The name of the system you propose is called challenge/response (CR). CR is not a good idea for the following reasons:
1) It says "My time is more important than yours" to all your correspondents, because you're not willing to look at a few spams getting past your Bayesian filter every day so instead you offload that time burden to people who want to talk to you. 2) Dueling CR systems ("Hey, bob@example.com, I don't recognize you. Please prove you are a human" "Re: Hey, bob -- steve@stupid.com, I don't recognize you. Please prove you are a human"). Even more fun in a potentially infinite loop. Any system you can make to shortcircuit this loop can be abused by spam to avoid the CR altogether. 3) Doesn't survive the Chinese Sweatshop Spam Attack, which will be ubiquitous if CR becomes popular. (Take poor Chinese person, teach them 10 words of English, pay them 2 cents an hour to answer CAPTCHAs so you get guaranteed delivery of your Maximize Your Mr. Wiggly offers.) 4) Breaks legitimate bulk mail senders, such as Amazon, Paypal, eBay, mailing lists, etc etc. Mailing lists in particular are going to be very fun, since a lot of CR systems would spam the entire list -- perhaps provoking 100 challenges! Which then leads to combinatorial hilarity!
Well, we showed the Commies, didn't we? Not only did we smack into the moon, but we've smacked into comets, we've smacked into Mars, we've smacked into the earth, we're getting to good at smacking that we smack into things without having to bother planning to do it. NASA is the worldwide leader at taking a few hundred million dollars and turning it into a giant crater on your celestial body of choice.
You've got two constraints. One is that you have to be able to compose an arbitrarily large numbers of capchas algorithmically. For example, that example you just used is human-composed. If its the only CAPTCHA you have, the following program gets me a job at Google: gawk 'BEGIN{print "b"}' . If you have 100 CAPTCHAS, I only need to add a switch statement and some elbow grease and then I get to break your CAPTCHA a trillion times.
The other contraint is that you have to have your problem be trivially solvable by humans. I know plenty of people who cannot solve the CAPTCHA you have given: one obvious example would be, umm, all of my coworkers, because I live in Japan and "sub sandwitch" is not generally on the Japanese English curriculum. Similarly, you could any number of parsing problems which are very difficult for machines ("Here are 10 pictures chosen from HotOrNot. Click the three hot chicks.") but which may also be difficult for some users, such as Slashdotters who have never met a girl before.
Steve Irwin mustered more humanity for the lowest lizard on one of his documentaries than/. seems to be able to muster for him. "reproduced successfully" "offspring" These are not words which one generally uses with regards to people, and certainly not when a family is currently grieving the loss of their father.
>> This is about the Computer Science way: returning an error when an error occurs. >>
There is nothing "Computer Science" about always allowing an error to propagate up to the end user. If you drop a TCP-IP packet, do you pop up a window over WoW saying "We just lost a packet boss, what do you want us to do about this?" No, you *handle the problem in a way which makes sense for your application*. For *some* applications, *certain* errors and exceptions should be presented to the user.
For *many* applications, errors and exceptions contain no useful information to the user other than "For a reason which will probably be totally inscrutable to you, something went wrong", so recovering from the error/exception is a priority. All Earthlink is doing here is making an exception handler for the UnsophisticatedUserTypedSearchEngineQueryIntoAddre ssBarException and TypoInURLException , which attempts to divine what they were trying to do and get them back on the correct path to accomplishing it.
An ISP whose customer base is non-technical users *is* a user-agent, in the literal sense, because the users pay them money to handle "The Internet" and if "The Internet" fails to work the first number that gets called is the ISP. An ISP whose average customer has a five-digit Slashdot ID can afford to provide a no-frills "we give you bandwidth, you take care of the rest" service. Earthlink is NOT that ISP.
Isn't that essentially NASA's entire purpose in life? The Space Shuttle. The International Space Station. The Hubble Telescope. Manned space flight. All of these are huge wastes of time and resources -- to the tune of billions of dollars a year. And all so that we can see the effect of weightlessness on spiders and slush-fund a couple billion to some defense contractors.
