The problem with Cyc is that we are not born knowing these millions of obvious things (because we learn some -- OTOH people also don't seem to start out as a blank slate) and I can deal with situatons that I have never considered by reasoning. Just adding more and more hacky rules (with dubious handling of contradictions) does not intelligence make. It's like saying that the people who do well on Jeopardy are "smart" because they know alot of facts.
Increasing understanding is more important than money.
Noble words. Increased understanding of what? The effects of weightlessness on ? The only financial problems NASA has is the amount they spend on the shuttle versus the amount they spend on useful things like deep space probes.
Personally, I'd rather have a pointless war (Antartica anyone?) than throw more money down the rathole which is the space shuttle.
Well guess what, some of the codebase is in apache. Probally not much at this point, but apache was derivied from a series of httpd patches. A-patch-e was a play on words to that fact.
My first read of the story title was "Jeff Bezos shot INTO space" -- now there's an idea I could get behind.
On the plus side, since most of these individuals are not "ego challenged" perhaps some of these projects will have the effect of thinning the super-rich "inventor" ranks.
Are you saying put these in a separate section of the feed, where a machine can easily filter them out? Or would you put them in the main part of the feed itself, indistinguishable from a normal link, a practice which got a few search engines accused of corruption?
Yes, in a section that can be easily filtered. Anyone who cares can already filter out ads so why should this be different. People who care aren't going to buy you products on general principle so it's a wash.
Try telling that to any major directory such as Yahoo!
Please. Ad revenue from the link/directory section is a joke. Does anyone still use that anyway?
In other words, the dot-com revenue model of "give away your product and make it up selling T-shirts". Or am I misled?
Your more correct than you know. The whole "My shitty little site links to articles in the New York Times so people will pay big money to advertise on it" days are over. Why do you presume that RSS can be "monetized" anyway?
What I meant was that most of the best RSS sources are people who are involved in a project or have something that they care about and want to share it with others so making money off of it is not there primary concern.
Granted there are probably also a bunch of dinks with linking sites who don't like this and don't have RSS or do a crappy job of it *ahem*slashdot*ahem*.
1) Text Ads 2) If your just linking to other people stuff, the RSS link will go to them -- do I really owe you advertising bucks if all you do is link? 3) If your linking to your stuff then the RSS link will go to your page which will presumably have ads on it if you care. 4) Alot of sites (the majority?) that offer RSS feeds are not designed to make money and those that do have better ways of doing it than ads (example: reading Jon Udels blog made me buy one of his books).
Slashdot has been blocking my rss aggregator for about 2 weeks -- despite the fact that my aggregator is set to every 4 hours. The sad thing is I didn't really care because the RSS summaries were pretty crap. Not putting the full article summary (which in most cases is the article) is bad, Stopping in the middle of a sentence to do it is really bad...
You may have an argument for the Apollo missions: more complex missions. But Apollo 13 was almost a disaster, and many people in the field consider it a miracle that one of the Apollo missions didn't go wrong.
Well sure but the point is that they didn't and the shuttle did. Given the damage that Apollo 13 had, which do you think would be more likely to survive, the Capsule or the shuttle?
The shuttle missions can rarely be compared to the early-NASA missions. It was a different world, there were different goals, a different government, and different public support. Yes the missions happen less often than they were originally intended, but then again, there's far less public support of space missions, and Congress cuts NASA's budget practically every year. What do you expect?
But the entire point of the shuttle was to fly frequently and cheaply (thus the reusable aspect). It has been a huge failure in both regards. Consequently, the money that Nasa desperatly needs for things that actually make discoveries (like Voyager and hubble) gets spent on Shuttle missions and the ISS. Maybe the reason no one cares about the space program anymore is that it stopped being a space exploration program and turned into a cross between a PR campaign and U-Haul.
We would need to know what "show stopper" means. I think a show stopping problem might mean a flaw that would mean permanently grounding the fleet because it is unfixable.
True. I claim that by nature of it's complexity and fundamental design, it's not likely to become grossly safer.
Comparing the risk to to IE is not the same, in some ways worse.
Yes but that's a question of the effect. If IE were being used in a situation where the slightest fault would cause disaster then we would expect a much higher quality rate.
For IE to compare, then there would be a 2% chance that any startup would completely destroy the computer to the point of unsalvageability of parts, and also kill its user.
