I work for a web host (not this one). From my experience, this is generally what is going on during downtime (note: times are BEST CASE scenario):
T0: Servers go down
T5-15: Someone realizes something is broken.
T15-45: Initial someone calls another someone to tell them it's broken because the night guy probably can't fix it all by himself.
T60-70: All the engineers are woken up and know OF the problem.
T90: Engineers figure out WHAT the problem is.
T120: Engineers fix problems.
T150: More problems arise.
T180: All problems are solved, no more customers are mad.
Moral of the Story: As you can see, it already is a very involved process to get servers running again. Now, as a customer, you want an email to notify you that services are down. First, the admin needs to find out exactly which customers are affected and then write up a nice happy email to you letting you know we're working on it. Do you want a happy email or do you want your servers fixed? Your call. Downtime is chaos. Do not ask to be notified of chaos.
Honestly, I don't need well-drafted prose or a happy email to alert me of a server outage. I could care less. They should have a pre-drafted document that let's them fill in blanks based on the problem at hand. I was one of these affected customers and can say that not being notified of the servers being down cost me a few hours of uptime. I would say that customer communication during chaos is nearly as important as fixing the problem itself. Just my two cents.
Do you want a happy email or do you want your servers fixed? Your call.
It's not like the two are mutually exclusive. Are you really suggesting that the entire 180 minutes of effort by multiple engineers would have to be directed at writing a "happy email" rather than fixing the problem?
The real reason, I imagine, is that if they automatically sent out an email to everyone who could be affected then more people would know of the problem. It's probably smart to accept a handful of customers being unhappy about being in the dark in return for the outage being exposed to far fewer customers.
They clearly ignored that rule for the name of the language =)
On a more serious note, this is rather exciting. It would make a very good candidate for a universal language. A great deal of time and effort went into making this language. Hopefully this isn't the last time I hear of Lojban.
If you like this, you should read In The Land of Invented Languages by Arika Okrent. Aside from the being the best non-fiction book I've ever read, it talks about Lojban and characteristics of invented languages that make them suitable for becoming a universal language. It turns out, Lojban would make a terrible universal language for precisely the reason I pointed out in my other post. It's too complicated. When we speak, we frequently start a sentence not knowing how it's going to end. We pause and insert filler words to give us time to form our thoughts. We use ambiguity because sometimes we just don't know precisely what we're trying to say (Lojban has, if I recall correctly from Okrent's book, over 30 ways to say 'and'). Forcing people to have a complete understanding of what they want to say before saying it won't make them more clear when they talk, it'll make them not talk.
> When we speak, we frequently start a sentence not knowing how it's going to end.
You can start and continue with a Lojban sentence indefinitely via various means. Metalinguistic markers such as sei ... se'u allows a discursive (on-the-fly) predicate or sentence. You can insert parenthetical notes with to ... toi into anywhere. You can insert the attitudinals (used to express attitudes, emotions, evidentiality, etc.) into anywhere. A construct called tanru allows an endless sequence of predicates (whose form in Lojban do not alter according to the natlang parts of speech such as adjective or adverb, thus imposing less restrictions on the way you keep forming a sentence than natlangs such as English does). With li'o you can omit any quantity of text you don't want in your expressions. With si/sa/su you can 'erase' various mistakes in your utterance. And so forth.
> We pause and insert filler words to give us time to form our thoughts.
That's what y is for in Lojban.
> We use ambiguity because sometimes we just don't know precisely what we're trying to say
The unambiguity of Lojban is mostly syntactic, not always semantic. You can be semantically ambiguous in Lojban with e.g. tanru.
> (Lojban has, if I recall correctly from Okrent's book, over 30 ways to say 'and').
Which includes ju'e, a vague connective for "and".
> Forcing people to have a complete understanding of what they want to say before saying it
Syntactic ambiguity is half the point. I still have to decide whether or not I want to use the vague/all-purpose connective for "and." If I want to add parenthetical information, I have to realize I'm doing that and indicate it. If I want to "erase" a mistake, I have to recognize that that's what I want to do and use the proper word. I still have to know exactly what I intend to say. When I'm speaking, I don't think to myself, "Ok, this is parenthetical... this is correcting an error... this is vague and all-purpose." I just speak.
In Python, whether or not a method is private is defined basically by whether or not you call it from another class. In Java, you have to be explicit about it. You CAN just declare everything public (be vague and all-purpose), but aside from being frowned upon, you still have to conciously decide to do this. If you don't care about the protection of scope, you can make everything public, but you're still specifying scope. In Python, you don't specify scope at all. Even if you wanted to, you can't.
The same thing shows up in type checking. If you want, you just call everything an object in Java. It's vague and all-purpose, but you still have to specify a type. You still can't write 'a = 4'. You still have to write 'Object a = new Integer(4);', which it's tough to argue is simpler just because it isn't type-checked.
Explicit ambiguity is not much closer than explicit disambiguity to implicit ambiguity.
I realize at this point, I'm getting beyond my own knowledge of Lojban, but I just want to make the general point that being able to be ambiguous does not automatically afford the advantages of the natural ambiguity in "natlangs."
