2. That it can be used on commodity PCs (with GPUs)
3. That the education is free (there are many, many free online resources like MOOCs that teach machine learning principles)
4. Even datasets used to train deep neural networks are free (Imagenet, Pascal VOC 2012, MS COCO, Youtube 8M).
5. Even the latest academic scholarship is quickly published publically to ArXiV while sitting in the traditional academic publishing pipeline.
Machine learning is still heavily an academic discipline, but it's never been easier for a layman or business to use and benefit from the technologies.
Umm, or GP is exactly correct. When I was in middle school there was a poster outside the guidance office at school that specifically says that high cost is not a reason not to attend a college. What's important is that I choose the college "right for me." Cost doesn't matter because the average college graduate makes more than the average high school graduate. That statistic, while true, has been tortured to death to justify any college expense.
Fortunately my parents and I were a bit more practical when I went to college, but I know friends who got "the right degree" (i.e. engineering) who have good jobs who will be paying off their debt for 15-20 years.
I'm guessing that the "half" of work they quote are tasks that are basically pattern recognition exercises or are straightforward application of rules. It's work that at some point someone will find it economically feasible to automate (or economically feasible to sell an automation solution).
Even work that isn't "practical" to automate now is being picked at by AI and robotics research wherever it can be. For example, robots that can learn by example and can work in close proximity to people: https://www.technologyreview.c... This would find a nice savings in between 100% trainable human labor (expensive) vs 100% inflexible automated robot process (also expensive).
Maybe undergrads (there are undergraduate IT workers in my school), but I doubt grad students. Grad students' measure of success is their publications, and you don't get many publications through systems administration.
So, while I don't agree with this offshoring plan, people should keep in mind UCSF only offers degrees in various medical fields. They don't have an Engineering, CS, or IT college. So while this might screw over other IT workers out of jobs, it doesn't screw over UCSF alumni and students specifically.
Consider looking into embedded software positions. In these kind of industries you're focused on programming a processor to control something physical: a radio, an elevator, a microwave, car subsystems, robots. This industry doesn't always use the sexiest of programming languages and tools (you'll likely be doing some flavor of assembly, C, or C++ on crappy vendor-specific compilers and IDEs), but you it's very rewarding to see your code have physical effect. I definitely preferred that over writing websites and sysadmin work.
That said, college is much more intellectually intense than industry often is. You'll start your career learning a bunch of industry-specific technical stuff, but very quickly a vast majority of your learning is soft skills like communication, project management, business sense, navigating a team environment, and so on. This may be "unsatisfying."
Another thing to consider is that wherever you work for a few years might yield a few intellectual interests that you didn't know about. For example, I worked in embedded for a few years and fell in love with digital signal processing. I ended up going for an MS in the subject and started a PhD. Don't be afraid to learn things outside of "pure CS." There's a lot of engineering (in all fields) that's heavy on analysis, math, and programming.
I'm still a sucker for OS upgrades, especially free ones, so I upgraded both Windows machines in my home (one laptop, one PC) to Windows 10 soon after it was released. I just recently upgraded the laptop to Anniversary edition. Overall the OS seems functional, and loses the annoying Windows 8/8.1 start screen, but I'm probably not taking full advantage of the features. I was interested in using Cortana, but not so interested that I would tie my local logins to a Windows Live account. Why not let me use the Cortana features with a local login? It's not like I'm lugging my PC everywhere or replacing it like a tablet.
Also one minor comment about the Windows 10-specific options dialogs is that they seem to have a lot fewer options, so 99% of the time I just use the search bar to get to the Windows 7-style options dialog.
Now the main reason I wanted to post was three pretty annoying bugs. One was with vanilla Windows 10 (haven't seen it yet in Anniversary, but the upgrade is young). That is that the start button and widgets on the start bar would sometimes stop working. This ranged from mildly annoying (I can't set the system volume!) to basically dealbreaking (I can't do any work with NO start bar!) Sometimes a reboot would fix this, but sometimes it wouldn't. In the worst case, after trying a bunch of online remedies, I basically had to do an in-place reinstall. That worked, but that shouldn't have to happen for such a basic piece of functionality. Perhaps a more effective repair install that fixes the start bar?
