Microsoft is sitting on a $38 billion pile of cash.
$6 million is 0.15 cents on the dollar.
Ralph Nader says this cash pile is distortion of capitalism.
Traditionally companies pay out dividends once they have grown into profitibility.
The stockholders are being screwed.
I thought it was technically the best F/X movie of the year, even though its story was somewhat lame. A recent thread here said the FF animation house is now gone.
Nothing illustrates the two cultures dichotomy in the US than two contrast between the neighbors Harvard and MIT in Cambridge MA.
This week's Business Week has the new president of Harvard Larry Summers on the cover. Dr. Summers has been controversial about shaking up things at Harvard. Claims graduates are not getting enough exposure to scientific ideas.
Ironically Dr. Summers, an economist, got his B.S. at MIT.
Do you people who can't tell you what a quadratic formula is or locate Afghanistan on globe to be teaching your children? Some of skill sets of people going through four year teacher colleges with 800 combine SATs are dreadful.
Back in the late 1970s Carver Mead of CalTech and Lynn Conway of Xerox PARC computerized the design of integrated circuit chips. Before them chips were designed by mechanical drawing and hand-taped photo-masks. This often resulted in spaghetti-looking chip circuits. Mead & Conway reduced chip design to a hierachical set of physics and geometry issues, and wrote a compiler to issue these from higher level descriptions. Chip design was then transformed more-or-less into a computer language. People then added optimization and simulation-testing tools to further automate the process. It got so simple that chip design labs were offered in engineering colleges with same-semester turn-around. Some guy in my class twenty years ago designed a "homogeneous coordinate multiplier" which become the geometry engine of a startup called Silicon Graphics.
UNIX (or Linux) can be as transparent as you want it, if you want to put lots of intelligence in a storage driver. It wouldn't matter in principle where the data was on tape or disk. You could have just one monster file storage device. In practice large applications want some control to increase efficiency.
Mainframes got very sophisticated in automating this. It was also somewhat difficult to program commands in IBMs or DECs data-definition languages. Much of this was lost in downsizing to personal workstations and is being rediscovered again.
Escpecially as you get older.
A new-brand insurere like ACM or Blue cross is
about $120 * age-in-years per year when all the deductables and co-pays are factored in.
Someone in their 50s may be looking at $6-7K per adult in their family. 20-somethings may just need a couple thousand a year.
If you buy something from one those street-poster ads, or a company you never heard of, you will never get a claim paid.
Matt Damon's movie Rainmaker is about this.
The average 401K isn't very large.
People with families and average paying
jobs save just enough for the match if they
can spare at all.
Techies becoming school teachers
on
The Laid-off Techie
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Todays NY Times (free registration required) reports that teacher applications are up 45% this year. Many districts have a fast-track program of teaching after a couple intro courses, although you have to takes about a years worth of courses for certification eventually. In the L.A. area where I have some teacher friends, pay starts about $3000 a month and hits $6000 after a dozen years. (This is for a nine-month year where you moonlight or vacation in the summer.) Same thing happened during the 91-94 recession.
Dont get me wrong. I've greatly enjoyed PG websites, books and photos. However, his attitude comes across as "I'm so much smarter than everyone else" when creating his web design business and his computer school. This attitude, which was pretty common at MIT and in the dot.com era may be good for getting new ventures started, but not for sustaining them. We all got to work together sometime.
IT appeared to be a selection of MIT CS courses in one year, from the syllabi on the web. Many of the courses appeared to be little different from those at MIT (I took the MIT ones) and many of the instructors had MIT backgrounds.
The AD course were taught in intensive serial fashion at a month each.
My guess is the MIT OpenCourseware initiative wil put a similar range on the web in upcoming years. The first installment will be this autumn according to the MIT site. (If bore through MIT's online course catalog, many syllabi are already on the web.)
The benefits of a MIT education, tempered by real-world experience, without the MIT prices, and without the MIT diploma.
Despite its flaws it is much better than anything
MicroSoft has had before from a developer's viewpoint.