Yes, that would be more of a "Windows 95 level" of crapulence;-)
The shuttle is similar, given that almost any problem can easily turn into a catastophic problem, how much of that failure rate is intrinisic in the activity (e.g. no matter how safe you try to make mountain climbing, there is always an element of risk that is higher than many other activities).
It's a hallmark of poor design that the shuttle is not fault tolerant. Looking back at the Mercury / Gemini / Apollo missions, they were largely safe because:
1) Simple design -- as few moving parts as possible (largely to save weight). 2) By design they were fault tolerant. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to realize that something that falls directly down to earth and then pops a parachute to land in the ocean is going to be more reliable than a giant glider with wings which has to land itself on a runway.
And the frequency of that activity, if we're talking 50 missions at two missions a year, that's a lot of years between failures. Hey, that's what makes being an astronaut what it is, a risk, that's why they are elevated to such a high status (unfortunately often times not until AFTER something bad happens).
But the shuttle was supposed to fly one a week. Why do you think it doesn't? And why do you think it is hugely more expensive than its supposed to be?
Just because Astronauts are willing to do it doesn't make it a good idea. They find people to be suicide bombers but that's not justified now is it?
This report just highlights the "band-aid" nature of any fixes to the shuttle. X happened so we must protect against X. Then Y happens and the thing crashes.
And if the shuttle had broken up over somewhere more populated, would you still be saying it was worth the risk?
The space shuttles are man made vehicles designed to take people into space! There are going to be inherent risks with such undertakings, but this is the nature of space exploration. Time will provide safer alternatives, but for now 1/50 isn't bad.
Really? The Mercury/Gemini/Apollo program didn't kill anyone in a flight (3 were killed on the ground and another 3 came about as close as possible) and that was in the 60s and they were going to the moon. The reason the space shuttle has a higher failure rate is simply that it has more moving parts and things to go wrong. The shuttle failure rate would be significantly higher if it really flew once a week as it was designed to and if the per flight costs were what they were expected to be. Doesn't the fact that it flies 1/50th of the amount it was designed to tell you something about the difference between the expected failure rate and the actual failure rate?
The astronauts know these risks too, and they willingly assume them.
They are brave people, no question. I'm sure, given the choice, they would rather fly in a safer space craft and risk there lives for something more important than studying the effects of weightlessness on tiny screws.
And what if the columbia had broken up over a populated area of California rather than empty portion of Texas. Would all those people who gave their lives appreciate the risk that was being taken on their behalf?
PS: The Internet Explorer comment is unnecessary.
Well IE never killed anyone (although I could be wrong on that) -- they are both crap though.
This is totally true. Palm, as a company, is doomed because they have done nothing but sit on their asses and crank out the same products without any innovation. Look at the palms you can buy today versus the ones that came out in the mid-90s. Not a lot of progress is it? Same applications, a little more memory but it is available in several snappy colors! I hate Pocket PC for their upgrade policies (new version -- better buy a new device!) and their "lets-put-a-watered-down-version-of-windows-on-a-h andheld" philosophy but at least they're trying to improve the damn thing...
NASA Administrator O'Keefe seems optimistic that they will be able to return the shuttle fleet to flight by the end of the year since there has been no show-stopping problems which have been discovered during the investigation."
So a 1-in-50 catastrophic failure rate is not considered a show stopper? At this rate, we'll be out of shuttles in another 150 flights. Would you use software that crashed 1-in-50 times? The shuttle is the "Internet Explorer" of space vehicles...
I want to do a really shitty operating system that has lots of security holes which I will take my sweet time to fix (if I fix them at all...). And the API (which will be designed by a retarded monkey after he's drunk a case of beer) will work only somewhat like the documentation and crap out with undocumented error codes when you do anything not exactly like the toy sample code.
The annual april fools crapfest serves to remind us all, on this very special day, how much worse the whole mess of perl scripts and duct tape could be.
If the crew were to leave, they'd not be able to close the doors, nor would anyone be able to put it on the right course/heading/atitiude/speed
If NASA can't control this kind of thing from the ground (at least for the initial re-entry) then they shouldn't be launching things into space at all.