The second annoying bug (again, in vanilla Windows 10, don't know if this was fixed in Anniversary), but my laptop tends to wake up from sleep in tablet mode. It's a Lenovo Yoga, so it can theoretically be used as a tablet. However, I practically never use it as such and never put it in the tablet "position," and yet I have to keep dealing with the initial disorientation of the UI not being what I expect when I open it.
The last annoying bug just started happening with Windows 10 Anniversary on my laptop. It seems like the pointer keeps jiggling nonstop. Now, I don't visually see the cursor move, but if, say, I'm watching Netflix in full screen, the player UI keeps popping up every second as if I'm continuing to move the mouse. Moreover, the screen never sleeps (I assume for the same reason).
I'm willing to put up with this nonsense (and foist it upon my poor wife), because I still have some fun fixing up OS issues (see many hours of toying around with Linux). But for my mother, I made sure that her system did not get the free update, because I thought there was very little gain for her in exchange for a lot of new issues.
You could just put in a comment that says "This regex tests for an email address."
I've massaged if-else code into regexes before. Having several if-elses for a piece of data is rickety and (in my opinion) would take more work to rework than a regular expression if the data changed.
I've taken my girlfriend to see both Twilight movies so far. It was a really rowdy crowd, with everybody cracking jokes and MST3King the movie and throwing popcorn at the screen. I'm not a huge fan of the Twilight series, but both times I saw the movie it was a lot of fun. I don't know who would sit silently through these films when there's so much to make fun of.
It's not always a problem with not enough money in the budget. Some schools manage budgets horribly. The high school I went to purchases all kinds of Smartboards and projectors and regularly-upgraded computers. Somehow, after buying all these expensive toys, they found themselves broke and had to cut wages, buses for high-school students, after-school activities such as drama club. Yet the tax levies they always try (and fail) to pass are never for what the community wants (wages, busing, drama club), they are for building new schools to replace the old ones!
It's not always so cut and dry as "why won't the community accept new taxes for the poor schools?"
Actually, I think the worst problem are ads that are ugly (like some fairly recent weight loss ones) or tasteless (Evony's barely-covered breasts). Give me some ads I'd actually want to look at.
So if everyone is in the same room and the room does not have an internet connection, are we SOL or will it realize that we simply want a LAN game and leave it at that? Not all LAN's have an internet connection as well (for example, a LAN in a garage that can't reach a wireless access point) Sometimes patches and mods are transported via sneakernet.
Download prices are actually slightly smaller. Whereas an album may be anywhere between $12 and $18 (depending on where you buy it), Amazon regularly lists $9 and $10 albums (Itunes sits somewhere in between). That's not a huge difference, but it is a difference, and it's a lot better than the game industry, where the boxed copy is often less than or equal in price to the digital download.
One of the most frustrating things with many fighting games are the ridiculously cheap final bosses. Soul Calibur IV is a recent exception, but I remember many games that required beating the final boss several times to unlock all the game's characters. This isn't terrible except that final bosses aren't particularly smart AI, they just have lots of cheap moves that make fighting them frustrating. I don't plan on playing in fighting game tournaments, I just want to mess around in the game with friends with whichever character I choose.
Honestly, I'd play a few bucks for DLC that simply unlocked all the possible unlockable content: characters, stages, modes, and other goodies instantly. I remember Guild Wars' PVP component allowed you to pay $10 to unlock all the spells and items instantly. This worked because Guild Wars PVP was more about skill and strategy than having the "BEST EVER" gear. Something similar for other games I think would be reasonable. I wouldn't always pay for it, but in some games I would.
As much as I respect the Iranians who protest, what's going on in Iran is a big example of why the US may be hesitant to protest: protesting is SCARY. One of the most watched videos on Reddit recently is a gruesome video of an Iranian girl being shot to death for protesting. I think a lot of people in the US just want to be left alone by the government. Is protesting the government worth risking your neck or your job? What about your spouse and children? It's sad, but that seems to be the case.
