Slashdot Mirror

http://crc.ca/

I have friends who work there. They love it. Pay isn't as high as private industry (where you get to do _no_ research), but the work makes up for it.

One of my favourite stories from a friend there is from when he completed his first (assigned) research project after being there for six months or so.
Friend (to boss): Ok, I'm done this. What should I work on next?
Boss (looking at friend like he's an idiot): Uh, whatever you want to work on.
Friend: Huh?
Boss: We're a research institute. Go find something that is worthwhile to research that interests you and do it.
Friend: Uhhh? What?
Boss: Let me know how it turns out.

There's another story about this friend and his attempt to fake his ability to speak french to the beer vendor, but as I said, that's another story.

BTW, you must have at least a Master's degree before they'll consider you. (yes, I know you do, IRTFA, but there will be others reading this)

For corn fields, you could use something like that:
http://www.crc.ca/en/html/milton/home/home

It's basically a hub, with 24 antennas to which ~30 subscribers can be connected to each antenna. Up to 3-4 km range. Pretty cheap, ~10k for the hub and ~100$ per subscriber for the equipment. I don't know why a govt agency was developing this though... (I used to design it)

OK - how's this?

Back in April, Slashdot reported the announcement of a Universal 3D File Format by Intel, Microsoft & others - to be "as open as MP3". Of course, that's not all that open. And this turns out to be the sneaky part. There is a real open standard already - X3D is ISO-ratified, royalty-free, and has multiple open source implementations. U3D is "going to be submitted to ISO" - one day - but right now they're talking to ECMA, which allows royalty-bearing patents.
I found this article by Tony Parisi, co-chair of the X3D Working Group a fascinating insider's picture of the standards wars, along with insights into what it takes to release an online game, what really killed VRML, and why open standards do (and don't) matter.
I mean, a royalty-bearing, pseudo-open universal 3D format from Intel and Microsoft? Sorry, guys. That trick doesn't work anymore


BTW, I need to get a life.

I mean: people seem blind to the fact that by moving jobs overseas, yes, they're lowering their bottom line, but they're ALSO PUTTING PEOPLE OUT OF WORK.

i.e. One job lost, one job gained. Yes, the person getting the job is making less money, but the stuff they get to buy is less overpriced. So people are still getting paid, products are still getting bought.

The problem (in your eyes) is that people here are losing jobs because someone else can offer the same service cheaper. Uhhh...free market, hello? NAFTA? World trade? Those weren't India's ideas.

This is when it's your job to INNOVATE. Free Software means you can start up your new company with very little capital, in your basement. Use all those free software tools to design a nifty little gadget, patent it, go nuts. Shoot a movie like The Blair Witch, write an album like The Strokes. Be an American. Shape up. Do something they haven't. It's unamerican to whine about other's good fortune, but you wouldn't guess it now (did everyone else miss the irony that you shat on the country that gave you the damn Statue of Liberty for exercising their free (as in libre) choice to not fight in a war they didn't believe in?).

But greed is the key, right?
YOUR greed to hang onto your cushy job when someone else can do it cheaper, apparently. You made your free market, now lie in it.

I'll continue to live in my Socialist Paradise where the Government employs people to write Free Software while your military foots the bill it. I love it.

Very interesting - I don't suppose you could summarise how Loebner changed the rules after that?

I imagine Whalen's entry was based on CHAT, which I played with an older version of back in the early nineties when I was a psych undergrad at Carleton and was fortunate to know co-creator Andrew Patrick through the NCF. CHAT was/is a project at the Communications Research Centre of Industry Canada. You could reach it in those days from Hypertelnet (I think I was the first person to escape Maur the dragon alive ;).

Personally I think that natural language systems are a very important research area, both for regular human-machine interaction and AI (in fact, I believe these define a spectrum, but that's a WHOLE 'nuther discussion). Say you do manage to establish a Friendly AI along the lines of Lem's Golem (thanks to other posters for the links). How do you begin to communicate with it if you haven't already put work into natural language comprehension and Turing-like blackbox human seeming expression? It can't be infinitely intelligent, after all, and to start with it'll be more like (some barely imaginable Friendly AI version of) a child. It seems like people assume anything smart enough to be called "AI" will automatically understand how to make itself known to us. I don't see it that way.

Even though contests like the Loebner prize may not lead to "real" AI, they help develop useful adjuncts to it, as well as tools for more immediately useful machine interfaces. People get all amped about speech interfaces and such even for regular old computers; where do you think that work is going to magically spring from? It's a long hard incremental path.

Very interesting - I don't suppose you could summarise how Loebner changed the rules after that?

I imagine Whalen's entry was based on CHAT, which I played with an older version of back in the early nineties when I was a psych undergrad at Carleton and was fortunate to know co-creator Andrew Patrick through the NCF. CHAT was/is a project at the Communications Research Centre of Industry Canada. You could reach it in those days from Hypertelnet (I think I was the first person to escape Maur the dragon alive ;).

Personally I think that natural language systems are a very important research area, both for regular human-machine interaction and AI (in fact, I believe these define a spectrum, but that's a WHOLE 'nuther discussion). Say you do manage to establish a Friendly AI along the lines of Lem's Golem (thanks to other posters for the links). How do you begin to communicate with it if you haven't already put work into natural language comprehension and Turing-like blackbox human seeming expression? It can't be infinitely intelligent, after all, and to start with it'll be more like (some barely imaginable Friendly AI version of) a child. It seems like people assume anything smart enough to be called "AI" will automatically understand how to make itself known to us. I don't see it that way.

