Yeah, sure, play a driving game and you can become a pro race driver. A whole generation of geeks spent ages with leisure suit larry, and what did we get in real life???
I've been reading about exciting devices that will be released with Android for quite some time now. I am a developer and I am more interested in the device as a developer than I am as an end user. iPhone has a lot of roadblocks for me, I need a Mac to develop on it, which is a huge cost for me at the moment. Apple's policy about publishing apps is another story which has been discussed a lot. The problem is; even if Android is emphasizing openness, its development model seems to be "we know what is good for you". As far as I can see, there is no low level access to device for developers, and you are supposed to use Java, with some JNI capabilities for process intensive tasks. Native code can only be isolated chunks which still can't access device using C/C++. This is most likely to ensure that code runs on all devices, but this is a choice that should be left to the developer, at least if you're claiming that your platform is open. If I decide to develop something on a particular phone, knowing that it may not work in the same way on other devices, this is my choice, and I should have this option. For whatever reason I have, I want to have native apis for C/C++ and Android does not seem to offer this. Maybe my money is not that important, but for things like gaming, which will probably be huge on the iPhone quite soon, this will be a problem.
Here you go: http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/short/327/7417/716?fmr It is titled: "Understanding sensitivity and specificity with the right side of the brain " Exactly written for the purpose. PDF should be available freely.
I have to build quite complex tools using GEF and GMF, and there are many cases where I'd like to have the power of Java2D, and reuse some of the great frameworks out there built on Swing. More and more people are using AWT/SWT bridge, since SWT does not provide an underlying drawing framework as rich as Java2D. Eclipse has great things like EMF, and the platform is number one choice for tooling, but when it comes to things like Bezier curves etc, Swing is much easier to use. So are we going to see more developer friendly versions of Eclipse where Swing is more available to us?
if you are coming from a programming background, I assure you that you'll hate gui oriented tools like spss. if you have a slightly better understanding of probability and the notion of sampling, you'll find that the way r approaches data as a whole feels very nice for a developer. in data analysis, you'll be transforming, filtering typecasting data. you'll be turning numbers into nominal values, you'll be sampling from complex distributions etc. writing code to do these lets you stay in complete control of what you're doing and at least for me looking at a function line by line is a much better way of seeing what I'm doing, instead of clicking on icons and selecting menu items in a particular order. the whole process is documented in code, and for me it is much easier to map the things I'm doing to statistics. the downside of R is, as you start dealing with more and more data, things become a little bit harder since R takes all data into memory and processes it in memory. scaling into very large amounts of data is not easy, at least I can't afford as much ram as necessary (my data sets are really huge). the most important advantage of some commercial tools in my work is that they can treat data as a stream on disk, and even if it takes longer, it is possible to process huge amounts of data. R forces you to think about what you are doing, instead of hiding behind spss and saying, well these are the results spss has given us, when we clicked these buttons and menus. my 2 cents of course.
Sorry, I should have been clearer. I'm aware of those solutions, but would it be the same in terms of processing power, software support (cuda, related libraries etc..) I mean is this a convenient repackaging of what is already out there, or does it have something extra?
Is it possible to build a smaller version of this configuration? I do not have 10K, but I can come up with something smaller for my PhD research. In that case, is this a package that can be replicated via off the shelf nvidia hardware, or do I need to wait for NVidia to release a smaller version?
If I have the money someday, the device that I'll be giving a try is sold by http://www.irextechnologies.com/ They have been producing a nice one for some time, but their new series of e-readers is one step closer to my dream. The price tag is way too high, but considering the amount of material I have to read (tech guy + PhD student) it is still an investment worth considering. I can not read from the screen no matter what kind of device (laptop, lcd monitor, shiny, glossy, crt etc..) I use. E-Ink seems to be much more promising, and especially the new line of devices with almost A4 size is perfect for me. They also have annotation support with a stylus. The downside of the thing seems to be the page flipping speed. Now if only they had a lower price tag...
