Musings on our technological world
Rants, Postulations, Opinions, Commentaries, or just plain noise on the computer orientated and technological world we are increasingly living in.
From AI to advertising to scientific reasoning and bias, anything that takes my fancy really.
Monday 8 January 2007, 10:33 AM
Web 2.0, RSS, AJAX, the whole buzzarky
I've recently been looking at a relatively new tech based news site (the link to which I'm afraid I forget, it's purpose was a bit like "digg"'s though) which relies on user interference instead of algorithmically generated news selections from aggregations of new stories. Interestingly, this received a fair amount of criticism as unnecessarily increasing the running cost of the site, despite the obvious bonuses that human intelligence can be used to genuinely select the most relevant and potentially interesting stories from I suspect a very large number of candidates.
When I wish to see my news, I appreciate the idea of a professional group of news-nerds carefully selecting good material, especially when somewhere like slashdot (by user contribution) has so many duplicate, out of date, and "badly spelled link" stories - include a relatively ignorant bunch of commenters, whose poor (albeit democratic) moderation has left me removing the site from my favourites and only visiting once in a blue moon.
However, and returning to the point of the entry, they have missed out something which I see as ultra critical to a good news site, and that is reliable RSS feeds. I hear that RSS usage is waning, which I find very surprising - It strikes me a far easier way of quickly removing the chaff and getting quickly to the stories of interest, but maybe the interest wanes because it isn't plugged hard enough, or that good free aggregrators are hard to find / use?
To me, Web 2.0 is about creating dynamic websites with multiple ways of accessing the raw data that supports the site to suit the end user. Maybe it involves the user being able to "skin" their page so the information is presented the way that they would like to read it - either way, it allows the user to customise their usage of a given site. RSS feeds are an integral part of this for sites where the user would like to be informed of "updates" - I still think that all forum software should generate concise, intelligent summaries of information on a given forum and thread, or at the very least a thread listing for the forum (some of these do this very well admittedly), purely because it simplifies the job for the end user to reach their desired information destination.
Why, for such a simple and yet powerful tool, is so much more hype and attention given to AJAX. AJAX is interesting, and something I have quite enjoyed playing with recently. However, despite the hype I find that it's application is quite limited. For pages that are having to return tiered hierarchical information from a database, it can make a lot of sense to have only the uppermost tier presented on page load, and by AJAX and javascript populate an element (perhaps a useful box somewhere on the page marked "More Information" or suchlike) with the next level of detailed information on an individual instance when it is clicked on - without having to reload the page itself. This can be a big saving on bandwidth and, often more importantly on database heavy servers, can reduce the load on the db itself. However, you cannot bookmark the AJAX loaded page, as the request is all client sent, so unless you include server side code to replicate the AJAX call and complicate favourite generation to make sure your browser correctly saves the page, you have to remember exactly the steps taken to get there again.
Web 2.0 (which I think is a horribly ambiguous and mostly meaningless buzzword) is overly hyped without justification. A lot of the key individual components have their usage in specific environments, where they can contribute to the site as a whole. But trying to incorporate them just to be "Web 2.0" is frankly quite ridiculous - sites should be designed to achieve and end aim, and technology should be chosen to enable them to reach that aim, not the other way round.
Can we please just allow the Internet to be the Internet, and not force sites to fit into some poorly drawn up sub-category. If there are good technologies out there (such as RSS and AJAX), let them be called individually for their respective merits, and used as required, not bundled into some big package of generic improvement that everyone should try to adopt on principle. Technology is a tool to achieve a goal, not a goal in itself.
Friday 5 January 2007, 10:33 AM
Experts Exchange and Paid Subscriptions
Well, having eaten all the pies and drunk all the wine, I guess Christmas / New Year is well and truly over - as always, it was fun whilst it lasted.
Anyway, back to techie things, I've noticed that Experts Exchange is beta testing a new skin / site layout. On the whole, besides the now well known desire to "glassify" everything, I actually really like the improvements. It seems the pages load a bit slower which is disappointing, but there is more information on offer and it is presented cleanly and easy enough to find your way around.
However, I do notice to my amusement a whole section on gaming. Not many questions in there yet, but I wonder if it will be possible to be labelled a bone-fide MMORPG Guru by Expert Certification. Wouldn't that look good on a CV!
Anyway, light heartedness aside, I noticed Amazon users have reviewed the site (I thought they just reviewed stuff Amazon sold ??) and have given it an enormous drilling for being so "money-orientated". What is it with the modern internet culture that people just think everything should be free? I had a quick go on answering some questions the other day and picked up 2600 points in the day -- that's some 25% the way to a full membership, thus giving me full access for free. If you don't know enough to contribute, you need to support the service in some way, and I can't see why that is unreasonable. Server space is not free, bandwidth is not free, staff moderation time is not free, so why should the service be?