It makes it easy to write money-making apps on the worlds large operating system.
I heard them speak in Palo Alto about 20 years ago. Xerox PARC latched onto their ideas very early creating SmallTalk, Mesa, and ObjectivePascal. The last was the basis of much Macintosh software. Prof. Wirth in Switzerland created Pascal and evolved it into Modula. An east coast company combined C and SamllTalk into ObjectiveC, which became the basis of the NeXT user interface. ObjectiveC was more reliable and commercially suported than the buggy C++ coming out of Bell Labs at the same time. However, C++ was initially freeware which allowed it to evolve past its weakness and get adopted by large parts of academica.
At about $20 million a head, it would take about
500 visitors a year to meet NASAs budget.
A practical definition of A.I.
on
Arguing A.I.
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I agree with "receding horizon" comment of S.W. that onece you've built it, it doesn't seem that intelligent anymore. However, I suggest the essential aspect of humans are that we are language animals (to paraphrase Steven Pinker). Therefore, where a computer exhibits useful & creative conversation, I will consider that to be A.I. This doesn't mean the 'parrot programs' like the Eliza psychologist that just reflect stock phrase back at you based on keywords in your input.
I mean some true understanding, perhaps a dash of emotional insight, and saying something new and interesting (the creative part).
A few expert systems can discuss narrow topics fairly well, but not much else, and are boring.
Natural language understanding and creation has been an important objective of A.I. and C.S. for a half century, with very limited and disappointing results.
complexity of supercomputers approaching brain
on
Arguing A.I.
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
A thread in useset comp.ai.philosophy today notes the number of logical gates per second in the fastest supercomputers are within a couple magnitudes of the human brain. The brain has 100 million neurons, each connected to thousand others, and runs around 20 Hz. So this is about two quadrillion ops per second.
The fastest supercomputer operates on 64 bit words at a several trillion operations a second, or about a hundred trillion ops per second; a hundred times slower or so.
Instead of quibbling exactly about these numbers, note that Moore's Law implies a factor of ten every five years. So a supercomputer will be as complex as brain somewhere in the 2010 to 2020 time frame. Don't even think about 2050 or 2100!
However, computers aren't programmed as well as a brain in many areas, so the software people have a long way to catch up.
"Beautiful Mind" and A.I.
on
Arguing A.I.
·
· Score: 2
Just as a side note: several founders of A.I.- John von Neumann, John McCarthy, and Marvin Minsky- were in John Nash's cohort at Princeton. All are mentioned at various times in the book version of the movie.
Nash's thesis on the equilibrium point is related to the most common algorithm used in A.I. games like chess.
Her book is basically pro-Scott, with qualification "mistakes were made".
My first introduction to this topic was about a decade ago with the PBS special "Race to the Pole". This documentary essentially blasted Scott as being ignorant and bureaucratic- thus costing his life.
Susie calls Scott the careful and scientific one and Amundson a gambler (who succeeded).
Scotts expedition compiled very accurate weather temperature profiles - similar to current results.
However they hit the "1 in 20" bad year when winter starts a month early than normal.
Scott was "on plan" until winter arrived early.
Its was so cold that sleds and skis would not slide. Slipperness is caused by thin frictional melt beneath the skis.
Amudson built his base camp on the ice shelf edge which breaks off every year. He set up a minimum of food depots, compared to Scott's abundance. Shakleton's earlier expedition that ran out of food was the motivation for Scott's extra depots.
The Brits had bad luck with dogs and good results with Siberian ponies. Amundson knew to how to get good and fast fast results out of the dogs.
I look forward to these statistical results.
It increases knowledge of ourselves.
I have two reservations:
(1) No individual data are made available.
(2) All results are made available to everyone.
I think the Brits, a couple whom authored "1984" and "Brave New World" are showing the proper direction.
They put surveillence cams up everywhere.
However they make much of the feed publically available.
There is less opposition to more information when *everyone* has *full* access to it.
Slashdot Mirror
Enron had huge debt and 75% of its claimed assets were phoney.
Microsoft has not debt to speak of and $38 billion in cash.
