China's obvious censorship goal -- quasi-permanent suppression of the citizens' desire to be able to throw their rulers out of office. (Which is the one big advantage democracies have over other forms of government. Even if you usually replace the bums with guys equally bad, the fact that you can get rid of them certain limits how bad they can get.) This should be fought at almost any cost, both on moral grounds and for enlightened self-interest. And so I'll again shamelessly plus my proposal of how WE -- yes, WE -- can make a difference. http://www.monashreport.com/2006/04/17/how-to-beat -chinese-censorship-operation-peking-duck/
India's apparent censorship goal -- well, like the anti-Nazi free speech limitations in Europe, India's political censorship seems to be focused on defusing (and diffusing) racial, religious, or ethnic tensions, so that they don't erupt into violence or worse. This censorship is certainly something we should carefully monitor and worry about, but it could yet turn out to be relatively benign. E.g., as another poster suggested, it could be the work of an overzealous bureaucrat, or some incompetent ISPs panicking in the face of a sensibly limited directive and blocking much more than they were told to. Either way, the whole thing might and hopefully will soon be reverse.
And just to be clear -- I think ALL this censorship is stupid. I just think that some of it is bad enough to be my problem and yours, while some of it is benign enough it should be left to the people of the affected countries themselves to deal with as they see fit.
My links to http://www.texttechnologies.com/ weren't just of the shameless plug variety; I really have written more there arguing the case than can realistically be repeated here. That said, if I have to choose between them I lean strongly to what you're calling a "rigid" ontology, because if the ontology is just automagically generated from each corpus, one can't build any kind of application on top of it. But what I really want is a combo; think of it as 100% of the benefits of a "rigid" ontology, plus 50% of the benefits of a fluid ontology as well.
Anyhow, to make any kind of "rigid" ontology work, it clearly has to be much more easily extensible (both by hand and as the result of automatic clustering) than ontologies are today. That's the challenge for the new product category I'm calling for.
And by the way, relying on authors to tag their documents is a non-starter. You can't even get Wall Street analysts' reports, which go through a double round of editing so as to comply with SEC regulations, accurately tagged according to the stocks mentioned in them. And that was true even BEFORE the online era, when publishing cycles were several days long. Really. It boggles the mind.
"I'll accept IMs from anybody who needs help with issue XYZ."
"Hello, my name is Honeypot. I have issue XYZ, and I'm a hot, horny 21-year old blonde with big boobs. I'm just sooo grateful for your help. Click here to make a date with me so I can thank you properly!"
Corporate search technology isn't good enough. And it's not going to get good enough until it's informed by much better ontologies/taxonomies. What's more, when the required ontology/taxonomy engines and business processes finally exist, they won't just be used for search; they'll also be used for text mining, knowledge extraction, speech recognition, and so on. So far as I can tell, none of the big generalists or small linguistics specialist companies understand this point, or else the ones that do are really small and lack the resources to do anything about it.
The first company to break that logjam will be a huge winner, with a market opportunity comparable at least to that of, say, app servers. Unless, of course, the whole thing is just open-sourced.
One thing in Google's favor, however, is their internal use of knowledge extraction. They seem to really be ahead of the competition in that regard.
Meanwhile, I've got to say -- search is one of the areas where Microsoft has been saber-rattling for a long time, to little effect. Just a couple of quick examples of what I mean:
1. In 1997, I was at the Verity user's conference, and a Microsoft guy there told me how Microsoft would soon be in the business.
2. A few years ago, a woman emailed me and told me she'd just joined Microsoft, and was personally writing all of their web search algorithms.
The game I've played most recently is the MMORPG Guild Wars. And it has a lot of game balance and sophistication that can only be maintained via Software-as-a-Service style tweaks. Meanwhile, when I think of the things I don't like about it (e.g., less characterization and story than Morrowind or the KOTOR games), they do NOT seem to be products of the SaaS technological approach. Rather, they are just game design choices (the forced-teamplay community aspect of Guild Wars works for combat adventures and nothing else).
Casual gaming, from what I can tell (I'm not totally clear on what the boundaries of the category are) also has a strong SaaS aspect. Maybe SaaS is just winning as the preferred game platform approach?
This would certainly be consistent with what Bill Gates seemed to be saying in the article. And by the way, in the >20 years since I first met him, that kind of grand, no-particular-details platform vision is the kind of thing he's been consistently right about.
The dead are dead, and unless you have some unusual religious beliefs there isn't a lot we can do to bring them back.
