Well yeah. I didn't read any more than skim the webmasterworld blurb, and you came with the details about the namespace change. You might almost mistake it for dialouge, were you not careful.
This is an interesting move by Amazon, and it's certainly an improvement over delivering static HTML pages from a database, an increasingly worthless exercise.
However, why do they need to extend RSS? I fail to see what the extensions are for, when all they really need is a XSL transformed RSS document or perhaps an XSL transformed XHTML document with an accompanying or alternative URL to fetch RSS directly.
Anyway, I like this because hopefully the next move is for the big three to start offering straight XML results; this in addition to or in leiu of the data APIs Google and Yahoo already make available to web authors.
Thing is, if they just published search results in RSS, then non programmers could jump in the game and start utilizing the data for different applications. It would open up the field considerably, but unfortunately, it would mean a lot more abuse too from search spammers would would seek to capitalize on the data.
In the summer of 2002 I saw an article about the homemade steadicam on slashdot. I then used it for many shots of this independent production of dubious artistic or technical merit.
I loved it, but the whole time I was using it, I kept thinking of possible ways to improve it without spending any money if possible. I tried using more weight, which helps, but only very marginally. Anyone know a way to improve it inexpensively without electronic stabilization?
Each time, Russian thrusters have to take over, potentially exposing the crew to toxic fuel. This time, flight controllers were careful not to fire the thrusters until the spacewalkers were at a safe distance.
That's probably a sound idea. Definitely pin that up next to "Use either Metric or Imperial units consistently throughout."
Why be so nice about it. That guy is a complete asshat for trying to dis the Beatles in order to increase his own celebrity stock. What a zero.
The Beatles were on the cutting edge of popular music, even at the very beginning. As soon as they found Ringo, and would stay late after shows and play Blues records and listen to Fats Domino and later, Bob Dylan they were right on the edge. Remember, where they come from, no one was playing the stuff they were listening to. They chomped bennies all night and drank booze to perform like machines in those Hamburg shows until late into the night. They were surrounded by hookers the rest of the time. If that's not rock n' roll, I don't know what is.
Once they got introduced to psychedelics and perhaps more significantly, transcendental meditation and Eastern culture generally, they exploded. The beginnings of their compositional transendence (of their rock n' roll peers) is heard on Revolver, still among my personal favorite Beatles albums.
You'd think there'd be some kind of audio analog of that to fill the gap. Like something with simple avatars even; something which requires only a fraction of the resources as even low res, low frame rate video. People like chatting, it seems, and I think the reason for this is that it's passive and asynchronous. If little clips could be recorded easily and placed into a queue so your system is truly analogous to IM, meaning passive and asynchronous, then it could catch on.
In the book, Hawkins remarks that AI researchers often took the misguided approach that intelligence is a set of principles or properties, when in fact it's strictly a matter of behavior. To be intelligent is to behave intelligently. If he's right, then it's the act of being, wherein which the brain's primary tool is the continuous analogizing of current circumstances to past situations in order to make good predictive decisions, which constitutes intelligence.
He's the first to claim that he's not looking for sentience or to answer the question of sentience, but is instead only looking for a practical engineering approach to building intelligent machines. I think this is doubly clever since the issue of sentience should not be addressed until well after, as Hawkins often remarks, our own brains are understood first, in terms of how they operate. Why they operate, or what motivates us or what makes us 'cognitive agents' don't enter the equation with his approach.
Honestly, I use a patched Windows 2000 Pro. I do video editing and all kinds of stuff with a 64MB RAM nvidia video card from 2001 and half a gig of system RAM. Win2K Pro is hands down the finest product MS ever released for my dollar. Well, I like MS Money too. It's not all doom and gloom.
No one is ready to pay what really bug-free code would cost. We accept a few bugs. Please note that we even accept some airplane crashes (not to mention car accidents), but, naturally, different industries and software components pose different levels of "reasonable" bug count.
