What I don't get is that in every circle I knew the AOL had been mud for a long, long long time. How disconnected from the real world do you have to be to merge with this turd of a company that everyone was cheering all the way to the bankruptcy courts? AOL was akin to some sort of naive ponzi scheme, its viability so dependent on easy-new subscribers that they probably have printed more CDs than Sony Music by now. It's just ridiculous. Back then AOL subscribers were like people still watching black & white movies without words in the year 2000 because they didn't know color 'talkies' existed.
Now, let's talk about the next big companies I want to fail, here's the top of my list: - Sony (largely a has-been) - Microsoft (could take awhile) - GM (let it die, for god's sake) - Citigroup ($1 per share = lols) - Al Gore's media channel (he invented the internet) - T-Mobile (horrible coverage) - I would put Apple on here, but the iPod redeemed them in my eyes \ I broke down and bought one, and it works fairly well.
Anyone got any I missed that need to be aded to the list?
Yeah, I've stuck with corded mice too. Every time I've used someone else's wireless I hear the stories. From the WoW tank who's mouse battery died while the guild had the last boss to 1% hp for the first time, to the intermittent rolling and clicking. It just all sucks. Plus, I don't want to be buying batteries all the time, or plugging my mouse in like its a Norelco razor. I am damn happy with my corded mouse. 100% reliability. Doesn't get much better.
My dad has a cheap USB cordless laptop mouse, one of those super tiny ones with a single AAA battery. It works like a charm. But I would never use one for my desktop.
Here's a question: when is someone going to fix Javascript?
Why is it that we all have mods to block it on our browser. We have to disable it in our PDF readers. Why is no one complaining to the developers of javascript about this? Have we just given up the problem as intractable?
Hey, isn't this a golden, golden opportunity for the open source community? Here you've got the industry leader droppin' it like it's hot, time to pickup the ball. Chop, chop! How hard could it be to code a bare-bones PDF reader (asks the nonprogrammer)?
The only features I have to have are the various view options, the ability to fullscreen it, and the fact that it saves my position in the document between views (and actually, the adobe reader sucks at this because it only saves upon closing, so if your system crashes it is not saved, it should save at interval). Someone mentioned the ability to highlight and annotate the text, that would be nice.
I use both in tandem. Repagination is more manual, Autopager is more automatic, both useful at different times. I assume this is what he's referring to anyway. I know there are some web pages that can do this without requiring a mod, like, oh say Slashdot! If you try the beta homepage and scroll to the bottom it will automatically add in the previous day's entries: http://slashdot.org/index2.pl
"So what in god's name is Adobe doing with that extra 200 megabytes of disk space?"
I shouldn't really be telling you this, but there's an easter-egg video involving Carrot Top hidden somewhere in Adobe Reader. Call it a result of the 'more megabytes = more powerful' school of software management:P
I should mention that anyone interested in a fuller elaboration of this phenomena and the associated ideas should pick-up the seminal book "Knowledge and Decisions" by famed economist Thomas Sowell. Highly recommended. I didn't understand why the gov could never run things as efficiently as a corporation until I read that eye-opening book which proves it once and for all.
To claim that the government can do what a corporation can't do is to claim that people can do what people can't do. That's clearly false.
So, where exactly is the government getting these massive cost savings, eh? It's a sham, a ruse, etc. There's always a trade-off, and generally when the gov runs something it runs it into the ground? Why? Because the gov loves to run things 'in the name of the people' and do it not on a profit basis. No, they do it in exchange for political power instead. So, when you don't have a profit incentive for providing the service, you also don't have a profit incentive to make sure the customer is happy, or to keep the service running, or to upgrade in a timely manner, or even to do regular maintenance. Businesses excel at these latter aspects because if the system goes down for any reason they're screwed. But the gov, and the employees in the gov, get no benefit for running a service well and experience no loss when a service is run poorly.
Don't buy the bullshit, you're being sold a bill of goods to further someone's agenda. If these two companies are genuinely overcharging then the gov should simply make-sure that the barriers to entry are removed and allow the inevitable: a company willing to charge less to come in and compete.
