What's more amazing to me is how the tone here has changed over the years.
IIRC, years ago on slashdot, people generally seemed to mock overprotective (/overly paranoid) parents who were afraid of their kids being "corrupted" by the Internet. This included parents who would censor the web using something like net nanny or who just flat out refused to let the kid use a computer in their bedroom alone.
However, now it seems that many slashdoters have now matured and become the very same people they used to scrutinize.
Yeah, but relevance is really hard too quantify over a large collection of web pages. It depends not only on the pages you've indexed, but also who your target audience is. For example, what's relevant to the average web surfing teenager is not at all relevant to an Oracle DBA trying to looking into some problematic query, and the stuff that's relevant to the Oracle DBA is probably not relevant to someone in the Marketing dept. of a luxury car company.
In contrast, quantity is really easy to quantify and allows you to put out buzz generating press releases stating how you now have X many billion more pages than you're closest competitor. It doesn't really matter in terms of the press release whether your X many billion pages were generated by a spider trap, or not.
I thought IBM tried to patent everything and anything plausibly patentable that came across the desk of someone on their research team.
If they patent everything, they can be pretty sure that they'll be able to extract some pretty hefty licensing fees from the industry at large. However, if they keep too many things under wraps, while they might gain a competitive advantage for a product that they're bringing to market relatively soon, they risk loosing the ability to file for all of the relevant patents. For example, someone in another research lab might simultaneously make similar discoveries and file for some patents. Thus, in the worst case, IBM could be forced to pay heavy licensing fees to the second company, for tech that IBM originally discovered.
So, I guess, I'd like to know, under what conditions does IBM tend to keep things underwraps and when do they opt for the patent?
But, if the cops one day find Google Earth printouts in some terrorist's bag, well... that won't be good for their PR.
While this is true, I bet that if they found a more standard road atlas (think a book of maps that people used to keep in their cars in order to find where things were at prior to mapquest, google maps, etc., etc.), then the fact that the guy was carrying one of these would be mentioned only in passing, if at all.
However, if some people were to hear that the map was from some new fangled internet/web based technology, then they would probably want to head over to google with pitchforks and torches. So, naturally, in this case where the guy got his road map would get a lot more media attention.
I guess it really depends on the type of question they asked.
For example, if the guy is a PhD and they asked him something like, "Could you please write us code for a linked list?", the question would be down right insulting. As a personal anecdote - I actually know of a PhD in silicon valley who got asked this question during a interview at some start up. How such a clueless start up ever received any VC funding remains an open question...
However, if they asked some thing more sophisticated and relevant to the type of job he would be hired for, then it seems totally reasonable. For example, if you're hiring someone to work on your OS's kernel, it seems totally reasonable to quiz them on if they're up on the lasted research in OS design & kernel architecture.
It remains unclear what Smith was using the Wi-Fi for, to surf, play online video games, send e-mail to his grandmother,...
I really hope it's not any of these. I mean being convicted of a 3rd degree felony for just surfing the web or sending e-mail using someone else's network seems really extreme. Shouldn't something like this be a more of a misdemeanor?
Hrm....so spam can actually subconsiously effect people and cause them to alter their behavior.
It seems this is only a "good thing" iff the spam people get encourages a healthy productive life style. If it's for various enlargement pills, web cams, viagra and such, as most real world spam is, it's actually probably a very *bad thing* that people are subconsiously effected by it.
This is really more of a "democracy and free market working against freedom of speech and expression" sort of thing.
That is, it seems it is officials elected by the people of Iran choosing to censor their own people. If international companies are involved, then it's international companies providing goods and services requested by the elected officials of Iran. And, thus, at least in principle, services desired by the people of Iran.
So, I guess the lesson is that while democrary, freedom of speech, and a free market often occur together, there is nothing necessarily requiring that if you have one or more of these that you must necessarily have the third.
Given how draconian this school seems to be (e.g. felony charges for misusing a school issued laptop), it seems very plausible that even running a non-standard OS on the system could be construed as unauthorized use of the equipment, and thus worthy of police action.
It's awful really, programs like this should be a good thing. I mean when I was in high school I would have loved a free laptop that I could use for homework and coding. *sigh*
If you think you can deliver consumer products at high volume using the techniques that you prefer, go for it.