What we CAN do, however, is try to minimize the ADDITIONAL harm done by this attack. If this attack also smothers their economic boom, the terrorists have won. So if we can help figure out how to keep the economic boom going, that's a good thing...... unless, of course, you don't WANT the outsourcing-led economic boom to continue. Some people don't, and indeed state their reasons for feeling that way at great length, in this forum and others.
* Telecom infrastructure * Work process * Geographical diversification
You need reliable telecom infrastructure for obvious reasons. You need good work processes for backup and the like, but even more so that if you lose the people on a project, somebody else can step in and at least understand what needs to be done. And you need geographical diversification so that, if worst comes to worst, there IS somebody else to step in.
To the extent you have those three, outsourcing or otherwise doing business in unstable places can be a smart risk to take. If not, you can be very badly exposed.
Maybe it means you didn't focus on the practical use of the chocolate item referred to in the last scene of the story.:)
Bacteria are crucial to cleanup in general
on
Gold Mining Bacteria
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
From the insides of our intestines to animal carcasses to sewage plants to toxic waste sites, bacteria are crucial to cleaning things up. Surely this is yet another area where biotechnology will be hugely important in the 21st Century and beyond. In fact, if you're one of the IMO excessively laissez-faire "Oh, go ahead and pollute; technology will fix the problem later" types, you almost have to be betting on microorganisms as the solution. Almost everything else can be easily ruled out.
No, no. The question is -- what do you say to a chocolate-covered manhole cover?
The short story of that title was very important in my life, because it quoted a very funny paragraph -- the Agnostic's Prayer -- from Roger Zelazny, who became one of my absolutely favorite writers (I am still angry at him for smoking and dying of lung cancer so prematurely).
Actually, I've been thinking of the story for its own sake a bit recently too, just because I argue with so many idiot creationists these days...
In other SF trivia, the questioner character in that story is obviously based on a real-life friend of his. The same guy was also used as a model for a character in the "Pink elephants invade Kansas" book whose title I'm obviously forgetting for a moment. Not as important as the diabetic guy from JPL, but a recurring Niven character model even so.
Let's be real. Government WILL wind up with huge amounts of information about us, and the technological means to filter it. Financial transactions, electronic communications, travel -- all of those are trackable in theory, and anything trackable can be stored and mined. Over the next couple of decades, that theory will increasingly become fact.
We need laws that protect us DESPITE this inevitable progression. I.e., since freedom will lose on the battlefield of what information government has access to, we need to find ANOTHER battlefield where freedom can win. And the only viable candidate I see is to greatly strengthen laws controlling what government can DO with data, even if it possesses same.
This winds up being a system design issue, as tough as the flip-side problem of "How will government integrate all that information to get at it anyway." So we need to start solving it right away, just like the integration problem is already being worked on, then get that solution out into the public consciousness.
While the government is good at stopping large financial transfers, it's lousy at stopping small ones. So if they really want to crack down on gambling, they'll have to go directly after the ads too.
But if you can't run gambling ads, I think a lot of current and potential future sports information sites will be in trouble. There are only so many retro jerseys their advertisers can sell...
Odd though it may sound, the big losers from a real crackdown on internet gambling might be fantasy sports players.
And nobody's explained to me why internet gambling is worse than lottery tickets, which are just another tax on the poor and uneducated, and are actually promoted by government-funded advertising.
This addresses a particular kind of spam page that is promoted in a particular way.
But it does nothing to address the vast majority of the pages that contaminate search engine results. I'm referring to automatically generated pages that look like good pages and hence rank well in search engines, but really have little except links and perhaps some public domain info. E.g., there could be one each for every resort hotel in Mexico. The search engine result turns up a summary that makes it look like there are "reviews" there. But either the reviews section is empty, or else they reproduce something that's available on dozens of other sites as well. In one case, apparently, a single such site had 4 billion "different" pages. I'm not making that number up.
More sophisticated kinds of link-network analysis will be needed before those bite the dust.
I do agree that there are a lot of ways to usefully do things other than directly through the political power structure. For example, this column http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?com mand=viewArticleBasic&articleId=111516 makes some very specific suggestions along those lines and, uh, I wrote it.;) Really, please take a look. There are some areas where technologists' personal involvement is VERY badly needed.
Beyond that -- fortunately, I think you're being a little extremist in your view of how things are run. I've known a bunch of people in the Cabinet, and even more so at the Undersecretary and Assistant Secretary levels, and these folks are by no means all bought, paid for, blackmailed, controlled, or anything else. And I've known some rich/powerful people, in some cases pretty well. (E.g., there was a time that, whenever I had a new girlfriend, I'd bring her to SF to meet some of my friends, and Larry Ellison was one of those friends.)