So just where is all this hair coming from, exactly? Are there 3rd world hair factories where children will be surreptitiously filmed hanging from the ceiling with their hair attached to hooks to make it grow faster, videos of natives explaining just how many beads they get paid for a pound of hair which figures out to a monthly income equivalent of 63 cents, and the poor orphans trotting out missing chunks from their ear where the evil corporate barbers sheared just a bit too fast and cut them for squirming? Will we see Sally Struthers begging us for just $1 a day so the poor hairless masses CAN AFFORD WIGS?!?!
Should they really be calling it unbreakable? Isn't that essentially the same as asking to have it broken so some hacker can make a name for himself? Any good social-engineer could crack this thing in a few days flat, I'm sure. As/. posters love pointing out, even if the system were perfect its users ain't.
That's not so bad. My HS science teacher told me about an experiment where people off the street were given free chicken and asked how it tastes, etc. Later they were told that the chickens were fed plants grown exclusively from human waste. They didn't eat any more of the chicken after being told this.
But, there's absolutely nothing wrong with eating an animal which has been fed plants grown on manure, human or otherwise:P
Others are calling it like it is. This has to happen eventually, and the time seems to be now. I do support this move, we need to get this monkey off our backs, it was gonna be painful either way they did it, but we gotta do it and be done with it.
I read the article, then I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of music executives cried out in terror and were suddenly calling their RIAA lawyers...
No, but they do have the most to lose, and the most to spend. Except in cases where a sea-change occurs, or a paradigm shifts, companies are usually able to keep up their end.
"A few facts!? a simple 5 word sentence needs the three facts you mention, plus several more in your etc to even be able to guess the meaning. and what are these facts? simply negations of all the computers mistakes." - Alright, AC, let's delve deeper. All those facts represent are areas of knowledge that haven't been trained into the system yet. Basically revealing work that still needs to be done by the researchers. And once it's done it's done forever.
"you don't need to tell a human that there's no such thing as a time fly. that's why people are infinately better at NLP than computers (God knows where you got your 'about equal' claim from, that's patently untrue)." - Look at it from a foreign language perspective. The computer is trying to learn english as a second language. A foreigner, hearing this sentence, may very well wonder what a 'time fly' is. All language has certain ambiguities built into it generally for convenience. This, again, is where context comes in.
People are not infinitely better at NLP. And my claim of 'about equal' comes from Ray Kurzweil's book "Age of Spiritual Machines" where he makes the same claim. Take it up with him. But I'll just consider you refuted.
"Both companies built the machines they "wanted". Why they did so is based on their understanding of their capabilities and where that would fit into the market. Sony, coming off a massive expansion from the PS1/2 success has a machine developed with a lot of money and fingers in the pie, and it shows."
Except Nintendo doesn't have a music, movies, electronics manufacturing, and chip manufacturing businesses. PSX was originally a division of Sony Music. When the PS3 came around, Sony's aim was to make the PS3 the media center of the living room. The Xbox is actually an attempt to blunt that intrusion on MS's territory, and it worked. If the PS3 did not have Bluray, and did not have the egomaniacal Cell-chip it would've come in at a decent cost and would likely have a better graphics chip also and might've had a chance of doing well against Nintendo.
In any case, the entire methodology that produced the Wii is a focus on what makes a game fun. This is very clearly not what Sony was thinking about in producing the PS3 with the usual paradigm of 'better, faster, smarter' and in the case of consoles 'better-graphics'.
"Kutaragi will end up being laid off from Sony and start working for Fox News. Had the Iraq war gone differently he'd probably have replaced Baghdad Bob."
Hehe, or maybe we can get Baghdad Bob to run Sony?
"Natural language processing is an absolute and total bitch - take it someone who has studied it. One of my AI professors once explained it to me such; the human brain tricks you into believing the hardest tasks it accomplishes are the easiest. Stuff like language, walking, and so on take up far much more of your neural hardware than what you would consider 'thinking' - but it all happens subconsciously."
- This isn't exactly true. It may be a 'total bitch' to duplicate within the framework of digital processors. For a neural net it's a fairly trivial task, and the human brain is far more like a neural net (obviously) than a CPU.
On the other side of the equation, a computer can iterate and calculate as if it were a cinch, something the human brain finds rather difficult.
We were just talking about this in another thread... A lot o the comments here have been that natural language software isn't that great.
