and I'll say it again. Google doesn't give up-to-date PageRank figures through the toolbar (IIRC they update figures every few weeks/months), primarily to hinder the efforts of SEO types. Without instant feedback, it's more difficult to figure out how to game the system. I would imagine that the site's actual PR is quite high, since it already made the rounds in the media quite some time ago and got many links from sites with high PR.
If the Internet Archive can back up the entire internet every few months, I would think the National Archive could handle a few hundred million emails.
Have you heard of Java subroutines? They are a clever mechanism designed to reduce code bloat from nested finally clauses. To make a long story short, subroutines account for more than half the length of the formal correctness proof for Java, and complicate the implemention of the compiler and runtime system substantially. The punchline is, changing the name from "Java" to "Oak" would, on average, save 13 times as much space as adding subroutines. Well designed with a theoretical basis in mind? Decide for yourself.
One of the most important pro-Google points you left out: AOL will shift from using another search engine (I forget who) to using Google as the built-in search provider. Hence millions of extra ad impressions for Google per day.
What I've seen mentioned but not described in detail that scares me is that Google may have given its away its impartiality and somehow give AOL precedence in its ads / search results. Anyone have details?
last i heard, bittorrent made up more than 1/3 of all internet traffic (not just P2P). i'm not sure what proportion of traffic is p2p in general, but bittorrent is almost certainly the biggest piece of the pie.
While this might be a significant change if you are a frequent Wikipedia editor, it really isn't anything that we on the outside will notice. This is basically a less restricted form of protection that is currently applied to a heavily vandilized pages, where only administrators are allowed to edit. This adds an intermediate status where you don't have to be an administrator, but your account has to be (only) about 4 days old.
device that lets you move onscreen objects by just thinking about it. We can do a brain-controled 2-d cursor easily now, better stuff will be on the way soon.
Obviously these bozos haven't revolutionized anything. The only reasonable reason for posting an article like this one would be to hope to produce some insightful commentary... but if that was the point, an "Ask slashdot: what's going on in AI today" would have been much more effective.
as long as you're giving end users internet service for free. They've gotta be crazy if they think I'm gonna pay $35 a month for a crippled internet service, though.
IANAGP (game programmer), but it would seem to me that physics and lighting calculations should be easily parallelizable. Each processor can compute the physics for a separate set of objects / pixels / etc. Same for AI for each agent, if the companies actually bothered to put some effort into gameplay over graphics. On the other hand, I would guess that things like fluids (i.e. Far Cry) would be more difficult to do in parallel, due to the less local nature of the interactions.
...automated phone system. Sure, they are infuriating when they are designed to waste your time, but the real problem is that in general companies try to give customers the runaround instead of providing real customer support. I can't even count the number of times I have been "accidentally" hung up on while being transferred (by a human) when complaining about being overcharged. I once had to call my insurance company (United Healthcare) over FIFTY times to get them to drop a bogus $1000 charge, which was due to a computer glitch in their system. They operate on the principle that if they make it hard enough to get what you want, you will eventually get frustrated and give up. The problem is that it's extremely difficult to hold them accountable for this behaviour, since they mask it in a thin veil of (partially?) feigned incompetence.
I should clarify: reading the qubit will destroy all quantum effects (superposition as well as entanglement), effectively making the qubits look like ordinary bits (when you open the box, the cat's either dead or alive, not both). However, quantum computers are designed with this in mind; reading the output destroys any quantum properties it may have, but a computation can be repeated many times to get an idea of what uncertainty was present in the output.
> Wouldnt this violate the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle?
Reading a qubit doesn't violate the Uncertainty Principle by itself; if qubits couldn't be read or written, they'd be worthless. The issue you are probably thinking of is that entanglements between qubits will be destroyed by the reading process (and there is no way to "read" such entanglements without destroying the individual qubit values).
Google only updates their publicly visible Pagerank data every couple weeks or so, to make it more difficult to game the system. New pages will show up as PR 0 until the next public update, but (of course) Google updates their private Pagerank database more often.
That being said, WTF?! World Wide Wing Tour?!
Small scale wind turbines already exist. Wikipedia shows a picture of a roof-mounted turbine much like you describe: this rooftop-mounted urban wind turbine charges a 12 volt battery and runs various 12 volt appliances within the building on which it is installed.
Of course, the real question is why you would waste time and money running a separate power grid in your house, just to supply electricity to things you're obviously willing to do without (say, if it's not windy outside). I'm all for sustainable energy, but might as well put it to a good use if you're going to go to the effort of collecting it.