Shuttle would be 100 tons of mostly reentry-protected metal and ceramics
Well apparently a small section of missing tile made a big difference. If it were to re-entry inverted, where the are no heat tiles, I'm sure it would burn up alot sooner.
Columbia didn't kill anyone because it was on the "skip-across-the-sky" flight path.
Bullshit. Columbia didn't kill anyone because it cracked up over Texas which has huge expanses of unpopulated area. It had nothing to do with the re-entry orbit.
The only thing that matters is where the debris ends up. If it's in the middle of the ocean it's not a problem. If it's downtown miami then it's a big problem.
Microsoft itself doesn't put out software affected by DLL hell, but other software vendors do.
That is flat out false. Remember when MSVC 6 came out and Adobe Photoshop stopped working because they had made non-backwards compatible changes to the only MFC DLL?
Microsoft is just (if not more) likely to introduce backwards compatibility problems into system DLLs. How is IE (which updates all kinds of system DLLs) any differnt from a user application?
Just because they (meaning the OS group) doesn't mean that they (meaning the applications group) knows what they are doing. They've been making half assed attempts to fix this problem for years -- this is just yet another lame attempt. It's also a good example of "Press Release Engineering" -- they don't have to actually do anything, just mention it in a press release, then people will complain and they'll decide whether to do it or not.
If your lawyers were really being this kind hearted, they could do one of two things less obnoxious than what they did:
1) Patent it and donate the patent to the public domain. 2) Publish it in a journal. Bell Labs has (had?) a journal specifically for things they dicovered but were not going to patent purely for the purposes of establishing prior art.
I suspect the real reason your lawyers did not do either of these two things was to maintain a defensive patent portfolio. Basically someone is going to sue you for patent infringment on one of their patents (justifiably or not) so you look in your patent portfolio and come up with something to countersue for. Hopefully this is enough to make them go away.
A copyright will protect you from someone cut and pasting your code but it won't protect you from someone playing with your product to see how it works (or taking it apart) and building their own. That's what a patent is for.
Slashdot Mirror
My grandmother calls this "shopping around."
Damn! I was going to patent this but it sounds like there is some "prior art"...
The problem with Cyc is that we are not born knowing these millions of obvious things (because we learn some -- OTOH people also don't seem to start out as a blank slate) and I can deal with situatons that I have never considered by reasoning. Just adding more and more hacky rules (with dubious handling of contradictions) does not intelligence make. It's like saying that the people who do well on Jeopardy are "smart" because they know alot of facts.
Hmmm. Is that urine I smell?
produce a computer that has been smashed with a rock, urinated upon, and four pages worth of the letter 's.'
Still more intelligent than the average slashdot poster...
Don't you mean the Flowers By Irene van?
Increasing understanding is more important than money.
Noble words. Increased understanding of what? The effects of weightlessness on ? The only financial problems NASA has is the amount they spend on the shuttle versus the amount they spend on useful things like deep space probes.
Personally, I'd rather have a pointless war (Antartica anyone?) than throw more money down the rathole which is the space shuttle.
Well guess what, some of the codebase is in apache. Probally not much at this point, but apache was derivied from a series of httpd patches. A-patch-e was a play on words to that fact.
Actually this is a myth.
My first read of the story title was "Jeff Bezos shot INTO space" -- now there's an idea I could get behind.
On the plus side, since most of these individuals are not "ego challenged" perhaps some of these projects will have the effect of thinning the super-rich "inventor" ranks.
Are you saying put these in a separate section of the feed, where a machine can easily filter them out? Or would you put them in the main part of the feed itself, indistinguishable from a normal link, a practice which got a few search engines accused of corruption?
Yes, in a section that can be easily filtered. Anyone who cares can already filter out ads so why should this be different. People who care aren't going to buy you products on general principle so it's a wash.
Try telling that to any major directory such as Yahoo!
Please. Ad revenue from the link/directory section is a joke. Does anyone still use that anyway?
In other words, the dot-com revenue model of "give away your product and make it up selling T-shirts". Or am I misled?
Your more correct than you know. The whole "My shitty little site links to articles in the New York Times so people will pay big money to advertise on it" days are over. Why do you presume that RSS can be "monetized" anyway?
What I meant was that most of the best RSS sources are people who are involved in a project or have something that they care about and want to share it with others so making money off of it is not there primary concern.