And therein lies the heart of the MS development philosophy. Strictly speaking, that's true, but take something like Windows XP. It's is the ultimate case of the kid who cleans his room, ostensibly, but when his mother checks the closet, an avalanche of dirty clothes and assorted toys and things exlpodes from the doorway. I think MS could learn a lot from Apple, as they always have, and should look into utilizing something like BSD to start over. Obviously, they can't come out and say "our products suck; it takes half a gig of ram just to appease the system tray icons in Windows XP...sorry about that." But some way, some time they will have to move away from Windows as it is today.
Well, I know what you're saying. However, I'd submit that the cultural climate right now is dangerous. I'd submit that those folks who subscribe to the Christian faith, a particular mythology, and a damn fine one if I may say so myself, have attained a position in America's mainstream consciousness, in its government and in its media that is dangerous. The average person is actually starting to believe his own hype, sort of like Bono did right around the time of Joshua Tree, hence all the subsequent sucky US albums. Fact is, just because media panders to the right for its own reasons (ad revenue, of course), that doesn't legitimize what are, let's face it, on the whole some pretty insane and downright dangersous beliefs and dogmatic belief systems.
Right. But also, because is those changes. Science is not some dogma, it's a process. So, for anyone who wants to get snarky about "holes" in evolution, well, no pooh-pooh Sherlock. It's not about authority or control, science is, instead, a process by which we attempt to attain and refine knowledge.
Unfortunately, that will be the major headlines coming across the Fox News screen..."Evolution flawed: mutations don't occur. Jesus weighs in on Bill O'Reilly tonight!"
But the reality is that they don't know what causes this, they don't claim that it stops mutations on the whole, and they don't know if it stops all mutations. As per the article, it may only stop harmful mutations.
Exactly. And if they'd just stop giving PageRank credit to the redirect destination, it'd all be over. In fact, the algorithm should check to see what the link density is between to disparate domains if it's going to even cache 302'ed content. Because in these scam cases, the perpetrator never has an inbound link from the victim domain and Google could "grade" this relationship as being very one-sided and not generally very trustworthy. The more interlinkages, the more trust. But assigning Pagerank on 302's is just nuts.
Well, it's only a few bytes. Just look at the head of the document and if the size of the file is different and/or the date is different, then get the entire thing. I dunno. I've already been accused of being a "PHB" for daring to posit an idea that wasn't pre-approved by the cubicle-dwelling intelligentia. But it's just a thought, and a whimsical one at that.
Hey, just throwing it out there. I know you'd have to have some kind of initial point of contact. Another poster replied that you'd have to move your feeds if you move ISPs, but that's not so different from repointing the DNS for your domain name...
I don't claim to have an end-to-end solution in mind, only saying that a new technology might provide some new tools for combating the spam in electronic communications.
IBM says in a new report that, in February, 76 percent of all e-mails were spam. While its report says that is down from a summer 2004 peak of nearly 95 percent, it is well above levels in February 2004.
Interesting that the figure has dropped so significantly in a year's time. The mere fact that email has been so thoroughly polluted as a medium by spamvertisers prompts me to think that RSS could be a way to circumvent email and its problems entirely. Imagine if people had pass-protected RSS feeds for all their contacts, as well as group feeds and a public feed. Then, when it's time to email someone, you just insert a new entry in that person's feed. A mechanism that checks feeds 10 times an hour should be sufficient. In terms of end-user interface, it would be identical to email in every significant way. Just seems to me that there's no room for spammers in a system like that, since in order to be "spammed" you'd have to subscribe specifically to a spammers feed.
There would be a lot of traffic overhead with a system like that, but it couldn't possibly be worse than the 75% spam overhead of email.
"I'm staggered and close to offended that some businesses choose the risk of vendor lock-in, and I'm staggered by the timidity of some IT managers," he says.