Because I needed a website with a high level of interaction. The client asked for enabling disabling of various things on a widget, some bells and whistles,but nothing fancy. In the beginning I wrote the code for this using javascript, hand coded the whole thing. But change requests, and much more important than that, browser compatibility problems cost me a lot of time. GWT fixed this aspect. Mostly compatible with all major browsers, and being much more experienced in Java than in js, I became more productive. However, I should have limited my implementation to a single widget, and that was my mistake when using GWT. Use a plain jsp page, attach the widget to a div, and be done with it. Instead I've built the whole thing on GWT, and later fell in a position where I can not easily add very simple stuff. The usual GWT app is one single js chunk, which navigates to different pages by hiding and showing things on a page. This requires a little getting used to, and I've implemented more flexible things like pulling html via remote calls etc. But in general, mixing GWT with a more server side oriented technology (asp.net, jsp, jsf etc...) looks like a better approach now. But when you have to build a slightly complex interface where there are trees, enabled disable compoenents, users adding, removing things to a list etc, GWT serves well. I guess the secret is in the balance, just use it at the necessary level, no more. I could have used Flash, but that'd be a total pain for multiple reasons. (a lot of reasons actually)
Sorry, just have to ask: What do you recommend instead of jsf? This comes from a guy who has to choose a java web stack for an upcoming project, that'll have to scale. No need for a flame war, just asking for a short answer here:)
No, you are not alone. This is a problem that almost everyone who develops software faces somehow. It all depends on your line of work actually. If you are working on building business oriented information systems which seem to cover everything from online gambling to financial decision support, you are in trouble, for there is simply too much technology that is competing in the field. In general, you have to have a decent level of knowledge and experience about major technologies, you can not avoid java or c#. I admit that becoming an expert on any of these technologies takes quite some time, but the market usually does not let you do so. The only people who are immune to this problem are usually working in a product based company, rather than a project based one. My personal experience has shown me that a successful product is much less likely to switch technologies, and if it happens, it is usually a switch to next generation in the same technology, so it is not that hard to adopt. Also, guys in image processing, or embedded development on hardware is quite stable. When you are in a field with buzzwords being pushed to market everyday, you find yourself in a position where you have to adopt to bullshit to survive. Managers, bosses and most important of all, customers are willing to buy new stuff all the time, which means there is no excuse in their book for "this is useless technology". So to get rid of what you're complaining about, switch to a well defined and stable solution space. (Military sector for example) On the other hand, it is possible to take advantage of this, in case you are a fast learner who can learn and recognize patterns in these technologies. There is the usual pain of getting deeper in one technology occasionally, when something that pays good comes up, but till then, you keep working on all of these. This is pretty much what everyone has to do in a particular segment of the software market these days. Sometimes learning fast becomes more important than knowing something in depth, and it is a shame. My advice, to avoid drowning, pick a few major technologies, and map new ones to concepts in them when you have to. Java, C#, Python, MySql etc..
As some other./ members have written, Ubik is a very complex book, that requires reader's attention. There are scenes in the book which would give any cgi guy nightmares, and the overall feeling is quite dark, like in many other Dick's works.
Faced with the challenge, the director and the studio would give us the following: A man with a group of super sexy, super mad, super funy soldiers, who are both mutants and martial arts masters at the same time Dead people appearing in the sky in tones of blue and at least one of them telling the main character I love you, as she fades away with a soft and emotional music. etc etc...
I'd be more than happy to see this being done right, but it is higly unlikely. I guess there are some books which would rather not touched by studios unless they have a huge budget and a great cast, with a good director. Tiger Tiger is one of them, Ubik can be another one IMHO.
Really. I've had my eyes on this one for quite some time. I'm a PhD student, and I usually carry around at least two thick and heavy books with me depending on the subject I'm working on. A huge pile of books are scattered around my home, in the office where I work part time and in my car. It is quite usual that I have to go back to some books for reference and check for something. It is needless to mention the large amount of papers I have to read (but I've mentioned it anyways). This is a scenario where Iliad can be a real saver, but it is simply very, very expensive for me. I also can not feel comfortable with a reading device that is too small, and Iliad has a decent screen size, but the damn price does not seem to be dropping at all!!! Guys like me (with more money of course) should be buying this thing like crazy, but somehow it is now known very well. If IRex produces a color version of it, I'd probably consider selling a few personal belongings for it though.
