Currently running 96% spam at home! Fortunately, I'm running POPFile which identifies 99% of it. Then Eudora moves it to my trash folder. Still, it's VERY annoying - I'm thinking of moving to a white list.
Worked for AT&T Bell Labs in the mid-80's including a project developing voice recognition dialing for wireless telephony. Project was canned after a new VP decided that there was no future in wireless telephony! AT&T got out of the business, only to have to pay billions for McCaw to get back in years later. I see that after all these years, the quality of management has not changed much.
Demand for our product is down so we'll make up for it by raising the price... hmmm, sounds like the economists for the former Soviet Union all went to work for the recording industry.
I worked at Bell Labs in Columbus, OH for ten years when I first got out of school. Great place, interesting work, and lots of very smart people. Most of the folks I knew there are gone. When AT&T split into AT&T / Lucent, the Columbus Labs went with Lucent. The management of Lucent then proceeded to run the company into the ground. The dotcom bust and telecom implosion (i.e. Worldcom) didn't help either.
Today the Lucent branch of Bell Labs is a shadow of it's former greatness. It's ranks have been decimated, and most of what's left is being shipped overseas. A rather sad and undeserving epitaph for what was once one of America's premier R&D institutions.
P.S. For any BTL alumni out there - I worked in area 59 - on speech recognition in Conversant, and then on DCS (the Display Construnction Set) - a UIMS for network management.
My favorite sci-fi/fantasy series about a law firm is 'Angel'. But it's about an eeeevilllll law firm (is that redundant, or what) called 'Wolfram & Hart'. Apart from that, I'm tired of television's endless stream of doctor / lawyer / cop / reality shows. Probably why I don't watch much TV anymore.
Apple has 2% of the worldwide market and 3% of the U.S. market. Anti-trust authorities are concerned with (or should be) maintaining a level competitive playing field. At 2% of the market, Apple does not have the clout to unilaterally set prices, and to tie unrelated products to achieve unfair competitive advantages. Microsoft does and has been judged guilty of doing do (in the U.S.).
Sure, for any company X, I can say the company dominates 100% of the X market, which while true, is also meaningless.
Why doesn't Apple get any heat for including iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, QuickTime, Safari, etc?
Because Apple doesn't control 90+ percent of the desktop. Because Apple isn't trying to leverage an OS monopoly into other market segments. Because Apple doesn't have a history of trying to "cut off the oxygen supply" to their competitors through use of monopoly.
I had a rental car once that had a 'voice'. I simply found unsolicited speech by a car to be annoying (and I was working on a speech recognition project at that time). The machine starts talking - it has no context. It doesn't know what your doing, whether you're ready to attend to it, or if you already have the information. On my speech recognition project, it seemed more acceptable, because the system was responding to my requests - the information (presented as text-to-speech) was solicited.
A Doctor Who episode The Robots of Death has a sub-plot involving 'robophobia'. It was a mental (illness) condition broguht on by close contact with entities that looked and acted human but had no emotions or expressions and were impossible for humans to 'read'. Of course, that's fiction. However, in the 1980's car makers added a 'feature' to luxury cars, where the car would 'speak' to the driver and passengers. ("A door is ajar! A door is ajar!"). People hated this, and it was quickly abandoned. I briefly had a rental car with a 'voice' - and found it annoying. I'm not sure that making machines look a little bit human is a good thing.
Flunkie: Mr Gates the EU is fining us 100 million Euros... Gates:... no response... Flunkie: Mr. Gates, did you hear me; 100 million! Gates: Yeah, yeah, hold on a sec... Flunkie: Ummm, Mr. Gates... Gates: Hang on, I've got one more sofa cushion to go... OK, there you go... 100 million!
You didn't say what you're planning to study. If it's IT - before you spend $XX,XXX dollars, you should first read any of the dozens of Slashdot threads on outsourcing and offshoring.
I'm in the midst of upgrading a SQL Server 2000 installation. MS issued their latest patch in August - a mere 56 MB patch. Hopefully that will fix some of the flakiness I've been seeing.
Ribosomes are essentially molecular assemblers that build proteins out of amino acids using instructions from messenger RNA (originally transcribed from the DNA in the nucleus). So, it's not only possible, your cells are doing it as you read this.
Jon Bentley - "Programming Pearls" and "More Programming Pearls". Also, Fred Brooks - The Mythical Man Month (unfortunately most managers have not heard of this). Bentley had articles in the CACM for a while. "The Psychology of Computer Programming" and "The Design of Everyday Things" are worth a read. Everyone should have (or have access to) Knuth's multi-volume set. Also, anything by Kernighan and Robb Pike.
More recently, "Design Patterns" by the gang of four, and Fowler's "Refactoring" are must reads.
Tandem (bought by Compaq, bought by HP) FT boxes (both Unix and Non-Stop OS) had the capability of literally phoning home (a Tandem monitoring center) to report the failure of a single component. Often a customer would be surprised when a service rep "spontaneously" showed up with a replacement part without being called by the customer.
Slashdot Mirror
(AD 2004)
Viewer: "Main screen turn on"
Screen: "All Your Bits Are Belong to Us!"
"You have no chance to record, make
your time!"
Viewer: "What you say?"
Time to get cracking on the calculation of how to reverse entropy (per Asimov).
Currently running 96% spam at home! Fortunately, I'm running POPFile which identifies 99% of it. Then Eudora moves it to my trash folder. Still, it's VERY annoying - I'm thinking of moving to a white list.