What if the techniques I prefer involve using an algorithm or approach that is covered by an overly broad and not exactly innovative patent held by either Nokia/Apple/somebody else?
It seems that both
apple and
nokia are strongly in favor of having
software patents in the EU. I think one the given reasons for why this is necessary is that without
software patents, they'll get eaten alive by open
source developers.
However, neither company seems to have a problem using open source software to futher their business objectives. So, it seems like they're
simulanteously using and try to hobble open source so it can't compete with their proprioritary offerings. So wouldn't the best characterization of their behavior be selfish exploitation rather than 'support' of OSS.
Unfortunately, the deadline has also pasted for students to submit project proposals.
And, nothing on the summer of code website seems to indicate that they'll now extend that deadline and take some more applications. So, they also probably won't be talking on any new mentoring organizations, as all of the current applications are already associated with one of the existing possible mentors.
If that looks like it's not going to completely do the trick then make a point of choosing some of the stupidest names for the program that you can possibly find.
Even if the current Google management can say in good faith that their patents are purely 'defensive', it's important to remember that patents are good for about two decades.
Given employee turn over as well as yet to be seen external market forces (e.g. a cool new search engine that works so well that it threatens to make Google redundant), it's very possible for the collective mind set of the company to change and become slightly less altruistic. So, all encompassing patents that include a bunch of obvious, random and/or trivial stuff such probably be looked at no better than similar patents from other companies. Ultimately, they're just as dangerous.
Re:Google is the memory of the global village
on
Google Never Forgets
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Yeah, but fortunately in a real small town, you can always move some where else and effectively start over again.....
However, in a global village this isn't really an option.
Some linguistics & psycholinguistics (e.g Norm Chompsky and Steve Pinker) argue the human brain is unique in that it is able to quickly master the complex grammar present in all human languages.
In fact there is even a mathematical proof that seems to indicate that human languages should be technically unlearn-able (google: EM Gold language grammar - "Language identification in the limit"). IIRC - the synopsis being that, human languages are at least as sophisticated as context free languages (and can to some degree be modeled by context free languages) and the grammar of context free languages should not be learnable from the sort of linguistic input available to a child.
So...anyhow, I'm not so sure if studying how birds learn a sequence of sounds really gets at the more interesting aspects of human language acquisition. I mean it's probably interesting in terms of how animals, and even people, learn to produce simple sequences of sounds.
But, for human language? Or, at least for the interesting, i.e. uniquely human, parts of it? For that you probably need to either study people, or possibly very similar animals like other primates.
While being able to search for video and images is great and all, I wonder if much more significant effort should be put into improving plain old text (technically, html/pdf/ps/doc/etc) document retrival?
It seems that on the major search engines (google/yahoo/msn), there hasn't been any radical improvement in this area since google first came onto the scene.
And, right now, it's not like these search engines are sufficiently close to perfection yet that there's little room for improvement. For a good number of types of queries, the signal to noisy ratio can be bit too low.
Recognizing the [rant] statis of your statements, I feel that your co-workers are right to feel disappointed that you can't help them with their 'nuts-and-bolts' Windows configuation and application problems and situations.
It seems you've totally misunderstood my post. I'm not talking about jobs where someone is hired as the 'computer guy'.
In fact, I personally have no interest in such jobs. I'm trained as a computer scientist, this qualifies me for jobs in things like software development, not really ones where I'm a windows tech support guru (in fact, that was roughly the point of my post).
So what I was talking about was jobs where you're hired to do something like unix development, java development, etc, etc, and people still expect that you can solve random issues with Microsoft word.
Most people working in IT probably won't benefit from computer science degrees. Moreover, someone really interested in IT, should probably transfer to their university's school of business and, if possible, enroll in whatever their equivalent of an "Information Technology" degree is. Such programs usually have a number of IT classes, e.g. databases & networking (both with a much more applied slant then you would get in a typical CS class on the same topic), but also provide students with enough knowledge of business that they'll be able to more effectively interact with the high ups in the company when it comes to such things as policy making and infrastructure planning. Alternatively, there are also some two year programs that strictly focus on IT skills.
