"they can point a satellite at your house and count the fleas on your dog while looking through your roof."
That is eaxactly the problem with telescopes. Before you can count the fleas you need to know where they are so you can aim the telescope. You can't aim it at every house hoping to find you dog. These high powered scopes are only good for looking at things that you know are there and then only on clear days.
"There's no doubt in my mind, from the sample of people and businesses that I know, that they'd take a long hard look at Linux if they were unable to pirate MS products so easily."
The people at Microsoft know this. That why they leave it easy to install stolen copies. Their plan is to make everyone who can pay and to let the others use it for free. Much better to give away a copy for free then to let them find out about the competition.
You missed the point. A system like that proposed here would be fault tolerant. It could continue to operate even if some parts of it failed or lacked power. In fact in a system this large there would always be many parts that were broken. Servers and data centers have been designed like this for some time now. What's interresting here is that the technology scales so well.
"The electricity to charge all those batteries has to come from someplace. all you are doing is shifting the the consumption of fossil fuel from one place to another. The energy required to manufacture these batteries in VERY large quantities has to come from someplace as well."
The above is correct. But there are two other factors
(1) In the US only about 1/2 of our electric power is from burning fuels like coal. But even coal, as bad as it is, it is not imported. We expect this trend to improve as other types of power plants are built, nuclear, geo, wind soloar and so on. An electric powered car even today runs mainly on hydro-electric power if you live in the north on either US coast.
(2) Even if 100% of our electric power were generated with liquid fuels it would be BETTER to to burn those fuel in some big plant some place. When you burn them in a car very little of the energy from the fuel goes into moving the car, most goes to heating the air around the car and is wasted. A large plant can do to things (a) be very efficient at conversion and (b) can capture the products of combustion - they can pump the carbon back underground where it came from. Cars have to be light enough to move under their own power but power plants can be massive because in a stationary plant mass has zero effect of efficiency.
One simple way to fix the feed back system:
1) The ONLY thing a buyer can do wrong is not pay. Sellers should be able to leave a "no pay" feedback after two weeks of the time the auction closes. If not two weeks then some other fixed period. This could even be made automatic if PayPal is used
2) Buyers should not be able to leave any feedback at all until they have paid for the item and then allowed reasonable shipping time. All feedback needs to be date stamped with the date of payment.
The other problem is that it is easy to have many eBay accounts. Feedback and history needs to follow the person not the acount(s)
Good idea but the iPhone is a RADIO TRANSMITTER that uses a frequency that must be licenses. A software error could disable nearby cell phones. A computer or a game console is different. So what Apple has done is to make an SDK and has introduced a level of quality control betwen the developer and the iPhone.
What happens if you do write your own software, put it on the iPhone and it causes problems to other people? What you have done is built an unlicensed transmitters causing what the FCC calls "harmful interference".
The problem here is that while it is OK to modify your own phone, computers or game console. After all you bought it. It is yours but when you mess around with a shared resource that you don't own that's different. radio transmitters are that way, they use a shared resouce (the RF spectrum) So you cam mess with a phone but not in a way that that might harm other phones
I think "700 Mbz" means some one is going to auction off seven hundred German made automobiles. Seems unlikely that Google would want so many of them so trading them off seems reasonable.
If the eye were a camera it would have smaller more dense pixels in the center of the field. So, yes when looking at text one word at a time we ca notice the diferent between 600 DPI and 1200 DPI and even 2400 DPI. Quality printing is done at 2400 while the best laser printers do 1200. This is why high quality text book look beter then even a 1200 dpi laser printer.
Bit photo are bigger then words of text and our eyes only see to about 300 dpi
So unlike cameras our eyes resolution depends on what we are looking at. Itis as iff we had zoom lenses
will need something similar to high level programming tools in order to accomplish useful modifications. I think that there is already plenty of evidence that genetic systems have procedural abstraction.
Sounds to me like programming in Prolog.
For those who don't know... A Prolog program is a set of patterns and actions. When a pattern is "matched" it action occures. The set is unordered. A more modern and more widely used version of this is the language "Erlang". I think Erlang points to the way we will write very large systems in the future. For one thing it scales well to systems that have many, many cores. Procedural languages just don't scale so well. Also I think this style of programming could be adapted to formal methods, proof of correctness and so on.