This isn't at all true. Today, understanding verbal and written communication is done by state of the art computers and programs at a rate about equal to human listeners and readers. Where a computer doesn't particularly excel is in parsing that language, mostly because a computer doesn't have access to our culture in order to absorb context, but context can still be added.
Here's an example from Ray Kurzweil's book "Age of Spiritual Machines." He talks about a phrase famously given to a language parsing program that goes thus: "Times flies like an arrow." This phrase can be understood in various ways:
"* The common simile: time moves quickly just like an arrow does;
* measure the speed of flies like you would measure that of an arrow (thus interpreted as an imperative) - i.e. (You should) time flies as you would (time) an arrow;
* measure the speed of flies like an arrow would - i.e. Time flies in the same way that an arrow would (time them);
* measure the speed of flies that are like arrows - i.e. Time those flies that are like arrows;
* all of a type of flying insect, "time-flies," collectively enjoys a single arrow (compare Fruit flies like a banana);
* each of a type of flying insect, "time-flies," individually enjoys a different arrow (similar comparison applies);
* A concrete object, for example the magazine, Time, travels through the air in an arrow-like manner."
(from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_processing)
With a few facts it becomes obvious which is correct and which isn't. Tell the computer that there's no such thing as a 'time fly' and that flies don't time things, and that flies aren't sophisticated enough to like things in an affectionate manner, etc., and the correct interpretation soon becomes clear.
So, if you think a computer can't understand both written and verbal communication and then parse it quickly enough to answer the questions I will have to strenuously disagree. These challenges are quickly being overcome on the bleeding edge of the art. But since this perception persists that the state of the art is somehow bad, because Joe down the street messed with some free-ware language software that worked poorly -- I think a lot of people are in for a surprise, and winning Jeopardy in this manner is really the perfect way to show it off. Can't wait to see the Youtube clips.
Slashdot Mirror
'Cause.
What I don't get is that in every circle I knew the AOL had been mud for a long, long long time. How disconnected from the real world do you have to be to merge with this turd of a company that everyone was cheering all the way to the bankruptcy courts? AOL was akin to some sort of naive ponzi scheme, its viability so dependent on easy-new subscribers that they probably have printed more CDs than Sony Music by now. It's just ridiculous. Back then AOL subscribers were like people still watching black & white movies without words in the year 2000 because they didn't know color 'talkies' existed.
Now, let's talk about the next big companies I want to fail, here's the top of my list:
- Sony (largely a has-been)
- Microsoft (could take awhile)
- GM (let it die, for god's sake)
- Citigroup ($1 per share = lols)
- Al Gore's media channel (he invented the internet)
- T-Mobile (horrible coverage)
- I would put Apple on here, but the iPod redeemed them in my eyes \ I broke down and bought one, and it works fairly well.
Anyone got any I missed that need to be aded to the list?
Yes, but if Turner and his buddies sold short they probably made out like bandits, lol :P
Yeah, I've stuck with corded mice too. Every time I've used someone else's wireless I hear the stories. From the WoW tank who's mouse battery died while the guild had the last boss to 1% hp for the first time, to the intermittent rolling and clicking. It just all sucks. Plus, I don't want to be buying batteries all the time, or plugging my mouse in like its a Norelco razor. I am damn happy with my corded mouse. 100% reliability. Doesn't get much better.
My dad has a cheap USB cordless laptop mouse, one of those super tiny ones with a single AAA battery. It works like a charm. But I would never use one for my desktop.
I requested a built-in torrent app as part of that 'garbage bag' BUT NO, THANKS A LOT.
Well, at least it's got 3D support natively. About damn time.
ROFL, mod the parent up XD
Ironically, human crap is also the best fertilizer in the world, or so good ol' teach said.
Here's a question: when is someone going to fix Javascript?
Why is it that we all have mods to block it on our browser. We have to disable it in our PDF readers. Why is no one complaining to the developers of javascript about this? Have we just given up the problem as intractable?
Hey, isn't this a golden, golden opportunity for the open source community? Here you've got the industry leader droppin' it like it's hot, time to pickup the ball. Chop, chop! How hard could it be to code a bare-bones PDF reader (asks the nonprogrammer)?
The only features I have to have are the various view options, the ability to fullscreen it, and the fact that it saves my position in the document between views (and actually, the adobe reader sucks at this because it only saves upon closing, so if your system crashes it is not saved, it should save at interval). Someone mentioned the ability to highlight and annotate the text, that would be nice.