Why? Well any CS program worth its salt doesn't focus on teaching people how to admin Windows Server 2003, or Oracle administration. Rather, it focuses on teaching people about theories computation, algorithms, and, on the more applied side, best practices in software engineering. This kind of training will make some one a better programmer or software engineer, but it wouldn't necessarily be even that the relevant to the individual deciding which routers to buy or even the one installing set routers
<rant>
Okay, so maybe I am little bit peeved when people ask me how to do such and such in Microsoft Word or Windows XP, and the looks they give me when I tell them I don't know. It's like they think it's so inexplicable that I don't know since some of the core classes for CS majors *must* be esoteric document formatting in Microsoft Word, and Windows XP - Why sometimes it can't connect to the network printer. </rant>
What makes you think that slowing down technological progress will help solve a significant number of the problems humanity faces?
People lived without much tech or tech progress (by today's standards) for thousands upon thousands of years. During this time, they still did all sorts of nasty things to each other. e.g. Wars driven by superstition, genocide, institutionalized slavery, socially accepted discrimination based on race or caste etc. etc.
In fact, empirically at least, there seems to be a loose correlation between the progress of technology and various social progress.
Men and women are different. Men and women feel different things when they are "in love". To say that gay men and women feel the same things, and that those feelings are the same as straights feel, is a logical contradiction.
I'm wondering, is your point of view based on just cultural stereotypes, or do you have an evidence to back this up?
I would argue that any two people, regardless of whether they are male or female, probably have idiosyncrasies in the way they experience love. But, the claim that there is something necessarily very different between a couple consisting of a woman and a man and couples consisting of either a man and a another man or a woman and another woman reeks of sexism.
Slashdot Mirror
Of those slashdoters that have experienced it first hand, I wonder how many of them are in any real way worse off because of it?
I imagine almost all of them just learned very quickly to not look at pages from the seedier (/more grotesque) parts of the web.
What's more amazing to me is how the tone here has changed over the years.
IIRC, years ago on slashdot, people generally seemed to mock overprotective (/overly paranoid) parents who were afraid of their kids being "corrupted" by the Internet. This included parents who would censor the web using something like net nanny or who just flat out refused to let the kid use a computer in their bedroom alone.
However, now it seems that many slashdoters have now matured and become the very same people they used to scrutinize.
Yeah, but relevance is really hard too quantify over a large collection of web pages. It depends not only on the pages you've indexed, but also who your target audience is. For example, what's relevant to the average web surfing teenager is not at all relevant to an Oracle DBA trying to looking into some problematic query, and the stuff that's relevant to the Oracle DBA is probably not relevant to someone in the Marketing dept. of a luxury car company.
In contrast, quantity is really easy to quantify and allows you to put out buzz generating press releases stating how you now have X many billion more pages than you're closest competitor. It doesn't really matter in terms of the press release whether your X many billion pages were generated by a spider trap, or not.
Interesting....
I thought IBM tried to patent everything and anything plausibly patentable that came across the desk of someone on their research team.
If they patent everything, they can be pretty sure that they'll be able to extract some pretty hefty licensing fees from the industry at large. However, if they keep too many things under wraps, while they might gain a competitive advantage for a product that they're bringing to market relatively soon, they risk loosing the ability to file for all of the relevant patents. For example, someone in another research lab might simultaneously make similar discoveries and file for some patents. Thus, in the worst case, IBM could be forced to pay heavy licensing fees to the second company, for tech that IBM originally discovered.
So, I guess, I'd like to know, under what conditions does IBM tend to keep things underwraps and when do they opt for the patent?
But, if the cops one day find Google Earth printouts in some terrorist's bag, well... that won't be good for their PR.
While this is true, I bet that if they found a more standard road atlas (think a book of maps that people used to keep in their cars in order to find where things were at prior to mapquest, google maps, etc., etc.), then the fact that the guy was carrying one of these would be mentioned only in passing, if at all.
However, if some people were to hear that the map was from some new fangled internet/web based technology, then they would probably want to head over to google with pitchforks and torches. So, naturally, in this case where the guy got his road map would get a lot more media attention.