> I still have to decide whether or not I want to use the vague/all-purpose connective for "and."
If you are undetermined, you use the undetermined option, the vague one. You don't really make a decision for that.
> If I want to add parenthetical information, I have to realize I'm doing that and indicate it. If I want to "erase" a mistake, I have to recognize that that's what I want to do and use the proper word. I still have to know exactly what I intend to say.
Planning is not required for adding parenthetical information. You use it on the spot where you happen to want it.
If you don't recognize that you want to erase a mistake, you just don't use the erasers.
> When I'm speaking, I don't think to myself, "Ok, this is parenthetical... this is correcting an error... this is vague and all-purpose." I just speak.
I'm not a native English speaker. When I started learning and speaking in English, I would think to myself, "Ok, the word "which", when used after a slight pause, which corresponds to the comma in writing, it means a non-restrictive relative pronoun, which is what I want now, so I'm going to use it that way". As I kept practicing the language, I internalized the rule, becoming less and less actively conscious of it. Lojban is no exception. I have already internalized some parts of the grammar to which I used to pay much attention in my earlier period of learning.
Also important to note is that, what English expresses with non-verbal properties such as intonation, Lojban can do verbally. When you orally say something in English which you would put in a parenthesis in writing, your speech act are still subject to some phonetic principles such as inserting a pause, changing the rhythm, lowering the pitch, using less breath, and so on. You consciously or unconsciously have to be in command of these properties if you are to successfully deliver your utterance. A particular combination of these non-verbal phonetic properties is what Lojban expresses with to ... toi, the parenthetical markers. Whether or not you are actively conscious of them is a matter of internalization. Just like an experienced English speaker not always actively thinks about each noun's grammatical number in their utterance but still manages to add the plural marker "s" where appropriate, an experienced Lojban speaker would be able to correctly start a parenthetical note with "to" but without always actively checking whether or not that's what they really want to say.
> I realize at this point, I'm getting beyond my own knowledge of Lojban, but I just want to make the general point that being able to be ambiguous does not automatically afford the advantages of the natural ambiguity in "natlangs."
Could you give me an English example with such advantages?
I agree that would disqualify it as a universal language candidate. At the same time though, how often do you wish you'd thought out your next sentence in its entirety when speaking to your girlfriend/boss/mother/etc ?
I'm a rather thoughtful speaker, so I rarely regret my words, but this is a somewhat separate issue. There are lots of factors that affect how likely someone is to say something they will later regret. The biggest thing that makes people say things they'll regret isn't a language, it's the internet. If you say something you might regret in a letter, it's pretty easy to catch it before sending it. In an email, not so easy. In an IM, you're likely to send the message before you've even read it back.
What this tells me isn't that we need better tools (whether they be software or languages or anything else), it's that sometimes people say stupid things, and we need to be more understanding. A hundred years ago, it may have been reasonable to expect that a long-distance friend would never say anything rude to you, because they'd have time to edit their words. It isn't reasonable to expect that anymore. People haven't changed, but their ability to edit themselves has. Instead of trying to recreate that ability to edit ourselves, we need to evolve our interactions with each other so that these thoughts that we had time to edit before don't play such a big role in our communication.
In Lojban,the letters which appear in the word Lojban are pronounced thusly:
L as in Logger;
O as in wOn't;
J as in aZure;
B as in Boy;
A as in wAter;
N as in Nice;
Lojban is therefore pronounced LõZH-ban, with stress on "LõZH".
"Lojban" is a cmene (name) derived from the lujvo (compound word) "lojbau", a conjunction of "lojbo bangu", a tanru meaning "logical type-of language".
"Lojban" is not ambiguous as to spelling, being phonetic (unlike "phonetic") and also non-ambiguous in meaning, since the name for the logical language Lojban means "logical language".
> Lojban: "spelling is phonetic and unambiguous"
> They clearly ignored that rule for the name of the language =)
I don't understand your point. The name of the language follows precisely the same rules of spelling and pronunciation. Can you expand on why you think otherwise?
Although a few people want a Universal Language, the Logical Language Group which administers the Lojban language standard has never sought that as the purpose of Lojban. It is a thought experiment.
I'm of the opinion that the LHC will make a great mess of physics. I saw a show on Discovery where most of the physicists at CERN feel there's a 9/10 chance they'll find the Higgs. Just a hunch, but I don't think they'll find it. I think they'll find something that forces them to rethink all of sub-atomic physics, which would be way cooler.
Also, is anyone else tired of every LHC article talking about Earth getting sucked into a black hole? Ludicrous, I tell you...
Not only the black hole bit, but the time ripples propagating back from the future to prevent an abomination?
Yeesh...
I agree with you, about the scientists not finding the Higgs Boson. From everything I've seen so far of science, it hardly seems like it could be that simple. It seems as though every time we delve deeper into a field, our conception of how everything works is changed, and this hardly seems like the time for it to stop. I could be proven wrong though. Someone might prove that P=NP. That would be cool.
