Haibane.info

Author: fledgling otaku

  • Microsoft Office Online?

    A few days ago, Nicholas Carr reported a rumor that Microsoft was poised to take its Office Suite into the cloud, and was building out huge new server farms to prepare:

    I’ve heard that Microsoft has begun briefing its large enterprise clients on an expansive and detailed strategy for moving its software business into the cloud. If the report proves correct – and I make no guarantees – the company will unveil the strategy to the public either next week or the week after.
    […]
    it’s been building out the backend infrastructure – the data center network – required to run web apps reliably and on a large scale. These obstacles are now coming down. The upgrades have been out for more than a year, and, despite some glitches, have generated a lot of cash for the company. As for its infrastructure, a massive new data center near Chicago is expected to come online this year, adding to the capacity of the new centers the company has built or bought in Washington, Texas, and California.

    However, Michael Arrington threw cold water on the idea:

    I fear that the rumor may have been wrong, and that Microsoft has no such plans in the near future. Tonight Microsoft announced an expansion of their “software plus services” strategy that gives businesses many of the collaboration and storage benefits of Sharepoint without actually having to install software on their own internal machines. The program was initially launched in September 2007.

    This is not a web based version of office. It’s not competitive with what Google is offering businesses with Apps and Docs. It’s a half way approach that still requires the installation of Office and other software on local machines.

    However it isn’t clear that this necessarily means that CloudOffice is dead. The above strategy could certainly be a half-way step in porting Office to the cloud. And a lot of enterprise customers are probably still going to stick with their local installs for quite some time, they aren’t going to switch overnight. IT has inertia, after all – as does the significant investment most companies have made in legal licenses for Office. I think Microsoft has to move cautiously, and it’s going to take time.

    Can Google or anyone else deliver a fully-web-based office suite with a complete enough feature set to match Office in the interim? I think that no pure web application can hope to match functionality of a desktop one, because the desktop app has so much more computing power. The browser is a constraint – which is why Adobe AIR, which breaks free of the browser, is such an innovative and exciting product. Microsoft’s own version, called Silverlight, is probably going to be the backend for Office online. The advantage here is that the immense computing power of the client – RAM, CPU – can be used to make the cloud app much richer than if all of the functionality has to be delivered via the narrow Internet pipe.

  • TechCrunch (hearts) Valleywag

    Does Mike Arrington have a stake in Valleywag? At TechCrunch, Arrington issues a dire warning that Valleywag (a Silicon Valley gossip rag) will drive someone to suicide soon enough:

    Today I read all the sordid details about the alleged sexual encounter between a notable technology visionary and a woman who appears to be looking for as much publicity as possible. Where did I read it? On the Silicon Valley gossip blog Valleywag.
    […]
    A lot of people I know read Valleywag, and say it’s fun to hear all the gossip. But all of those people change their tune the first time the blog turns on them and includes them in a rumor. An example: TED founder Chris Anderson, distressed over the publication of the TED attendee list, recently wrote to Valleywag owner Nick Denton that he “didn’t think [he’d] be on the receiving end” of Valleywag gossip. His email was promptly posted to the site.

    Most of the gossip is harmless. Much of it, though, isn’t (like the sex incident above). Celebrities have had to live with this kind of nonsense for decades, which explains why some of them pull out of society entirely and become completely anti-social. Perhaps, some argue, they bring it on themselves by seeking fame.

    But for people in Silicon Valley, who are not celebrities and who have no desire other than to build a great startup, a post on Valleywag comes as a huge shock. Seeing your marriage woes, DUI or employment termination up on a popular public website (permanently indexed by search engines) is simply more than they can handle. They have not had the ramp up time to build resistance to the attacks.

    The suggestion that web entrepreneurs are more emotionally fragile than Hollywood celebs is pretty weak. The reason for Valleywag’s success is not because Nick Denton is out to getcha. It’s because prominent Silicon Valley entrepreneurs – like Michael Arrington – keep reading Valleywag, sending them tips and gossip, and blogging about it.