Lets get real: given the choice between paying $60 for MechCommander (which came with an excellent bound manual the size of a small Bible) and paying $55 for the bare CD, 95% of the game-playing public would go straight for the CD. The paper box is getting thrown out within 48 hours of opening it. Coupons to buy the strategy guide at a discount could only possibly motivate a pirate if they were going to pirate the game but purchase the strategy guide legitimately, which probably covers a total of 0 people in the entire world.
You can certainly add value with packaging, but you can't justify anything near a game's price without presuming that the game in and of itself has value, which is what this line of reasoning denies.
>> I expect my child's school to teach my children about what real scientists do, and what real science is going on, and even about what real scientists are arguing about. >>
Then why do you care about your school teaching *astronomy*? Here's everything anyone needs to know about astronomy: space is big and mostly empty. Every once in a while, you'll find a burning ball of gas. Every once in a very long while, some rocks of various shapes and sizes. We're not sure how space got here. Some people find space impressive. For the rest of your life, a couple billion of your tax dollars will be spent firing rockets into space to get a better look at the rocks. OK, that wraps up astronomy. Lets move on to chemistry, biology, physics, and other sciences which actually have an impact on the lives of human beings.
... print "Just another Perl hacker" and run a web server. Remember to carefully check that you typed &$'$_ and not &$"$_ . Perl syntax gets me every time.
... that we institute a tax on every computer to pay for software. And establish a gigantic governmental organization to distribute the tax out to various programmers. But you can get a tax credit for donating to a software project of your choice.
Basically, he's totally out of his gourd. This would get us overpriced computers, squash Moore's law flat (since every computer upgrade would make you pay a non-productive tax again you'd be hesitant to upgrade), put the IRS or its successor agency in charge of software development (I'm sure I'd LOVE to see all paid development paid for by a group in Washington -- oh wait, I sell software and can't afford a lobbyist, this doesn't look like a winner for me), and provide nothing of value to anyone. Except neo-Marxists who get a frisson off of taking potshots at capitalism. (See GNU Manifesto, search for "Software Tax": http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html )
Only thing I saw DRM do is stop a Backstreet Boys CD from working on my exgf's portable CD/DVD player.
Isn't this enough reason to accept, nay, praise it?
You call him "Tank mage", "template of the month", or "gimped". Because all players in a skill-based system will be one of those three. One just happens to cover more ground than the other two.
The email example is doable today
on
A New Kind of OS
·
· Score: 1
Bayes filter + plugin in Thunderbird + option to pop up window when "messages like this" show up = good enough "AI" for mail priority filtering. I don't actually pop up a window, but I have PopFile separate my mail into a variety of folders, including one marked "Urgent Action"*, and while its not quite as effective as having a human screener its a whole lot cheaper and PopFile will never accuse me of sexual harassment for exposing it to the contents of my spam folder.
But, as you say, there is no reason this is (or should be) an OS function. Dyamically optimizing the actual OS-level stuff for you ("We're going to alter the functionality of malloc() on the fly so that your applications are more responsive!") is probably a much more difficult problem. Some of the real pie-in-the-sky stuff in the article actually would require Strong AI.
* I like digging under the hood. My Urgent Action bucket seems to work primarily off of header information (mails from my boss are more likely to be urgent than those from my mother, mails from @hotmail.com are vanishingly likely to be urgent) with some spice coming from keywords (the filter "knows" what words relate to an illness a certain family members is suffering, what words are about my pet project at work, etc).
... who has never actually used genetic programming. Genetic programming doesn't create new inventions -- it typically tweaks parameters in an existing invention so that the output of the invention approaches a goal. For example, you could use it dynamically weigh, say, SpamAssassin test scores. It doesn't just magically evolve new tests, and it certainly doesn't evolve a regular-expression based server side spam filter, it just tweaks the efficiency of one which already exists. Even for artifically restricted problem domains, such as CoreWars or similar combative programming environments, the successful A-life programs generally revolve around optimizing a strategy and a base implementation which a human came up with. Call it "intelligent design", because thats what it is:)
They also most certainly do not beat all existing algorithms. In some problem domains they work very well. In others (hmm, lets see: sort, calendar applications, Internet telephony, uncountably many fields of human endeavor) they're wholly 100% inapplicable.
