Price an Apple computer against a competitors eq. computer. They will be pretty close.
Uh. Really? Howabout the MacBook Air? It's basically an Apple Netbook, but they won't call it that. There are plenty of sites explaining how to install MacOS onto price-cheaper Dell and getting basically the same thing. Just Google "Hackintosh Dell".
And this is proof that it's not something a tech-savvy person is actually required for. Sure, twiddle a few settings in the router's GUI, but that's about as advanced as it gets...
Once again showing that Apple products typically cost 2.5 to 3 times more than non-Apple equivalents.
I think AMD cards can pull more instructions/second on this kind of workload too; NVidia users lose out both ways.
It doesn't matter how many instructions per second... Different instructions will take different numbers of CPU/GPU cycles to perform.
The AC poster would have a better point if he said something like NVidia's 3 instructions to rotate also take more GPU cycles to perform than the AMD 1-instruction equivalent. As it stands, I don't know which one uses more GPU cycles in bit rotating, nor do I know what frequency the GPUs are running at. Without knowing those, it's impossible to estimate the speed at which each GPU would rotate bits and properly compare the GPUs.
So if they're coding that "whitespace separates words", then any text written in Mandarin will consist of sentences with one single word? Mandarin and many other Asian languages (other Chinese dialects, Korean, Japanese, Thai) do not use whitespace to indicate word boundary.
Look at the proceedings of any major NLP conference in the last five years (e.g. ACL 2011 or EMNLP 2010) and you'll find a number of papers on unsupervised word segmentation.
Thanks for the links; it is interesting to see what NLP conferences are talking about. That said, I didn't see many articles on unsupervised word segmentation...
I won't find language AI interesting until we have true language learning. Sure, this may be better than previous attempts at language AI, but when there are limiting assumptions built into the foundation of the code, I find it hard to believe that it will ever be able to "learn" any language.
Do you mean that? You won't even find AI interesting until we have solved the entire problem of language acquisition? I don't know about you, but problems strike me as much less interesting once we have solved them, and consider progress towards that solution extremely interesting.
I meant that I don't find language AI interesting when it starts learning with coded assumptions about the language. I just don't think it will be useful beyond the specific case they're programming for. I'd be a lot more interested in this/. story if they showed the win percentage increase across multiple languages.
My impression, from just LOOKING at Hiragana(?? The ideographic Japanese printing), was that they DID use spaces to separate words. And tended to use them frequently. Also to separate sentences, but larger spaces. (I'll grant that frequently the separation was left out, but not always. My guess was that it was put in to disambiguate.)
OTOH, the layout also seems to be a bit inconsistent. Even to sometimes being vertical and sometimes being horizontal. (I'm assuming that vertical is the older form, and that horizontal is much more recent. The same may be true for spacing.)
Can I ask what Hiragana you're looking at?
If you go to yahoo.jp, you'll see lots of Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji all mixed together. I didn't see many spaces between words or sentences. Note that Hiragana and Katakana are both phonetic alphabets, while Kanji refers to characters borrowed from Chinese. I've studied much less Japanese than Mandarin, but my understanding is that one Japanese word, depending on conjugation, can include one or more Kanji characters followed by any number of Hiragana letters.
The actual meaning doesn't matter. What matters is the fact that Mandarin requires special processing in order to determine the boundaries of a word. If one word (eg, "cellphone") gets broken out to two words ("hand" and "machine"), there is a much greater probability for it to infer the wrong meaning of the word(s).
An equivalent example in English might be "preposition"; breaking it down a bit we can get "pre" and "position". If the computer correctly infers that "pre" means "before" and position means "location", does that mean that "preposition" is the prior location of something? But this case doesn't come up with English, because our words are separated by spaces.
I like the simplicity of not having to worry about formations in Civ.
If you want formations and really in-depth strategy for battles, check out the Total War franchise of games. My little brother played Rome: TW endlessly, and my understanding is that Rome:TW is the best one in the franchise.
They do use separations, but in their own way. Each character is a self-contained unit, separated from the others by being a different character. Each character is comprised of 5 or so different sections, each with its own function.
You're partially right.
In Mandarin, each character is a self-contained unit, and is separate from others around it. The problem, though, is that one character is not always a complete word. If you look character-by-character, you'll break down multi-character words like "shou ji" (cellphone) to "hand" and "machine".
