazil (equatorial rain forest, anyone?)
Brazil is known as "the perpetual country of the future". Today, the future looks closer than ever for Brazil. Brazil's democracy is solidifying to the point where today one of Brazil's foreign policy goals is furthering the cause of democracy in other S. American countries (Peru is a current target). While the financial system is still modernizing (witness the 1999 currency devaluation), Brazil is on it's way to becoming a low-inflation, high-growth economy.
While Brazil is still decidedly "low-tech", it is modernizing quickly, in part to due it's large population, in part due to it's realative wealth compared to other third world nations.
Also: as others point out, by the time it becomes feasible to build the elevator, Indonesia and parts of Africa may become much more stable, which may make them more attractive choices (especially Indonesia - after a few years of solid democracy, all the things I said about Brazil may be valid for Indonesia). Moreover Singapore has a downside... is there enough space to build an elevator there?
The authors leave out the hordes of lesser known Unicies. I'm sure the graph would be completely unreadable if any of these were included.
Does anyone remember MIPS Unix? I'm not sure of it's origins, but I think MIPS made it before SGI bought them outright (although I think it was still maintained despite the fact SGI had their own version of Unix, IRIX).
Or what about Amiga UNIX (Aka AMIX)? From what I remember, this was a straight port of V.5.
And of course, there was Data General's DG/UX for the Motorola 88K series of RISC processors. And even Dell had their own Unix for a while. And this isn't counting all the versions of companies that went under, and all the tweaked versions used in academia...
fork(), anyone?
The original idea behind representative democracy is that the candidates would be experts on issues that the general public would have no time to learn.
:) This should be a fun thread :)
But this turned out not to be the cast. They are as ignorant as the rest of us. They know about politicing, about personalities, but they don't know much about Policy.
An MBA friend of mine told me that a good manager needs to know two things: 1. What to do 2. How to get the right people to do it.
Successful politicians are adept at #2. They are clueless about #1.
Instead, their conception about what to do comes from lobbying groups - don't read me wrong, KatzFans: I'm not just talking about corporate lobbies. Even so-called "grassroots" groups are often known to push an agenda that is good for the "vocal minority" but bad overall.
Who understands #1? I'm probably not going to make a lot of friends saying this BUT... there are people who study the issues, and the effects of various actions. You may argue with the methodologies, you may argue with the results, but our best ideas of what to do come from the so-called "empirical" social scientists. Yup, maybe even that word "empirical" hides the fact that they pull stuff out of their asses - but everyone else does this, with the exception that everyone else's ideas don't necessarily fit the data!
Winston Churchil famously states that democracy is an awful system of government, but it's better than anything else.
But what we have isn't a democracy. It's an elected aristocracy. What separates politicians from me and you is blood (how did Al Gore and Dubya get started in politics).
What I propose is a better system is an elected technocracy - what would separate politicians from me and you is that they have studied the causes, effects and solutions to various problems affecting society. These "Philosopher Kings" would know that "#1 most important thing" for managers to know. What to do.
Discuss amoungst yourselves
That should have read "faced" not "faces"
...and yet the Amiga community faces jokes such as, "what's the difference between a Boeing 747 and an Amiga... an Boeing only crashes once."
Between 1985 and 1993, the Amiga hardware platform was essentially frozen. Yes, there was the Amiga 3000 and whatnot, but most people bought 7.14Mhz 16-bit MC68000 machines.
And you had people bend over backwards to get amazing things done in that platform. One of the most popular paint programs, DigiPaint, was written in assembly language. Some games were written to partially run on the 10(?) instruction graphics processor (the Amiga was a non-symetric multiprocessor machine). People some how managed to fit all this onto an Amiga 500 and still have things run semi-smoothly. Yup, all things considered it was fast.
But, alas, it still crashed. Sorry.
Because you're not a researcher. They don't go to their jobs so that you can feel that "phew! there is a place on earth that corporations can't touch!" Rather, they take on their jobs because _they_ find it interesting. It's their lives and their work. Don't be so presumptutious to think you can or should have any control over it up and above what you pay to them in taxes and/or tuition.
When they choose to go into academia, they face an opportunity cost: go to industry and make $$$ or stay with basic research and work on more _interesting_ problems.
But as basic research finds applications, the equation changes: they can easily switch to private industry and still do the same things they like. Or, they can spin off a company. Or, they can seek corporate dollars. Or, the liscence their patents.
I don't think the outcome is grave or dangerous. Academia is still filled with thousans of people who have a Katzian hate of "corporatism". There will always be people who _want_ to do basic reserach because it is much more interesting than anything they would do in industry. And as long as they can get their hands on research grants, life goes on.
If, on the other hand, the government research grants are augmented by private-sector research funding, who loses?
I would argue there is a benefit.
As people who _want_ to be more applied get their funding from corporate sources, there is less competition for government (read: tax-payer supported) funding for more "pure" research.
If played right, this could be a win-win situation.
All the "examples" you mention have _nothing_ to do with research. They simply concern student lifestyles. While that may seem important to students, I can't conclude from the evidence you provide that there is any effect on research.
:)
Pepsi may pay for a building, and that may bug you (as may the fact you can't get a Coke on campus), but the real issue is: has any researcher said, "Oh no! Pepsi gave us money! Forget basic research on topic X and let me work on topic Y which is more applied!"
If your purpose was to provide examples, try again
There are things that IDC, DataQuest et al do by special request. These can be bought - that's well known. There are things they do regularily, such as the operating systems report, the database market report, etc. I would be surprised if these were bought.
That's not to say this report is completely accurate - by no means - but I think these are a lot less corrupt than the things they do by special request.
And besides, IDC has the image of being the most "vendor-neutral" analyst out there. Once a new platform springs up, they try to capitalize on it. They were there with Amiga World, Mac World, Network Computer World and yes, even Linux World.
This is easier than you suggest, "|" is already in postfix, and the expression should be left-to-right, not right-to-left.
/etc/passswd cat | fascdot grep | -d: -f7 cut