Because Flash and Shockwave can be used to make games, and games are excellent educational tools. Also, Flash works more smoothly and predictably, is now an open specification, is faster and more sophisticated yet easier to develop for than any other web-based platform. If you ever worked with Flash, you'd know that it rocks and works better than any alternative. Shockwave (which, in terms of compatibility with Linux, is a bigger problem) can be used to develop full-fledged web-based games, and is also very easy to write for. Flash and Shockwave are both more reliable than Java and more appropriate for the things they are useful for.
Educational publishers create web-sites that complement their printed content. Interactivity is the main feature that online material has that printed material won't.
Linux advocates must, must, must move away from thinking "if it can't be done with Linux, it must not be worth doing" towards "how, both technically and politically, can we get Linux to do this thing as well as Windows does and do so at least as easily as Windows does." Otherwise, Linux will be the sour-grapes alternative only.
Guh, I meant "Ontology... is pretty specific," not "... is pretty specially." Smart-assed language-processing AI comments welcomed with rueful resignation.
Ontology, in AI, is pretty specially. The system has to know what the thing is. Not just as a word that gets associated with other words, but as a thing in itself, interaction with which reveals properties. When you have ontology, all the sorts of logical inferences that CYC is being taught by rote ("if David is in New York, his left foot is in New York") don't need to be made explicit. If I had said "epistemology", then you'd be right to make your point.
Read more closely. Bell Labs is privately funded - and was on my list of quality research labs. But it is not per se a commercial venture. In fact, like Xerox PARC and IBM's research departments, it is given considerable free reign to do research without paying much mind to investors or the market. That is different from a business making claims about its core business product - very different.
Ad hominem attacks are not per se unfair, they are simply logically inadequate. However, they are not without any merit in debate. In legal discourse, motive is one of the key points for determining guilt, and that is essentially ad-hominem: commercial efforts are motivated by the need to pump investor confidence and ready the market. If I had left it at that, my attack would have been unfair, but in the context of my more specific critiques of the claims, those comments are fair and provide context.
Ironic that you now face being shunted into Microsoft environments - or out of technology -by the free market that your philosophy extolls as the engine of excellence.
Both laissez-faire capitalism and communism rely on the existence of humans that don't exist yet: the former on perfectly rational, completely informed agents, the latter on completely fair, totally socialized comrades. The failures of each system are based on the fact that humans are not that easy to reinvent.
The exaggerated claims are classic for private-sector AI research. Language acquisition is a process of highly structured connectionism that will probably require some hardware isomorphism (if we're talking about something that humans can talk to, anyway) and, ultimately, ontology. I see no reference to any sort of ontology engine - the sorts of successes they've had indicate absolutely no ontological grounding, and there's no way that simply training a network without some way of generating ontologies that allow things like binding pronouns accurately to precedent references could occur.
When I see an AI claim, I check its source - if its a business, I suspect exaggeration; if it's a real research center (public or private, MIT or Bell Labs) then I'm more likely to take the claims on face value. This is hyperbolic investor-porn, no more.
You've just stated the biggest problem with shareholder capitalism as it is practiced today. We are only beginning to catch the fallout from this - there will be virtually no value in making long-term strategic goals if Boards of Directors are controlled by stock holders (usually fund managers) who have no stake in what happens after the current quarter. And it all becomes a numbers game.
During the boom, even companies that didn't want to grow (that is, wanted to build up existing markets instead of trying to rush into new ones and buy companies, etc.) were pretty much forced into it by shareholder expectations. And now shareholder expectations are working the other way - even solvent companies with working business models are compelled to cut back spending and lay people off, just because that's what "analysts" want to see.
The problem I had was that getting any given game to work on my system (note: my system - not your built-from-the-ground-up-just-to-run-games-for-Lin ux system) was such an ordeal, with problems with ESD, DRI, some games working in Xfree86 3.3 and some in 4.0, each using different kernels, needing to change mouse driver settings, getting the 3d libraries to work just so, that aobut 30% of the Linux games I bought simply *never worked*, while the others worked intermittently.
This issue is distinct from that of the performance of the 3D; when I got it to work, 3D in Linux was at least as good as that in Windows. But getting it to work was the issue.