Further, there isn't one single way of constructing a character in Chinese; there are 6 ways. The only consistency is that in some ways, there are radicals that can be used to glean the general meaning (eg, san dian shui "three-dot-water" or shou zi pang "hand-character radical").
I'm not as familiar with other Asian languages, but my understanding is that one Korean character is constructed from an alphabet and only indicates one syllable -- again, not always a complete word.
Right, so because the journalist of the article picked the wrong screenshot, and because they likely told their software that whitespace seperates words, it must be bullshit.
Standard slashdot loser, trying so desperately to degrade the efforts of others to make himself feel better about his dead-end IT job.
Taken from the article itself:
But what would it mean for a computer to actually understand the meaning of a sentence written in ordinary English — or French, or Urdu, or Mandarin
So if they're coding that "whitespace separates words", then any text written in Mandarin will consist of sentences with one single word? Mandarin and many other Asian languages (other Chinese dialects, Korean, Japanese, Thai) do not use whitespace to indicate word boundary.
I won't find language AI interesting until we have true language learning. Sure, this may be better than previous attempts at language AI, but when there are limiting assumptions built into the foundation of the code, I find it hard to believe that it will ever be able to "learn" any language.
If no prior knowledge of the language is used, how is the program able to determine word boundaries? Perhaps they meant the domain-specific language (meaning vocabulary), for example "unit" and "cell"? Otherwise, there's a plethora of bits of knowledge about English grammar and structure that they probably coded into the AI...
I also find it junk that the web.mit.edu link posts a screenshot of Civ 5, when the AI they are discussing runs against Civ 2... My bullshit meter is starting to tickle.
I find this much easier to configure than the multi-page fun of privacy settings that is facebook.
The most fun privacy setting to find is the little check-box, hidden away from almost all other privacy settings, stating: My friends' apps can access any of my data, regardless of whether I use the app myself
(That's a paraphrase. I'm at work and don't want to log into my soon-to-be-deleted facebook account now.)
Also, this project is a much more noble cause than Gates'
misguided drive to immunize the world's population. The world's health care systems
would collapse unded the weight of all the new cases of Autism if
successful.
I may be dense, but I sure hope that's sarcasm. Autism has no relation to vaccination.
The article spurring that whole belief has been outed as a fabrication. Andrew Wakefield was attempting to push single-disease vaccination shots as a means of boosting pharmaceutical profits, so his "study" showed that only multi-disease vaccinations caused autism. I know it's Wikipedia, but check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine_controversy for a brief overview. Note the many citations to non-Wikipedia sources such as BMJ and the CDC.
Someone please tell me this was a Whooooosh moment and I missed the joke.
Who is better, the Christian that goes to church every Sunday and makes sure everyone knows he goes to church, or the Christian that doesn't always go to church, but volunteers at the soup kitchen downtown and tells nobody?
I don't see how this comparison works. The fact that they they do/don't go to church has no bearing on the charitable service/money they provide, and you've not indicated whether the first guy does anything for charity. So in the context of a debate about charity, I don't have enough facts to determine which one is "better".
What I can tell you is that the soup-kitchen guy is probably a criminal who is sentenced to a number of hours of community service... which is why he doesn't brag about it.
Ok. Kidding aside, I don't see the obsession with people physically going and helping at soup kitchens. That's more of a selfish act than anything else. Go to work for another hour and donate an hour's worth of salary money to pay for multiple people to work at the soup kitchen.
Sadly, I think a movie about Hungry Hungry Hippos would be more interesting.
All these aliens-invade-Earth movies get really old: aliens come to Earth with high-tech guns and start killing everyone, humans almost die off entirely, some hero with a hot girlfriend kill off all the aliens, hero and girlfriend repopulate the Earth...
If they did a "Triple-H" movie, they could mix it up: Hippos surround every major city and bounce people between each other devouring them as they get close, humans almost die off entirely, some hero with a hot girlfriend kills off all the hippos, hero and girlfriend repopulate the Earth...
Well done, sir. This is one of the best/. comments I've read in a while. It makes one humorous point after the other, and each point makes perfect sense. But at the end of the comment, I'm left wondering what sense any of it made at all.