>>Also, is anyone else tired of every LHC article talking about Earth getting sucked into a black hole? Ludicrous, I tell you...
A simple physics experiment destroying humanity seems really stupid -- but it would be a really neat solution to Fermi's Paradox ("why aren't there any visible technological civilizations"). 1/2 :-)
Because MS is also an advertiser. Bing would become immediately worthless to advertisers if they did. Plus, assuming MS let their ads through and blocked Google's, Google would yell "anti-competition lawsuit" faster than you can say, well, anti-competition.
I don't think advertising is going to be able to sustain Google indefinitely. As more tech-savvy users get on the web, their tolerance for advertisements will dwindle, along with advertisers' return. Google probably knows this, which is why they've moved into other markets like Android and Google's office tools. As far as search goes, I think they're either going to be king forever as we know it, or a 'better' search will come out... though I can't think of what could make search better than what Google has.
I, personally, would like to see Google become their own ISP. When there was news they were buying up 'dark fiber' I thought this might be in their future plans.
"As more tech-savvy users get on the web" => you realize you got it the wrong way round there, right? In other words, advertising will just get better on the web. Google's golden there.
Dark fiber is great for peering but it's the last mile that costs real money. Even Google doesn't have enough money to pull it off on a really large scale.
Android is actually a way to keep Apple from dominating, and to keep other mobile devices open.
Google knows it dominates certain services like search, so it can use Android to make sure other devices stay open in order to compete against it. This forces them to let people choose and Google knows more often than not that choice will be for Google services. For example if Android allows Google talk, then Apple will become tremendously pressured to do the same because it's supposedly a really useful feature.
Android forces others to be more open, Google dominates, therefore more open means more customers for Google, more eyes looking at Google ads, etc.
Don't let anyone tell you otherwise: golf is about getting trashed and seeing if you can still manage to ever put the ball in the cup. While on a business outing, the object of the game is now to play WORSE than the exec you are there with. Golf is no longer a competition, but a social function. Turns out I don't enjoy social functions OR golf.
It is a social game, but i'm not sure how much it's not as social as basketball or any other sport really. Those who don't play for money or to win an executive over (redundant) play in order to hang out with their friends. The game itself has its own interesting skill to acquire, but I guess since it doesn't have an athletic component it's lost in the "shuffle" of old person games.
Maybe in movies. I played golf in high school, and not everyone is out there to get drunk. Many people enjoy the game because it's difficult and interesting. Executives, even...
What is possible? Everything. It just depends on what level we are able to effectively manipulate the universe. Suppose for a moment that the universe is comprised of 'bits' at the very smallest possible scales. We do not currently have direct (root) access to these bits, so we must manipulate them from within the system. Because our universe is NP-complete, given enough control over these universal bits, anything that is thinkable is possible. Will we ever be able to control these bits? It remains to be seen, but I should think so eventually.
Proof: universe = 42 (Adams 1978). 42 can be computed in O(1) time. Therefore, universe is in P. If one problem in the set of NP-complete problems is in P, they are all in P. Therefore, P = NP.
We lack sufficient evidence to prove that we reside in a Matrix-like construct. Pending evidence, we shall continue believing that we do not live in such a construct.... though the line between physical reality and virtual reality become blurrier every day.
Crude synopsis: if it is possible to create such an simulation then the probability that we in one is the number of possible simulated universes (v. large) vs the number of real universes (1) ie high probability that we are within a simulation.
I've always heard that expressed as the Simulation Paradox: either full-fidelity simulations, a la The Matrix, are impossible, or we're already in one.
The digital divide will not close itself, but rather can only grow larger as time goes on. Technology has been key to human evolution since man learned to create fire and sharp sticks. As such, we are inextricably bound to our technology. Having better tech is most certainly an evolutionary advantage. These days, technology is progressing so fast that it can be difficult to keep up.
What are the repercussions of not keeping up? Well, you've seen what happened to the tribal folk that got owned by Europeans back in the day, right? If you don't keep up with technology, you will fall behind in the evolutionary chain. Just hope those higher on the chain than you have some compassion and lack the desire to conquer/eat you.
The article makes an excellent point that our children need to be computer and technology literate. Those that do not embrace technology will forever be collecting the second-hand table-scrap-tech that we throw out. As any parent, we want our children to have all the opportunities that other kids have. Knowledge is power.
T0: Servers go down T5-15: Someone realizes something is broken. T15-45: Initial someone calls another someone to tell them it's broken because the night guy probably can't fix it all by himself. T60-70: All the engineers are woken up and know OF the problem. T90: Engineers figure out WHAT the problem is. T120: Engineers fix problems. T150: More problems arise. T180: All problems are solved, no more customers are mad.
Moral of the Story: As you can see, it already is a very involved process to get servers running again. Now, as a customer, you want an email to notify you that services are down. First, the admin needs to find out exactly which customers are affected and then write up a nice happy email to you letting you know we're working on it. Do you want a happy email or do you want your servers fixed? Your call. Downtime is chaos. Do not ask to be notified of chaos.