BTW, anyone know a way for me to toggle link text format fron standard (blue w/ underline) to normal (black no underline) and back, quickly?
Perhaps the LinkVisitor Firefox plugin is what you're looking for. Among other things, it has context menu options for "mark all links as (un)visited".
The Open Content Alliance is a consortium of non-profit and for-profit groups which is dedicated to building a free archive of digital text and multimedia. It was conceived in 2005 by Yahoo and the Internet Archive. It was conceived in response to Google Print's closed nature, and aims to keep public domain works in the public domain on-line. These results will then be used in the search results of participating search engines. You can see a sample of the open content at openlibrary.org
A large difference between the OCA's approach and that of Google Print is that the OCA intends to ask a copyright holder before digitising a work that is still under copyright, while Google Print will digitise any book unless explicitly told not to do so by November 1, 2005.
So, Google Print will almost certainly be better when searching for copyrighted material. For public domain works, we'll have to wait and see.
IMHO, it seems like a little cooperation here would make a lot of sense for both parties - they could save money trading digital copies 1-for-1 while remaining in (healthy) competition.
A loophole in British insolvency laws and a clause within many Microsoft licenses that permits disused or unwanted volume licenses to be transferred enables Disclic to sell the licenses legally. The licenses are offered at a discount of around 20 to 50 percent below prices of any other authorised Microsoft reseller.
A Microsoft representative confirmed on Thursday in the UK that Disclic's resale of licenses "does meet Microsoft's terms and conditions."
My point was that regardless of legal loopholes that may exist in British laws and Microsoft's EULA, at least some of us have the right to resell Windows without asking Microsoft's permission. Not to mention the fact that M$ would probably be grumbling if they thought they had a case...
District courts in California and Texas have issued decisions applying the doctrine of first sale for bundled computer software in Softman v. Adobe (2001) and Novell, Inc. v. CPU Distrib., Inc. (2000) even if the software contains a EULA prohibiting resale.
M$ can grumble all they want, but (at least for some of us) reselling Windows is a legal right regardless of the contents of the EULA.
Slashdot Mirror
and I'll say it again. Google doesn't give up-to-date PageRank figures through the toolbar (IIRC they update figures every few weeks/months), primarily to hinder the efforts of SEO types. Without instant feedback, it's more difficult to figure out how to game the system. I would imagine that the site's actual PR is quite high, since it already made the rounds in the media quite some time ago and got many links from sites with high PR.
If the Internet Archive can back up the entire internet every few months, I would think the National Archive could handle a few hundred million emails.
Have you heard of Java subroutines? They are a clever mechanism designed to reduce code bloat from nested finally clauses. To make a long story short, subroutines account for more than half the length of the formal correctness proof for Java, and complicate the implemention of the compiler and runtime system substantially. The punchline is, changing the name from "Java" to "Oak" would, on average, save 13 times as much space as adding subroutines. Well designed with a theoretical basis in mind? Decide for yourself.
by converting this post from analog to digital in your brain. You will be hearing from my lawyers (fp?).
That is all
One of the most important pro-Google points you left out: AOL will shift from using another search engine (I forget who) to using Google as the built-in search provider. Hence millions of extra ad impressions for Google per day. What I've seen mentioned but not described in detail that scares me is that Google may have given its away its impartiality and somehow give AOL precedence in its ads / search results. Anyone have details?
last i heard, bittorrent made up more than 1/3 of all internet traffic (not just P2P). i'm not sure what proportion of traffic is p2p in general, but bittorrent is almost certainly the biggest piece of the pie.
While this might be a significant change if you are a frequent Wikipedia editor, it really isn't anything that we on the outside will notice. This is basically a less restricted form of protection that is currently applied to a heavily vandilized pages, where only administrators are allowed to edit. This adds an intermediate status where you don't have to be an administrator, but your account has to be (only) about 4 days old.
device that lets you move onscreen objects by just thinking about it. We can do a brain-controled 2-d cursor easily now, better stuff will be on the way soon.
Anyone know? For once Wikipedia isn't much help.
Obviously these bozos haven't revolutionized anything. The only reasonable reason for posting an article like this one would be to hope to produce some insightful commentary... but if that was the point, an "Ask slashdot: what's going on in AI today" would have been much more effective.
as long as you're giving end users internet service for free. They've gotta be crazy if they think I'm gonna pay $35 a month for a crippled internet service, though.
IANAGP (game programmer), but it would seem to me that physics and lighting calculations should be easily parallelizable. Each processor can compute the physics for a separate set of objects / pixels / etc. Same for AI for each agent, if the companies actually bothered to put some effort into gameplay over graphics. On the other hand, I would guess that things like fluids (i.e. Far Cry) would be more difficult to do in parallel, due to the less local nature of the interactions.