While I agree with you that we should have more outfits like GOG.com, Steam is a lot better than some of the other DRM out there. It's incredibly easy to break, doesn't install false drivers, allows offline backup/restore and play of games, etc. And the good thing is that once you break it for one game, you've basically broken it for all the games. (The exception is the few games that also include other DRM.)
The only thing that I wish Steam would allow is transfer of games between accounts; gifting of a "used" copy of a game to a friend, for example... But they're more interested in capturing the money by restricting resale.
To be clear: DRM sucks, but when I have to choose a form of DRM in order to get a game, I choose Steam over the others.
There are several other routers that support various 3rd party firmware but we haven't seen anything else that does so as solidly as the GL.
I think you have that backward. The hardware doesn't support any 3rd-party firmware. The 3rd-party firmware supports the GL hardware. The reasons that so many firmwares support the GL is probably due to its cheap cost and wide distribution.
Well Thunderbird doesn't even support that much. Also the webmail interface to certain Exchange versions does not have all the functionality if you use a browser other than IE.
And to support you with an example: OWA 2003 only offers search functionality to IE users.
Are you sure it's a good idea to tell a linux-newb to start using all sorts of hard drive diagnostic and recovery tools from a LiveCD? Most of those tools have disclaimers: "If you don't know what you're doing, don't use this. Any damage you do is your own fault" (paraphrased). So yes, he wouldn't be installing another operating system, but that doesn't mean he wouldn't be causing damage to his disk...
University of Nebraska at Lincoln? University of Nebraska at Omaha? Or the whole University of Nebraska system? There're more than one University of Nebraska...
The problem with your assertion is that rogue antivirus targets home users, where the unsavvy user is required to also be administrator. Or are you suggesting that the average user pays some service like Geek Squad to administrate the user's home computer? That sounds like it's an even bigger waste of money...
Slashdot Mirror
That argument is pretty much dead.
Price an Apple computer against a competitors eq. computer. They will be pretty close.
Uh. Really? Howabout the MacBook Air? It's basically an Apple Netbook, but they won't call it that. There are plenty of sites explaining how to install MacOS onto price-cheaper Dell and getting basically the same thing. Just Google "Hackintosh Dell".
Base price of a MacBook Air: $1000
Price of a hackintosh-friendly Dell Mini 9: $400
Result: $1000 = $400 * 2.5
Site: http://gizmodo.com/5156903/how-to-hackintosh-a-dell-mini-9-into-the-ultimate-os-x-netbook
Granted it's from 2 years ago, but there's plenty describing hackintoshing the Dell Mini 10v. A quick search found one as recent as Jan 2 this year.
Intelligent. Not bitchy.
You think anything intelligent would get caught dead near any of us /.ers? :-P
And this is proof that it's not something a tech-savvy person is actually required for. Sure, twiddle a few settings in the router's GUI, but that's about as advanced as it gets...
Once again showing that Apple products typically cost 2.5 to 3 times more than non-Apple equivalents.
I wonder how durable the devices are...
Probably about as durable as Jell-O
I think AMD cards can pull more instructions/second on this kind of workload too; NVidia users lose out both ways.
It doesn't matter how many instructions per second... Different instructions will take different numbers of CPU/GPU cycles to perform.
The AC poster would have a better point if he said something like NVidia's 3 instructions to rotate also take more GPU cycles to perform than the AMD 1-instruction equivalent. As it stands, I don't know which one uses more GPU cycles in bit rotating, nor do I know what frequency the GPUs are running at. Without knowing those, it's impossible to estimate the speed at which each GPU would rotate bits and properly compare the GPUs.
The number of instructions does not directly equate to the computing time required to perform the operations.
So if they're coding that "whitespace separates words", then any text written in Mandarin will consist of sentences with one single word? Mandarin and many other Asian languages (other Chinese dialects, Korean, Japanese, Thai) do not use whitespace to indicate word boundary.
Look at the proceedings of any major NLP conference in the last five years (e.g. ACL 2011 or EMNLP 2010) and you'll find a number of papers on unsupervised word segmentation.
Thanks for the links; it is interesting to see what NLP conferences are talking about. That said, I didn't see many articles on unsupervised word segmentation...
I won't find language AI interesting until we have true language learning. Sure, this may be better than previous attempts at language AI, but when there are limiting assumptions built into the foundation of the code, I find it hard to believe that it will ever be able to "learn" any language.