You'd make a terrible investor or stock broker if you cant tell the difference.
Microsoft is sitting on a $38 billion pile of cash. $6 million is 0.15 cents on the dollar.
Ralph Nader says this cash pile is distortion of capitalism. Traditionally companies pay out dividends once they have grown into profitibility. The stockholders are being screwed.
I thought it was technically the best F/X movie of the year, even though its story was somewhat lame. A recent thread here said the FF animation house is now gone.
Nothing illustrates the two cultures dichotomy in the US than two contrast between the neighbors Harvard and MIT in Cambridge MA. This week's Business Week has the new president of Harvard Larry Summers on the cover. Dr. Summers has been controversial about shaking up things at Harvard. Claims graduates are not getting enough exposure to scientific ideas. Ironically Dr. Summers, an economist, got his B.S. at MIT.
Do you people who can't tell you what a quadratic formula is or locate Afghanistan on globe to be teaching your children? Some of skill sets of people going through four year teacher colleges with 800 combine SATs are dreadful.
Back in the late 1970s Carver Mead of CalTech and Lynn Conway of Xerox PARC computerized the design of integrated circuit chips. Before them chips were designed by mechanical drawing and hand-taped photo-masks. This often resulted in spaghetti-looking chip circuits. Mead & Conway reduced chip design to a hierachical set of physics and geometry issues, and wrote a compiler to issue these from higher level descriptions. Chip design was then transformed more-or-less into a computer language. People then added optimization and simulation-testing tools to further automate the process. It got so simple that chip design labs were offered in engineering colleges with same-semester turn-around. Some guy in my class twenty years ago designed a "homogeneous coordinate multiplier" which become the geometry engine of a startup called Silicon Graphics.
UNIX (or Linux) can be as transparent as you want it, if you want to put lots of intelligence in a storage driver. It wouldn't matter in principle where the data was on tape or disk. You could have just one monster file storage device. In practice large applications want some control to increase efficiency.
Mainframes got very sophisticated in automating this. It was also somewhat difficult to program commands in IBMs or DECs data-definition languages. Much of this was lost in downsizing to personal workstations and is being rediscovered again.
I remember talking about it the 1980s. His articles could be used as "prior publication".
Escpecially as you get older. A new-brand insurere like ACM or Blue cross is about $120 * age-in-years per year when all the deductables and co-pays are factored in. Someone in their 50s may be looking at $6-7K per adult in their family. 20-somethings may just need a couple thousand a year.
If you buy something from one those street-poster ads, or a company you never heard of, you will never get a claim paid. Matt Damon's movie Rainmaker is about this.
The average 401K isn't very large. People with families and average paying jobs save just enough for the match if they can spare at all.
Todays NY Times (free registration required) reports that teacher applications are up 45% this year. Many districts have a fast-track program of teaching after a couple intro courses, although you have to takes about a years worth of courses for certification eventually. In the L.A. area where I have some teacher friends, pay starts about $3000 a month and hits $6000 after a dozen years. (This is for a nine-month year where you moonlight or vacation in the summer.) Same thing happened during the 91-94 recession.
Thats about the only good result of the slump :-(
Dont get me wrong. I've greatly enjoyed PG websites, books and photos. However, his attitude comes across as "I'm so much smarter than everyone else" when creating his web design business and his computer school. This attitude, which was pretty common at MIT and in the dot.com era may be good for getting new ventures started, but not for sustaining them. We all got to work together sometime.
IT appeared to be a selection of MIT CS courses in one year, from the syllabi on the web. Many of the courses appeared to be little different from those at MIT (I took the MIT ones) and many of the instructors had MIT backgrounds. The AD course were taught in intensive serial fashion at a month each.
My guess is the MIT OpenCourseware initiative wil put a similar range on the web in upcoming years. The first installment will be this autumn according to the MIT site. (If bore through MIT's online course catalog, many syllabi are already on the web.)
The benefits of a MIT education, tempered by real-world experience, without the MIT prices, and without the MIT diploma.