Granted there are probably also a bunch of dinks with linking sites who don't like this and don't have RSS or do a crappy job of it *ahem*slashdot*ahem*.
1) Text Ads
2) If your just linking to other people stuff, the RSS link will go to them -- do I really owe you advertising bucks if all you do is link?
3) If your linking to your stuff then the RSS link will go to your page which will presumably have ads on it if you care.
4) Alot of sites (the majority?) that offer RSS feeds are not designed to make money and those that do have better ways of doing it than ads (example: reading Jon Udels blog made me buy one of his books).
Slashdot has been blocking my rss aggregator for about 2 weeks -- despite the fact that my aggregator is set to every 4 hours. The sad thing is I didn't really care because the RSS summaries were pretty crap. Not putting the full article summary (which in most cases is the article) is bad, Stopping in the middle of a sentence to do it is really bad...
You may have an argument for the Apollo missions: more complex missions. But Apollo 13 was almost a disaster, and many people in the field consider it a miracle that one of the Apollo missions didn't go wrong.
Well sure but the point is that they didn't and the shuttle did. Given the damage that Apollo 13 had, which do you think would be more likely to survive, the Capsule or the shuttle?
The shuttle missions can rarely be compared to the early-NASA missions. It was a different world, there were different goals, a different government, and different public support. Yes the missions happen less often than they were originally intended, but then again, there's far less public support of space missions, and Congress cuts NASA's budget practically every year. What do you expect?
But the entire point of the shuttle was to fly frequently and cheaply (thus the reusable aspect). It has been a huge failure in both regards. Consequently, the money that Nasa desperatly needs for things that actually make discoveries (like Voyager and hubble) gets spent on Shuttle missions and the ISS. Maybe the reason no one cares about the space program anymore is that it stopped being a space exploration program and turned into a cross between a PR campaign and U-Haul.
We would need to know what "show stopper" means. I think a show stopping problem might mean a flaw that would mean permanently grounding the fleet because it is unfixable.
;-)
True. I claim that by nature of it's complexity and fundamental design, it's not likely to become grossly safer.
Comparing the risk to to IE is not the same, in some ways worse.
Yes but that's a question of the effect. If IE were being used in a situation where the slightest fault would cause disaster then we would expect a much higher quality rate.
For IE to compare, then there would be a 2% chance that any startup would completely destroy the computer to the point of unsalvageability of parts, and also kill its user.
Yes, that would be more of a "Windows 95 level" of crapulence
The shuttle is similar, given that almost any problem can easily turn into a catastophic problem, how much of that failure rate is intrinisic in the activity (e.g. no matter how safe you try to make mountain climbing, there is always an element of risk that is higher than many other activities).
It's a hallmark of poor design that the shuttle is not fault tolerant. Looking back at the Mercury / Gemini / Apollo missions, they were largely safe because:
1) Simple design -- as few moving parts as possible (largely to save weight).
2) By design they were fault tolerant. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to realize that something that falls directly down to earth and then pops a parachute to land in the ocean is going to be more reliable than a giant glider with wings which has to land itself on a runway.
And the frequency of that activity, if we're talking 50 missions at two missions a year, that's a lot of years between failures. Hey, that's what makes being an astronaut what it is, a risk, that's why they are elevated to such a high status (unfortunately often times not until AFTER something bad happens).
But the shuttle was supposed to fly one a week. Why do you think it doesn't? And why do you think it is hugely more expensive than its supposed to be?
Just because Astronauts are willing to do it doesn't make it a good idea. They find people to be suicide bombers but that's not justified now is it?
This report just highlights the "band-aid" nature of any fixes to the shuttle. X happened so we must protect against X. Then Y happens and the thing crashes.
And if the shuttle had broken up over somewhere more populated, would you still be saying it was worth the risk?
The space shuttles are man made vehicles designed to take people into space! There are going to be inherent risks with such undertakings, but this is the nature of space exploration. Time will provide safer alternatives, but for now 1/50 isn't bad.
Really? The Mercury/Gemini/Apollo program didn't kill anyone in a flight (3 were killed on the ground and another 3 came about as close as possible) and that was in the 60s and they were going to the moon. The reason the space shuttle has a higher failure rate is simply that it has more moving parts and things to go wrong. The shuttle failure rate would be significantly higher if it really flew once a week as it was designed to and if the per flight costs were what they were expected to be. Doesn't the fact that it flies 1/50th of the amount it was designed to tell you something about the difference between the expected failure rate and the actual failure rate?