Yes, I spoke to him on the phone. I asked him when I'd be able to benefit from this cpu to build better performing software, on a stable and widely used platform, and more important than that, when would I earn enough money to buy a machine to build this environment I'm talking about. Well, he said, imagine me holding my middle finger in front of your face... I did not say anything else.
I'm not sure I am getting the reason for taking this app down. Really. If I were to clone an app to demonstrate a new platform, would that be a problem? So, what is the possibility of Google taking down google docs, in response to complaints from MS, or some other online office software provider? No bad intentions here, I just don't get it. Care to enlighten me?
The team with more data performed better, probably because their data allowed them to clearly differentiate between movies using a far significant dimension than the given ratings per movie dimension. The fundamental idea is to be able to identify clusters of movies, or users (who like a certain type of movie), and the idea of clusters is built on some form of distance. When you add a new dimension to your feature vector, you get a chance to identify groups of entities better, using that dimension. You may do worse as well, a new dimension may blur the lines between groups. Genres for movies looks like a good label for identifying groups of movies. Trying to do the same with more complex methods, using only ratings is harder. More data does not necessarily mean you'll do better, it has to allow you to identify differences better, it should either contain or add a dimension with a "good" data. It seems team B directly went for generating a more relevant data set for the problem at hand.
I am working on bayesian belief networks, and though I have been able to find some nice libraries, I have writing a simple one just to really get it, and to get quick results, I'll be taking a look at python. A client of mine has been showing interest in IPhone apps, and if he deals with the quirks of the sdk (registering etc), then it will be objective-c for me. I have never been able to actually learn or use a language without a clear need for it, so even though there are many others I'd be interested in, I know that as long as I do not have something to produce, the learning process just does not work for me.
A geek with a lot of imagination hacks the helper, uses a wig, some silicone, adding some more movement capability, and voila: we have a car with automated blowjobs. A happy end to getting bored in traffic jams. (a lot of accidents will surely follow)
I think the importance and power of a PhD in USA is different in USA and India. India is just an example here, you can easily say that the same argument goes for Turkey, Hungary, etc.. When you get back from USA with a PhD, you certainly have an advantage compared to others at your own country. If you can find a good position as a researcher or a developer etc in USA, that's probably better than your lifestyle in your own country. If it does not work out after the PhD, just go back, and your PhD will provide you a substantially better life at home. For well developed economies, the competition for various fields is relatively at a different level. I'd like to hear comments about the difference in the quality of life of an American engineer who goes all the way to the PhD, and one that does not bother to do so. Believe me, in some parts of the world, that grad degree creates huge advantages, which may not be true for USA.
Well, doctors and patients using different languages, is a well known problem in this domain. That's why we have huge terminologies in almost every field. Please google for Snomed CT, UMLS, HL7 RIM and OpenEHR. In short, even if written information by the doctor is very valuable, it is not easy to use in multi lingual scenarios, and also it is a nightmare for semantic interoperability and therefore machine use. The idea of electronic healthcare records based on these terminologies exits since people want to avoid the language problem. If you check out the mentioned standards and terminologies, you can see that they all aim to provide language independent medical data representation. Yes, an ICD code for a disease "still" has to be mapped to a set of spanish words, but in the end this is much easier than overcoming the nlp and translation problem. In practice, your Dutch GP (by the way, 90% of Dutch GPs use computer supported information management) should use a solution that uses an electronic healhtcare record as a backend, or can export it. Instead of writing down headache, vomitting etc, he should check boxes in his own languages on a screen, and an EHR instance with codes from say Snomed CT, should be created, which would be much more interoperable for your Spanish pysician. Believe me, a lot of people have been working on these issues, and even the smallest implementations have huge benefits. It's just that everyone likes to go for the ultimate project, the ultimate challange, which is far too complicated to achive for a single step.