Worked for AT&T Bell Labs in the mid-80's including a project developing voice recognition dialing for wireless telephony. Project was canned after a new VP decided that there was no future in wireless telephony! AT&T got out of the business, only to have to pay billions for McCaw to get back in years later. I see that after all these years, the quality of management has not changed much.
Demand for our product is down so we'll make up for it by raising the price ... hmmm, sounds like the economists for the former Soviet Union all went to work for the recording industry.
Amen, brother
I worked at Bell Labs in Columbus, OH for ten years when I first got out of school. Great place, interesting work, and lots of very smart people. Most of the folks I knew there are gone. When AT&T split into AT&T / Lucent, the Columbus Labs went with Lucent. The management of Lucent then proceeded to run the company into the ground. The dotcom bust and telecom implosion (i.e. Worldcom) didn't help either.
Today the Lucent branch of Bell Labs is a shadow of it's former greatness. It's ranks have been decimated, and most of what's left is being shipped overseas. A rather sad and undeserving epitaph for what was once one of America's premier R&D institutions.
P.S. For any BTL alumni out there - I worked in area 59 - on speech recognition in Conversant, and then on DCS (the Display Construnction Set) - a UIMS for network management.
That does it! This is taking outsourcing way too far!
My favorite sci-fi/fantasy series about a law firm is 'Angel'. But it's about an eeeevilllll law firm (is that redundant, or what) called 'Wolfram & Hart'. Apart from that, I'm tired of television's endless stream of doctor / lawyer / cop / reality shows. Probably why I don't watch much TV anymore.
Apple has 2% of the worldwide market and 3% of the U.S. market. Anti-trust authorities are concerned with (or should be) maintaining a level competitive playing field. At 2% of the market, Apple does not have the clout to unilaterally set prices, and to tie unrelated products to achieve unfair competitive advantages. Microsoft does and has been judged guilty of doing do (in the U.S.).
Sure, for any company X, I can say the company dominates 100% of the X market, which while true, is also meaningless.
Why doesn't Apple get any heat for including iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, QuickTime, Safari, etc?
Because Apple doesn't control 90+ percent of the desktop. Because Apple isn't trying to leverage an OS monopoly into other market segments. Because Apple doesn't have a history of trying to "cut off the oxygen supply" to their competitors through use of monopoly.
I guess the Europeans won't be getting the default virus-scanner either.
Nope -just the default viruses.
Personally, I plan to take my $13.86 check and give the money to the EFF.
I had a rental car once that had a 'voice'. I simply found unsolicited speech by a car to be annoying (and I was working on a speech recognition project at that time). The machine starts talking - it has no context. It doesn't know what your doing, whether you're ready to attend to it, or if you already have the information. On my speech recognition project, it seemed more acceptable, because the system was responding to my requests - the information (presented as text-to-speech) was solicited.
A Doctor Who episode The Robots of Death has a sub-plot involving 'robophobia'. It was a mental (illness) condition broguht on by close contact with entities that looked and acted human but had no emotions or expressions and were impossible for humans to 'read'. Of course, that's fiction. However, in the 1980's car makers added a 'feature' to luxury cars, where the car would 'speak' to the driver and passengers. ("A door is ajar! A door is ajar!"). People hated this, and it was quickly abandoned. I briefly had a rental car with a 'voice' - and found it annoying. I'm not sure that making machines look a little bit human is a good thing.
Flunkie: Mr Gates the EU is fining us 100 million Euros ... ... no response ... ... ... ... OK, there you go ... 100 million!
Gates:
Flunkie: Mr. Gates, did you hear me; 100 million!
Gates: Yeah, yeah, hold on a sec
Flunkie: Ummm, Mr. Gates
Gates: Hang on, I've got one more sofa cushion to go
Imagine a beowolf cluster of ...
Oh! Never mind.
You didn't say what you're planning to study. If it's IT - before you spend $XX,XXX dollars, you should first read any of the dozens of Slashdot threads on outsourcing and offshoring.
You've got to remember that Ohio is a state that elected people like Dennis 'Tinfoil Hat' Kucinich and Jim 'Unmarked Twenties' Traficant.
I'm in the midst of upgrading a SQL Server 2000 installation. MS issued their latest patch in August - a mere 56 MB patch. Hopefully that will fix some of the flakiness I've been seeing.
Ribosomes are essentially molecular assemblers that build proteins out of amino acids using instructions from messenger RNA (originally transcribed from the DNA in the nucleus). So, it's not only possible, your cells are doing it as you read this.
1998
Q: What did the high school grad say to the Computer Science Major?
A: Would you like fries with that?
2003
Q: What did the high school grad say to the Computer Science Major?
A: You're supposed to ask them if they want fries with that!
Personally, I'm waiting for cabbits. But only the ones that transform into either spacecraft or mechas.
Jon Bentley - "Programming Pearls" and "More Programming Pearls". Also, Fred Brooks - The Mythical Man Month (unfortunately most managers have not heard of this). Bentley had articles in the CACM for a while. "The Psychology of Computer Programming" and "The Design of Everyday Things" are worth a read. Everyone should have (or have access to) Knuth's multi-volume set. Also, anything by Kernighan and Robb Pike.
More recently, "Design Patterns" by the gang of four, and Fowler's "Refactoring" are must reads.
Tandem (bought by Compaq, bought by HP) FT boxes (both Unix and Non-Stop OS) had the capability of literally phoning home (a Tandem monitoring center) to report the failure of a single component. Often a customer would be surprised when a service rep "spontaneously" showed up with a replacement part without being called by the customer.