I guess it really depends on the type of question they asked.
For example, if the guy is a PhD and they asked him something like, "Could you please write us code for a linked list?", the question would be down right insulting. As a personal anecdote - I actually know of a PhD in silicon valley who got asked this question during a interview at some start up. How such a clueless start up ever received any VC funding remains an open question...
However, if they asked some thing more sophisticated and relevant to the type of job he would be hired for, then it seems totally reasonable. For example, if you're hiring someone to work on your OS's kernel, it seems totally reasonable to quiz them on if they're up on the lasted research in OS design & kernel architecture.
From the article:
...
It remains unclear what Smith was using the Wi-Fi for, to surf, play online video games, send e-mail to his grandmother,
I really hope it's not any of these. I mean being convicted of a 3rd degree felony for just surfing the web or sending e-mail using someone else's network seems really extreme. Shouldn't something like this be a more of a misdemeanor?
Hrm....so spam can actually subconsiously effect people and cause them to alter their behavior.
It seems this is only a "good thing" iff the spam people get encourages a healthy productive life style. If it's for various enlargement pills, web cams, viagra and such, as most real world spam is, it's actually probably a very *bad thing* that people are subconsiously effected by it.
This is really more of a "democracy and free market working against freedom of speech and expression" sort of thing.
That is, it seems it is officials elected by the people of Iran choosing to censor their own people. If international companies are involved, then it's international companies providing goods and services requested by the elected officials of Iran. And, thus, at least in principle, services desired by the people of Iran.
So, I guess the lesson is that while democrary, freedom of speech, and a free market often occur together, there is nothing necessarily requiring that if you have one or more of these that you must necessarily have the third.
Given how draconian this school seems to be (e.g. felony charges for misusing a school issued laptop), it seems very plausible that even running a non-standard OS on the system could be construed as unauthorized use of the equipment, and thus worthy of police action.
It's awful really, programs like this should be a good thing. I mean when I was in high school I would have loved a free laptop that I could use for homework and coding. *sigh*
This seems....um...random?
What exactly is the added trill of having the position of your player on a monoploy board correlated with the position of a real life cabby?
I guess I just don't get it.
If you think you can deliver consumer products at high volume using the techniques that you prefer, go for it.
What if the techniques I prefer involve using an algorithm or approach that is covered by an overly broad and not exactly innovative patent held by either Nokia/Apple/somebody else?
It seems that both apple and nokia are strongly in favor of having software patents in the EU. I think one the given reasons for why this is necessary is that without software patents, they'll get eaten alive by open source developers.
However, neither company seems to have a problem using open source software to futher their business objectives. So, it seems like they're simulanteously using and try to hobble open source so it can't compete with their proprioritary offerings. So wouldn't the best characterization of their behavior be selfish exploitation rather than 'support' of OSS.
high-five-figure salaries
Dang those high flying community college grads who think they're worthing of pulling down 10k a year right out of school.
yeah, yeah, I know, there are two way's to parse that...
Unfortunately, the deadline has also pasted for students to submit project proposals.
And, nothing on the summer of code website seems to indicate that they'll now extend that deadline and take some more applications. So, they also probably won't be talking on any new mentoring organizations, as all of the current applications are already associated with one of the existing possible mentors.
Too bad really...
If that looks like it's not going to completely do the trick then make a point of choosing some of the stupidest names for the program that you can possibly find.
e.g going from Mandrake to Mandriva?
Seriously....
Even if the current Google management can say in good faith that their patents are purely 'defensive', it's important to remember that patents are good for about two decades.
Given employee turn over as well as yet to be seen external market forces (e.g. a cool new search engine that works so well that it threatens to make Google redundant), it's very possible for the collective mind set of the company to change and become slightly less altruistic. So, all encompassing patents that include a bunch of obvious, random and/or trivial stuff such probably be looked at no better than similar patents from other companies. Ultimately, they're just as dangerous.
Yeah, but fortunately in a real small town, you can always move some where else and effectively start over again.....
However, in a global village this isn't really an option.
Some linguistics & psycholinguistics (e.g Norm Chompsky and Steve Pinker) argue the human brain is unique in that it is able to quickly master the complex grammar present in all human languages.