Back to DNA. I think DNA simply reacts to patterns in it's environment with all of the DNA "looking" for these patterns pretty much in parallel
I went ahead in time and grabbed a history book written in the year 5,000 AD. Here is what it had to say....
"... For 10,000 years musicians earned their money by playing in front of a live audience except for a short 80 year period in the 20th century. Before this period recording has not technically possible and after the period recordings had no commercial value because they could be universally disseminated at no cost...."
This is NOT about a not-working detector. It is about a working detector not seeing a wave. This is a Good Thing. Science only moves forward what people observations do not match xpectations and then they have to ask "Why?" So you first say "he edetector is broken", The detector is not senitive enough, the GRB is farther away then we thought, Gravity does not work like we thought, We should all hope it is the last case but it will be a long time until we know.
One way to classify Science, mathmatics and religion is by how "truth" can be changed. Mathmatical truth is proved ad once proved (corectly) can never change. In science "truth" is alway subject to change as new data is collected and interpeted. With religion, I can simply decide to become Buddhist tomorrow then get bored and join some New Age group. So with religion "Truth" whatever you currently choose to believe.
But I do agree 100% that each of Science, mathematics and religion address a different non-overlapping area. If you see conflict it is because people forget this.
"That doesn't always work for a code base with millions of lines of atrociously written code. I've worked with code where it is absolutely not feasible to step through everything"
You are correct. All these people talking about using a debugger and so on... That does NOT work on larger projects any on fairly simple ones. "Large" projects might have 250 source code files and thousands of functions or classes and likely a dozen or so interacting executable programs. I've seen print outs of source code that fill five bookcase shelves. No one could ever read that.
I've had to come up to speed on million+ lines of code projects many times. The tool i use is pencil and paper
The first step is to become an expert user of the software. Just run the thing, a lot and learn what it does. Looking at code is pointless untill yu know it well as a user.
You hit it right on the head. The decline in test scores is a direct result of demographic changes. Why has the height of graduating high school seniors declined? Junk food? No there are now more Hispanics in the mix who tend to be shorter. The real story is that students tend to do about as well in school as their parents did. (Yes exceptions happen but we are talking about averages here.) and there has been a large influx of poorly educated parents.
The people who get pushed here to the US to look for work are not Mexico's higher classes but mexico's least educated and most un-employable. Many did not complete even the 6th grade. Their children have a huge disadvantage in school and bring down the averages.
If you look at the schools the best kids still do great work. Just like height. Adding short kids does bring down the average height but does not actually make the other tall kids shorter. Test scores work the same way those making low scores affect the average but do not bring down the scores of the best students.
This is VERY common at Fry. They have a libral return policy that is NOT likely to change. The return policy is the main reason many people put up with shopping there. The place is a mess and staffed with people who don't know anything about the products being sold. But everyone knows that it they don't like whatever they bought they can just bring it back within 30 days no questions asked.
My brother worked in IT for some company and they wanted to buy vidio cards for their computers. So he goes to Frys and buys a half dozen cards. Tries them all out and returns all but one. Lots of people shop this way. I bought AV cables and speaker mounts that way. I did not know what I would need for a installation so I just bought a s--t load of parts and next week returned the stuff I did not use
They DO have a less libral policy for cameras and big screen TVs. The return period on those is much,shorter. People were "renting" these big TVs for the the "big game" and returning them the day after. Same with people "renting" camera for a vacation.
REI, the outdoor equipment reseller is even more better with returns. They do not have a time limit. I've seen completely thrash hiking boots returned because "they wore out sooner then they should have" REI actually took back boots with the soles worn smooth that had seen a year of hard use.
These policies do NOT run up the cost for all of us. they serve to increase the sales volume for the store and actually have a net positive effect.
I worked at Mcdonalds also when i was 16. That was a lot more then 20 years ago. Same thing the meat was better quality than what was generally sold to the public at the super markets. Same with all the other ingrediance. The quality was all first rate but the end result was all in preparation.
But you know what? They taste that way because of very careful and scientific studies done by the company. They do focus groups and test marketing and they make what the vest majority of their customers want.
Why does American beer taste like it does? Because that is what sells.
Quite surprizingly there is a large difference between what customers tell you they want and what they actually buy given the chance. So the trick is actually NOT to listen to what they say but watch what they do.