For example, many Sonic the Hedgehog fans have been begging for a Sonic game with absolutely no innovation whatsoever, just pretty graphics and genesis-era gameplay. Sega acted ridiculous by announcing that Sonic Unleashed would be old-school Sonic gameplay--with the innovation that Sonic could now turn into a werewolf that punched things. Seriously, if somebody shoehorned in Sonic 2 game logic into a modern graphics engine, I wouldn't mind, just stop the innovation!
On the other hand, Half Life 2 Episode 2 felt pretty stale, especially compared to the rest of the Orange Box. Episode 1 was exciting because Alyx Vance felt chillingly like a real person, so I didn't mind playing what was basically more HL2 levels. However, the innovations in Episode 2 were mostly graphics and animation related, the one gameplay change (the "strider buster") was too minor and came too late in the game to make the game feel fresh.
If a publisher asked its customers whether it wanted innovation or just rehashing in several upcoming titles, they'd find that the answer really depends on the title.
I do seem to remember some short guy in the books (probably a kid) that had some hardware that could turn him invisible, but he couldn't kill for crap and he was always being harassed by this monkey-goblin.
I remember downloading the Bioshock demo when Bioshock first came out and discovering that it I would get a BSOD about a couple minutes into it. I remember downloading the Timeshift demo and discovering that the executable wouldn't even... execute. I remember downloading the Unreal Tournament 3 demo and having to spend a couple of hours searching forums and playing with obscure settings just to get it to run.
The only game out of those three I bought was UT3. However, Epic seems to have considered UT3 PC as a sales failure. Is it any surprise that sales are lost if the company is unable to provide a demo that even works?
The two best demos I ever played were Doom (obviously, a third of the game is not a bad demo) and Unreal Tournament 2004, which provided 1 map for every single game mode except the new one (Onslaught) which had TWO maps. Not only that, but there was not one but TWO demo releases, the second fixing bugs and adding content. Is that good business sense? I don't know. I played the UT2004 demo for a LONG time, but I was 17 and penniless, so I don't think I'm a good sample.
I have a question--how do I estimate the time it takes me to do a particular task and communicate that to my employer?
In my first internship (as a programmer, not an IT guy) I was asked often how long I think I would need to do a particular task, and I usually had no idea because I had not done something like it before. I would be noncommittal about it, work to get the job done, and get derisive comments from my employer about how he would have had the job done much faster. Perhaps he was correct, but I took as long as I personally needed to get the job done. How do I resolve these communication issues?
You don't need to do much to the graphics of an old game--if it was reasonably detailed to begin with (SNES and beyond) just "rez up" the sprites or 3d models so that they look sharp and crystal clear in HD. That's what the Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix did, it works. Honestly, that's all Katamari Damacy would need if ported to a modern console.
Sound you can probably do even less if it was just beeps and boops. Just keep the beeps and boops. If there was actual recorded sound, rerecord or remaster it so that it sounds clearer, don't play with it.
As for the controls/gameplay, keep the basics the same, but if there were quirks that were clearly because of the limitations of the hardware, take them out. If Goldeneye was being remade, why force people to use one thumbstick instead of two? Why have laser pellets disappear after 2 inches or have enemies respawn simply because the console didn't remember they died? That might result in some games being easier, but I'd rather play a challenge that was designed as a challenge, not a hurdle that was put up because the console it was first programmed for had 10KB of RAM.
The Daily Show's "America (the book)" has a 2 page spread that depicts the Supreme Court of the time completely nude. It's eye-burningly hideous, but it's there if you really want Rule 34 on SCOTUS.
I disagree. To get the equivalent of a text message in a short call, I would have to say "My plane landed safely in Phoenix, I love you, bye," and then hang up before they have a chance to respond. I use phone calls for conversations, even short ones. However, if I can fit the entire conversation into 160 characters, I use a text message instead.
I, like almost everyone else on Slashdot, think that text message rates are exorbitant, but I have no room to talk since I signed up for a plan. Yes, I'm a "feckless youth" like conureman says, but I pay out of my own pocket for my plan. I justify it to myself by saying that I'm paying for convenience, and I am.