"Programatically clone a page to the end of the document."
Autopager
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4925
"Orgasmic."
Repagination
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2099
"Genius."
I use both in tandem. Repagination is more manual, Autopager is more automatic, both useful at different times. I assume this is what he's referring to anyway. I know there are some web pages that can do this without requiring a mod, like, oh say Slashdot! If you try the beta homepage and scroll to the bottom it will automatically add in the previous day's entries: http://slashdot.org/index2.pl
"So what in god's name is Adobe doing with that extra 200 megabytes of disk space?"
I shouldn't really be telling you this, but there's an easter-egg video involving Carrot Top hidden somewhere in Adobe Reader. Call it a result of the 'more megabytes = more powerful' school of software management :P
Wolves, bears in the arctic still eat the defrosting remains of thousands of years old Mammoths as the weather exposes them.
I should mention that anyone interested in a fuller elaboration of this phenomena and the associated ideas should pick-up the seminal book "Knowledge and Decisions" by famed economist Thomas Sowell. Highly recommended. I didn't understand why the gov could never run things as efficiently as a corporation until I read that eye-opening book which proves it once and for all.
Here's what's dumb:
- Corporation = a group of people.
- Government = a group of people.
To claim that the government can do what a corporation can't do is to claim that people can do what people can't do. That's clearly false.
So, where exactly is the government getting these massive cost savings, eh? It's a sham, a ruse, etc. There's always a trade-off, and generally when the gov runs something it runs it into the ground? Why? Because the gov loves to run things 'in the name of the people' and do it not on a profit basis. No, they do it in exchange for political power instead. So, when you don't have a profit incentive for providing the service, you also don't have a profit incentive to make sure the customer is happy, or to keep the service running, or to upgrade in a timely manner, or even to do regular maintenance. Businesses excel at these latter aspects because if the system goes down for any reason they're screwed. But the gov, and the employees in the gov, get no benefit for running a service well and experience no loss when a service is run poorly.
Don't buy the bullshit, you're being sold a bill of goods to further someone's agenda. If these two companies are genuinely overcharging then the gov should simply make-sure that the barriers to entry are removed and allow the inevitable: a company willing to charge less to come in and compete.
So just where is all this hair coming from, exactly? Are there 3rd world hair factories where children will be surreptitiously filmed hanging from the ceiling with their hair attached to hooks to make it grow faster, videos of natives explaining just how many beads they get paid for a pound of hair which figures out to a monthly income equivalent of 63 cents, and the poor orphans trotting out missing chunks from their ear where the evil corporate barbers sheared just a bit too fast and cut them for squirming? Will we see Sally Struthers begging us for just $1 a day so the poor hairless masses CAN AFFORD WIGS?!?!
Should they really be calling it unbreakable? Isn't that essentially the same as asking to have it broken so some hacker can make a name for himself? Any good social-engineer could crack this thing in a few days flat, I'm sure. As /. posters love pointing out, even if the system were perfect its users ain't.
That's not so bad. My HS science teacher told me about an experiment where people off the street were given free chicken and asked how it tastes, etc. Later they were told that the chickens were fed plants grown exclusively from human waste. They didn't eat any more of the chicken after being told this.
But, there's absolutely nothing wrong with eating an animal which has been fed plants grown on manure, human or otherwise :P
Others are calling it like it is. This has to happen eventually, and the time seems to be now. I do support this move, we need to get this monkey off our backs, it was gonna be painful either way they did it, but we gotta do it and be done with it.
I read the article, then I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of music executives cried out in terror and were suddenly calling their RIAA lawyers...
No, but they do have the most to lose, and the most to spend. Except in cases where a sea-change occurs, or a paradigm shifts, companies are usually able to keep up their end.
"A few facts!?
a simple 5 word sentence needs the three facts you mention, plus several more in your etc to even be able to guess the meaning. and what are these facts? simply negations of all the computers mistakes."
- Alright, AC, let's delve deeper. All those facts represent are areas of knowledge that haven't been trained into the system yet. Basically revealing work that still needs to be done by the researchers. And once it's done it's done forever.
"you don't need to tell a human that there's no such thing as a time fly. that's why people are infinately better at NLP than computers (God knows where you got your 'about equal' claim from, that's patently untrue)."