I have built (with a colleague) a turn-based Go site (http://www.online-go.com) which is encountering the same problem. It's great fun to write, fun to play on, great community building up, but it is beginning to be quite a financial strain. The only option is to have memberships (with obvious bonus perks) to support the running of the site - I'd love to offer it for free but my hosts don't want to offer it to me for free, so what do I do?
Personally, I'd rather pay for a service than use it for free and be bombarded with "Free Smilies" and "You are the 1,000,000 visitor" ads, and other wildly annoying popups (even from corporations like IBM?!) that often get plastered everywhere.
For example, I really enjoy ZDNet.co.uk, but as I write I have a "sponsored link" advertised below to "100% Free Gay Teen Dating" (http://www.boy18.co.uk - probably NSFW, I didn't check) -- I have nothing against Gay Teen Dating but why is that next to a tech blog on a tech site? Where exactly is the relevance?
Anyway, am I the only one that feels that users should be prepared for those services that we find to be useful?
Monday 11 December 2006, 7:41 PM
LAMP vs WISA
For those that have no idea what I'm on about, it's the open-source / commercial competition between LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) and WISA (Windows-IIS-SQL Server-ASP), and what is the most appropriate. And yes, I know that P can be Perl as well, but PHP I see as a closer match with ASP, so there.
I've seen this argument in a number of places on the web, and most (not all) seem to be on the side of LAMP is wonderful and free, WISA is evil and expensive, and I simply cannot agree. Sure, if you are implementing WISA on your own corporate network, you are looking at potentially expensive license costs -- SQL Server is notoriously expensive (albeit powerful). However, under the basis you already have a Windows computer, particularly a Windows server, IIS and ASP are free and require very little configuration to have fully working. If you don't have SQL in your company anyway, WIMA (same but with MySQL) is a very quick and easy alternative, and then you have the (effectively) free solution again.
Go back 5 years and most web hosts offered Linux web hosting, and with that you got no IIS and ASP anyway (I don't think Linux _could_ support ASP until very recently, and IIS is part of the Windows OS), so you were left without little choice. I reckon this is the real reason that LAMP is so widely praised - people are simply used to it, and most free web apps in community projects are written in PHP (largely for the same reasons). In the last few years I have switched over to Windows hosting, and started playing around with ASP - I have to admit, it's a walk in the park compared with PHP; I like the easy to read syntax, it's like writing rather odd English. The performance seems extremely similar, and it's a damn sight easier IMHO to look at someone else's code and know what you are seeing at first glance.
Don't get me wrong, I have nothing wrong with LAMP. I like its open free status, I like the large community of support and large number of applications that other people have written for it. However, in the current age of Windows servers everywhere and free MySQL or SQL Server databases online, I would never hesitate in first recommending people start with ASP, especially for intranet work and simple but db-functional websites.
However, it needs us technophiles to jump on the "let's build a community" bandwagon to get the same level of feature rich, freely available open source ASP software into the market so that it can be recognised. So this seems as good an opportunity as any to shamelessly plug my (currently pre-alpha) ordering system SBOMPS.
SBOMPS stands for Small Business Office Management and Processing System, and is intended for small companies that operate by buying (from suppliers) and selling (to customers) products, and is designed by default to work with both SQL Server and MySQL, and be compatible with IE (6.1 and 7.0 tested) and Firefox (1.5.0.1 onwards tested).
If you have any comments on either my post or the software, I'd love to hear about them!
Friday 1 December 2006, 8:53 PM
Artificial Intelligence - What is it anyway?
A few years ago I started getting really interested in the concept of AI, a genuine, thinking, learning, created intelligence. I started playing around with chess engines to see just how a computer could really get as good as a human Grandmaster, and tried to program a simple Connect 4 (or 4-in-a-row thanks to some inane copyright) engine. However, the more I got into the grassroots of how they were set up and how they worked, the more it dawned on me that they simply weren't "intelligence". Don't get me wrong, it is a genuinely brilliant feat that they do so well against the top players, but when we consider that an average chess engine calculates hundreds of thousands of positions a second compared to a top Grandmaster's 1 to 2, it seems a grossly inefficient attempt to play good chess. Rybka is doing rather better, performing to a slightly higher level than the top "mainstream" chess engines and calculating at only 40,000 positions a second on my humble machine. But of course, whilst its performance is clearly improved, it is still in a different league to a grandmaster at pruning out bad moves when thinking - all this at something that a computer should be able to do exceptionally, after all, to the computer this is just glorified number-crunching. I cannot see how this can be defined as Artificial Intelligence.