> Oh, one thing that Google hasn't done is Database...
ummm...
...automated phone system. Sure, they are infuriating when they are designed to waste your time, but the real problem is that in general companies try to give customers the runaround instead of providing real customer support. I can't even count the number of times I have been "accidentally" hung up on while being transferred (by a human) when complaining about being overcharged. I once had to call my insurance company (United Healthcare) over FIFTY times to get them to drop a bogus $1000 charge, which was due to a computer glitch in their system. They operate on the principle that if they make it hard enough to get what you want, you will eventually get frustrated and give up. The problem is that it's extremely difficult to hold them accountable for this behaviour, since they mask it in a thin veil of (partially?) feigned incompetence.
figure.
I should clarify: reading the qubit will destroy all quantum effects (superposition as well as entanglement), effectively making the qubits look like ordinary bits (when you open the box, the cat's either dead or alive, not both). However, quantum computers are designed with this in mind; reading the output destroys any quantum properties it may have, but a computation can be repeated many times to get an idea of what uncertainty was present in the output.
> Wouldnt this violate the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle?
Reading a qubit doesn't violate the Uncertainty Principle by itself; if qubits couldn't be read or written, they'd be worthless. The issue you are probably thinking of is that entanglements between qubits will be destroyed by the reading process (and there is no way to "read" such entanglements without destroying the individual qubit values).
Google only updates their publicly visible Pagerank data every couple weeks or so, to make it more difficult to game the system. New pages will show up as PR 0 until the next public update, but (of course) Google updates their private Pagerank database more often. That being said, WTF?! World Wide Wing Tour?!
Small scale wind turbines already exist. Wikipedia shows a picture of a roof-mounted turbine much like you describe: this rooftop-mounted urban wind turbine charges a 12 volt battery and runs various 12 volt appliances within the building on which it is installed.
Of course, the real question is why you would waste time and money running a separate power grid in your house, just to supply electricity to things you're obviously willing to do without (say, if it's not windy outside). I'm all for sustainable energy, but might as well put it to a good use if you're going to go to the effort of collecting it.
BTW, anyone know a way for me to toggle link text format fron standard (blue w/ underline) to normal (black no underline) and back, quickly?
Perhaps the LinkVisitor Firefox plugin is what you're looking for. Among other things, it has context menu options for "mark all links as (un)visited".
From the Wikipedia article on the Open Content Alliance:
The Open Content Alliance is a consortium of non-profit and for-profit groups which is dedicated to building a free archive of digital text and multimedia. It was conceived in 2005 by Yahoo and the Internet Archive. It was conceived in response to Google Print's closed nature, and aims to keep public domain works in the public domain on-line. These results will then be used in the search results of participating search engines. You can see a sample of the open content at openlibrary.org
A large difference between the OCA's approach and that of Google Print is that the OCA intends to ask a copyright holder before digitising a work that is still under copyright, while Google Print will digitise any book unless explicitly told not to do so by November 1, 2005.
So, Google Print will almost certainly be better when searching for copyrighted material. For public domain works, we'll have to wait and see.
IMHO, it seems like a little cooperation here would make a lot of sense for both parties - they could save money trading digital copies 1-for-1 while remaining in (healthy) competition.
From TFA:
A loophole in British insolvency laws and a clause within many Microsoft licenses that permits disused or unwanted volume licenses to be transferred enables Disclic to sell the licenses legally. The licenses are offered at a discount of around 20 to 50 percent below prices of any other authorised Microsoft reseller.
A Microsoft representative confirmed on Thursday in the UK that Disclic's resale of licenses "does meet Microsoft's terms and conditions."
My point was that regardless of legal loopholes that may exist in British laws and Microsoft's EULA, at least some of us have the right to resell Windows without asking Microsoft's permission. Not to mention the fact that M$ would probably be grumbling if they thought they had a case...
From the Wikipedia article on first sale:
District courts in California and Texas have issued decisions applying the doctrine of first sale for bundled computer software in Softman v. Adobe (2001) and Novell, Inc. v. CPU Distrib., Inc. (2000) even if the software contains a EULA prohibiting resale.
M$ can grumble all they want, but (at least for some of us) reselling Windows is a legal right regardless of the contents of the EULA.
$400,000,000 just to launch this thing into a geosynchronous transfer orbit (not counting construction costs).
I'm sure there's already more than 20 tons of junk in orbit... all we'd need to do is collect it and add a thruster, and we'd be good to go...