- Look at it from a foreign language perspective. The computer is trying to learn english as a second language. A foreigner, hearing this sentence, may very well wonder what a 'time fly' is. All language has certain ambiguities built into it generally for convenience. This, again, is where context comes in.
People are not infinitely better at NLP. And my claim of 'about equal' comes from Ray Kurzweil's book "Age of Spiritual Machines" where he makes the same claim. Take it up with him. But I'll just consider you refuted.
"Both companies built the machines they "wanted". Why they did so is based on their understanding of their capabilities and where that would fit into the market. Sony, coming off a massive expansion from the PS1/2 success has a machine developed with a lot of money and fingers in the pie, and it shows."
Except Nintendo doesn't have a music, movies, electronics manufacturing, and chip manufacturing businesses. PSX was originally a division of Sony Music. When the PS3 came around, Sony's aim was to make the PS3 the media center of the living room. The Xbox is actually an attempt to blunt that intrusion on MS's territory, and it worked. If the PS3 did not have Bluray, and did not have the egomaniacal Cell-chip it would've come in at a decent cost and would likely have a better graphics chip also and might've had a chance of doing well against Nintendo.
In any case, the entire methodology that produced the Wii is a focus on what makes a game fun. This is very clearly not what Sony was thinking about in producing the PS3 with the usual paradigm of 'better, faster, smarter' and in the case of consoles 'better-graphics'.
"Kutaragi will end up being laid off from Sony and start working for Fox News. Had the Iraq war gone differently he'd probably have replaced Baghdad Bob."
Hehe, or maybe we can get Baghdad Bob to run Sony?
No, no, it should say:
"Argumentative: Just start the game, meatbag."
"Natural language processing is an absolute and total bitch - take it someone who has studied it. One of my AI professors once explained it to me such; the human brain tricks you into believing the hardest tasks it accomplishes are the easiest. Stuff like language, walking, and so on take up far much more of your neural hardware than what you would consider 'thinking' - but it all happens subconsciously."
- This isn't exactly true. It may be a 'total bitch' to duplicate within the framework of digital processors. For a neural net it's a fairly trivial task, and the human brain is far more like a neural net (obviously) than a CPU.
On the other side of the equation, a computer can iterate and calculate as if it were a cinch, something the human brain finds rather difficult.
We were just talking about this in another thread... A lot o the comments here have been that natural language software isn't that great.
This isn't at all true. Today, understanding verbal and written communication is done by state of the art computers and programs at a rate about equal to human listeners and readers. Where a computer doesn't particularly excel is in parsing that language, mostly because a computer doesn't have access to our culture in order to absorb context, but context can still be added.
Here's an example from Ray Kurzweil's book "Age of Spiritual Machines." He talks about a phrase famously given to a language parsing program that goes thus: "Times flies like an arrow." This phrase can be understood in various ways:
"* The common simile: time moves quickly just like an arrow does;
* measure the speed of flies like you would measure that of an arrow (thus interpreted as an imperative) - i.e. (You should) time flies as you would (time) an arrow;
* measure the speed of flies like an arrow would - i.e. Time flies in the same way that an arrow would (time them);
* measure the speed of flies that are like arrows - i.e. Time those flies that are like arrows;
* all of a type of flying insect, "time-flies," collectively enjoys a single arrow (compare Fruit flies like a banana);
* each of a type of flying insect, "time-flies," individually enjoys a different arrow (similar comparison applies);
* A concrete object, for example the magazine, Time, travels through the air in an arrow-like manner."
(from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_processing)
With a few facts it becomes obvious which is correct and which isn't. Tell the computer that there's no such thing as a 'time fly' and that flies don't time things, and that flies aren't sophisticated enough to like things in an affectionate manner, etc., and the correct interpretation soon becomes clear.
So, if you think a computer can't understand both written and verbal communication and then parse it quickly enough to answer the questions I will have to strenuously disagree. These challenges are quickly being overcome on the bleeding edge of the art. But since this perception persists that the state of the art is somehow bad, because Joe down the street messed with some free-ware language software that worked poorly -- I think a lot of people are in for a surprise, and winning Jeopardy in this manner is really the perfect way to show it off. Can't wait to see the Youtube clips.