    Arrington goes on to observe the obvious, that tragedy is good business:

    So how long will it be before Valleywag drives someone in our community to suicide? My fear is that it isn’t a matter of if it will happen, but when. Valleywag and Nick Denton, though, will likely look forward to the event, and the great traffic growth that will surely follow.

    Emphasis mine. I think that it borders on libel to suggest that Denton would “look forward” to the event, though obviously he won’t mind the traffic. But all of that traffic exists because, as Arrington observes, there’s a market for it. Is Denton to blame, or the people who Valleywag writes about themselves, who seem all too eager to eat their own? As Anderson found out in the anecdote above, no one thinks they will be on the “receiving end” of Valleywag’s gossip. As they say, pride goeth before the fall.

    Arrington must be making good on his promise to suck up to Denton, because his post at TechCrunch just gives Valleywag all that much more power. He complains that “the valley was a much nicer place to live and work before the days of Valleywag” – but whose fault is that?

  • singularity skeptic

    kurzweil

    I am not a luddite by any means, but I just have to state my position plainly: I think all talk of a “Singularity” (of the Kurzweil variety) is nothing more than science fiction. I do not have an anti-Singularity manifesto but rather just a skeptical reaction to most of the grandiose predictions by Singularians. I’d like to see someone articulate a case for Singularity that isn’t yet another fancy timeline of assertions about what year we will have reverse engineered the human brain or have VR sex or foglets or whatever. I am also leery of the abusive invocation of physics terms like “quantum loop gravity” and “energy states” as if they were magic totems (Heisenberg compensators, anyone?).

    If I were to break down the concept of Singularity into components, I’d say it relies on a. genuine artificial intelligence and b. transhumanism. Thus the Singularity would be the supposed union of these two. But I guess it’s not much of a surprise that I am an AI skeptic also. AI is artificial by definition – a simulation of intelligence. AI is an algorithm whereas true intelligence is something much less discrete. I tend towards a stochastic interpretation of genuine intelligence than a deterministic one, myself – akin to the Careenium model of Hoftstadter, but even that was too easily discretized. Let me invoke an abused physics analogy here – I see artificial intelligence as a dalliance with energy levels of an atom, whereas true intelligence is the complete (and for all purposes, infinite) energy state of a 1cm metal cube.

    The proponents of AI argue that if we just add levels of complexity eventually we will have something approximating the real thing. The approach is to add more neural net nodes, add more information inputs, and [something happens]. But my sense of the human brain (which is partly religious and partly derived from my career as an MRI physicist specializing in neuroimaging) is that the brain isn’t just a collection of N neurons, wired a certain way. There are layers, structures, and systems within whose complexities multiple against each other.

    Are there any neuroscientists working in AI? Do any AI algorithms make an attempt to include structures like an “arcuate fasciculus” or a “basal ganglia” into their model? Is there any understanding of the difference between gray and white matter? I don’t see how a big pile of nodes is going to have any more emergent structure than a big pile of neurons on the floor.

    Then we come to transhumanism. Half of transhumanism is the argument that we will “upload” our brains or augment them somehow, but that requires the same knowledge of the brain as AI does, so the same skepticism applies. The other half is physical augmentation, but here we get to the question of energy source. I think Blade Runner did it right:

    Tyrell: The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long. And you have burned so very very brightly, Roy.

    Are we really going to cheat thermodynamics and get multipliers to both our physical bodies and our lifespans? Or does it seem more likely that one comes at the expense of the other? Again, probably no surprise here that I am a skeptic of the Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) stuff promoted by Aubrey de Gray – the MIT Technology Review article about his work gave me no reason to reconsider my judgment that he’s guilty of exuberant extrapolation (much like Kurzweil). I do not dismiss the research but I do dismiss the interpretation of its implications. And do they address the possibility that death itself is an evolutionary imperative?

    But ok. Lets postulate that death can simply be engineered away. That human brains can be modeled in the Cloud and data can be copied back and forth from wetware to silicon. Then what do we become? A race of gods? or just a pile of nodes, acting out virtual fantasies until the heat death of the universe pulls the plug? That’s not post- or trans-humanism, its null-humanism.