Fanboys don't work so hard. Investment analysts sometimes do. The point is that if you can predict the future you can make a killing in the stock market. Apple's stock is very volitile. It goes up and down. If you can predict those little bumps you can get rich. Just think: If you KNEW 100% that some long awaited announcement would result in disappointment and a $11 loss in the stock price you'd short Apple. So there is a whole ecosystem built around trying to predict what will happen to Apple.
In 1993 you had many other quality options. Why SCO on a 286? I know. Because it was cheap. That's the root cause of your company going bust - trying to get by on the cheap. If it was business critical why was there no backup plan in place? Why keep if when it failed? It was obsolite even in '93. Why didn't yuu call the people at Sun and buy a SPARC system running SunOS. Why not change the MX records on your DNS serve to point your email to a different server?
Our public library too is very good. They buy most of the new videos as soon as they come out. You can reserve the DVD on-line and they will place it in a special holding area and put a note on it with your name. They have better sevice then the video rental stores.
"Nuance has a virtual monopoly in realistically priced (read: "in a budget that a normal small-to-medium-sized business can afford") general-purpose speech recognition systems."
Not really. The best software as usual is free and Open Source. The trouble is that (1) It lacks a marketing budget so few people know about it and (2) it is software "by Phds and for Phds" meaning that it is not packaged with a slick installer and GUI.
The Mac and PC software we are talking about here mgame out of CMU decades ago and the basic science was funded mostly by DARPA. Well DARPA is still funding CMU and you can see their latest up to the minute work here http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/ but like I said above the software's target user base has an advanced degree in computer science.
So Nuance does not have a monopoly on SR. They only have the monopoly on packaging and marking SR. Ste of the art SR part is available to anyone for free.
They bought MySQL because you can't buy Postgres. There is no "postgres inc." to take your money. I think they needed a DBMS that they could own and control.
Sun seems to support both MySQL and PostrageSQL but they may be looking for a dbms they can embed in non-open source projects maybe the way Apple embeds SQL Lite in Mac OS X.
If Sun planned to build a DBMS into Solaris they would want to control the dbms' technical direction and quality.
Yes technically they can't force the retailer to sell at a given price BUT they can cut the retail off and not sell them any more product. This is how they do it. They have "authorized" retailers. If the retailer gets out of line they loose their autorized status and can't buy any more product directly. So if you do discount the Apple iPod to much, Apple will not sell you any more iPods. So a 40% off iPod sale would be a one time event.
It is kind of like the big sign in some places that read "we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone"
There is an easy way to have a reliable, read/write ZFS on you Mac right now. get VMware Fusion and then install Solaris in a VM. Solaris is free. If you look you can even find a VM image with Solaris alredy installed so the installation is easier even than "triveal". The solaris running in the VM can then export the ZFS files to Mac Os X using the interal virtual network.
I bring this up just so that maybe more people can get to see first hand how ZFS works. If you happen to already have Fusion then getting Solaris is just a download away.
So while the initial repsonce is going to be great but don't expect to see lots of these people as return customers in the next few years.
same is true for children's clothing. Buy one pair of size 1 shoes and you will likely not be buying another. So if these guys can sell just one PC to each person when they turn 13 thell will sell enough and every year there is a new bacth of customers. The trick is to offer a line of PCs, one at every price point. Then as yur customers upgrade you can keep them. Adding a PC at the bottom of the line can only serve to expand the whole market for PCs as at will alow people to buy their first PC ealier than thy would have.
In the article the guy says it's just like providing heat and light to guests. Fine, why not give them all your money, too. Why not take the fall when your "guests" are pulled for speeding, or online fraud?
Because that is different. Heat and light is something you have in your house anyways and it costs you nothing to share it. WiFi is the same. When my son'e freind came over and brought his Apple iPod Touch it cost me nothing to put him on my wireless network
The problem with making it public is that 99.999% of the populatin does not know how to do it afely. You can't just open up your home network because typically that network in on the private side of your firewall. You want to open up the conection on the public side if you are to share it. And today in 2008 very few peope have the technical skill to set up a public WiFi that does not allow access to private data. But I can envision routers being pre-configured to do this
Slashdot Mirror
"they can point a satellite at your house and count the fleas on your dog while looking through your roof."