... but "The US and China are the two of the three most populous continents" is even funnier.
Seriously though. Kyoto was a dead letter and everybody knew it -- look at how Europe universally welched on their quotas after signing it ("Um, oops, turns out we would have devastated our economy to make that... well, can't be having that. Oh, bad Dubya bad, you're a convinient scapegoat!") About the only people really enthusiastic about adhering to it, as opposed to playing kissy-face with their domestic Greens or greens, were the Russians, because they got to compare against their old Soviet Union pollution levels and the systemic economic collapse they've suffered in the interim has made it physically impossible for them to reach those pollution levels again. Oh, and the Chinese/Indians, who saw it as a method to restrain competitors while not having to commit to a single thing themselves.
... but I wouldn't want to hire an engineer who couldn't figure out how to do it with a pencil and paper.
You're not expected to remember the solution for reversing a linked list. You're supposed to remember the most trivial, basic property of lists: they start with one node which you know about, and each node points to the next node. And you're supposed to use those twenty years of experience to be able to *devise* a solution to the problem. Which if you know that simple property and have a practical understanding of how to actually work with lists you should be able to do in about five minutes. Then you say "Oh wait, my twenty years of experience is tingling, that solution is O(n^2) and it shouldn't be nearly that hard because the framework I use every day does it a heck of a lot faster".
Odds are they are using boilerplate language and have even less desire to hear about your velcro detachable sideburns than you have to tell them. Just ask them if they're wedded to having that clause in the contract, and if not strike it. Alternately, specify that the clause only applies to a certain problem domain (e.g. "With respect to image processing, we warrant that the following is an exhaustive list of our IP: blah blah blah" and then your Sideburns 2.0 get to remain your own secret.)
IANAL, DTAYROS (don't trust anything you read on Slashdot).
I used to work on grid computing at a Japanese technology incubator. The project eventually got shelved because there were just not enough applications which honestly benefit from it when you consider the pain involved in programming the application to distribute over the grid (I gather our American competitors are having the same problem), but the idea was taking your company's totally-idle-at-night fleet of desktops and turning them into a virtual Beowulf cluster. I think our biggest success, if you can call it that, was turning about 1,000 computers at 15 sites (hospitals, college labs, and the like) into what for two hours was the largest supercomputer in the prefecture by a factor of 10. (Gifu Prefecture... this is sort of like bragging that you have the biggest computer in Iowa, but hey, you take your wins where you can.)
The downside, aside from the 100% solvable issue of being able to wake up 1,000 computers in the middle of the night without needing a staff of 80 (which was what it took for our "successful" run), is that programming for a grid is hard and tedious, and none of the frameworks that I am familiar with really take it down to the level where it needs to be for "regular" programmers to be able to do it.
In short: a lovely technology, some practical uses, not exactly going to set the world on fire though.
You can read here, linked from TFA that it was from April '94 through February '95. I rather doubt that the numbers would be much more different now -- take a look at the Movable Type example cited later in the article, which covers totally voluntary donationware in the 2000s.
(Hiya, I'm the author of TFA and Bingo Card Creator). Here's the closest OSS program to my software: http://sourceforge.net/projects/bingo-cards/ . Feel free to use it if it fits your needs better. (I'll be perfectly honest: I think I do a much better job. For example, I have features such as "actually runs on a Windows PC instead of crashing on install" and "prints without leaving the program". If I didn't think I could do a better job than what was available for free, I wouldn't have invested my time and money into the project.) If not, you can do things the traditional way by paying your educational publisher of choice $15 a bingo card set. If you plan on doing this activity twice, ever, I really do save you money.
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing says "sexy" like paragraph breaks.
Its not hard. No, no, that's not what I meant.
The name of the system you propose is called challenge/response (CR). CR is not a good idea for the following reasons:
1) It says "My time is more important than yours" to all your correspondents, because you're not willing to look at a few spams getting past your Bayesian filter every day so instead you offload that time burden to people who want to talk to you.