Not that you don't have a good point directionally; but I think magnitude matters here as well as direction.
I suggest you try actually reading my post. Then, if you like, rather than guessing about my resume, you can check it out (I post under my real name).
The parts of your post that were actually connected to reality in no way contradicted what I wrote. But I did present evidential reasoning to contradict your vague theories. I suggest you either address it directly, or stay silent on the whole subject.
I was once an Institutional Investor-ranked analyst following Microsoft, although that was a long time ago...
Market cap does matter. Microsoft can sell stock to get cash -- or rather forgo repurchasing it.
The income statement matters somewhat. If this were a true foreseeable-future ongoing cost, it would matter a lot more. But it will be over soon, one way or the other.
The balance sheet it what matters most directly. They can pay the fines out of cash easily, I should think, not that I've actually looked at their balance sheet for quite a while.
Like, "our documentation wasn't good enough", or "those commissioners are too dumb to understand we don't deserve to be punished?"
The real problem, of course, is that Windows is such a huge hairball -- as Scott McNealy so aptly put it -- that they don't really know how to unbundle. Complying with the law is just as late as everything else is.
But before we all bash them too too hard -- where, again, are the usable Linux desktops that we'd like to have to replace Windows???
Slashdot Mirror
China's obvious censorship goal -- quasi-permanent suppression of the citizens' desire to be able to throw their rulers out of office. (Which is the one big advantage democracies have over other forms of government. Even if you usually replace the bums with guys equally bad, the fact that you can get rid of them certain limits how bad they can get.) This should be fought at almost any cost, both on moral grounds and for enlightened self-interest. And so I'll again shamelessly plus my proposal of how WE -- yes, WE -- can make a difference. http://www.monashreport.com/2006/04/17/how-to-beat -chinese-censorship-operation-peking-duck/
India's apparent censorship goal -- well, like the anti-Nazi free speech limitations in Europe, India's political censorship seems to be focused on defusing (and diffusing) racial, religious, or ethnic tensions, so that they don't erupt into violence or worse. This censorship is certainly something we should carefully monitor and worry about, but it could yet turn out to be relatively benign. E.g., as another poster suggested, it could be the work of an overzealous bureaucrat, or some incompetent ISPs panicking in the face of a sensibly limited directive and blocking much more than they were told to. Either way, the whole thing might and hopefully will soon be reverse.
And just to be clear -- I think ALL this censorship is stupid. I just think that some of it is bad enough to be my problem and yours, while some of it is benign enough it should be left to the people of the affected countries themselves to deal with as they see fit.
My links to http://www.texttechnologies.com/ weren't just of the shameless plug variety; I really have written more there arguing the case than can realistically be repeated here. That said, if I have to choose between them I lean strongly to what you're calling a "rigid" ontology, because if the ontology is just automagically generated from each corpus, one can't build any kind of application on top of it. But what I really want is a combo; think of it as 100% of the benefits of a "rigid" ontology, plus 50% of the benefits of a fluid ontology as well.
Anyhow, to make any kind of "rigid" ontology work, it clearly has to be much more easily extensible (both by hand and as the result of automatic clustering) than ontologies are today. That's the challenge for the new product category I'm calling for.
And by the way, relying on authors to tag their documents is a non-starter. You can't even get Wall Street analysts' reports, which go through a double round of editing so as to comply with SEC regulations, accurately tagged according to the stocks mentioned in them. And that was true even BEFORE the online era, when publishing cycles were several days long. Really. It boggles the mind.
"I'll accept IMs from anybody who needs help with issue XYZ."
"Hello, my name is Honeypot. I have issue XYZ, and I'm a hot, horny 21-year old blonde with big boobs. I'm just sooo grateful for your help. Click here to make a date with me so I can thank you properly!"
It is described as an indigineous replacement for something they can already import. It sounds as if it's just for birds.
And you hardly can inoculate all the poultry in a country. So the significance of this seems pretty limited.
Dang. I had my hopes way up from reading the headline.
Corporate search technology isn't good enough. And it's not going to get good enough until it's informed by much better ontologies/taxonomies. What's more, when the required ontology/taxonomy engines and business processes finally exist, they won't just be used for search; they'll also be used for text mining, knowledge extraction, speech recognition, and so on. So far as I can tell, none of the big generalists or small linguistics specialist companies understand this point, or else the ones that do are really small and lack the resources to do anything about it.
x t-technologies-market-3-heres-whats-missing/ and related articles. The big missing piece (about the open source alternative) is coming soon, on the same site, and perhaps in my next Computerworld column as well.