That is eaxactly the problem with telescopes. Before you can count the fleas you need to know where they are so you can aim the telescope. You can't aim it at every house hoping to find you dog. These high powered scopes are only good for looking at things that you know are there and then only on clear days.
"There's no doubt in my mind, from the sample of people and businesses that I know, that they'd take a long hard look at Linux if they were unable to pirate MS products so easily."
The people at Microsoft know this. That why they leave it easy to install stolen copies. Their plan is to make everyone who can pay and to let the others use it for free. Much better to give away a copy for free then to let them find out about the competition.
"they better use a really big UPS."
You missed the point. A system like that proposed here would be fault tolerant. It could continue to operate even if some parts of it failed or lacked power. In fact in a system this large there would always be many parts that were broken.
Servers and data centers have been designed like this for some time now. What's interresting here is that the technology scales so well.
"The electricity to charge all those batteries has to come from someplace. all you are doing is shifting the the consumption of fossil fuel from one place to another. The energy required to manufacture these batteries in VERY large quantities has to come from someplace as well."
The above is correct. But there are two other factors
(1) In the US only about 1/2 of our electric power is from burning fuels like coal. But even coal, as bad as it is, it is not imported. We expect this trend to improve as other types of power plants are built, nuclear, geo, wind soloar and so on. An electric powered car even today runs mainly on hydro-electric power if you live in the north on either US coast.
(2) Even if 100% of our electric power were generated with liquid fuels it would be BETTER to to burn those fuel in some big plant some place. When you burn them in a car very little of the energy from the fuel goes into moving the car, most goes to heating the air around the car and is wasted. A large plant can do to things (a) be very efficient at conversion and (b) can capture the products of combustion - they can pump the carbon back underground where it came from. Cars have to be light enough to move under their own power but power plants can be massive because in a stationary plant mass has zero effect of efficiency.
One simple way to fix the feed back system: 1) The ONLY thing a buyer can do wrong is not pay. Sellers should be able to leave a "no pay" feedback after two weeks of the time the auction closes. If not two weeks then some other fixed period. This could even be made automatic if PayPal is used 2) Buyers should not be able to leave any feedback at all until they have paid for the item and then allowed reasonable shipping time. All feedback needs to be date stamped with the date of payment. The other problem is that it is easy to have many eBay accounts. Feedback and history needs to follow the person not the acount(s)
just open it up for any developer.
Good idea but the iPhone is a RADIO TRANSMITTER that uses a frequency that must be licenses. A software error could disable nearby cell phones. A computer or a game console is different. So what Apple has done is to make an SDK and has introduced a level of quality control betwen the developer and the iPhone.
What happens if you do write your own software, put it on the iPhone and it causes problems to other people? What you have done is built an unlicensed transmitters causing what the FCC calls "harmful interference".
The problem here is that while it is OK to modify your own phone, computers or game console. After all you bought it. It is yours but when you mess around with a shared resource that you don't own that's different. radio transmitters are that way, they use a shared resouce (the RF spectrum) So you cam mess with a phone but not in a way that that might harm other phones
I think "700 Mbz" means some one is going to auction off seven hundred German made automobiles. Seems unlikely that Google would want so many of them so trading them off seems reasonable.
If the eye were a camera it would have smaller more dense pixels in the center of the field. So, yes when looking at text one word at a time we ca notice the diferent between 600 DPI and 1200 DPI and even 2400 DPI. Quality printing is done at 2400 while the best laser printers do 1200. This is why high quality text book look beter then even a 1200 dpi laser printer.
Bit photo are bigger then words of text and our eyes only see to about 300 dpi
So unlike cameras our eyes resolution depends on what we are looking at. Itis as iff we had zoom lenses
will need something similar to high level programming tools in order to accomplish useful modifications. I think that there is already plenty of evidence that genetic systems have procedural abstraction.
Sounds to me like programming in Prolog.
For those who don't know... A Prolog program is a set of patterns and actions. When a pattern is "matched" it action occures. The set is unordered. A more modern and more widely used version of this is the language "Erlang". I think Erlang points to the way we will write very large systems in the future. For one thing it scales well to systems that have many, many cores. Procedural languages just don't scale so well. Also I think this style of programming could be adapted to formal methods, proof of correctness and so on.