Do you mean that? You won't even find AI interesting until we have solved the entire problem of language acquisition? I don't know about you, but problems strike me as much less interesting once we have solved them, and consider progress towards that solution extremely interesting.
I meant that I don't find language AI interesting when it starts learning with coded assumptions about the language. I just don't think it will be useful beyond the specific case they're programming for. I'd be a lot more interested in this /. story if they showed the win percentage increase across multiple languages.
My impression, from just LOOKING at Hiragana(?? The ideographic Japanese printing), was that they DID use spaces to separate words. And tended to use them frequently. Also to separate sentences, but larger spaces. (I'll grant that frequently the separation was left out, but not always. My guess was that it was put in to disambiguate.)
OTOH, the layout also seems to be a bit inconsistent. Even to sometimes being vertical and sometimes being horizontal. (I'm assuming that vertical is the older form, and that horizontal is much more recent. The same may be true for spacing.)
Can I ask what Hiragana you're looking at?
If you go to yahoo.jp, you'll see lots of Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji all mixed together. I didn't see many spaces between words or sentences. Note that Hiragana and Katakana are both phonetic alphabets, while Kanji refers to characters borrowed from Chinese. I've studied much less Japanese than Mandarin, but my understanding is that one Japanese word, depending on conjugation, can include one or more Kanji characters followed by any number of Hiragana letters.
The actual meaning doesn't matter. What matters is the fact that Mandarin requires special processing in order to determine the boundaries of a word. If one word (eg, "cellphone") gets broken out to two words ("hand" and "machine"), there is a much greater probability for it to infer the wrong meaning of the word(s).
An equivalent example in English might be "preposition"; breaking it down a bit we can get "pre" and "position". If the computer correctly infers that "pre" means "before" and position means "location", does that mean that "preposition" is the prior location of something? But this case doesn't come up with English, because our words are separated by spaces.
I like the simplicity of not having to worry about formations in Civ.
If you want formations and really in-depth strategy for battles, check out the Total War franchise of games. My little brother played Rome: TW endlessly, and my understanding is that Rome:TW is the best one in the franchise.
They do use separations, but in their own way. Each character is a self-contained unit, separated from the others by being a different character. Each character is comprised of 5 or so different sections, each with its own function.
You're partially right.
In Mandarin, each character is a self-contained unit, and is separate from others around it. The problem, though, is that one character is not always a complete word. If you look character-by-character, you'll break down multi-character words like "shou ji" (cellphone) to "hand" and "machine".
Further, there isn't one single way of constructing a character in Chinese; there are 6 ways. The only consistency is that in some ways, there are radicals that can be used to glean the general meaning (eg, san dian shui "three-dot-water" or shou zi pang "hand-character radical").
I'm not as familiar with other Asian languages, but my understanding is that one Korean character is constructed from an alphabet and only indicates one syllable -- again, not always a complete word.
Right, so because the journalist of the article picked the wrong screenshot, and because they likely told their software that whitespace seperates words, it must be bullshit.
Standard slashdot loser, trying so desperately to degrade the efforts of others to make himself feel better about his dead-end IT job.
Taken from the article itself:
But what would it mean for a computer to actually understand the meaning of a sentence written in ordinary English — or French, or Urdu, or Mandarin
So if they're coding that "whitespace separates words", then any text written in Mandarin will consist of sentences with one single word? Mandarin and many other Asian languages (other Chinese dialects, Korean, Japanese, Thai) do not use whitespace to indicate word boundary.
I won't find language AI interesting until we have true language learning. Sure, this may be better than previous attempts at language AI, but when there are limiting assumptions built into the foundation of the code, I find it hard to believe that it will ever be able to "learn" any language.
If no prior knowledge of the language is used, how is the program able to determine word boundaries? Perhaps they meant the domain-specific language (meaning vocabulary), for example "unit" and "cell"? Otherwise, there's a plethora of bits of knowledge about English grammar and structure that they probably coded into the AI...
I also find it junk that the web.mit.edu link posts a screenshot of Civ 5, when the AI they are discussing runs against Civ 2... My bullshit meter is starting to tickle.
I find this much easier to configure than the multi-page fun of privacy settings that is facebook.