I learned my lesson that way: the Linux box is great for *serving* for multi-player games, but as a client it was too big a pain in the ass. Much easier to just buy the game for my Windows box. It's not Loki's fault - nor anyone else's, really - that this is the case, but it's just the reality of the situation. I know that this isn't everyone's experience, but it has been the experience of friends of mine. The variety of distributions and the spottiness and inconsistancy over hardware support over different libs and kernel versions and X versions is simply too daunting a task for an OS that is already a small minority.
A goal-less world lets you have the goals you want. If you WANT to go around shooting people or whatever, you can. It's just not necessarily and inherently built in to the game that that's what you're supposed to do. That's not called boredom, that's called existential freedom. The fact that you need your goals external structured for you suggests a failure of imagination, or a fear of freedom.
The difference that a virtual world has from the real world is its malleability, the fact that creative possibilities are not restricted by physics and the economics thereof. The possibility of creating and then inhabiting just about any type of environment - dwelling in landscapes of pure imagination - is very compelling to me.
Or a company with enough smarts and the right people to market to people who *aren't* 15 year old boys and the like.
If the women go there, the rest of the world will follow. Market a non-goal 3d virtual world to people who aren't playing Quake, not to the people who are.
Considering the fact that technicians outnumber biotech and even medical professionals by a good order of magnitude, just imagine what kind of poor information we must be getting about those domains.
As an aside, I'm a little perplexed by the claim that there are few qualified high-tech experts: the field of computers and networks seems to enjoy a huge population, vis-a-vis just about any other (i.e., chemistry, the environment, biology, public health, economics etc.)
If you believe that organic matter that hasn't even organized itself into a single neuron is a human life, then you'll believe that a toaster is a web server.
Of course. It's far easier to change the educational infrastructure, and the developmental and intellectual environment of a heterogenous nation of 400 million people, than to develop a spell checker. What were we thinking? Let's start rounding up toddlers now and putting them in the orthography camps.
Although a cursory attempt to find a URL that goes into depth about the subject failed, I believe that publishers and other "content providers" are looking at ways to combat this very "leak" in the protection of their intellectual property and their ability to profit off of it.
When Bradbury wrote Fahrenheity 451, he seemed to think that it would be a tyrannical state that would suprise libraries and other unapproved channels of information. Who would have thought that it would be the publishing sector that instituted as many controls as they could, at the expense of a public institution (the library?)
I won't see it. I haven't seen Phantom Mayonnaise, and I won't see this. There's plenty of small, independent films that deserve my money a hell of a lot more than this crap does. You want to see a good movie? Go see Ghost World, or Sexy Beast, or Memento. There's even that new Silent Bob and Jay movie coming out soon. I am pretty certain that on any given night you can find a form of entertainment for you $9 that you'll get more out of than the Star Wars schlock. (Including other, better schlock). Go to a club and see an up and coming band. Go to a jazz club. Take a dance class. Do anything but give George Lucas more cocaine money!
It's ridiculous that people can be so wed to a franchise that they lose the power to opt out. So much for the free market. And you complain about people using Microsoft products!
The question is, however, whether the difference in productivity between a mono-tasker and a multi-tasker is greater than the cost of hiring additional mono-taskers to fill in the void created by the dedication of staff to one-and-just-one function. And whether the perspective gained by having people work on a variety of tasks - giving them more of a birds-eye view of the organization's needs and goals - has any value that might be lost by creating an organization of super-focused people.
I suspect that, except for the staff geniuses and the people focused on make-or-break tasks, the answer is often that the productivity costs of multitasking is offset by its benefits.
If I was going to moderate you, I'd moderate you as (-1 On a massive dose of crack cocaine). There has been a backlash against fanatical anti-Microsoft sentiments by those of us who are proponents of non-MS operating systems and software (including Free/Open ones) but are sick of being perceived as paranoid, ranting zealouts who are incapable of objectivity.In the past year, it got so bad that I completely gave up proposing Linux-based solutions in my workplace because of the association such a gesture would bring. If you really think that Microsoft employees are sitting around here trying to discredit Linux, you might consider looking at the people who deride Microsoft with irrational venom, since they discredit the open source movement far more than people who try to give the devil his due.