2) Dueling CR systems ("Hey, bob@example.com, I don't recognize you. Please prove you are a human" "Re: Hey, bob -- steve@stupid.com, I don't recognize you. Please prove you are a human"). Even more fun in a potentially infinite loop. Any system you can make to shortcircuit this loop can be abused by spam to avoid the CR altogether.
3) Doesn't survive the Chinese Sweatshop Spam Attack, which will be ubiquitous if CR becomes popular. (Take poor Chinese person, teach them 10 words of English, pay them 2 cents an hour to answer CAPTCHAs so you get guaranteed delivery of your Maximize Your Mr. Wiggly offers.)
4) Breaks legitimate bulk mail senders, such as Amazon, Paypal, eBay, mailing lists, etc etc. Mailing lists in particular are going to be very fun, since a lot of CR systems would spam the entire list -- perhaps provoking 100 challenges! Which then leads to combinatorial hilarity!
Well, we showed the Commies, didn't we? Not only did we smack into the moon, but we've smacked into comets, we've smacked into Mars, we've smacked into the earth, we're getting to good at smacking that we smack into things without having to bother planning to do it. NASA is the worldwide leader at taking a few hundred million dollars and turning it into a giant crater on your celestial body of choice.
You've got two constraints. One is that you have to be able to compose an arbitrarily large numbers of capchas algorithmically. For example, that example you just used is human-composed. If its the only CAPTCHA you have, the following program gets me a job at Google: gawk 'BEGIN{print "b"}' . If you have 100 CAPTCHAS, I only need to add a switch statement and some elbow grease and then I get to break your CAPTCHA a trillion times.
The other contraint is that you have to have your problem be trivially solvable by humans. I know plenty of people who cannot solve the CAPTCHA you have given: one obvious example would be, umm, all of my coworkers, because I live in Japan and "sub sandwitch" is not generally on the Japanese English curriculum. Similarly, you could any number of parsing problems which are very difficult for machines ("Here are 10 pictures chosen from HotOrNot. Click the three hot chicks.") but which may also be difficult for some users, such as Slashdotters who have never met a girl before.
By the way, you can find an implementation of that CAPTCHA at http://www.hotcaptcha.com/
... your days at being the world's only celestial-body-impacting-space-agency are over!
Steve Irwin mustered more humanity for the lowest lizard on one of his documentaries than /. seems to be able to muster for him. "reproduced successfully" "offspring" These are not words which one generally uses with regards to people, and certainly not when a family is currently grieving the loss of their father.
>>
e ssBarException and TypoInURLException , which attempts to divine what they were trying to do and get them back on the correct path to accomplishing it.
This is about the Computer Science way: returning an error when an error occurs.
>>
There is nothing "Computer Science" about always allowing an error to propagate up to the end user. If you drop a TCP-IP packet, do you pop up a window over WoW saying "We just lost a packet boss, what do you want us to do about this?" No, you *handle the problem in a way which makes sense for your application*. For *some* applications, *certain* errors and exceptions should be presented to the user.
For *many* applications, errors and exceptions contain no useful information to the user other than "For a reason which will probably be totally inscrutable to you, something went wrong", so recovering from the error/exception is a priority. All Earthlink is doing here is making an exception handler for the UnsophisticatedUserTypedSearchEngineQueryIntoAddr
An ISP whose customer base is non-technical users *is* a user-agent, in the literal sense, because the users pay them money to handle "The Internet" and if "The Internet" fails to work the first number that gets called is the ISP. An ISP whose average customer has a five-digit Slashdot ID can afford to provide a no-frills "we give you bandwidth, you take care of the rest" service. Earthlink is NOT that ISP.
Isn't that essentially NASA's entire purpose in life? The Space Shuttle. The International Space Station. The Hubble Telescope. Manned space flight. All of these are huge wastes of time and resources -- to the tune of billions of dollars a year. And all so that we can see the effect of weightlessness on spiders and slush-fund a couple billion to some defense contractors.