The astronauts know these risks too, and they willingly assume them.
They are brave people, no question. I'm sure, given the choice, they would rather fly in a safer space craft and risk there lives for something more important than studying the effects of weightlessness on tiny screws.
And what if the columbia had broken up over a populated area of California rather than empty portion of Texas. Would all those people who gave their lives appreciate the risk that was being taken on their behalf?
PS: The Internet Explorer comment is unnecessary.
Well IE never killed anyone (although I could be wrong on that) -- they are both crap though.
This is totally true. Palm, as a company, is doomed because they have done nothing but sit on their asses and crank out the same products without any innovation. Look at the palms you can buy today versus the ones that came out in the mid-90s. Not a lot of progress is it? Same applications, a little more memory but it is available in several snappy colors! I hate Pocket PC for their upgrade policies (new version -- better buy a new device!) and their "lets-put-a-watered-down-version-of-windows-on-a-h andheld" philosophy but at least they're trying to improve the damn thing...
NASA Administrator O'Keefe seems optimistic that they will be able to return the shuttle fleet to flight by the end of the year since there has been no show-stopping problems which have been discovered during the investigation."
So a 1-in-50 catastrophic failure rate is not considered a show stopper? At this rate, we'll be out of shuttles in another 150 flights. Would you use software that crashed 1-in-50 times? The shuttle is the "Internet Explorer" of space vehicles...
Ahh touche!
I want to do a really shitty operating system that has lots of security holes which I will take my sweet time to fix (if I fix them at all...). And the API (which will be designed by a retarded monkey after he's drunk a case of beer) will work only somewhat like the documentation and crap out with undocumented error codes when you do anything not exactly like the toy sample code.
Oh wait, it's been done...
The annual april fools crapfest serves to remind us all, on this very special day, how much worse the whole mess of perl scripts and duct tape could be.
If the crew were to leave, they'd not be able to close the doors, nor would anyone be able to put it on the right course/heading/atitiude/speed
If NASA can't control this kind of thing from the ground (at least for the initial re-entry) then they shouldn't be launching things into space at all.
Shuttle would be 100 tons of mostly reentry-protected metal and ceramics
Well apparently a small section of missing tile made a big difference. If it were to re-entry inverted, where the are no heat tiles, I'm sure it would burn up alot sooner.
Columbia didn't kill anyone because it was on the "skip-across-the-sky" flight path.
Bullshit. Columbia didn't kill anyone because it cracked up over Texas which has huge expanses of unpopulated area. It had nothing to do with the re-entry orbit.
The only thing that matters is where the debris ends up. If it's in the middle of the ocean it's not a problem. If it's downtown miami then it's a big problem.
The atomic bomb worked.
Microsoft itself doesn't put out software affected by DLL hell, but other software vendors do.
That is flat out false. Remember when MSVC 6 came out and Adobe Photoshop stopped working because they had made non-backwards compatible changes to the only MFC DLL?
Microsoft is just (if not more) likely to introduce backwards compatibility problems into system DLLs. How is IE (which updates all kinds of system DLLs) any differnt from a user application?
Just because they (meaning the OS group) doesn't mean that they (meaning the applications group) knows what they are doing. They've been making half assed attempts to fix this problem for years -- this is just yet another lame attempt. It's also a good example of "Press Release Engineering" -- they don't have to actually do anything, just mention it in a press release, then people will complain and they'll decide whether to do it or not.
If your lawyers were really being this kind hearted, they could do one of two things less obnoxious than what they did:
1) Patent it and donate the patent to the public domain.
2) Publish it in a journal. Bell Labs has (had?) a journal specifically for things they dicovered but were not going to patent purely for the purposes of establishing prior art.
I suspect the real reason your lawyers did not do either of these two things was to maintain a defensive patent portfolio. Basically someone is going to sue you for patent infringment on one of their patents (justifiably or not) so you look in your patent portfolio and come up with something to countersue for. Hopefully this is enough to make them go away.
A copyright will protect you from someone cut and pasting your code but it won't protect you from someone playing with your product to see how it works (or taking it apart) and building their own. That's what a patent is for.