The disintegration of the commercial wing of the web has led to this sort of desperate "we have to show a profit NOW" sort of behavior - only companies that show a very-short-term profit have any hope of added investor funding, and the few web-content survivors like Yahoo and Salon are thrashing around for *any* opportunity to differentiate themselves and make a quick ad buck.
When web advertising was less invasive, this was not such a big deal to readers. In fact, it was the business-model-of-last-resort: "ads will pay for an essentially free internet." (Let's play find-the-fallacy.) Web publishers ("content providers") promised the moon to advertising customers - that they could instantly generate sales and site visits, measure the results with click-throughs, and do this all without alienating their own base. It didn't work that way.
If the expectations of web advertising had been more moderate to begin with - in line with those of print ads - this sort of thing wouldn't be happening now. But I don't expect it to get better. I don't believe in rational markets with good information finding optima, I believe that irrational expectations create bad situations, vicious cycles develop, and things fall apart. The nice bit about it is that we are, ultimately, getting the internet back from the suits that are failing to selling it to us.
While it's easier to administor homogenous networks, IT usually doesn't dictate to the rest of the business just who they are going to buy or merge with. Heterogenous environments are often a product of history, not choice. But this sort of reality is what separates the enterprise-level players from small-shop or departmental-level.
Wait a sec. If girls only go out with jerks, and never with "nice guys," that would mean that sys admins would be getting all the girls. And I know that ain't so.
Prohibition may be wrong, and have unintended consquences, but insofar as it reduces the likelihood and ease of something happening, it works. If you are using 100 percent success as the metric for whether a policy works, then no law - not even those against rape and murder - work. But prohibition does reduce the likelihood that one's kid would get exposed to something by a nontrivial amount. (Hint - is one more likely to be killed by a drunk driver or one on crack? die by lung cancer from smoking or from some banned carcinogen? the legally available products are clearly more prevalent than the illegal ones.)
I am likely to agree with an argument based on civil liberties and free speech, but not one based on your fallacy.
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Educational publishers create web-sites that complement their printed content. Interactivity is the main feature that online material has that printed material won't.
Linux advocates must, must, must move away from thinking "if it can't be done with Linux, it must not be worth doing" towards "how, both technically and politically, can we get Linux to do this thing as well as Windows does and do so at least as easily as Windows does." Otherwise, Linux will be the sour-grapes alternative only.
Guh, I meant "Ontology ... is pretty specific," not "... is pretty specially." Smart-assed language-processing AI comments welcomed with rueful resignation.
Ontology, in AI, is pretty specially. The system has to know what the thing is. Not just as a word that gets associated with other words, but as a thing in itself, interaction with which reveals properties. When you have ontology, all the sorts of logical inferences that CYC is being taught by rote ("if David is in New York, his left foot is in New York") don't need to be made explicit. If I had said "epistemology", then you'd be right to make your point.
Ad hominem attacks are not per se unfair, they are simply logically inadequate. However, they are not without any merit in debate. In legal discourse, motive is one of the key points for determining guilt, and that is essentially ad-hominem: commercial efforts are motivated by the need to pump investor confidence and ready the market. If I had left it at that, my attack would have been unfair, but in the context of my more specific critiques of the claims, those comments are fair and provide context.
Both laissez-faire capitalism and communism rely on the existence of humans that don't exist yet: the former on perfectly rational, completely informed agents, the latter on completely fair, totally socialized comrades. The failures of each system are based on the fact that humans are not that easy to reinvent.
When I see an AI claim, I check its source - if its a business, I suspect exaggeration; if it's a real research center (public or private, MIT or Bell Labs) then I'm more likely to take the claims on face value. This is hyperbolic investor-porn, no more.
By "Java can be as fast as C++," do you mean that "C++ can be as slow as Java?" It takes some doing, but I'm been able to code that badly.
During the boom, even companies that didn't want to grow (that is, wanted to build up existing markets instead of trying to rush into new ones and buy companies, etc.) were pretty much forced into it by shareholder expectations. And now shareholder expectations are working the other way - even solvent companies with working business models are compelled to cut back spending and lay people off, just because that's what "analysts" want to see.