    I’d rather have a future akin to Star Trek, or Foundation, or even Snow Crash – one full of space travel, star empires, super hackers and nanotech. Not a future where we all devolve into quantum ghosts – or worse are no better than the humans trapped in the Matrix, living out simulated lives for eternity.

  • ef me

    okay, I am torrenting ef. The repeated mention of it was like endless drops of water carving down the mountain into sand.

  • D&D 4th Edition

    Massawyrm at AICN has an exclusive review of the new 4th Edition D&D. Reading the review really brings me back to my own memories of being a D&D gamer; I gave up D&D back during 2nd Edition (when there was still the Basic vs Advanced dichotomy). What lured me away was Magic: The Gathering, and then after college I just never had time again to play anything. I really would love to get back into D&D but the constraints on my time are even worse now than before. Plus, no matter how innovative the rules, to have fun you just need to play with friends, and most of mine are too far away, scattered around the nation. Maybe next year.

    Actually wouldn’t it be amazing if we could run a D&D campaign via group chat?

    UPDATE via Scott,

    hmm. Anyone up for a campaign? 🙂

  • Season 4 teaser

    Nothing massively spoilish, aside from the (obvious) fact that Starbuck is not a Cylon.

  • the social horizon

    Does the inherent limit on human interaction group size apply to online social networks?. That limit is called “Dunbar’s Number” and is estimated to be ~150, based on observations of social networks among primates and then extrapolating to humans taking increased brainpower into consideration. An intriguing piece in the WSJ asks whether online social networks are still bound by Dunbar’s number or whether technological innovation might permit us to exceed it:

    But there is reason to believe that the social-networking sites will enable their users to burst past Dunbar’s number for friends, just as humans have developed and harnessed technology to surpass their physical limits on speed, strength and the ability to process information.
    Robin Dunbar, an Oxford anthropologist whose 1993 research gave rise to the magical count of 150, doesn’t use social-networking sites himself. But he says they could “in principle” allow users to push past the limit. “It’s perfectly possible that the technology will increase your memory capacity,” he says.

    The question is whether those who keep ties to hundreds of people do so to the detriment of their closest relationships — defined by Prof. Dunbar as those formed with people you turn to when in severe distress.

    The problem here is the definition of the word “relationship”. Dunbar’s definition of “closest” is just one of many possible ones, and the various definitions might well overlap. But does that mean that business relationships are excluded from Dunbar’s limit? If so, then you might expect to see many more contacts on LinkedIn, which caters to a business networking model, than on Facebook which is primarily stalker heaven. LinkedIn is approaching critical mass in terms of network effect; RWW found over 80% of their business contacts already using it, for example.

    There are surely other models one could employ to map relationships: blogrolls, chat client lists, twitter fans/friends, etc. I think any one of these – or a weighted combination of all of them – would be good data sets to see whether Dunbar’s number truly holds online or not.

    The reason why it is important to consider is because if it does hold (or if indeed there is any limit at all) then that substantially undermines the argument that the social graph is a construct of unlimited utility for search personalization or the semantic web. If anything, the social graph could well become an obstacle to finding information rather than an asset. Everyone keeps talking about search “personalization” but that’s a synonym for search filtering; filtering is a lossy process, you are discarding data. Optimal search wouldn’t define the best result as the most “personal” but rather the most “relevant” – and often that ight well be data lying far eyond the cozy confines of your social graph. In fact, assuming that you are searching for something you don’t know, it’s more likely to be outside than inside.

    Human nature eing what it is, people might not even realize that their newly personalized search results are less relevant!

  • Dennou Coil 3-11

    Yeah, ok I’ve just been zoomig through these. Too entranced to even take screencaps, except for these.

    dennou coildennou coil

    Is it just me and my blatant bias but do I see an analogy between Illegals and Haibane developing?

  • brrr

    Quantitative evidence of how cold it was last week (click to enlarge):

    very cold

    Incidentally, Meteorological Spring begins March 1st. Humbug.

  • Ubu!!!

    for shame.

    More stuff to toss on the unwatched pile with Pumpkin Scissors, Haibaine Renmei, and the rest of Ikkitousen. Poor Haibaine, what bad company.

    I call on the Otakusphere to apply appropriate pressure.