Even though contests like the Loebner prize may not lead to "real" AI, they help develop useful adjuncts to it, as well as tools for more immediately useful machine interfaces. People get all amped about speech interfaces and such even for regular old computers; where do you think that work is going to magically spring from? It's a long hard incremental path.

I agree that the entries are really bad-- one recent winner just said the same things no matter what the human asked. But one winner, unmentioned in Salon, was Thom Whalen, whose design was a genuine advance in the art. (Regrettably, Loebner changed the rules to exclude his approach in the future.)

What Whalen did was limit his domain to one topic, and compile a set of general answers to likely questions, which he matched by spotting keywords. So even if the answer wasn't a perfect match, it was general enough to be useful. This design should be better known and more widely used, and the Loebner contest would have been a good launchpad to bring it to people's attention if the academics weren't so prejudiced.

But the top academics get six-figure salaries for generating lots of jargon and no useful products, so a level playing-field is the last thing they want.

I would suggest Canadians start using the Canadian Communications Research Centre's servers. They do have the bandwidth, especially to University students (CA*Net III and other academic/research networks) who are probably a large amount of users of the Linux kernel.

Incidentally, just some of the files available via rsync from ftp.crc.ca (which, sadly, has an anon-ftp limit of 25 users):

Perl CPAN mirror
GNOME desktop and utilities
Linux HowTo's
KDE desktop and utilities
XFree86
ALSA Linux sound drivers
Debian Linux
Debian Linux ISO images
FreeBSD
Alexy Kuznetsov's IP Routing Tools for linux
Blackdown's port of JAVA for Linux
CRC's Linux Kernel Archive (I wonder if this is different from the standard kernel? they don't say "CRC's" on everything)
CRC's RedHat mirror
CRC's RedHat Contrib (interesting)
Slackware Linux
SUSE Linux
TurboLinux
CRC's VQEG Digital Video Experiments
CRC's XAnim mirror

So if you are Canadian and use any of these software packages (or the others on the page I linked), PLEASE use this site, it's extremely fast on broadband and even more so to university students. I used it for my Debian packages until they dropped the limit on FTP users. Maybe if I ask real nice they'll give me a login....

The site itself is interesting too. Neat stuff.

--Dan

I would suggest Canadians start using the Canadian Communications Research Centre's servers. They do have the bandwidth, especially to University students (CA*Net III and other academic/research networks) who are probably a large amount of users of the Linux kernel.

Incidentally, just some of the files available via rsync from ftp.crc.ca (which, sadly, has an anon-ftp limit of 25 users):

Perl CPAN mirror
GNOME desktop and utilities
Linux HowTo's
KDE desktop and utilities
XFree86
ALSA Linux sound drivers
Debian Linux
Debian Linux ISO images
FreeBSD
Alexy Kuznetsov's IP Routing Tools for linux
Blackdown's port of JAVA for Linux
CRC's Linux Kernel Archive (I wonder if this is different from the standard kernel? they don't say "CRC's" on everything)
CRC's RedHat mirror
CRC's RedHat Contrib (interesting)
Slackware Linux
SUSE Linux
TurboLinux
CRC's VQEG Digital Video Experiments
CRC's XAnim mirror

So if you are Canadian and use any of these software packages (or the others on the page I linked), PLEASE use this site, it's extremely fast on broadband and even more so to university students. I used it for my Debian packages until they dropped the limit on FTP users. Maybe if I ask real nice they'll give me a login....

The site itself is interesting too. Neat stuff.

--Dan

I would suggest Canadians start using the Canadian Communications Research Centre's servers. They do have the bandwidth, especially to University students (CA*Net III and other academic/research networks) who are probably a large amount of users of the Linux kernel.

Incidentally, just some of the files available via rsync from ftp.crc.ca (which, sadly, has an anon-ftp limit of 25 users):

Perl CPAN mirror
GNOME desktop and utilities
Linux HowTo's
KDE desktop and utilities
XFree86
ALSA Linux sound drivers
Debian Linux
Debian Linux ISO images
FreeBSD
Alexy Kuznetsov's IP Routing Tools for linux
Blackdown's port of JAVA for Linux
CRC's Linux Kernel Archive (I wonder if this is different from the standard kernel? they don't say "CRC's" on everything)
CRC's RedHat mirror
CRC's RedHat Contrib (interesting)
Slackware Linux
SUSE Linux
TurboLinux
CRC's VQEG Digital Video Experiments
CRC's XAnim mirror

So if you are Canadian and use any of these software packages (or the others on the page I linked), PLEASE use this site, it's extremely fast on broadband and even more so to university students. I used it for my Debian packages until they dropped the limit on FTP users. Maybe if I ask real nice they'll give me a login....

The site itself is interesting too. Neat stuff.

--Dan

And I hate to point this part out, too, but not only are we not nearly as controversial; we got there first. I'm pretty certain there's actually even a trademark on the name.

[ looks ]

Yep. 1986.

And for the anal-retentives in the audience, yeah, I think a court would accept a dilution argument, given the close association of the problem spaces.

Cheers,
-- jra
-----

"ri" in katakana
"n" in katakana

"ri" in katakana
"n" in katakana

ftp://ftp.crc.ca/mirrors/by-site/rh-mirror.redhat. com/redhat/redhat-6.1/iso/6.1-i386 .iso