In fact there is even a mathematical proof that seems to indicate that human languages should be technically unlearn-able (google: EM Gold language grammar - "Language identification in the limit"). IIRC - the synopsis being that, human languages are at least as sophisticated as context free languages (and can to some degree be modeled by context free languages) and the grammar of context free languages should not be learnable from the sort of linguistic input available to a child.
So...anyhow, I'm not so sure if studying how birds learn a sequence of sounds really gets at the more interesting aspects of human language acquisition. I mean it's probably interesting in terms of how animals, and even people, learn to produce simple sequences of sounds.
But, for human language? Or, at least for the interesting, i.e. uniquely human, parts of it? For that you probably need to either study people, or possibly very similar animals like other primates.
While being able to search for video and images is great and all, I wonder if much more significant effort should be put into improving plain old text (technically, html/pdf/ps/doc/etc) document retrival?
It seems that on the major search engines (google/yahoo/msn), there hasn't been any radical improvement in this area since google first came onto the scene.
And, right now, it's not like these search engines are sufficiently close to perfection yet that there's little room for improvement. For a good number of types of queries, the signal to noisy ratio can be bit too low.
Recognizing the [rant] statis of your statements, I feel that your co-workers are right to feel disappointed that you can't help them with their 'nuts-and-bolts' Windows configuation and application problems and situations.
It seems you've totally misunderstood my post. I'm not talking about jobs where someone is hired as the 'computer guy'.
In fact, I personally have no interest in such jobs. I'm trained as a computer scientist, this qualifies me for jobs in things like software development, not really ones where I'm a windows tech support guru (in fact, that was roughly the point of my post).
So what I was talking about was jobs where you're hired to do something like unix development, java development, etc, etc, and people still expect that you can solve random issues with Microsoft word.
Most people working in IT probably won't benefit from computer science degrees. Moreover, someone really interested in IT, should probably transfer to their university's school of business and, if possible, enroll in whatever their equivalent of an "Information Technology" degree is. Such programs usually have a number of IT classes, e.g. databases & networking (both with a much more applied slant then you would get in a typical CS class on the same topic), but also provide students with enough knowledge of business that they'll be able to more effectively interact with the high ups in the company when it comes to such things as policy making and infrastructure planning. Alternatively, there are also some two year programs that strictly focus on IT skills.
Why? Well any CS program worth its salt doesn't focus on teaching people how to admin Windows Server 2003, or Oracle administration. Rather, it focuses on teaching people about theories computation, algorithms, and, on the more applied side, best practices in software engineering. This kind of training will make some one a better programmer or software engineer, but it wouldn't necessarily be even that the relevant to the individual deciding which routers to buy or even the one installing set routers
<rant> Okay, so maybe I am little bit peeved when people ask me how to do such and such in Microsoft Word or Windows XP, and the looks they give me when I tell them I don't know. It's like they think it's so inexplicable that I don't know since some of the core classes for CS majors *must* be esoteric document formatting in Microsoft Word, and Windows XP - Why sometimes it can't connect to the network printer. </rant>
What makes you think that slowing down technological progress will help solve a significant number of the problems humanity faces?
People lived without much tech or tech progress (by today's standards) for thousands upon thousands of years. During this time, they still did all sorts of nasty things to each other. e.g. Wars driven by superstition, genocide, institutionalized slavery, socially accepted discrimination based on race or caste etc. etc.
In fact, empirically at least, there seems to be a loose correlation between the progress of technology and various social progress.
Men and women are different. Men and women feel different things when they are "in love". To say that gay men and women feel the same things, and that those feelings are the same as straights feel, is a logical contradiction.
I'm wondering, is your point of view based on just cultural stereotypes, or do you have an evidence to back this up?
I would argue that any two people, regardless of whether they are male or female, probably have idiosyncrasies in the way they experience love. But, the claim that there is something necessarily very different between a couple consisting of a woman and a man and couples consisting of either a man and a another man or a woman and another woman reeks of sexism.
Yeah, but, Google has an exclusive license to it from Stanford until 2011. So, no other American companies can use it until then....
of course, if you're in a country that doesn't have software patents, then you might not have that problem.