Slashdot Mirror


User: hoytak

hoytak's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
140
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 140

  1. One step closer to their dream... on Low-Latency Network Shaves Milliseconds from UK-Asia Traffic · · Score: 1

    ... of being able to outsource the high speed trading decisions to countries with lower labor costs, thus saving millions and increasing shareholder value.

  2. Re:Dang! on Seagulls Spreading Resistant Bacteria On Beaches · · Score: 1

    you should go snipe hunting, they are tasty little birds

    Be careful with this advice, people. I tried that, and the nasty little buggers chewed right through my tennis shoes and gave me some nasty scars before I could whack them to death. Those things are evil, depraved spawns of the devil himself. You only hunt them if you're strong, fast, and scared of nothing. And I mean nothing.

    But heck, if it weren't for snipes, Iowa would be truly boring. Everyone there has a good story about them, as if it's a rite of passage. Me? I'll stick to my seagulls, thank you.

  3. Dang! on Seagulls Spreading Resistant Bacteria On Beaches · · Score: 4, Funny

    I guess I should stop hunting these free-range seagulls for food. I've heard the farm-raised variety is tastier anyway, but I haven't yet found a cheap supplier.

    Disclaimer: I work for a major fast food chain...

  4. Re:Maybe... on Pirate Party Wins Seat In Berlin · · Score: 1

    ...others can copy their strategy?

    as long as they don't patent it as a business method.

  5. Re:Here is "dickhead's" fact-based reply then on Serious Crypto Bug Found In PHP 5.3.7 · · Score: 1

    Steve, I know you're pretty animated on stage, but it's just not the same when you're only using boldface and caps.

  6. Re:$32 for the results of public funded research on Hotspot Found On Moon's Far Side · · Score: 1

    Not quite the same thing, but closer: http://meteorites.wustl.edu/abstracts/lpsc42/a_l11j02.pdf

  7. Re:Anonymous social networking. on Anonymous Creates Its Own Social Network · · Score: 1
  8. Re:Happy Birthday IBM on IBM Turns 100 · · Score: 2

    I'd disagree, It seems there's a steady stream of articles in IEEE or other magazines about cool research that IBM is doing (e.g. http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-06-ibm-graphene-based-circuit.html). I think the issue is that the current problems driving innovation in companies as big as IBM are much more technical and thus more difficult to explain to a general audience, except as "20% faster" or other forgettable phrases. I suspect there's a lot of cool stuff going on.

  9. Re:Come on! on Microsoft Demos C++ AMP At AMD Developers Summit · · Score: 1

    In response to your comment, Microsoft just announced the release of the Microsoft Pony(tm) Acquisition Suite. "Pony(tm) is designed to provide developers with a solution oriented roadmap for their every need and desire, as quickly as possible; this is the fulfillment of their every dream," announced Steve Ballmer. Critics, however, denounce Pony(tm) as a ripoff of Eliza, with the phrase "We will provide that within 6 months." inserted liberally in the responses.

  10. Re:I Can Has Subject Title? on Judge Prevents 23,322 Filesharing Does From Being Sued For Now · · Score: 1

    It's the new slogan of the pirate bay, similar to Motorola's "Droid Does" slogan. The 23322 is elite speak for zeezz, but you'd have to get them to explain that one.

  11. Re:Are any of these actually useful? on National Academies Release Over 4,000 Free Science Books · · Score: 2

    Err, make that "less broad." I really shouldn't have had that last coffee; it just makes my submit button spontaneously pressable.

  12. Re:Are any of these actually useful? on National Academies Release Over 4,000 Free Science Books · · Score: 1

    Err, make that "math, chemistry, and physics", which is even more broad.

  13. Re:Are any of these actually useful? on National Academies Release Over 4,000 Free Science Books · · Score: 1

    That's cause it's in the general "math, chemistry, and science" category which is full of books that apply to all three. You have to go to the specific categories to get the good stuff.

  14. Re:This is a problem. on Sprint Pushes FPS NOVA With Firmware — and Users Can't Remove It · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I've got a samsung epic with sprint, and really like it. Two things, though:

    1. Install Advanced Task Killer app. it periodically kills things like this when they run in the back ground. Usually, they don't restart once they are killed. After first booting the phone up, it usually kills 16-18 or so of these crapware apps. Most don't run again.

    2. If you root your phone (your call), you can uninstall all these apps. In fact, there are programs to do that.

  15. Re:Hear her out on New Book Reports Soviets Behind Roswell UFO Scare · · Score: 1

    Ah.... a nice example of knowing what would sell.

    In other words, she doesn't have to believe it to understand how people think about this, and it's likely a lot of readers will see it as a work of fiction, buy it, and be entertained. In other words, she seems successful as an author here.