And it will only get worse.
This issue is distinct from that of the performance of the 3D; when I got it to work, 3D in Linux was at least as good as that in Windows. But getting it to work was the issue.
I learned my lesson that way: the Linux box is great for *serving* for multi-player games, but as a client it was too big a pain in the ass. Much easier to just buy the game for my Windows box. It's not Loki's fault - nor anyone else's, really - that this is the case, but it's just the reality of the situation. I know that this isn't everyone's experience, but it has been the experience of friends of mine. The variety of distributions and the spottiness and inconsistancy over hardware support over different libs and kernel versions and X versions is simply too daunting a task for an OS that is already a small minority.
The difference that a virtual world has from the real world is its malleability, the fact that creative possibilities are not restricted by physics and the economics thereof. The possibility of creating and then inhabiting just about any type of environment - dwelling in landscapes of pure imagination - is very compelling to me.
If the women go there, the rest of the world will follow. Market a non-goal 3d virtual world to people who aren't playing Quake, not to the people who are.
As an aside, I'm a little perplexed by the claim that there are few qualified high-tech experts: the field of computers and networks seems to enjoy a huge population, vis-a-vis just about any other (i.e., chemistry, the environment, biology, public health, economics etc.)
If you believe that organic matter that hasn't even organized itself into a single neuron is a human life, then you'll believe that a toaster is a web server.
Of course. It's far easier to change the educational infrastructure, and the developmental and intellectual environment of a heterogenous nation of 400 million people, than to develop a spell checker. What were we thinking? Let's start rounding up toddlers now and putting them in the orthography camps.
When Bradbury wrote Fahrenheity 451, he seemed to think that it would be a tyrannical state that would suprise libraries and other unapproved channels of information. Who would have thought that it would be the publishing sector that instituted as many controls as they could, at the expense of a public institution (the library?)
It's ridiculous that people can be so wed to a franchise that they lose the power to opt out. So much for the free market. And you complain about people using Microsoft products!
I suspect that, except for the staff geniuses and the people focused on make-or-break tasks, the answer is often that the productivity costs of multitasking is offset by its benefits.
You are really a very, very troubled little man.
If I was going to moderate you, I'd moderate you as (-1 On a massive dose of crack cocaine). There has been a backlash against fanatical anti-Microsoft sentiments by those of us who are proponents of non-MS operating systems and software (including Free/Open ones) but are sick of being perceived as paranoid, ranting zealouts who are incapable of objectivity.In the past year, it got so bad that I completely gave up proposing Linux-based solutions in my workplace because of the association such a gesture would bring. If you really think that Microsoft employees are sitting around here trying to discredit Linux, you might consider looking at the people who deride Microsoft with irrational venom, since they discredit the open source movement far more than people who try to give the devil his due.
When web advertising was less invasive, this was not such a big deal to readers. In fact, it was the business-model-of-last-resort: "ads will pay for an essentially free internet." (Let's play find-the-fallacy.) Web publishers ("content providers") promised the moon to advertising customers - that they could instantly generate sales and site visits, measure the results with click-throughs, and do this all without alienating their own base. It didn't work that way.
If the expectations of web advertising had been more moderate to begin with - in line with those of print ads - this sort of thing wouldn't be happening now. But I don't expect it to get better. I don't believe in rational markets with good information finding optima, I believe that irrational expectations create bad situations, vicious cycles develop, and things fall apart. The nice bit about it is that we are, ultimately, getting the internet back from the suits that are failing to selling it to us.
While it's easier to administor homogenous networks, IT usually doesn't dictate to the rest of the business just who they are going to buy or merge with. Heterogenous environments are often a product of history, not choice. But this sort of reality is what separates the enterprise-level players from small-shop or departmental-level.
Ford may have a right to tell Ford dealers that they can't put GM signs up on their walls, or risk losing the right to sell Fords.
Wait a sec. If girls only go out with jerks, and never with "nice guys," that would mean that sys admins would be getting all the girls. And I know that ain't so.
I am likely to agree with an argument based on civil liberties and free speech, but not one based on your fallacy.