There are a variety of orgranizations, large and small, that utilize open source technologies. As was pointed out in a recent thread about the looming IE7, the lack of a centralized, push-button management tool for corporate customers is one thing hampering Firefox. Another thing are applications that utilize Active X and are dependent upon an MS browser as part of their platform. Isn't a lot of high tier banking and insurance software like this; I've read that anyways?
I don't think it's timid IT people. As frightening as it may be, folks who are of my age bracket (28 this summer) are now being put into positions of leadership in technology. People who've spent 5 to 10 years with Linux and accept it. I can't imagine life without Perl and Apache. Simply unthinkable. Firefox and Google are part of this scenerio as well, which is what the author of the article is alluding to: a culture of open source software and open standards.
What I think is so great about Firefox is that it shows the promise of open source in full bloom and it speaks for itself. Nothing's worse than an OSS nerd trying to convince a normal person why they should switch to XYZ program or platform. Not that the reasons lack legitimacy; I'm just saying it's physically painful to watch because most folks don't want to hear it.
But plop a slick "modern car", as the article puts it, in front of them and they immediately reach for the steering wheel.
The segment about the "World's Youngest Video Blogger" is amazing. The time to media was a matter of a couple weeks and she goes from her first iMovie lesson from her father to being on ABC's "People of the Year" show.
It then hit me: she's a "bigger" star online than on the television. Just watching that piece inadvertantly acts as a portent for a time when television is more or less culturally irrelevant, or more to the point, indistinguishable from "web" media.
How is it that MS can get away with releasing a 'beta' of 7th generation software? Even if there's legitimate reasons for doing such a thing in general, shouldn't MS have the user/test pool to get the thing tested and reasonable before going massive with it?
At least they're reacting to the marketplace demand for a browser now and not later.
Well, right. Your pedantry is typical, though, of missing the forest for the trees here in slashdot. For the record, I do understand the distinction. I should have said "effectively a sub-set."
Slashdot Mirror
Well yeah. I didn't read any more than skim the webmasterworld blurb, and you came with the details about the namespace change. You might almost mistake it for dialouge, were you not careful.
On rare occasions, I love slashdot. Thanks Lamer.
This is an interesting move by Amazon, and it's certainly an improvement over delivering static HTML pages from a database, an increasingly worthless exercise.
However, why do they need to extend RSS? I fail to see what the extensions are for, when all they really need is a XSL transformed RSS document or perhaps an XSL transformed XHTML document with an accompanying or alternative URL to fetch RSS directly.
Anyway, I like this because hopefully the next move is for the big three to start offering straight XML results; this in addition to or in leiu of the data APIs Google and Yahoo already make available to web authors.
Thing is, if they just published search results in RSS, then non programmers could jump in the game and start utilizing the data for different applications. It would open up the field considerably, but unfortunately, it would mean a lot more abuse too from search spammers would would seek to capitalize on the data.
In the summer of 2002 I saw an article about the homemade steadicam on slashdot. I then used it for many shots of this independent production of dubious artistic or technical merit.
I loved it, but the whole time I was using it, I kept thinking of possible ways to improve it without spending any money if possible. I tried using more weight, which helps, but only very marginally. Anyone know a way to improve it inexpensively without electronic stabilization?
Each time, Russian thrusters have to take over, potentially exposing the crew to toxic fuel. This time, flight controllers were careful not to fire the thrusters until the spacewalkers were at a safe distance.
That's probably a sound idea. Definitely pin that up next to "Use either Metric or Imperial units consistently throughout."
Why be so nice about it. That guy is a complete asshat for trying to dis the Beatles in order to increase his own celebrity stock. What a zero.
The Beatles were on the cutting edge of popular music, even at the very beginning. As soon as they found Ringo, and would stay late after shows and play Blues records and listen to Fats Domino and later, Bob Dylan they were right on the edge. Remember, where they come from, no one was playing the stuff they were listening to. They chomped bennies all night and drank booze to perform like machines in those Hamburg shows until late into the night. They were surrounded by hookers the rest of the time. If that's not rock n' roll, I don't know what is.