  16. Re:In other news.. on Amazon Servers Used In Sony Playstation Hack · · Score: 1

    Rather, it's like they were using Amazon Fresh when they suddenly learned this: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=876#comic

  17. Been here a while... on Bin Laden Hideout Recreated In Counter-Strike · · Score: 1

    "Honestly, we're a little surprised that it took this long."

    Eh, it just took that long for military intelligence to get it declassified.

  18. In other news on Marking 125 Years Since the Great Gauge Change · · Score: 1

    "This month ends with the -125th anniversary of one of the most remarkable achievements in the technology future. Over two days beginning Monday, May 31, 2136, the gui manager for the linux desktop was converted from the old-earth version one to one compatible with the slightly narrower one used in the space federation. The shift was meticulously planned and executed. It required one side of every gui to be moved three inches closer to the other. All font sets had to be adjusted as well. Some minor animations and rolling stock were sensibly deferred until later, but by Wednesday, the 11,500 megaline code base was back in business and able to exchange screenshots with the rest of the world. Other operating systems are still struggling with incompatible interfaces. MicrApple still has two. Most of the solar system runs linux, but the outer planets use essentially the same gui gauge as old earth and CmdrTaco and timothy use an even broader gui size. Alpha centari has a multi-year Project Unigui, aimed at converting its narrow gui lines to the federation's five foot six inch standard."

  19. Re:I'm going to be rich and famous on Robotic "Tongue" Lets You French Kiss Over The Internet · · Score: 1

    STAB, dude, STAB. Epic nerd culture reference fail. I hereby condemn you to reading 500 randomly chosen bash.org quotes.

    (ref: http://bash.org/?4281).

  20. SVMs vs. LDA on Are 625 Pixels Enough To Identify Sex? · · Score: 4, Informative

    The algorithm is also interesting in that it proves that an older and fundamental pattern recognition technique - linear discriminant analysis is just as good as the more trendy Support Vector Machines if used correctly and much more efficient.

    A bit of clarity might be useful here. Support vector machines use linear discriminants as the central part of the algorithm. These linear discriminates -- simply hyperplanes separating two regions, are defined by a subset of the data points (called the support vectors). The other key part of an SVM is that it projects the data into a high-dimensional space in which hyperplanes can appear as curves or other shapes in the original space. This higher dimensional space is determined from the data using distances between the points in the data set (it's a kernel space).

    The net result of all this is that SVMs are pretty much guaranteed to always perform better in terms of misclassification error than a simple linear discriminant, as every possible linear discriminant is considered in building the SVM. But it can be slower, and it can overfit.

    So what's going on here? Linear discriminant analysis is an old statistical technique (1930s) that fixes a hyperplane based on distributional assumptions about the two classes. This allows the two classes to be plotted in a simple histogram by projecting them to the normal of this hyperplane, as shown in the picture in the article. It's used all over in statistics, and it works very well when dealing with two symmetric Gaussian distributions (that's what the theory assumes).

    Thus the reason it works well here is that they've managed to transform their data in such a way that the two classes look like this sort of distribution. That's the insight here, not the choice of classifier. When the simplest model works, more complex techniques will overfit, meaning that you train on noise instead of the underlying structure of the data.

  21. Re:filter on Groklaw: Microsoft Cloud Services Aren't FISMA Certified · · Score: 2

    Ok, done. Now what?

  22. i guess on Flash On Android Fails To Impress · · Score: 1

    .... it's just not flashy enough.

    Or is that too Flash-y?

  23. Re:And now there are TWO gaps! on New Dinosaur Species Is a Missing Link · · Score: 1

    It's the key idea of "The Bisection of the Species", a book written by Darwin's lesser-known great-great-great-grandson who studied computer science. Incidently, they both had similar beards.

  24. Re:Japan to raise severity level of Fukushima acci on Fukushima: What Happened and What Needs To Be Done · · Score: 1

    Fair enough, and my summary was an unfair and misleading simplification of things. Thanks for the clarification. However, the fundamental difference between Chernobyl and Fukushima Daiichi, which I should have pointed out first, is this: With Chernobyl, virtually all of the fissionable material was sent into the atmosphere because of the lack of a proper containment structure and the graphite moderator / fuel burning. Here, however, 99.9% of it is still in the containment structure.

  25. Re:Japan to raise severity level of Fukushima acci on Fukushima: What Happened and What Needs To Be Done · · Score: 4, Informative

    This comparison is misleading, even if the raw amounts of radiation are comparable. The radioactive materials released from Fukushima Daiichi when those readings were taken have a half-life of minutes and don't pose a health hazard outside of the really close vicinity. The materials released from Chernobyl were much more dangerous, as they have a half-life of a couple hundred years, and only negligible amounts of those have been released from Fukushima.

    Bottom line: this accident is not at all like Chernobyl, even though the "OMG RADIATION SPEWING FROM REACTORS!!!!!!" media likes to think so.