Back to DNA. I think DNA simply reacts to patterns in it's environment with all of the DNA "looking" for these patterns pretty much in parallel
I went ahead in time and grabbed a history book written in the year 5,000 AD. Here is what it had to say....
"... For 10,000 years musicians earned their money by playing in front of a live audience except for a short 80 year period in the 20th century. Before this period recording has not technically possible and after the period recordings had no commercial value because they could be universally disseminated at no cost...."
This is NOT about a not-working detector. It is about a working detector not seeing a wave. This is a Good Thing. Science only moves forward what people observations do not match xpectations and then they have to ask "Why?" So you first say "he edetector is broken", The detector is not senitive enough, the GRB is farther away then we thought, Gravity does not work like we thought, We should all hope it is the last case but it will be a long time until we know.
One way to classify Science, mathmatics and religion is by how "truth" can be changed. Mathmatical truth is proved ad once proved (corectly) can never change. In science "truth" is alway subject to change as new data is collected and interpeted. With religion, I can simply decide to become Buddhist tomorrow then get bored and join some New Age group. So with religion "Truth" whatever you currently choose to believe.
But I do agree 100% that each of Science, mathematics and religion address a different non-overlapping area. If you see conflict it is because people forget this.
"That doesn't always work for a code base with millions of lines of atrociously written code. I've worked with code where it is absolutely not feasible to step through everything"
You are correct. All these people talking about using a debugger and so on... That does NOT work on larger projects any on fairly simple ones. "Large" projects might have 250 source code files and thousands of functions or classes and likely a dozen or so interacting executable programs. I've seen print outs of source code that fill five bookcase shelves. No one could ever read that.
I've had to come up to speed on million+ lines of code projects many times. The tool i use is pencil and paper
The first step is to become an expert user of the software. Just run the thing, a lot and learn what it does. Looking at code is pointless untill yu know it well as a user.
You hit it right on the head. The decline in test scores is a direct result of demographic changes. Why has the height of graduating high school seniors declined? Junk food? No there are now more Hispanics in the mix who tend to be shorter. The real story is that students tend to do about as well in school as their parents did. (Yes exceptions happen but we are talking about averages here.) and there has been a large influx of poorly educated parents.
The people who get pushed here to the US to look for work are not Mexico's higher classes but mexico's least educated and most un-employable. Many did not complete even the 6th grade. Their children have a huge disadvantage in school and bring down the averages.
If you look at the schools the best kids still do great work. Just like height. Adding short kids does bring down the average height but does not actually make the other tall kids shorter. Test scores work the same way those making low scores affect the average but do not bring down the scores of the best students.
This is VERY common at Fry. They have a libral return policy that is NOT likely to change. The return policy is the main reason many people put up with shopping there. The place is a mess and staffed with people who don't know anything about the products being sold. But everyone knows that it they don't like whatever they bought they can just bring it back within 30 days no questions asked. My brother worked in IT for some company and they wanted to buy vidio cards for their computers. So he goes to Frys and buys a half dozen cards. Tries them all out and returns all but one. Lots of people shop this way. I bought AV cables and speaker mounts that way. I did not know what I would need for a installation so I just bought a s--t load of parts and next week returned the stuff I did not use They DO have a less libral policy for cameras and big screen TVs. The return period on those is much,shorter. People were "renting" these big TVs for the the "big game" and returning them the day after. Same with people "renting" camera for a vacation. REI, the outdoor equipment reseller is even more better with returns. They do not have a time limit. I've seen completely thrash hiking boots returned because "they wore out sooner then they should have" REI actually took back boots with the soles worn smooth that had seen a year of hard use. These policies do NOT run up the cost for all of us. they serve to increase the sales volume for the store and actually have a net positive effect.
I worked at Mcdonalds also when i was 16. That was a lot more then 20 years ago. Same thing the meat was better quality than what was generally sold to the public at the super markets. Same with all the other ingrediance. The quality was all first rate but the end result was all in preparation.
But you know what? They taste that way because of very careful and scientific studies done by the company. They do focus groups and test marketing and they make what the vest majority of their customers want.
Why does American beer taste like it does? Because that is what sells.
Quite surprizingly there is a large difference between what customers tell you they want and what they actually buy given the chance. So the trick is actually NOT to listen to what they say but watch what they do.