Once they got introduced to psychedelics and perhaps more significantly, transcendental meditation and Eastern culture generally, they exploded. The beginnings of their compositional transendence (of their rock n' roll peers) is heard on Revolver, still among my personal favorite Beatles albums.
Maybe the fine folks at audio.com might consider making their audio clips available by means other than the Real or MS media players?
You'd think there'd be some kind of audio analog of that to fill the gap. Like something with simple avatars even; something which requires only a fraction of the resources as even low res, low frame rate video. People like chatting, it seems, and I think the reason for this is that it's passive and asynchronous. If little clips could be recorded easily and placed into a queue so your system is truly analogous to IM, meaning passive and asynchronous, then it could catch on.
In the book, Hawkins remarks that AI researchers often took the misguided approach that intelligence is a set of principles or properties, when in fact it's strictly a matter of behavior. To be intelligent is to behave intelligently. If he's right, then it's the act of being, wherein which the brain's primary tool is the continuous analogizing of current circumstances to past situations in order to make good predictive decisions, which constitutes intelligence.
He's the first to claim that he's not looking for sentience or to answer the question of sentience, but is instead only looking for a practical engineering approach to building intelligent machines. I think this is doubly clever since the issue of sentience should not be addressed until well after, as Hawkins often remarks, our own brains are understood first, in terms of how they operate. Why they operate, or what motivates us or what makes us 'cognitive agents' don't enter the equation with his approach.
Honestly, I use a patched Windows 2000 Pro. I do video editing and all kinds of stuff with a 64MB RAM nvidia video card from 2001 and half a gig of system RAM. Win2K Pro is hands down the finest product MS ever released for my dollar. Well, I like MS Money too. It's not all doom and gloom.
No one is ready to pay what really bug-free code would cost. We accept a few bugs. Please note that we even accept some airplane crashes (not to mention car accidents), but, naturally, different industries and software components pose different levels of "reasonable" bug count.
And therein lies the heart of the MS development philosophy. Strictly speaking, that's true, but take something like Windows XP. It's is the ultimate case of the kid who cleans his room, ostensibly, but when his mother checks the closet, an avalanche of dirty clothes and assorted toys and things exlpodes from the doorway. I think MS could learn a lot from Apple, as they always have, and should look into utilizing something like BSD to start over. Obviously, they can't come out and say "our products suck; it takes half a gig of ram just to appease the system tray icons in Windows XP...sorry about that." But some way, some time they will have to move away from Windows as it is today.
Yeah really. What's the median and the mode?
Well, I know what you're saying. However, I'd submit that the cultural climate right now is dangerous. I'd submit that those folks who subscribe to the Christian faith, a particular mythology, and a damn fine one if I may say so myself, have attained a position in America's mainstream consciousness, in its government and in its media that is dangerous. The average person is actually starting to believe his own hype, sort of like Bono did right around the time of Joshua Tree, hence all the subsequent sucky US albums. Fact is, just because media panders to the right for its own reasons (ad revenue, of course), that doesn't legitimize what are, let's face it, on the whole some pretty insane and downright dangersous beliefs and dogmatic belief systems.
Science changes, because it needs to.
Right. But also, because is those changes. Science is not some dogma, it's a process. So, for anyone who wants to get snarky about "holes" in evolution, well, no pooh-pooh Sherlock. It's not about authority or control, science is, instead, a process by which we attempt to attain and refine knowledge.
Unfortunately, that will be the major headlines coming across the Fox News screen..."Evolution flawed: mutations don't occur. Jesus weighs in on Bill O'Reilly tonight!"
But the reality is that they don't know what causes this, they don't claim that it stops mutations on the whole, and they don't know if it stops all mutations. As per the article, it may only stop harmful mutations.