Lets get real: given the choice between paying $60 for MechCommander (which came with an excellent bound manual the size of a small Bible) and paying $55 for the bare CD, 95% of the game-playing public would go straight for the CD. The paper box is getting thrown out within 48 hours of opening it. Coupons to buy the strategy guide at a discount could only possibly motivate a pirate if they were going to pirate the game but purchase the strategy guide legitimately, which probably covers a total of 0 people in the entire world.
You can certainly add value with packaging, but you can't justify anything near a game's price without presuming that the game in and of itself has value, which is what this line of reasoning denies.
>>
I expect my child's school to teach my children about what real scientists do, and what real science is going on, and even about what real scientists are arguing about.
>>
Then why do you care about your school teaching *astronomy*? Here's everything anyone needs to know about astronomy: space is big and mostly empty. Every once in a while, you'll find a burning ball of gas. Every once in a very long while, some rocks of various shapes and sizes. We're not sure how space got here. Some people find space impressive. For the rest of your life, a couple billion of your tax dollars will be spent firing rockets into space to get a better look at the rocks. OK, that wraps up astronomy. Lets move on to chemistry, biology, physics, and other sciences which actually have an impact on the lives of human beings.
... print "Just another Perl hacker" and run a web server. Remember to carefully check that you typed &$'$_ and not &$"$_ . Perl syntax gets me every time.
... that we institute a tax on every computer to pay for software. And establish a gigantic governmental organization to distribute the tax out to various programmers. But you can get a tax credit for donating to a software project of your choice.
Basically, he's totally out of his gourd. This would get us overpriced computers, squash Moore's law flat (since every computer upgrade would make you pay a non-productive tax again you'd be hesitant to upgrade), put the IRS or its successor agency in charge of software development (I'm sure I'd LOVE to see all paid development paid for by a group in Washington -- oh wait, I sell software and can't afford a lobbyist, this doesn't look like a winner for me), and provide nothing of value to anyone. Except neo-Marxists who get a frisson off of taking potshots at capitalism. (See GNU Manifesto, search for "Software Tax": http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html )
Only thing I saw DRM do is stop a Backstreet Boys CD from working on my exgf's portable CD/DVD player.
Isn't this enough reason to accept, nay, praise it?
You call him "Tank mage", "template of the month", or "gimped". Because all players in a skill-based system will be one of those three. One just happens to cover more ground than the other two.
Bayes filter + plugin in Thunderbird + option to pop up window when "messages like this" show up = good enough "AI" for mail priority filtering. I don't actually pop up a window, but I have PopFile separate my mail into a variety of folders, including one marked "Urgent Action"*, and while its not quite as effective as having a human screener its a whole lot cheaper and PopFile will never accuse me of sexual harassment for exposing it to the contents of my spam folder.
But, as you say, there is no reason this is (or should be) an OS function. Dyamically optimizing the actual OS-level stuff for you ("We're going to alter the functionality of malloc() on the fly so that your applications are more responsive!") is probably a much more difficult problem. Some of the real pie-in-the-sky stuff in the article actually would require Strong AI.
* I like digging under the hood. My Urgent Action bucket seems to work primarily off of header information (mails from my boss are more likely to be urgent than those from my mother, mails from @hotmail.com are vanishingly likely to be urgent) with some spice coming from keywords (the filter "knows" what words relate to an illness a certain family members is suffering, what words are about my pet project at work, etc).
... who has never actually used genetic programming. Genetic programming doesn't create new inventions -- it typically tweaks parameters in an existing invention so that the output of the invention approaches a goal. For example, you could use it dynamically weigh, say, SpamAssassin test scores. It doesn't just magically evolve new tests, and it certainly doesn't evolve a regular-expression based server side spam filter, it just tweaks the efficiency of one which already exists. Even for artifically restricted problem domains, such as CoreWars or similar combative programming environments, the successful A-life programs generally revolve around optimizing a strategy and a base implementation which a human came up with. Call it "intelligent design", because thats what it is :)
They also most certainly do not beat all existing algorithms. In some problem domains they work very well. In others (hmm, lets see: sort, calendar applications, Internet telephony, uncountably many fields of human endeavor) they're wholly 100% inapplicable.