The most fun privacy setting to find is the little check-box, hidden away from almost all other privacy settings, stating: My friends' apps can access any of my data, regardless of whether I use the app myself
(That's a paraphrase. I'm at work and don't want to log into my soon-to-be-deleted facebook account now.)
Also, this project is a much more noble cause than Gates' misguided drive to immunize the world's population. The world's health care systems would collapse unded the weight of all the new cases of Autism if successful.
I may be dense, but I sure hope that's sarcasm. Autism has no relation to vaccination.
The article spurring that whole belief has been outed as a fabrication. Andrew Wakefield was attempting to push single-disease vaccination shots as a means of boosting pharmaceutical profits, so his "study" showed that only multi-disease vaccinations caused autism. I know it's Wikipedia, but check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine_controversy for a brief overview. Note the many citations to non-Wikipedia sources such as BMJ and the CDC.
Someone please tell me this was a Whooooosh moment and I missed the joke.
Who is better, the Christian that goes to church every Sunday and makes sure everyone knows he goes to church, or the Christian that doesn't always go to church, but volunteers at the soup kitchen downtown and tells nobody?
I don't see how this comparison works. The fact that they they do/don't go to church has no bearing on the charitable service/money they provide, and you've not indicated whether the first guy does anything for charity. So in the context of a debate about charity, I don't have enough facts to determine which one is "better".
What I can tell you is that the soup-kitchen guy is probably a criminal who is sentenced to a number of hours of community service... which is why he doesn't brag about it.
Ok. Kidding aside, I don't see the obsession with people physically going and helping at soup kitchens. That's more of a selfish act than anything else. Go to work for another hour and donate an hour's worth of salary money to pay for multiple people to work at the soup kitchen.
the dirty tricks that the printer manufacturers play now are bad. What will happen when your printer's solar cell cartridge runs low?
Sadly, I think a movie about Hungry Hungry Hippos would be more interesting.
All these aliens-invade-Earth movies get really old: aliens come to Earth with high-tech guns and start killing everyone, humans almost die off entirely, some hero with a hot girlfriend kill off all the aliens, hero and girlfriend repopulate the Earth...
If they did a "Triple-H" movie, they could mix it up: Hippos surround every major city and bounce people between each other devouring them as they get close, humans almost die off entirely, some hero with a hot girlfriend kills off all the hippos, hero and girlfriend repopulate the Earth...
Well done, sir. This is one of the best /. comments I've read in a while. It makes one humorous point after the other, and each point makes perfect sense. But at the end of the comment, I'm left wondering what sense any of it made at all.
While I agree with you that we should have more outfits like GOG.com, Steam is a lot better than some of the other DRM out there. It's incredibly easy to break, doesn't install false drivers, allows offline backup/restore and play of games, etc. And the good thing is that once you break it for one game, you've basically broken it for all the games. (The exception is the few games that also include other DRM.)
The only thing that I wish Steam would allow is transfer of games between accounts; gifting of a "used" copy of a game to a friend, for example... But they're more interested in capturing the money by restricting resale.
To be clear: DRM sucks, but when I have to choose a form of DRM in order to get a game, I choose Steam over the others.
There are several other routers that support various 3rd party firmware but we haven't seen anything else that does so as solidly as the GL.
I think you have that backward. The hardware doesn't support any 3rd-party firmware. The 3rd-party firmware supports the GL hardware. The reasons that so many firmwares support the GL is probably due to its cheap cost and wide distribution.
Well Thunderbird doesn't even support that much. Also the webmail interface to certain Exchange versions does not have all the functionality if you use a browser other than IE.
And to support you with an example: OWA 2003 only offers search functionality to IE users.
Are you sure it's a good idea to tell a linux-newb to start using all sorts of hard drive diagnostic and recovery tools from a LiveCD? Most of those tools have disclaimers: "If you don't know what you're doing, don't use this. Any damage you do is your own fault" (paraphrased). So yes, he wouldn't be installing another operating system, but that doesn't mean he wouldn't be causing damage to his disk...
University of Nebraska at Lincoln? University of Nebraska at Omaha? Or the whole University of Nebraska system? There're more than one University of Nebraska...
The problem with your assertion is that rogue antivirus targets home users, where the unsavvy user is required to also be administrator. Or are you suggesting that the average user pays some service like Geek Squad to administrate the user's home computer? That sounds like it's an even bigger waste of money...