Exactly. And if they'd just stop giving PageRank credit to the redirect destination, it'd all be over. In fact, the algorithm should check to see what the link density is between to disparate domains if it's going to even cache 302'ed content. Because in these scam cases, the perpetrator never has an inbound link from the victim domain and Google could "grade" this relationship as being very one-sided and not generally very trustworthy. The more interlinkages, the more trust. But assigning Pagerank on 302's is just nuts.
Well, it's only a few bytes. Just look at the head of the document and if the size of the file is different and/or the date is different, then get the entire thing. I dunno. I've already been accused of being a "PHB" for daring to posit an idea that wasn't pre-approved by the cubicle-dwelling intelligentia. But it's just a thought, and a whimsical one at that.
Hey, just throwing it out there. I know you'd have to have some kind of initial point of contact. Another poster replied that you'd have to move your feeds if you move ISPs, but that's not so different from repointing the DNS for your domain name...
I don't claim to have an end-to-end solution in mind, only saying that a new technology might provide some new tools for combating the spam in electronic communications.
IBM says in a new report that, in February, 76 percent of all e-mails were spam. While its report says that is down from a summer 2004 peak of nearly 95 percent, it is well above levels in February 2004.
Interesting that the figure has dropped so significantly in a year's time. The mere fact that email has been so thoroughly polluted as a medium by spamvertisers prompts me to think that RSS could be a way to circumvent email and its problems entirely. Imagine if people had pass-protected RSS feeds for all their contacts, as well as group feeds and a public feed. Then, when it's time to email someone, you just insert a new entry in that person's feed. A mechanism that checks feeds 10 times an hour should be sufficient. In terms of end-user interface, it would be identical to email in every significant way. Just seems to me that there's no room for spammers in a system like that, since in order to be "spammed" you'd have to subscribe specifically to a spammers feed.
There would be a lot of traffic overhead with a system like that, but it couldn't possibly be worse than the 75% spam overhead of email.
"I'm staggered and close to offended that some businesses choose the risk of vendor lock-in, and I'm staggered by the timidity of some IT managers," he says.
There are a variety of orgranizations, large and small, that utilize open source technologies. As was pointed out in a recent thread about the looming IE7, the lack of a centralized, push-button management tool for corporate customers is one thing hampering Firefox. Another thing are applications that utilize Active X and are dependent upon an MS browser as part of their platform. Isn't a lot of high tier banking and insurance software like this; I've read that anyways?
I don't think it's timid IT people. As frightening as it may be, folks who are of my age bracket (28 this summer) are now being put into positions of leadership in technology. People who've spent 5 to 10 years with Linux and accept it. I can't imagine life without Perl and Apache. Simply unthinkable. Firefox and Google are part of this scenerio as well, which is what the author of the article is alluding to: a culture of open source software and open standards.
What I think is so great about Firefox is that it shows the promise of open source in full bloom and it speaks for itself. Nothing's worse than an OSS nerd trying to convince a normal person why they should switch to XYZ program or platform. Not that the reasons lack legitimacy; I'm just saying it's physically painful to watch because most folks don't want to hear it.
But plop a slick "modern car", as the article puts it, in front of them and they immediately reach for the steering wheel.
The segment about the "World's Youngest Video Blogger" is amazing. The time to media was a matter of a couple weeks and she goes from her first iMovie lesson from her father to being on ABC's "People of the Year" show.
It then hit me: she's a "bigger" star online than on the television. Just watching that piece inadvertantly acts as a portent for a time when television is more or less culturally irrelevant, or more to the point, indistinguishable from "web" media.
I think the adoption of digital projection is due to the fact that Irish movie fans are the most ardent in Europe.
Gotcha. I hadn't considered that.
How is it that MS can get away with releasing a 'beta' of 7th generation software? Even if there's legitimate reasons for doing such a thing in general, shouldn't MS have the user/test pool to get the thing tested and reasonable before going massive with it?
At least they're reacting to the marketplace demand for a browser now and not later.
Well, right. Your pedantry is typical, though, of missing the forest for the trees here in slashdot. For the record, I do understand the distinction. I should have said "effectively a sub-set."