... that was the accident. What did you do, wrap it in a Hustler when you were walking out of the store so nobody would think poorly of you?
... but "The US and China are the two of the three most populous continents" is even funnier.
Seriously though. Kyoto was a dead letter and everybody knew it -- look at how Europe universally welched on their quotas after signing it ("Um, oops, turns out we would have devastated our economy to make that... well, can't be having that. Oh, bad Dubya bad, you're a convinient scapegoat!") About the only people really enthusiastic about adhering to it, as opposed to playing kissy-face with their domestic Greens or greens, were the Russians, because they got to compare against their old Soviet Union pollution levels and the systemic economic collapse they've suffered in the interim has made it physically impossible for them to reach those pollution levels again. Oh, and the Chinese/Indians, who saw it as a method to restrain competitors while not having to commit to a single thing themselves.
... but I wouldn't want to hire an engineer who couldn't figure out how to do it with a pencil and paper.
You're not expected to remember the solution for reversing a linked list. You're supposed to remember the most trivial, basic property of lists: they start with one node which you know about, and each node points to the next node. And you're supposed to use those twenty years of experience to be able to *devise* a solution to the problem. Which if you know that simple property and have a practical understanding of how to actually work with lists you should be able to do in about five minutes. Then you say "Oh wait, my twenty years of experience is tingling, that solution is O(n^2) and it shouldn't be nearly that hard because the framework I use every day does it a heck of a lot faster".
>>But she does have a point-- what would happen if THE CHILDREN began to eat power-ups and attack ghosts in real life?>>
Well, for one, they would probably get more fruit in their diet than they are currently. 100 points for a cherry, and not a Twinkie in sight!
Odds are they are using boilerplate language and have even less desire to hear about your velcro detachable sideburns than you have to tell them. Just ask them if they're wedded to having that clause in the contract, and if not strike it. Alternately, specify that the clause only applies to a certain problem domain (e.g. "With respect to image processing, we warrant that the following is an exhaustive list of our IP: blah blah blah" and then your Sideburns 2.0 get to remain your own secret.)
IANAL, DTAYROS (don't trust anything you read on Slashdot).
I used to work on grid computing at a Japanese technology incubator. The project eventually got shelved because there were just not enough applications which honestly benefit from it when you consider the pain involved in programming the application to distribute over the grid (I gather our American competitors are having the same problem), but the idea was taking your company's totally-idle-at-night fleet of desktops and turning them into a virtual Beowulf cluster. I think our biggest success, if you can call it that, was turning about 1,000 computers at 15 sites (hospitals, college labs, and the like) into what for two hours was the largest supercomputer in the prefecture by a factor of 10. (Gifu Prefecture... this is sort of like bragging that you have the biggest computer in Iowa, but hey, you take your wins where you can.)
The downside, aside from the 100% solvable issue of being able to wake up 1,000 computers in the middle of the night without needing a staff of 80 (which was what it took for our "successful" run), is that programming for a grid is hard and tedious, and none of the frameworks that I am familiar with really take it down to the level where it needs to be for "regular" programmers to be able to do it.
In short: a lovely technology, some practical uses, not exactly going to set the world on fire though.
You can read here, linked from TFA that it was from April '94 through February '95. I rather doubt that the numbers would be much more different now -- take a look at the Movable Type example cited later in the article, which covers totally voluntary donationware in the 2000s.
(Hiya, I'm the author of TFA and Bingo Card Creator). Here's the closest OSS program to my software: http://sourceforge.net/projects/bingo-cards/ . Feel free to use it if it fits your needs better. (I'll be perfectly honest: I think I do a much better job. For example, I have features such as "actually runs on a Windows PC instead of crashing on install" and "prints without leaving the program". If I didn't think I could do a better job than what was available for free, I wouldn't have invested my time and money into the project.) If not, you can do things the traditional way by paying your educational publisher of choice $15 a bingo card set. If you plan on doing this activity twice, ever, I really do save you money.
There was one nag screen on every startup, one on every shutdown.