Slashdot Mirror
Machine learning is still heavily an academic discipline, but it's never been easier for a layman or business to use and benefit from the technologies.
Umm, or GP is exactly correct. When I was in middle school there was a poster outside the guidance office at school that specifically says that high cost is not a reason not to attend a college. What's important is that I choose the college "right for me." Cost doesn't matter because the average college graduate makes more than the average high school graduate. That statistic, while true, has been tortured to death to justify any college expense.
Fortunately my parents and I were a bit more practical when I went to college, but I know friends who got "the right degree" (i.e. engineering) who have good jobs who will be paying off their debt for 15-20 years.
I'm guessing that the "half" of work they quote are tasks that are basically pattern recognition exercises or are straightforward application of rules. It's work that at some point someone will find it economically feasible to automate (or economically feasible to sell an automation solution).
Even work that isn't "practical" to automate now is being picked at by AI and robotics research wherever it can be. For example, robots that can learn by example and can work in close proximity to people: https://www.technologyreview.c... This would find a nice savings in between 100% trainable human labor (expensive) vs 100% inflexible automated robot process (also expensive).
Maybe undergrads (there are undergraduate IT workers in my school), but I doubt grad students. Grad students' measure of success is their publications, and you don't get many publications through systems administration.
So, while I don't agree with this offshoring plan, people should keep in mind UCSF only offers degrees in various medical fields. They don't have an Engineering, CS, or IT college. So while this might screw over other IT workers out of jobs, it doesn't screw over UCSF alumni and students specifically.
Consider looking into embedded software positions. In these kind of industries you're focused on programming a processor to control something physical: a radio, an elevator, a microwave, car subsystems, robots. This industry doesn't always use the sexiest of programming languages and tools (you'll likely be doing some flavor of assembly, C, or C++ on crappy vendor-specific compilers and IDEs), but you it's very rewarding to see your code have physical effect. I definitely preferred that over writing websites and sysadmin work.
That said, college is much more intellectually intense than industry often is. You'll start your career learning a bunch of industry-specific technical stuff, but very quickly a vast majority of your learning is soft skills like communication, project management, business sense, navigating a team environment, and so on. This may be "unsatisfying."
Another thing to consider is that wherever you work for a few years might yield a few intellectual interests that you didn't know about. For example, I worked in embedded for a few years and fell in love with digital signal processing. I ended up going for an MS in the subject and started a PhD. Don't be afraid to learn things outside of "pure CS." There's a lot of engineering (in all fields) that's heavy on analysis, math, and programming.
I'm still a sucker for OS upgrades, especially free ones, so I upgraded both Windows machines in my home (one laptop, one PC) to Windows 10 soon after it was released. I just recently upgraded the laptop to Anniversary edition. Overall the OS seems functional, and loses the annoying Windows 8/8.1 start screen, but I'm probably not taking full advantage of the features. I was interested in using Cortana, but not so interested that I would tie my local logins to a Windows Live account. Why not let me use the Cortana features with a local login? It's not like I'm lugging my PC everywhere or replacing it like a tablet.
Also one minor comment about the Windows 10-specific options dialogs is that they seem to have a lot fewer options, so 99% of the time I just use the search bar to get to the Windows 7-style options dialog.
Now the main reason I wanted to post was three pretty annoying bugs. One was with vanilla Windows 10 (haven't seen it yet in Anniversary, but the upgrade is young). That is that the start button and widgets on the start bar would sometimes stop working. This ranged from mildly annoying (I can't set the system volume!) to basically dealbreaking (I can't do any work with NO start bar!) Sometimes a reboot would fix this, but sometimes it wouldn't. In the worst case, after trying a bunch of online remedies, I basically had to do an in-place reinstall. That worked, but that shouldn't have to happen for such a basic piece of functionality. Perhaps a more effective repair install that fixes the start bar?
The second annoying bug (again, in vanilla Windows 10, don't know if this was fixed in Anniversary), but my laptop tends to wake up from sleep in tablet mode. It's a Lenovo Yoga, so it can theoretically be used as a tablet. However, I practically never use it as such and never put it in the tablet "position," and yet I have to keep dealing with the initial disorientation of the UI not being what I expect when I open it.