And you'll be successful. Really, the problem with these kind of national health information system projects (NHS being the most famous one) it that everybody loves giant projects. Giant in the sense of both scope and functional and technical complexity. The governments want to come up with a total change in healthcare which can be seen by everyone. The vendors are much more happy about this, since the bigger the project, the larger the profit from products, and especially consultancy. The problem is healthcare is very, very complex. I have been in software industry for over 10 years now, and I have spent the last 6 in healthcare. It is a beast that no one has ever tamed. Doctors, nurses the overall process in many levels of healthcare service makes the whole thing a nightmare. And trying to plan and implement a solution for the whole thing in the national scale is very risky. We have over 30 hospitals running on our hospital information sytem in my company, and each one of these hospitals have very different needs. You may imagine that the basic requirements for medical systems will be common, but it is not. Add financial aspects to this, and everyting becomes such a mess. Now talk to anyone in healthcare IT, and they'll tell you that you can't provide the potential benefits without standards. HL7 has been the most common messaging standard in healhtcare, but it is a huge beast with its own problems. You need electronic healthcare records if you want to provide, patient safety, decision support, accurate reporting etc. Now sharing these is important for the patient and the doctor, but moreover, aggregating that data is important for the government. EU countries spend and average of 8% of their gnp on health, and for policy makers, data is necessary. To overcome this complexity, governments should come up with incremental projects, each dealing with one important aspect at a time. FIRST: deal with electronic patient records based on standards. Use CDA, openEHR, CEN 13606, whatever. But first do this. Then when you have the ability to produce data in a standardized format in your healthcare institutions, work on messaging among them. The thing that no one seems to get is; each of the founding technologies of e-health has its own complexities and problems, and it becomes impossible to deal with them when you aim for super-high goals. Just keep it simple, and you'll see that even the simple will be hard enough. Australia seems to be doing good in their national e-health strategy, and Finland is also successful. Before going for the whole EU, national systems should be built and tested. No matter what the people in the industry say, governments always fail to grasp the complexity of these things.
That'd be nice. At the moment, eclipse has this sluggish performance when it comes to swt on linux. The VE project on my ubuntu box is much slower than in windows, and if this new jvm can perform better in this aspect, then I'm happy to read this. (there are alternatives to ve, and overall performance is fine, but again, faster is better...)
There are endless domains for software, and healthcare is a really hard one for everyone. I've been working in healthcare industry for about 6 years now, and I have to say that, in terms of requirements, it is one of the worst domains. (I've worked on e-business and erp systems before healthcare). Not only the requirements are very hard to capture, but also the requirements usually contradict with the laws and other requirements in the care chain. There are millions of things that I can write, but to make it short: healthcare is very complex, and I have never seen projects with very high hopes succeed. IF UK had not set so wide targets, and followed a more focused path, by prioritizing the targets, chances are high that they would be in a better position now. I have seen the same thing in most large scale health projects: everyone thinks that everything is connected (mostly true) and doing things step by step, project by project would increase the overall cost, and things should be done in parallel. Everybody, especially the vendors (oracle, sun, ms you name it) pushes through a complete solution, and governments fail to see the increasing risk in such an approach. Especially in large projects integration between different parts becomes a huge issue. Different companies, different technologies, different users etc. In healthcare there are many issues which no one has ever solved. Think about electronic health records, a security model for access to patient data etc. there is only discussion about these issues, and no silver bullet exists. Take a look at HIPAA. Did it really work in USA? Starting a project with so many issues that may cause problems, is the real mistake. Many of these issues arose from unforeseen requirements and regulations, and the size of the project made it impossible to estimate the risks accurately. If the budget has been much lower and targets have been smaller, maybe things would be much more under control. I am about to get involved in a very large scale project in healthcare, and it makes me have nightmares even if I know it is nothing compared to this one. I'll do whatever I can to set the goals as logical and feasible as possible, otherwise I know that no one will be able to follow the whole process in detail. I think the same thing happened in UK
This is what Oracle does. To me, they are a database vendor. Yes they have development tools in java, application servers, soa solutions etc. I have been working with their technology for over two years now, and the products other than the database really sucks. The database sucks too, but it sucks in a stable manner. Especially the application server is a pain in the a.s, and their development tools make you question your life as a developer. At the moment they have a product portfolio hidden behind their brand constructed by the database. This seems to work though, they somehow reflect the image of a large vendor with many solutions. (not to me, but to managers, market etc.)
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Best signature ever mate!! I'll even pretend that I did not read the MBA and intelligent thing...
Yeah, sure, play a driving game and you can become a pro race driver. A whole generation of geeks spent ages with leisure suit larry, and what did we get in real life???
I've been reading about exciting devices that will be released with Android for quite some time now. I am a developer and I am more interested in the device as a developer than I am as an end user. iPhone has a lot of roadblocks for me, I need a Mac to develop on it, which is a huge cost for me at the moment. Apple's policy about publishing apps is another story which has been discussed a lot.
The problem is; even if Android is emphasizing openness, its development model seems to be "we know what is good for you". As far as I can see, there is no low level access to device for developers, and you are supposed to use Java, with some JNI capabilities for process intensive tasks. Native code can only be isolated chunks which still can't access device using C/C++.
This is most likely to ensure that code runs on all devices, but this is a choice that should be left to the developer, at least if you're claiming that your platform is open. If I decide to develop something on a particular phone, knowing that it may not work in the same way on other devices, this is my choice, and I should have this option.
For whatever reason I have, I want to have native apis for C/C++ and Android does not seem to offer this. Maybe my money is not that important, but for things like gaming, which will probably be huge on the iPhone quite soon, this will be a problem.
Here you go: http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/short/327/7417/716?fmr It is titled: "Understanding sensitivity and specificity with the right side of the brain "
Exactly written for the purpose. PDF should be available freely.
I have to build quite complex tools using GEF and GMF, and there are many cases where I'd like to have the power of Java2D, and reuse some of the great frameworks out there built on Swing.
More and more people are using AWT/SWT bridge, since SWT does not provide an underlying drawing framework as rich as Java2D.
Eclipse has great things like EMF, and the platform is number one choice for tooling, but when it comes to things like Bezier curves etc, Swing is much easier to use. So are we going to see more developer friendly versions of Eclipse where Swing is more available to us?
if you are coming from a programming background, I assure you that you'll hate gui oriented tools like spss. if you have a slightly better understanding of probability and the notion of sampling, you'll find that the way r approaches data as a whole feels very nice for a developer.
in data analysis, you'll be transforming, filtering typecasting data. you'll be turning numbers into nominal values, you'll be sampling from complex distributions etc. writing code to do these lets you stay in complete control of what you're doing and at least for me looking at a function line by line is a much better way of seeing what I'm doing, instead of clicking on icons and selecting menu items in a particular order. the whole process is documented in code, and for me it is much easier to map the things I'm doing to statistics.
the downside of R is, as you start dealing with more and more data, things become a little bit harder since R takes all data into memory and processes it in memory. scaling into very large amounts of data is not easy, at least I can't afford as much ram as necessary (my data sets are really huge). the most important advantage of some commercial tools in my work is that they can treat data as a stream on disk, and even if it takes longer, it is possible to process huge amounts of data.
R forces you to think about what you are doing, instead of hiding behind spss and saying, well these are the results spss has given us, when we clicked these buttons and menus. my 2 cents of course.
Sorry, I should have been clearer. I'm aware of those solutions, but would it be the same in terms of processing power, software support (cuda, related libraries etc..)
I mean is this a convenient repackaging of what is already out there, or does it have something extra?
Is it possible to build a smaller version of this configuration? I do not have 10K, but I can come up with something smaller for my PhD research. In that case, is this a package that can be replicated via off the shelf nvidia hardware, or do I need to wait for NVidia to release a smaller version?
If I have the money someday, the device that I'll be giving a try is sold by http://www.irextechnologies.com/
They have been producing a nice one for some time, but their new series of e-readers is one step closer to my dream. The price tag is way too high, but considering the amount of material I have to read (tech guy + PhD student) it is still an investment worth considering. I can not read from the screen no matter what kind of device (laptop, lcd monitor, shiny, glossy, crt etc..) I use. E-Ink seems to be much more promising, and especially the new line of devices with almost A4 size is perfect for me. They also have annotation support with a stylus. The downside of the thing seems to be the page flipping speed. Now if only they had a lower price tag...
Because I needed a website with a high level of interaction. The client asked for enabling disabling of various things on a widget, some bells and whistles,but nothing fancy. In the beginning I wrote the code for this using javascript, hand coded the whole thing. But change requests, and much more important than that, browser compatibility problems cost me a lot of time. GWT fixed this aspect. Mostly compatible with all major browsers, and being much more experienced in Java than in js, I became more productive.
However, I should have limited my implementation to a single widget, and that was my mistake when using GWT. Use a plain jsp page, attach the widget to a div, and be done with it. Instead I've built the whole thing on GWT, and later fell in a position where I can not easily add very simple stuff. The usual GWT app is one single js chunk, which navigates to different pages by hiding and showing things on a page. This requires a little getting used to, and I've implemented more flexible things like pulling html via remote calls etc. But in general, mixing GWT with a more server side oriented technology (asp.net, jsp, jsf etc...) looks like a better approach now. But when you have to build a slightly complex interface where there are trees, enabled disable compoenents, users adding, removing things to a list etc, GWT serves well. I guess the secret is in the balance, just use it at the necessary level, no more. I could have used Flash, but that'd be a total pain for multiple reasons. (a lot of reasons actually)
Sorry, just have to ask: What do you recommend instead of jsf? This comes from a guy who has to choose a java web stack for an upcoming project, that'll have to scale. No need for a flame war, just asking for a short answer here :)
No, you are not alone. This is a problem that almost everyone who develops software faces somehow. It all depends on your line of work actually. If you are working on building business oriented information systems which seem to cover everything from online gambling to financial decision support, you are in trouble, for there is simply too much technology that is competing in the field. In general, you have to have a decent level of knowledge and experience about major technologies, you can not avoid java or c#. I admit that becoming an expert on any of these technologies takes quite some time, but the market usually does not let you do so. The only people who are immune to this problem are usually working in a product based company, rather than a project based one. My personal experience has shown me that a successful product is much less likely to switch technologies, and if it happens, it is usually a switch to next generation in the same technology, so it is not that hard to adopt.
Also, guys in image processing, or embedded development on hardware is quite stable.
When you are in a field with buzzwords being pushed to market everyday, you find yourself in a position where you have to adopt to bullshit to survive. Managers, bosses and most important of all, customers are willing to buy new stuff all the time, which means there is no excuse in their book for "this is useless technology".
So to get rid of what you're complaining about, switch to a well defined and stable solution space. (Military sector for example)
On the other hand, it is possible to take advantage of this, in case you are a fast learner who can learn and recognize patterns in these technologies. There is the usual pain of getting deeper in one technology occasionally, when something that pays good comes up, but till then, you keep working on all of these. This is pretty much what everyone has to do in a particular segment of the software market these days. Sometimes learning fast becomes more important than knowing something in depth, and it is a shame. My advice, to avoid drowning, pick a few major technologies, and map new ones to concepts in them when you have to. Java, C#, Python, MySql etc..
As some other ./ members have written, Ubik is a very complex book, that requires reader's attention. There are scenes in the book which would give any cgi guy nightmares, and the overall feeling is quite dark, like in many other Dick's works.
Faced with the challenge, the director and the studio would give us the following:
A man with a group of super sexy, super mad, super funy soldiers, who are both mutants and martial arts masters at the same time
Dead people appearing in the sky in tones of blue and at least one of them telling the main character I love you, as she fades away with a soft and emotional music.
etc etc...
I'd be more than happy to see this being done right, but it is higly unlikely. I guess there are some books which would rather not touched by studios unless they have a huge budget and a great cast, with a good director. Tiger Tiger is one of them, Ubik can be another one IMHO.
Really. I've had my eyes on this one for quite some time. I'm a PhD student, and I usually carry around at least two thick and heavy books with me depending on the subject I'm working on. A huge pile of books are scattered around my home, in the office where I work part time and in my car. It is quite usual that I have to go back to some books for reference and check for something. It is needless to mention the large amount of papers I have to read (but I've mentioned it anyways).
This is a scenario where Iliad can be a real saver, but it is simply very, very expensive for me. I also can not feel comfortable with a reading device that is too small, and Iliad has a decent screen size, but the damn price does not seem to be dropping at all!!!
Guys like me (with more money of course) should be buying this thing like crazy, but somehow it is now known very well. If IRex produces a color version of it, I'd probably consider selling a few personal belongings for it though.
Yes, I spoke to him on the phone. I asked him when I'd be able to benefit from this cpu to build better performing software, on a stable and widely used platform, and more important than that, when would I earn enough money to buy a machine to build this environment I'm talking about.
Well, he said, imagine me holding my middle finger in front of your face...
I did not say anything else.
I'm not sure I am getting the reason for taking this app down. Really. If I were to clone an app to demonstrate a new platform, would that be a problem? So, what is the possibility of Google taking down google docs, in response to complaints from MS, or some other online office software provider?
No bad intentions here, I just don't get it. Care to enlighten me?
The team with more data performed better, probably because their data allowed them to clearly differentiate between movies using a far significant dimension than the given ratings per movie dimension.
The fundamental idea is to be able to identify clusters of movies, or users (who like a certain type of movie), and the idea of clusters is built on some form of distance. When you add a new dimension to your feature vector, you get a chance to identify groups of entities better, using that dimension. You may do worse as well, a new dimension may blur the lines between groups. Genres for movies looks like a good label for identifying groups of movies. Trying to do the same with more complex methods, using only ratings is harder.
More data does not necessarily mean you'll do better, it has to allow you to identify differences better, it should either contain or add a dimension with a "good" data. It seems team B directly went for generating a more relevant data set for the problem at hand.
I am working on bayesian belief networks, and though I have been able to find some nice libraries, I have writing a simple one just to really get it, and to get quick results, I'll be taking a look at python.
A client of mine has been showing interest in IPhone apps, and if he deals with the quirks of the sdk (registering etc), then it will be objective-c for me.
I have never been able to actually learn or use a language without a clear need for it, so even though there are many others I'd be interested in, I know that as long as I do not have something to produce, the learning process just does not work for me.
A geek with a lot of imagination hacks the helper, uses a wig, some silicone, adding some more movement capability, and voila: we have a car with automated blowjobs. A happy end to getting bored in traffic jams. (a lot of accidents will surely follow)
I think the importance and power of a PhD in USA is different in USA and India. India is just an example here, you can easily say that the same argument goes for Turkey, Hungary, etc.. When you get back from USA with a PhD, you certainly have an advantage compared to others at your own country. If you can find a good position as a researcher or a developer etc in USA, that's probably better than your lifestyle in your own country. If it does not work out after the PhD, just go back, and your PhD will provide you a substantially better life at home.
For well developed economies, the competition for various fields is relatively at a different level. I'd like to hear comments about the difference in the quality of life of an American engineer who goes all the way to the PhD, and one that does not bother to do so. Believe me, in some parts of the world, that grad degree creates huge advantages, which may not be true for USA.
Well, doctors and patients using different languages, is a well known problem in this domain. That's why we have huge terminologies in almost every field. Please google for Snomed CT, UMLS, HL7 RIM and OpenEHR. In short, even if written information by the doctor is very valuable, it is not easy to use in multi lingual scenarios, and also it is a nightmare for semantic interoperability and therefore machine use.
The idea of electronic healthcare records based on these terminologies exits since people want to avoid the language problem. If you check out the mentioned standards and terminologies, you can see that they all aim to provide language independent medical data representation. Yes, an ICD code for a disease "still" has to be mapped to a set of spanish words, but in the end this is much easier than overcoming the nlp and translation problem.
In practice, your Dutch GP (by the way, 90% of Dutch GPs use computer supported information management) should use a solution that uses an electronic healhtcare record as a backend, or can export it. Instead of writing down headache, vomitting etc, he should check boxes in his own languages on a screen, and an EHR instance with codes from say Snomed CT, should be created, which would be much more interoperable for your Spanish pysician.
Believe me, a lot of people have been working on these issues, and even the smallest implementations have huge benefits. It's just that everyone likes to go for the ultimate project, the ultimate challange, which is far too complicated to achive for a single step.
And you'll be successful. Really, the problem with these kind of national health information system projects (NHS being the most famous one) it that everybody loves giant projects. Giant in the sense of both scope and functional and technical complexity. The governments want to come up with a total change in healthcare which can be seen by everyone. The vendors are much more happy about this, since the bigger the project, the larger the profit from products, and especially consultancy.