The first company to break that logjam will be a huge winner, with a market opportunity comparable at least to that of, say, app servers. Unless, of course, the whole thing is just open-sourced.
I've written up most of that argument in http://www.texttechnologies.com/2005/12/11/the-te
One thing in Google's favor, however, is their internal use of knowledge extraction. They seem to really be ahead of the competition in that regard.
Meanwhile, I've got to say -- search is one of the areas where Microsoft has been saber-rattling for a long time, to little effect. Just a couple of quick examples of what I mean:
1. In 1997, I was at the Verity user's conference, and a Microsoft guy there told me how Microsoft would soon be in the business.
2. A few years ago, a woman emailed me and told me she'd just joined Microsoft, and was personally writing all of their web search algorithms.
The game I've played most recently is the MMORPG Guild Wars. And it has a lot of game balance and sophistication that can only be maintained via Software-as-a-Service style tweaks. Meanwhile, when I think of the things I don't like about it (e.g., less characterization and story than Morrowind or the KOTOR games), they do NOT seem to be products of the SaaS technological approach. Rather, they are just game design choices (the forced-teamplay community aspect of Guild Wars works for combat adventures and nothing else).
Casual gaming, from what I can tell (I'm not totally clear on what the boundaries of the category are) also has a strong SaaS aspect. Maybe SaaS is just winning as the preferred game platform approach?
This would certainly be consistent with what Bill Gates seemed to be saying in the article. And by the way, in the >20 years since I first met him, that kind of grand, no-particular-details platform vision is the kind of thing he's been consistently right about.
It would be wonderful if we could find bacteria that removed radioactive isotopes from nuclear waste.
But oh, the mutations. I imagine that would be a deal-killer.
The dead are dead, and unless you have some unusual religious beliefs there isn't a lot we can do to bring them back.
... ... unless, of course, you don't WANT the outsourcing-led economic boom to continue. Some people don't, and indeed state their reasons for feeling that way at great length, in this forum and others.
What we CAN do, however, is try to minimize the ADDITIONAL harm done by this attack. If this attack also smothers their economic boom, the terrorists have won. So if we can help figure out how to keep the economic boom going, that's a good thing
Three considerations, IMO, outweigh the rest:
* Telecom infrastructure
* Work process
* Geographical diversification
You need reliable telecom infrastructure for obvious reasons. You need good work processes for backup and the like, but even more so that if you lose the people on a project, somebody else can step in and at least understand what needs to be done. And you need geographical diversification so that, if worst comes to worst, there IS somebody else to step in.
To the extent you have those three, outsourcing or otherwise doing business in unstable places can be a smart risk to take. If not, you can be very badly exposed.
Maybe it means you didn't focus on the practical use of the chocolate item referred to in the last scene of the story. :)
From the insides of our intestines to animal carcasses to sewage plants to toxic waste sites, bacteria are crucial to cleaning things up. Surely this is yet another area where biotechnology will be hugely important in the 21st Century and beyond. In fact, if you're one of the IMO excessively laissez-faire "Oh, go ahead and pollute; technology will fix the problem later" types, you almost have to be betting on microorganisms as the solution. Almost everything else can be easily ruled out.
No, no. The question is -- what do you say to a chocolate-covered manhole cover?
...
The short story of that title was very important in my life, because it quoted a very funny paragraph -- the Agnostic's Prayer -- from Roger Zelazny, who became one of my absolutely favorite writers (I am still angry at him for smoking and dying of lung cancer so prematurely).
Actually, I've been thinking of the story for its own sake a bit recently too, just because I argue with so many idiot creationists these days
In other SF trivia, the questioner character in that story is obviously based on a real-life friend of his. The same guy was also used as a model for a character in the "Pink elephants invade Kansas" book whose title I'm obviously forgetting for a moment. Not as important as the diabetic guy from JPL, but a recurring Niven character model even so.
Let's be real. Government WILL wind up with huge amounts of information about us, and the technological means to filter it. Financial transactions, electronic communications, travel -- all of those are trackable in theory, and anything trackable can be stored and mined. Over the next couple of decades, that theory will increasingly become fact.
e n-without-data-privacy/, but it's just a start. A lot more is needed.
We need laws that protect us DESPITE this inevitable progression. I.e., since freedom will lose on the battlefield of what information government has access to, we need to find ANOTHER battlefield where freedom can win. And the only viable candidate I see is to greatly strengthen laws controlling what government can DO with data, even if it possesses same.
This winds up being a system design issue, as tough as the flip-side problem of "How will government integrate all that information to get at it anyway." So we need to start solving it right away, just like the integration problem is already being worked on, then get that solution out into the public consciousness.
I think I've made a good start at http://www.monashreport.com/2006/06/06/freedom-ev
You argued that lotteries are less insidious than some other forms of gambling because one loses money more slowly. Good point. Thanks.
Also, part of the payoff is in the weekly drawing. You can get days of "entertainment" for the price of a lottery ticket. Again that's a dampener.
Hmm. That all makes sense -- but wouldn't sports betting be just as "benign" as lotteries?
While the government is good at stopping large financial transfers, it's lousy at stopping small ones. So if they really want to crack down on gambling, they'll have to go directly after the ads too.
...
But if you can't run gambling ads, I think a lot of current and potential future sports information sites will be in trouble. There are only so many retro jerseys their advertisers can sell
Odd though it may sound, the big losers from a real crackdown on internet gambling might be fantasy sports players.
And nobody's explained to me why internet gambling is worse than lottery tickets, which are just another tax on the poor and uneducated, and are actually promoted by government-funded advertising.
They'd claim the telescope was controlled, or the results misreported.
This addresses a particular kind of spam page that is promoted in a particular way.
But it does nothing to address the vast majority of the pages that contaminate search engine results. I'm referring to automatically generated pages that look like good pages and hence rank well in search engines, but really have little except links and perhaps some public domain info. E.g., there could be one each for every resort hotel in Mexico. The search engine result turns up a summary that makes it look like there are "reviews" there. But either the reviews section is empty, or else they reproduce something that's available on dozens of other sites as well. In one case, apparently, a single such site had 4 billion "different" pages. I'm not making that number up.
More sophisticated kinds of link-network analysis will be needed before those bite the dust.
Wasn't LOGO some kind of primitive version of this?
I say again -- beating Chinese censorship is easy in the short term, very hard in the long term, but probably also doable in the long term. But it needs a lot of smart techie brainpower from the outside to beat. http://www.monashreport.com/2006/04/17/how-to-beat -chinese-censorship-operation-peking-duck/ is my idea of a good place to start.
Hi. Thanks for toning it down!
m mand=viewArticleBasic&articleId=111516 makes some very specific suggestions along those lines and, uh, I wrote it. ;) Really, please take a look. There are some areas where technologists' personal involvement is VERY badly needed.
I do agree that there are a lot of ways to usefully do things other than directly through the political power structure. For example, this column http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?co
Beyond that -- fortunately, I think you're being a little extremist in your view of how things are run. I've known a bunch of people in the Cabinet, and even more so at the Undersecretary and Assistant Secretary levels, and these folks are by no means all bought, paid for, blackmailed, controlled, or anything else. And I've known some rich/powerful people, in some cases pretty well. (E.g., there was a time that, whenever I had a new girlfriend, I'd bring her to SF to meet some of my friends, and Larry Ellison was one of those friends.)
Not that you don't have a good point directionally; but I think magnitude matters here as well as direction.
I suggest you try actually reading my post. Then, if you like, rather than guessing about my resume, you can check it out (I post under my real name).
The parts of your post that were actually connected to reality in no way contradicted what I wrote. But I did present evidential reasoning to contradict your vague theories. I suggest you either address it directly, or stay silent on the whole subject.
Fair enough, but I generally try to use my computers to run software.
Or as doorstops, but when I use them for that purpose they gather too much dust.
I was once an Institutional Investor-ranked analyst following Microsoft, although that was a long time ago ...
Market cap does matter. Microsoft can sell stock to get cash -- or rather forgo repurchasing it.
The income statement matters somewhat. If this were a true foreseeable-future ongoing cost, it would matter a lot more. But it will be over soon, one way or the other.
The balance sheet it what matters most directly. They can pay the fines out of cash easily, I should think, not that I've actually looked at their balance sheet for quite a while.
Now that's a title to have on your business card when you swap phone numbers with a hot woman ...
Like, "our documentation wasn't good enough", or "those commissioners are too dumb to understand we don't deserve to be punished?"
The real problem, of course, is that Windows is such a huge hairball -- as Scott McNealy so aptly put it -- that they don't really know how to unbundle. Complying with the law is just as late as everything else is.
But before we all bash them too too hard -- where, again, are the usable Linux desktops that we'd like to have to replace Windows???