The last annoying bug just started happening with Windows 10 Anniversary on my laptop. It seems like the pointer keeps jiggling nonstop. Now, I don't visually see the cursor move, but if, say, I'm watching Netflix in full screen, the player UI keeps popping up every second as if I'm continuing to move the mouse. Moreover, the screen never sleeps (I assume for the same reason).
I'm willing to put up with this nonsense (and foist it upon my poor wife), because I still have some fun fixing up OS issues (see many hours of toying around with Linux). But for my mother, I made sure that her system did not get the free update, because I thought there was very little gain for her in exchange for a lot of new issues.
You could just put in a comment that says "This regex tests for an email address."
I've massaged if-else code into regexes before. Having several if-elses for a piece of data is rickety and (in my opinion) would take more work to rework than a regular expression if the data changed.
I've taken my girlfriend to see both Twilight movies so far. It was a really rowdy crowd, with everybody cracking jokes and MST3King the movie and throwing popcorn at the screen. I'm not a huge fan of the Twilight series, but both times I saw the movie it was a lot of fun. I don't know who would sit silently through these films when there's so much to make fun of.
It's not always a problem with not enough money in the budget. Some schools manage budgets horribly. The high school I went to purchases all kinds of Smartboards and projectors and regularly-upgraded computers. Somehow, after buying all these expensive toys, they found themselves broke and had to cut wages, buses for high-school students, after-school activities such as drama club. Yet the tax levies they always try (and fail) to pass are never for what the community wants (wages, busing, drama club), they are for building new schools to replace the old ones!
It's not always so cut and dry as "why won't the community accept new taxes for the poor schools?"
Actually, I think the worst problem are ads that are ugly (like some fairly recent weight loss ones) or tasteless (Evony's barely-covered breasts). Give me some ads I'd actually want to look at.
So if everyone is in the same room and the room does not have an internet connection, are we SOL or will it realize that we simply want a LAN game and leave it at that? Not all LAN's have an internet connection as well (for example, a LAN in a garage that can't reach a wireless access point) Sometimes patches and mods are transported via sneakernet.
Download prices are actually slightly smaller. Whereas an album may be anywhere between $12 and $18 (depending on where you buy it), Amazon regularly lists $9 and $10 albums (Itunes sits somewhere in between). That's not a huge difference, but it is a difference, and it's a lot better than the game industry, where the boxed copy is often less than or equal in price to the digital download.
One of the most frustrating things with many fighting games are the ridiculously cheap final bosses. Soul Calibur IV is a recent exception, but I remember many games that required beating the final boss several times to unlock all the game's characters. This isn't terrible except that final bosses aren't particularly smart AI, they just have lots of cheap moves that make fighting them frustrating. I don't plan on playing in fighting game tournaments, I just want to mess around in the game with friends with whichever character I choose.
Honestly, I'd play a few bucks for DLC that simply unlocked all the possible unlockable content: characters, stages, modes, and other goodies instantly. I remember Guild Wars' PVP component allowed you to pay $10 to unlock all the spells and items instantly. This worked because Guild Wars PVP was more about skill and strategy than having the "BEST EVER" gear. Something similar for other games I think would be reasonable. I wouldn't always pay for it, but in some games I would.
If that's what you want me to answer to hire me, I feel a bit more confident about my ability to get hired. (: (Saying this as a Junior in CS).
As much as I respect the Iranians who protest, what's going on in Iran is a big example of why the US may be hesitant to protest: protesting is SCARY. One of the most watched videos on Reddit recently is a gruesome video of an Iranian girl being shot to death for protesting. I think a lot of people in the US just want to be left alone by the government. Is protesting the government worth risking your neck or your job? What about your spouse and children? It's sad, but that seems to be the case.
How do I set up an effective proxy and make it available to Iranians?
They should listen to what their customers want.