There are of course the famous "George" and "ALICE" AI humans, who keep trying to be so convincing a conversationalist that a human cannot tell whether they are speaking to. Of course they are still nowhere near that goal, but they are capable of picking up inflections in a human tone of voice and moods - even picking up standard language used in unusual context. Great steps forward, but still fundamentally limited; if the programmers haven't told it what to look for, how to look for it and how to respond, it is completely stuck. It won't come to any conclusion by itself. So even if it does manage to fool a human to thinking they are talking to another human, again I can't see how it can truly be considered AI.
There are good progresses being made in real-time strategy computer games. If you start to win with set strategy types and certain units the computer AI will learn the way you play, and adapt to defeat your strategies (and you thought the profile setups were just to allow multiple users to keep their settings). This is without any doubt a self adjusting engine that learns to adapt to its surroundings, in this case direct competition. However, again, it can only adapt within the confines of pre-programmed parameters; it has a mathematical understanding of unit strength and a spatial understanding of unit tactics, so it is hard to consider it AI. To draw a comparison, a human can pre-empt what a computer might do based on empathetic psychology - what would the human do in the computer's position. A human can observe something it didn't know could happen, and adjust accordingly based on completely unrelated human experiences doing other things - a computer program is still limited to its programming.
So what then would properly consitute AI? Technically of course it could "randomly" adapt, but this is either limited to programming what it is allowed to change (which defeats the AI goal) or having it adapt truly randomly, and allow unsuccessful iterations to die -- sort of Darwinian. This is likely to be unfeasible because without something to guide it the randomness of the changes are likely to give an almost infinite chance of the change being detrimental to the program as a whole.
Ideally, true AI would update its understanding, increase the number of ways it can adapt to situations by drawing off successful reponses to other areas. It would have some level of parallel logical processing different types of information. True AI wouldn't just learn that it did something wrong, it would create a plausible solution based on some concept of artifical common sense. At the moment I don't think anyone has managed to theorise how this is possible, let alone program it, but I suspect it will lie in gaining some greater understanding of the human mind. Until then, I suspect "I, Robot" and the dreams of Isaac Asimov and millions of Hollywood Sci-Fi fans will have to wait a long long time.
Tuesday 28 November 2006, 1:20 PM
Advertising and subliminal side-taking
I remember a time when Microsoft were taking over as the super-giant in the computer industry, and creating an enormous amount of anti-M$ hatred, not _all_ of it warranted or almost justified -- oh, wait a minute, they still are. Ok, side taking is easy, it's not too hard to be outspoken about a very strongly polarised side to an argument, but the truth is Black and White is more of a theoretical principle than something that ever manifests itself in a real life situation. It also seems to distort reality for everyone else - religious fanatics who like turning the doctrine of their church / mosque / following rabble into something of exclusive right and wrong, right and wrong -- grey areas are nonexistent. We have the same in science, business and everything else around us. However, the truth of the matter is that this is very misleading for all. People get a chance to "pick sides" instead of taking an informed decision.
For example (and back to the original case), how come if Microsoft slate someone elses product they often get lambasted for using their corporate / financial muscle to beat competitors to a metaphorical pulp, yet Apple can use adverts with the architypical "cool" computer user as the mac and the architypical "business-nerd" as the Windows PC, with catchy points such as Mac's not getting virus' etc. It's true, you don't often hear of big virus outbreaks on a Mac, but then why would virus writers bother when the majority of information they want (corporate secrets, bank details etc..) are likely to be sitting on far more widely used Windows machines.
Same with the Firefox / IE debate -- ok, I must confess to using Firefox as I prefer the tab system, the way passwords and bookmarks are saved, and the wonderfully rich plug-in community. I do _not_ avoid IE based on security risks. Yes, native activeX support is a risk, but then so is downloading files using a browser anyway - I commend Microsoft's attempts to make the browser more powerful with the end aim of creating a more user-friendly experience with things like Windows / Office / Microsoft Update - it is development aimed to enhance the user experience, something all developers should strive towards with their products.
It also frustrates the hell out of me that most Linuxes come with a whole load of useful and excellent software (which I think is a good thing by the way) without penalty and Windows gets sued through the European courts for not having a Windows OS without Media Player. It's their software, they shouldn't be penalised for bundling stuff (especially when really good functional software such as FooBar and WinAmp are continually popular because of their increased functionality).
Maybe it is balanced reversed Darwinianism in action, where the strongest get penalised to keep a more even race, but it strikes me in a world where progress is normally so richly rewarded that this is somewhat counter-productive.
- Graham