The problem is healthcare is very, very complex. I have been in software industry for over 10 years now, and I have spent the last 6 in healthcare. It is a beast that no one has ever tamed. Doctors, nurses the overall process in many levels of healthcare service makes the whole thing a nightmare. And trying to plan and implement a solution for the whole thing in the national scale is very risky. We have over 30 hospitals running on our hospital information sytem in my company, and each one of these hospitals have very different needs. You may imagine that the basic requirements for medical systems will be common, but it is not. Add financial aspects to this, and everyting becomes such a mess.
Now talk to anyone in healthcare IT, and they'll tell you that you can't provide the potential benefits without standards. HL7 has been the most common messaging standard in healhtcare, but it is a huge beast with its own problems. You need electronic healthcare records if you want to provide, patient safety, decision support, accurate reporting etc.
Now sharing these is important for the patient and the doctor, but moreover, aggregating that data is important for the government. EU countries spend and average of 8% of their gnp on health, and for policy makers, data is necessary.
To overcome this complexity, governments should come up with incremental projects, each dealing with one important aspect at a time. FIRST: deal with electronic patient records based on standards. Use CDA, openEHR, CEN 13606, whatever. But first do this. Then when you have the ability to produce data in a standardized format in your healthcare institutions, work on messaging among them. The thing that no one seems to get is; each of the founding technologies of e-health has its own complexities and problems, and it becomes impossible to deal with them when you aim for super-high goals.
Just keep it simple, and you'll see that even the simple will be hard enough. Australia seems to be doing good in their national e-health strategy, and Finland is also successful. Before going for the whole EU, national systems should be built and tested.
No matter what the people in the industry say, governments always fail to grasp the complexity of these things.
That'd be nice. At the moment, eclipse has this sluggish performance when it comes to swt on linux. The VE project on my ubuntu box is much slower than in windows, and if this new jvm can perform better in this aspect, then I'm happy to read this. (there are alternatives to ve, and overall performance is fine, but again, faster is better...)
There are endless domains for software, and healthcare is a really hard one for everyone. I've been working in healthcare industry for about 6 years now, and I have to say that, in terms of requirements, it is one of the worst domains. (I've worked on e-business and erp systems before healthcare). Not only the requirements are very hard to capture, but also the requirements usually contradict with the laws and other requirements in the care chain. There are millions of things that I can write, but to make it short: healthcare is very complex, and I have never seen projects with very high hopes succeed. IF UK had not set so wide targets, and followed a more focused path, by prioritizing the targets, chances are high that they would be in a better position now. I have seen the same thing in most large scale health projects: everyone thinks that everything is connected (mostly true) and doing things step by step, project by project would increase the overall cost, and things should be done in parallel.
Everybody, especially the vendors (oracle, sun, ms you name it) pushes through a complete solution, and governments fail to see the increasing risk in such an approach. Especially in large projects integration between different parts becomes a huge issue. Different companies, different technologies, different users etc. In healthcare there are many issues which no one has ever solved. Think about electronic health records, a security model for access to patient data etc. there is only discussion about these issues, and no silver bullet exists. Take a look at HIPAA. Did it really work in USA? Starting a project with so many issues that may cause problems, is the real mistake.
Many of these issues arose from unforeseen requirements and regulations, and the size of the project made it impossible to estimate the risks accurately. If the budget has been much lower and targets have been smaller, maybe things would be much more under control.
I am about to get involved in a very large scale project in healthcare, and it makes me have nightmares even if I know it is nothing compared to this one. I'll do whatever I can to set the goals as logical and feasible as possible, otherwise I know that no one will be able to follow the whole process in detail. I think the same thing happened in UK
This is what Oracle does. To me, they are a database vendor. Yes they have development tools in java, application servers, soa solutions etc. I have been working with their technology for over two years now, and the products other than the database really sucks. The database sucks too, but it sucks in a stable manner.
Especially the application server is a pain in the a.s, and their development tools make you question your life as a developer. At the moment they have a product portfolio hidden behind their brand constructed by the database. This seems to work though, they somehow reflect the image of a large vendor with many solutions. (not to me, but to managers, market etc.)