For example, many Sonic the Hedgehog fans have been begging for a Sonic game with absolutely no innovation whatsoever, just pretty graphics and genesis-era gameplay. Sega acted ridiculous by announcing that Sonic Unleashed would be old-school Sonic gameplay--with the innovation that Sonic could now turn into a werewolf that punched things. Seriously, if somebody shoehorned in Sonic 2 game logic into a modern graphics engine, I wouldn't mind, just stop the innovation!
On the other hand, Half Life 2 Episode 2 felt pretty stale, especially compared to the rest of the Orange Box. Episode 1 was exciting because Alyx Vance felt chillingly like a real person, so I didn't mind playing what was basically more HL2 levels. However, the innovations in Episode 2 were mostly graphics and animation related, the one gameplay change (the "strider buster") was too minor and came too late in the game to make the game feel fresh.
If a publisher asked its customers whether it wanted innovation or just rehashing in several upcoming titles, they'd find that the answer really depends on the title.
I do seem to remember some short guy in the books (probably a kid) that had some hardware that could turn him invisible, but he couldn't kill for crap and he was always being harassed by this monkey-goblin.
I remember downloading the Bioshock demo when Bioshock first came out and discovering that it I would get a BSOD about a couple minutes into it. I remember downloading the Timeshift demo and discovering that the executable wouldn't even... execute. I remember downloading the Unreal Tournament 3 demo and having to spend a couple of hours searching forums and playing with obscure settings just to get it to run.
The only game out of those three I bought was UT3. However, Epic seems to have considered UT3 PC as a sales failure. Is it any surprise that sales are lost if the company is unable to provide a demo that even works?
The two best demos I ever played were Doom (obviously, a third of the game is not a bad demo) and Unreal Tournament 2004, which provided 1 map for every single game mode except the new one (Onslaught) which had TWO maps. Not only that, but there was not one but TWO demo releases, the second fixing bugs and adding content. Is that good business sense? I don't know. I played the UT2004 demo for a LONG time, but I was 17 and penniless, so I don't think I'm a good sample.
I have a question--how do I estimate the time it takes me to do a particular task and communicate that to my employer?
In my first internship (as a programmer, not an IT guy) I was asked often how long I think I would need to do a particular task, and I usually had no idea because I had not done something like it before. I would be noncommittal about it, work to get the job done, and get derisive comments from my employer about how he would have had the job done much faster. Perhaps he was correct, but I took as long as I personally needed to get the job done. How do I resolve these communication issues?
You don't need to do much to the graphics of an old game--if it was reasonably detailed to begin with (SNES and beyond) just "rez up" the sprites or 3d models so that they look sharp and crystal clear in HD. That's what the Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix did, it works. Honestly, that's all Katamari Damacy would need if ported to a modern console.
Sound you can probably do even less if it was just beeps and boops. Just keep the beeps and boops. If there was actual recorded sound, rerecord or remaster it so that it sounds clearer, don't play with it.
As for the controls/gameplay, keep the basics the same, but if there were quirks that were clearly because of the limitations of the hardware, take them out. If Goldeneye was being remade, why force people to use one thumbstick instead of two? Why have laser pellets disappear after 2 inches or have enemies respawn simply because the console didn't remember they died? That might result in some games being easier, but I'd rather play a challenge that was designed as a challenge, not a hurdle that was put up because the console it was first programmed for had 10KB of RAM.
The Daily Show's "America (the book)" has a 2 page spread that depicts the Supreme Court of the time completely nude. It's eye-burningly hideous, but it's there if you really want Rule 34 on SCOTUS.
I disagree. To get the equivalent of a text message in a short call, I would have to say "My plane landed safely in Phoenix, I love you, bye," and then hang up before they have a chance to respond. I use phone calls for conversations, even short ones. However, if I can fit the entire conversation into 160 characters, I use a text message instead.
I, like almost everyone else on Slashdot, think that text message rates are exorbitant, but I have no room to talk since I signed up for a plan. Yes, I'm a "feckless youth" like conureman says, but I pay out of my own pocket for my plan. I justify it to myself by saying that I'm paying for convenience, and I am.
Thanks. I've never taken college Biology, so your post certainly fixes a couple of misconceptions I've had about conception. (: