I played a lot of games on the good old c64 and the Amiga. Must say that those games had a lot of magic, due to lack of detail.
Probably the Myst series has made me feel different, they still can now. It's such a wonderful experience to walk in surrealistic worlds which do not exist. The concept of Myst, later Riven en Excile just made me feel part of the game, non-violent and puzzling challanges, it has been nice being part of these worlds. These games are IMHO unique and exceptional, being part of the Myst worlds is like going on a distant vacation, but now to worlds which can never exist.
As I really adore tropical holidays, farmost the jungle-island in Excile was absolutely the place to be. Even in an ordinairy northern European country, I could feel the sun shine, like it does in South-East Asia!
Yeaah, its on the net! So what do I do? Yep, I launch napshare and search for the keywords "two towers". Within 2 minutes I have a hit: "Lord Of The Rings - The Two Towers.mod", 38.0Mb
Darn, that's unbelievable. Shall I download it? Or shall I not?
In Holland, we have public television. Usually because the government provides the channels with a very high budget paid from the people's taxes. Also laws say that the channels should have certain percentage of education, certain percentage of culture and certain percentage of etc...
Sure, these channels provide much better TV (well, for me anyway) rather than the commercial channels, which broadcast the same average bull as the US channels do.
I think there are several questions you might ask yourself when creating a business model. What can TV do for its audience?
Once, four of the 8 commercial channels here in Holland, who own the best watched soap opera, announced that they would go behind the digital decoder. They made a gamble that people's addiction to this soap would force people to accept the new system. But what happened, a smaller national channel announced that they would never go behind the decoder and they owned a soap opera which was less popular, but still. So in the end, nobody went behind the decoder.
So what is TV for people? Education? Entertainment? There's one little problem with TV : forcing the customer to do anything that they're not doing now and which costs them more money will end-result in a competitor giving the same service without the force. People want freedom, not watching Buffy does not mean you're gonna die.
Just simply thinking of a business model is not enough. There's enough TV around anyway - you must have a good reason for me to watch your stuff.
By the way, both education and entertainment have substitutes: go to a theatre or a concert or perhaps read a good book. No TV does not mean no fun.
Good point, I guess that the "location" of the link doesn't matter, so even your bookmarks/favourites, just as they are, are forms of deep links. So bookmarking in the first place could therefore be threatened by this legislation.
I can't read Danish, but my guess is also that there will be such a thing as "notifying" the user that bookmarking/linking is allowed.
I'm saying that speed limits are not always good for safety. The basic idea of the web-site mentioned is to enforce speeds limits in those cases which they are necessary, and to loosely enforce them in cases they are less necessary.
The zero-tolerance policy has made people getting a fine for driving 1km/h too fast, actually, 60% of the fines are in the category of 1-5km/h too fast, as you can image, it doesn't solve the unsafety problem while people are getting very upset with this policy.
In Holland, we have about one camera on every corner of the street. Even the police claim it is better to rob the bank, as long as the flight-car drives the proper speed. People are being very frustrated about this and fighting Gatso's has become our national sport. This site is the biggest in our country (also has an English section) with pictures of devestated speed camera's: Tuftufclub.
The government is doing the speed camera policy and calling it a "safety measurment" while it is more or less only good for the country's financial benefit - we feel it is kind of an extra tax above all we already pay to drive a car.
The war on speed has also had its escalations, both in Germany and here in Holland, people start shooting the police officer who's doing a mobile Multi-Nova speed surveillance.
In Holland, somebody found a deserted Multi-Nova radar, who was flashed, and tried to remove the foto film. The speed officer drove a car against his leg which had to be amputated - a big price for a small mistake... The next thing is that the guy who's enforcing the speed camera policy, wants to take away our weapons, and forbid the usage of a radar detector, although this is legally impossible in our country.
The latest and most humane method of frustrating this policy in Holland is to go to the court for every fine received. The courts are up to their heads in work, such that the processing of the fine takes to long and is disposed even before it is tried. The web-site encourages people to go to court, and over 2001, 58% was disposed in the appeals court.
I'm not really a physicist, but when I read the article, I understand that this guy wants to bend space in order to travel through time, as the Einstein theory says that gravity would bend space etc.
For that little of physics education I had, there's one point which I think this guy forgets, cause and effect. I'm not too sure, but I understand that bending space is an effect, while this guy is turning things the other way and wants to use the space bending as a cause... I don't think it'll work.
In 1995, all Math was ready to explain how black-holes work, which was also an acceptible proof of black-holes. The Math implied that time travel would be possible through "worm-holes", a big story which even the greatest anti-time-travel-theorist "Steven Hawkins" had to admit that it could be possible.
Then came the grandfather paradox (read posting below to see what that is).
Within the math on worm-holes, it could be proven with billiards balls on a pool table that cause and effect were the most important relations within mother nature.
Tim could not kill his grandfather before he was born in a time travel age, nature would always prevent this. The math proved that mother nature never lets the relations between cause and effect to be broken. Math is math and practice is practice, I belief that the unbreakability of cause/effect relations is a viable axiom. It does mean that not everything has happened yet and that one is in charge of its own future.
Re:You can only go forward...
on
Time Travel
·
· Score: 1
If they send knowledge from the future to our own age, then this knowledge has no origin. Everything in Mother Nature has birth, and eventually dies; People, Planets AND knowledge.
And ofcourse you have IGOR, and an ex-FBI agent and a DOS-attack detection system and so on.
Being an "expert" on the other side of the ocean - outside the USA, PayPal has insecure legal operations. As long as negotiations continue, overseas "federal banks" won't sue, as PayPal actually breaks some European laws. Until that breakthrough, non-US PayPal users (ie customers and businesses) have very little legal security.
Every company doing business with Cuba is boycotted by the USA, well, actually that is what they want. So in terms of billiards, the ball is played through one of the sides, not directly into the pocket!
I'm sorry, I don't consider this as flamebait, DWord has a point. This war has some conveniences. Osama Bin Laden was never proven to have anything to do with the atrocities in New York AND Washington AND Pensilvania (it was not only New York!). Seems that every state which Bush considers to be an enemy of the USA is now harbouring terrorists, like Northern Korea, Iraq, Syria, Libia and so on. Did you know that Ghadaffi, although for his past, actually now wants to improve foreign affairs? That's why he sent the suspects of the Lockerby crime to camp Zeist here in Holland. Did you know there is also very important evidence that the CIA was involved in the Lockerby crash, ie they sent people on a different flight and let this flight continue?
Don't forget 'propaganda'. I sometimes read a moslim newspaper just to get the 'other' side of the story. In my opinion, DWord has an important point. One of the most important democratic foundaitions is "everybody is equal", although sometimes we - the west - absolutly don't care about our direct or indirect involvements of massive deaths abroad. Will Saudi Arabia ever be convicted of harbouring terrorists? Do you know what kind of government they have? Having the US army stationary in S.A. gives the US cheap oil. So while you're driving your car without a worry, thousands of people die because the S.A. government kills its own opposition.
C'mon, it's only about the almighty buck. Even the war on terrorism is just simply part of the old Anglo-Saxen interest. DWord *has* a point, the war on terrorism is easily an excuse to eliminate all US foes, while the US has that monopoly. Other countries screeming that they have a problem with terrorism have the obligation to the US, to ask them whether their problem will be recognized.
DWord has a point, this conflict has no clear truths, it's just a matter of interpretation.
I don't know the "true" definition of terrorism, but IMHO voilence is the common denominator.
Voilence lets itself to be categorised, based on motive or cause for voilence.
Suppose some group of people do not have the military means to achieve their goals, and there's only a military option, then such groups could choose for asymmetric tactics. Think of guerillia and terrorism. As far as I know, guerillia is based on surprise and mainly aimed at strategic targets. Terrorism is also based on surprise, but mostly aimed at non strategic targets.
I think that terrorism is mainly non-military, but rather political. It is not some plane crashes which threaten democracy, its the people's support for the system which threatens democracy, which may drastically reduce due to living in fear for a long time. In that view, terrorism is a political action.
IMHO, human does not understand the phenomina 'information' quite well. This is why the discipline of Artificial Intelligence is struggling.
This is also the reason why this DVD classification is unrealistic in any way. Information can be data, can be software. Data can be information, movies, audio and so on. But whenever is information "information"?
Point is that anything is information, your acts, but also the things you just don't do. Classifying information always has deep consequences.
Classification is the same as 'making a decision', but a decision can never be perfect, as it always *excludes* something.
In this DVD case, we see another stupid attempt to classify something unjust, while the consequences may be very undesirable. It's just lack of knowledge, of people who don't understand a thing about the impacts.
I thought about this as well. In my perception, the success of the Rebol concept depends on two basic developments:
1. Open availability, through independance of the software maker
2. Structure and discipline concepts in order to avoid a mess.
Although (point 1), there is a group developing Rebol as open source (OSCAR), the last time I checked, there was still no source code available. So I started my own implementation, btw absolutely not available yet because I don't have that much to offer right now.
Rebol's best idea is the distributed computing model. They actually state that the good ol' webbrowser is a load of crap, and basically unsuitable for the things we want to do. They have a point there, because as a prof web developer, I can't believe the efforts I have to make, just to create something simple. IMHO a web browser is only suitable for text and images. I see the plugins merely as patches, fixing the shortcomings of the browser.
So Rebol says - the browser 's gotta go, and we'll introduce a new internet application environment; a successor to the webbrowser.
Besides that, Rebol is a very good language for scientific research in the investigation of polymorphical algorithms; ie an algorithm is an idea, and code is an implementation of this idea. The keyword reprogramming feature of Rebol gives flexible tools to understand the idea of an algortihm better, perhaps that one implementation could serve multiple uses. This is ofcourse not the same as a reusable object, I'm talking about a reusable algorithm.
You are not screwed, you can load a dynamic linked library or shared object into the language and use the internal routines...
You must provide de.dll or.so yourself then, maybe new TCP routines. If you then reprogram some keywords, perhaps you don't need to rewrite the application code which used the old TCP connections in Rebol.
"The free gate" with television was simple the income of commercials...
"The free gate" with software is merely a metaphor. Suppose SUN would give the consumer a good bargain for StarOffice, without a pay-per-use system, complied with the software licences you buy now, the consumer may have a good motivator to migrate to SUN's product.
In the other case, there's the GPL'ed "Free software" or "Open Source Software" and I understand that those development groups are sponsored with money. Others sell books about their software and so on.
So you shouldn't take the "Free gate" metaphor too literally, I just meant "Microsoft competition", that's all...
This passport stuff reminds me of the fuzz we had here in the Netherlands with pay-per-view TV a couple of years ago.
The most popular channels wanted to get behind the digital decoder, but a lesser popular channel chose not to do so. In the end, none of the channels got behind the digital decoder, as the consumer would choose for the other gate: the free gate.
So even when Microsoft succeeds into implementing this passport into XP, the rumour will spread like fire, that there is a free alternative for their expensive habits. This rumour will spread via the internet and likely by the spoken word.
I'm not sure about the future, but I considering the option that MS is shooting themselves into their own feet with this...
I cannot find the negative sign in the article, not even in the source...
Still, (I'm no physisist) I interpreted this bit as "well, this bucky formation is magnetic (slightly) above 200 Celsius, which is high, but did not break the record, which is held by another formation which is magnetic at 255 Celsius"
Interesting, but one should define the tasks of a meta-optimizer first.
When I wrote a B-Tree, as an improvement on a Insertion sort, I wondered whether I could think of an algorithm, fed with meta-semantics on the insertion sort, and designing the B-Tree as a evolutionary successor. It took me quite some time to understand the algorithm myself, and implementing this was even harder - semantic comprehension of the building blocks "in english" resulted in many more lines of C++ code. Because of the recursion, the B-Tree code needed, except for the actual B-Tree code, the following elements:
* execution environmental code - organisation and anticipation of the recursive characteristics of the algorithmn; for example a messaging system to tell the calling function what we'd expect from it...
* datastructure environmental code - understanding the benefits of using multiple data structures to be able to perform the algoritmn; but this would be related to the B+ tree even more; using 1 data structure (BTree) was harder than using 2 data structures (B+Tree)...
* state determination code - needing to know where we stand and what to do when a (recrsive) function call returns; for the trees: do we need to rebalance?
* borderline code - dealing with those borderline cases; what if I'm in a left node, having no left sibbling, while the right sibbling is not an option?
Stepping from the B-Tree to the B+Tree, the data structures are quite simular to those used in the B-Tree, slight differences make the B+Tree algorithmn easier to implement, and better in throughput for table-indexing.
Ofcourse, this is just a simple example where we could try to think of a meta-optimizer. One can extrapolate this to R-Trees and X-Trees, still, B, B+ R and X trees won't have to be the panacea to organize complex information, perhaps a computed "tree" or indexing structure would even perform better in that case. Oracle's database (and others) are optimized to detect their environment and to act as effectively as possible, although their algorithmns are basically human optimized. Even using "Fuzzy Logic" to determine the best balance between the tasks of caching, defragmenting, reorganizing (ie hashtables and 'clusters'), the main way to store the data is predetermined. In pure (non ORDBMS) SQL based systems, the IT-specialist has a hard time designing flexible datastructures with hierarchy; one meets that point-of-no-return very quickly. So in a system which has the elements of organizing hierarchy and repeatance, the perfect storing algorithm should be computed, perhaps going beyond human comprehension (I agree with you).
Another problem with meta-optimization is that the system must try to model the way the user thinks - which is the only way for a system to act whether it understands the user. If you've ever studied the discipline of "Neuro Linguistic Programming" (I believe they call these guys 'motivation-guru's' in english), then you understand that everyone has personal sub-concious truths. A schema of reasoning is very personal, because every individual has learnt different things. The point is, that the system will be able to adapt to one person only would that be userfriendly? The system wouldn't be very suitable for public use.
Still, as I said, I'm playing the mind game, and if someone is to overcome these problems... brilliant!
Reading books about Fuzzy Logic, Artificial Life and so on, I played a mind game, designing this "software" few years ago (and many others have I'm sure!).
The problems I discovered were:
* The building blocks of the software itself, are human optimized algorithms and datastructures;
* In order to improve human optimized algorithmns (meta-optimization?), one could develop some form of trial and error optimization algorithmn, but this would complicate things even more (it's hard to determine whether the searchdirection makes any sense); designing such algorithmn is very hard, because, how long do we search before we give up? This is like the chess game, certain move may look silly in the first place, but it could be a very good move in the end...
* If the program is to optimize smart, it will need to use *known* optimizations, and be unable to improve human optimized algorithmns... Introducing the factor of meta-optimization gives the problem of CPU-time distribution: how much CPU time may content optimization take, and how much time may met-optimization take??
* If only known algorithmns are used, the program is bound to a limited level of complexities. Meaning that: lot's of human comprehension has high complexity, which is yet not very well understood by science; the "Perfect Human Interface" is likely to fail in this area - it's the area the user (again) needs to adapt to the machine.
But if these guys actually succeed in their quest... brilliant!!
Although I can support the spirit of the act "stopping cartel/monopolisitic powers", I don't think you'd be able to win that fight by giving "the opposition" the tools to form a monopoly themselves... They -do- have that opportunity when we're restricted in used RIAA content. Doesn't look good as this could mean a trade war over music between two economic powers - USA and Europe, as I don't think that the RIAA will take it... Perhaps I should start listening to local bands then.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably the Myst series has made me feel different, they still can now. It's such a wonderful experience to walk in surrealistic worlds which do not exist. The concept of Myst, later Riven en Excile just made me feel part of the game, non-violent and puzzling challanges, it has been nice being part of these worlds. These games are IMHO unique and exceptional, being part of the Myst worlds is like going on a distant vacation, but now to worlds which can never exist.
As I really adore tropical holidays, farmost the jungle-island in Excile was absolutely the place to be. Even in an ordinairy northern European country, I could feel the sun shine, like it does in South-East Asia!
I made this page for fun more than a year ago: http://home.zonnet.nl/dropdotnet/
Darn, that's unbelievable. Shall I download it? Or shall I not?
Baseline: I'm a little sceptical...
Sure, these channels provide much better TV (well, for me anyway) rather than the commercial channels, which broadcast the same average bull as the US channels do.
I think there are several questions you might ask yourself when creating a business model. What can TV do for its audience?
Once, four of the 8 commercial channels here in Holland, who own the best watched soap opera, announced that they would go behind the digital decoder. They made a gamble that people's addiction to this soap would force people to accept the new system. But what happened, a smaller national channel announced that they would never go behind the decoder and they owned a soap opera which was less popular, but still. So in the end, nobody went behind the decoder.
So what is TV for people? Education? Entertainment? There's one little problem with TV : forcing the customer to do anything that they're not doing now and which costs them more money will end-result in a competitor giving the same service without the force. People want freedom, not watching Buffy does not mean you're gonna die.
Just simply thinking of a business model is not enough. There's enough TV around anyway - you must have a good reason for me to watch your stuff.
By the way, both education and entertainment have substitutes: go to a theatre or a concert or perhaps read a good book. No TV does not mean no fun.
I guess you really have a problem.
I can't read Danish, but my guess is also that there will be such a thing as "notifying" the user that bookmarking/linking is allowed.
The zero-tolerance policy has made people getting a fine for driving 1km/h too fast, actually, 60% of the fines are in the category of 1-5km/h too fast, as you can image, it doesn't solve the unsafety problem while people are getting very upset with this policy.
I belief they removed the English section, you can have a look at burned Gatso's here
The government is doing the speed camera policy and calling it a "safety measurment" while it is more or less only good for the country's financial benefit - we feel it is kind of an extra tax above all we already pay to drive a car.
The war on speed has also had its escalations, both in Germany and here in Holland, people start shooting the police officer who's doing a mobile Multi-Nova speed surveillance.
In Holland, somebody found a deserted Multi-Nova radar, who was flashed, and tried to remove the foto film. The speed officer drove a car against his leg which had to be amputated - a big price for a small mistake... The next thing is that the guy who's enforcing the speed camera policy, wants to take away our weapons, and forbid the usage of a radar detector, although this is legally impossible in our country.
The latest and most humane method of frustrating this policy in Holland is to go to the court for every fine received. The courts are up to their heads in work, such that the processing of the fine takes to long and is disposed even before it is tried. The web-site encourages people to go to court, and over 2001, 58% was disposed in the appeals court.
For that little of physics education I had, there's one point which I think this guy forgets, cause and effect. I'm not too sure, but I understand that bending space is an effect, while this guy is turning things the other way and wants to use the space bending as a cause... I don't think it'll work.
In 1995, all Math was ready to explain how black-holes work, which was also an acceptible proof of black-holes. The Math implied that time travel would be possible through "worm-holes", a big story which even the greatest anti-time-travel-theorist "Steven Hawkins" had to admit that it could be possible.
Then came the grandfather paradox (read posting below to see what that is).
Within the math on worm-holes, it could be proven with billiards balls on a pool table that cause and effect were the most important relations within mother nature.
Tim could not kill his grandfather before he was born in a time travel age, nature would always prevent this. The math proved that mother nature never lets the relations between cause and effect to be broken. Math is math and practice is practice, I belief that the unbreakability of cause/effect relations is a viable axiom. It does mean that not everything has happened yet and that one is in charge of its own future.
If they send knowledge from the future to our own age, then this knowledge has no origin. Everything in Mother Nature has birth, and eventually dies; People, Planets AND knowledge.
Being an "expert" on the other side of the ocean - outside the USA, PayPal has insecure legal operations. As long as negotiations continue, overseas "federal banks" won't sue, as PayPal actually breaks some European laws. Until that breakthrough, non-US PayPal users (ie customers and businesses) have very little legal security.
Every company doing business with Cuba is boycotted by the USA, well, actually that is what they want. So in terms of billiards, the ball is played through one of the sides, not directly into the pocket!
Don't forget 'propaganda'. I sometimes read a moslim newspaper just to get the 'other' side of the story. In my opinion, DWord has an important point. One of the most important democratic foundaitions is "everybody is equal", although sometimes we - the west - absolutly don't care about our direct or indirect involvements of massive deaths abroad. Will Saudi Arabia ever be convicted of harbouring terrorists? Do you know what kind of government they have? Having the US army stationary in S.A. gives the US cheap oil. So while you're driving your car without a worry, thousands of people die because the S.A. government kills its own opposition.
C'mon, it's only about the almighty buck. Even the war on terrorism is just simply part of the old Anglo-Saxen interest. DWord *has* a point, the war on terrorism is easily an excuse to eliminate all US foes, while the US has that monopoly. Other countries screeming that they have a problem with terrorism have the obligation to the US, to ask them whether their problem will be recognized.
DWord has a point, this conflict has no clear truths, it's just a matter of interpretation.
Voilence lets itself to be categorised, based on motive or cause for voilence.
Suppose some group of people do not have the military means to achieve their goals, and there's only a military option, then such groups could choose for asymmetric tactics. Think of guerillia and terrorism. As far as I know, guerillia is based on surprise and mainly aimed at strategic targets. Terrorism is also based on surprise, but mostly aimed at non strategic targets.
I think that terrorism is mainly non-military, but rather political. It is not some plane crashes which threaten democracy, its the people's support for the system which threatens democracy, which may drastically reduce due to living in fear for a long time. In that view, terrorism is a political action.
This is also the reason why this DVD classification is unrealistic in any way. Information can be data, can be software. Data can be information, movies, audio and so on. But whenever is information "information"?
Point is that anything is information, your acts, but also the things you just don't do. Classifying information always has deep consequences.
Classification is the same as 'making a decision', but a decision can never be perfect, as it always *excludes* something.
In this DVD case, we see another stupid attempt to classify something unjust, while the consequences may be very undesirable. It's just lack of knowledge, of people who don't understand a thing about the impacts.
1. Open availability, through independance of the software maker
2. Structure and discipline concepts in order to avoid a mess.
Although (point 1), there is a group developing Rebol as open source (OSCAR), the last time I checked, there was still no source code available. So I started my own implementation, btw absolutely not available yet because I don't have that much to offer right now.
Rebol's best idea is the distributed computing model. They actually state that the good ol' webbrowser is a load of crap, and basically unsuitable for the things we want to do. They have a point there, because as a prof web developer, I can't believe the efforts I have to make, just to create something simple. IMHO a web browser is only suitable for text and images. I see the plugins merely as patches, fixing the shortcomings of the browser.
So Rebol says - the browser 's gotta go, and we'll introduce a new internet application environment; a successor to the webbrowser.
Besides that, Rebol is a very good language for scientific research in the investigation of polymorphical algorithms; ie an algorithm is an idea, and code is an implementation of this idea. The keyword reprogramming feature of Rebol gives flexible tools to understand the idea of an algortihm better, perhaps that one implementation could serve multiple uses. This is ofcourse not the same as a reusable object, I'm talking about a reusable algorithm.
Still, I think Rebol is kinda cool!
You are not screwed, you can load a dynamic linked library or shared object into the language and use the internal routines...
.dll or .so yourself then, maybe new TCP routines. If you then reprogram some keywords, perhaps you don't need to rewrite the application code which used the old TCP connections in Rebol.
You must provide de
"The free gate" with software is merely a metaphor. Suppose SUN would give the consumer a good bargain for StarOffice, without a pay-per-use system, complied with the software licences you buy now, the consumer may have a good motivator to migrate to SUN's product.
In the other case, there's the GPL'ed "Free software" or "Open Source Software" and I understand that those development groups are sponsored with money. Others sell books about their software and so on.
So you shouldn't take the "Free gate" metaphor too literally, I just meant "Microsoft competition", that's all...
The most popular channels wanted to get behind the digital decoder, but a lesser popular channel chose not to do so. In the end, none of the channels got behind the digital decoder, as the consumer would choose for the other gate: the free gate.
So even when Microsoft succeeds into implementing this passport into XP, the rumour will spread like fire, that there is a free alternative for their expensive habits. This rumour will spread via the internet and likely by the spoken word.
I'm not sure about the future, but I considering the option that MS is shooting themselves into their own feet with this...
I cannot find the negative sign in the article, not even in the source...
Still, (I'm no physisist) I interpreted this bit as "well, this bucky formation is magnetic (slightly) above 200 Celsius, which is high, but did not break the record, which is held by another formation which is magnetic at 255 Celsius"
Netscape composer, used it in 1997, I'm very sure... but yours would be better...
When I wrote a B-Tree, as an improvement on a Insertion sort, I wondered whether I could think of an algorithm, fed with meta-semantics on the insertion sort, and designing the B-Tree as a evolutionary successor. It took me quite some time to understand the algorithm myself, and implementing this was even harder - semantic comprehension of the building blocks "in english" resulted in many more lines of C++ code. Because of the recursion, the B-Tree code needed, except for the actual B-Tree code, the following elements:
* execution environmental code - organisation and anticipation of the recursive characteristics of the algorithmn; for example a messaging system to tell the calling function what we'd expect from it...
* datastructure environmental code - understanding the benefits of using multiple data structures to be able to perform the algoritmn; but this would be related to the B+ tree even more; using 1 data structure (BTree) was harder than using 2 data structures (B+Tree)...
* state determination code - needing to know where we stand and what to do when a (recrsive) function call returns; for the trees: do we need to rebalance?
* borderline code - dealing with those borderline cases; what if I'm in a left node, having no left sibbling, while the right sibbling is not an option?
Stepping from the B-Tree to the B+Tree, the data structures are quite simular to those used in the B-Tree, slight differences make the B+Tree algorithmn easier to implement, and better in throughput for table-indexing.
Ofcourse, this is just a simple example where we could try to think of a meta-optimizer. One can extrapolate this to R-Trees and X-Trees, still, B, B+ R and X trees won't have to be the panacea to organize complex information, perhaps a computed "tree" or indexing structure would even perform better in that case. Oracle's database (and others) are optimized to detect their environment and to act as effectively as possible, although their algorithmns are basically human optimized. Even using "Fuzzy Logic" to determine the best balance between the tasks of caching, defragmenting, reorganizing (ie hashtables and 'clusters'), the main way to store the data is predetermined. In pure (non ORDBMS) SQL based systems, the IT-specialist has a hard time designing flexible datastructures with hierarchy; one meets that point-of-no-return very quickly. So in a system which has the elements of organizing hierarchy and repeatance, the perfect storing algorithm should be computed, perhaps going beyond human comprehension (I agree with you).
Another problem with meta-optimization is that the system must try to model the way the user thinks - which is the only way for a system to act whether it understands the user. If you've ever studied the discipline of "Neuro Linguistic Programming" (I believe they call these guys 'motivation-guru's' in english), then you understand that everyone has personal sub-concious truths. A schema of reasoning is very personal, because every individual has learnt different things. The point is, that the system will be able to adapt to one person only would that be userfriendly? The system wouldn't be very suitable for public use.
Still, as I said, I'm playing the mind game, and if someone is to overcome these problems... brilliant!
The problems I discovered were:
* The building blocks of the software itself, are human optimized algorithms and datastructures;
* In order to improve human optimized algorithmns (meta-optimization?), one could develop some form of trial and error optimization algorithmn, but this would complicate things even more (it's hard to determine whether the searchdirection makes any sense); designing such algorithmn is very hard, because, how long do we search before we give up? This is like the chess game, certain move may look silly in the first place, but it could be a very good move in the end...
* If the program is to optimize smart, it will need to use *known* optimizations, and be unable to improve human optimized algorithmns... Introducing the factor of meta-optimization gives the problem of CPU-time distribution: how much CPU time may content optimization take, and how much time may met-optimization take??
* If only known algorithmns are used, the program is bound to a limited level of complexities. Meaning that: lot's of human comprehension has high complexity, which is yet not very well understood by science; the "Perfect Human Interface" is likely to fail in this area - it's the area the user (again) needs to adapt to the machine.
But if these guys actually succeed in their quest... brilliant!!
Although I can support the spirit of the act "stopping cartel/monopolisitic powers", I don't think you'd be able to win that fight by giving "the opposition" the tools to form a monopoly themselves... They -do- have that opportunity when we're restricted in used RIAA content. Doesn't look good as this could mean a trade war over music between two economic powers - USA and Europe, as I don't think that the RIAA will take it... Perhaps I should start listening to local bands then.
The link shows exactly the same article as previously on Slashdot today? Do I need to clear my cache?