Despite its flaws it is much better than anything MicroSoft has had before from a developer's viewpoint. It makes it easy to write money-making apps on the worlds large operating system.
I heard them speak in Palo Alto about 20 years ago. Xerox PARC latched onto their ideas very early creating SmallTalk, Mesa, and ObjectivePascal. The last was the basis of much Macintosh software. Prof. Wirth in Switzerland created Pascal and evolved it into Modula. An east coast company combined C and SamllTalk into ObjectiveC, which became the basis of the NeXT user interface. ObjectiveC was more reliable and commercially suported than the buggy C++ coming out of Bell Labs at the same time. However, C++ was initially freeware which allowed it to evolve past its weakness and get adopted by large parts of academica.
At about $20 million a head, it would take about 500 visitors a year to meet NASAs budget.
I agree with "receding horizon" comment of S.W. that onece you've built it, it doesn't seem that intelligent anymore. However, I suggest the essential aspect of humans are that we are language animals (to paraphrase Steven Pinker). Therefore, where a computer exhibits useful & creative conversation, I will consider that to be A.I. This doesn't mean the 'parrot programs' like the Eliza psychologist that just reflect stock phrase back at you based on keywords in your input. I mean some true understanding, perhaps a dash of emotional insight, and saying something new and interesting (the creative part). A few expert systems can discuss narrow topics fairly well, but not much else, and are boring. Natural language understanding and creation has been an important objective of A.I. and C.S. for a half century, with very limited and disappointing results.
A thread in useset comp.ai.philosophy today notes the number of logical gates per second in the fastest supercomputers are within a couple magnitudes of the human brain. The brain has 100 million neurons, each connected to thousand others, and runs around 20 Hz. So this is about two quadrillion ops per second.
The fastest supercomputer operates on 64 bit words at a several trillion operations a second, or about a hundred trillion ops per second; a hundred times slower or so.
Instead of quibbling exactly about these numbers, note that Moore's Law implies a factor of ten every five years. So a supercomputer will be as complex as brain somewhere in the 2010 to 2020 time frame. Don't even think about 2050 or 2100!
However, computers aren't programmed as well as a brain in many areas, so the software people have a long way to catch up.
Just as a side note: several founders of A.I.- John von Neumann, John McCarthy, and Marvin Minsky- were in John Nash's cohort at Princeton. All are mentioned at various times in the book version of the movie.
Nash's thesis on the equilibrium point is related to the most common algorithm used in A.I. games like chess.
Her book is basically pro-Scott, with qualification "mistakes were made".
My first introduction to this topic was about a decade ago with the PBS special "Race to the Pole". This documentary essentially blasted Scott as being ignorant and bureaucratic- thus costing his life.
Susie calls Scott the careful and scientific one and Amundson a gambler (who succeeded). Scotts expedition compiled very accurate weather temperature profiles - similar to current results. However they hit the "1 in 20" bad year when winter starts a month early than normal. Scott was "on plan" until winter arrived early. Its was so cold that sleds and skis would not slide. Slipperness is caused by thin frictional melt beneath the skis.
Amudson built his base camp on the ice shelf edge which breaks off every year. He set up a minimum of food depots, compared to Scott's abundance. Shakleton's earlier expedition that ran out of food was the motivation for Scott's extra depots. The Brits had bad luck with dogs and good results with Siberian ponies. Amundson knew to how to get good and fast fast results out of the dogs.
I look forward to these statistical results. It increases knowledge of ourselves.
I have two reservations:
(1) No individual data are made available.
(2) All results are made available to everyone.
I think the Brits, a couple whom authored "1984" and "Brave New World" are showing the proper direction. They put surveillence cams up everywhere. However they make much of the feed publically available. There is less opposition to more information when *everyone* has *full* access to it.
My specialty is computer graphics. Some super bowl commercials defeine the state-of-the-art in CGI and F/X.
Captain Cook carried citrus fruit on his long voyages in the 1700s. I guess this is what the berries may have been for.
Denver Museum of Science, Monday Feb 4, 7PM. There is an admission fee.