"Count me out. I'm not THAT big of a fanboy."
Fanboys don't work so hard. Investment analysts sometimes do. The point is that if you can predict the future you can make a killing in the stock market. Apple's stock is very volitile. It goes up and down. If you can predict those little bumps you can get rich.
Just think: If you KNEW 100% that some long awaited announcement would result in disappointment and a $11 loss in the stock price you'd short Apple. So there is a whole ecosystem built around trying to predict what will happen to Apple.
In 1993 you had many other quality options. Why SCO on a 286? I know. Because it was cheap. That's the root cause of your company going bust - trying to get by on the cheap. If it was business critical why was there no backup plan in place? Why keep if when it failed? It was obsolite even in '93. Why didn't yuu call the people at Sun and buy a SPARC system running SunOS. Why not change the MX records on your DNS serve to point your email to a different server?
Our public library too is very good. They buy most of the new videos as soon as they come out. You can reserve the DVD on-line and they will place it in a special holding area and put a note on it with your name. They have better sevice then the video rental stores.
"Nuance has a virtual monopoly in realistically priced (read: "in a budget that a normal small-to-medium-sized business can afford") general-purpose speech recognition systems."
Not really. The best software as usual is free and Open Source. The trouble is that (1) It lacks a marketing budget so few people know about it and (2) it is software "by Phds and for Phds" meaning that it is not packaged with a slick installer and GUI.
The Mac and PC software we are talking about here mgame out of CMU decades ago and the basic science was funded mostly by DARPA. Well DARPA is still funding CMU and you can see their latest up to the minute work here
http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/ but like I said above the software's target user base has an advanced degree in computer science.
So Nuance does not have a monopoly on SR. They only have the monopoly on packaging and marking SR. Ste of the art SR part is available to anyone for free.
They bought MySQL because you can't buy Postgres. There is no "postgres inc." to take your money. I think they needed a DBMS that they could own and control.
Sun seems to support both MySQL and PostrageSQL but they may be looking for a dbms they can embed in non-open source projects maybe the way Apple embeds SQL Lite in Mac OS X.
If Sun planned to build a DBMS into Solaris they would want to control the dbms' technical direction and quality.
Yes technically they can't force the retailer to sell at a given price BUT they can cut the retail off and not sell them any more product. This is how they do it. They have "authorized" retailers. If the retailer gets out of line they loose their autorized status and can't buy any more product directly. So if you do discount the Apple iPod to much, Apple will not sell you any more iPods. So a 40% off iPod sale would be a one time event. It is kind of like the big sign in some places that read "we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone"
There is an easy way to have a reliable, read/write ZFS on you Mac right now. get VMware Fusion and then install Solaris in a VM. Solaris is free. If you look you can even find a VM image with Solaris alredy installed so the installation is easier even than "triveal". The solaris running in the VM can then export the ZFS files to Mac Os X using the interal virtual network.
I bring this up just so that maybe more people can get to see first hand how ZFS works. If you happen to already have Fusion then getting Solaris is just a download away.
So while the initial repsonce is going to be great but don't expect to see lots of these people as return customers in the next few years.
same is true for children's clothing. Buy one pair of size 1 shoes and you will likely not be buying another. So if these guys can sell just one PC to each person when they turn 13 thell will sell enough and every year there is a new bacth of customers. The trick is to offer a line of PCs, one at every price point. Then as yur customers upgrade you can keep them. Adding a PC at the bottom of the line can only serve to expand the whole market for PCs as at will alow people to buy their first PC ealier than thy would have.
In the article the guy says it's just like providing heat and light to guests. Fine, why not give them all your money, too. Why not take the fall when your "guests" are pulled for speeding, or online fraud?
Because that is different. Heat and light is something you have in your house anyways and it costs you nothing to share it. WiFi is the same. When my son'e freind came over and brought his Apple iPod Touch it cost me nothing to put him on my wireless network
The problem with making it public is that 99.999% of the populatin does not know how to do it afely. You can't just open up your home network because typically that network in on the private side of your firewall. You want to open up the conection on the public side if you are to share it. And today in 2008 very few peope have the technical skill to set up a public WiFi that does not allow access to private data. But I can envision routers being pre-configured to do this