That is just a product page that has been up for weeks, if not months. The news about how it will be released today/friday/saturday morning is in fact, quite a recent development, and mentioned nowhere on the Apple site (except for maybe the support discussion boards:)).
KOffice does offer some benefits over StarOffice. KOffice is natively compiled for the machine platform on which it is executing, whereas StarOffice is a Java-based application. This means KOffice responds much faster and is less memory-intensive than StarOffice.
I remember watching the development of GNUStep from back when I just started using Linux (95? 96?). It seems to be a project that has been slowly in development for years now, yet unfortunately hampered by a lack of support from the OSS community.
I wouldn't blame anyone, though. Most people are not familiar or even interested in the NeXTStep/OpenStep platform. The technology is definately strange, based on Objective-C and a postscript-based rendering engine, but this platform was (is) years ahead of its time.
I have OpenStep 4.2 for intel, and it is probably the coolest OS ever. At one point I got a copy of an early OS X beta for intel, and it was basically OpenStep 4.2 recompiled with a Macos-looking widget set and a menubar instead of the Wharf ("Dock" in WindowMaker land). The look and feel of OpenStep is far and beyond any UNIX or Windows desktop in terms of sheer quality and useability (many believe the Windows widget set is imitative of the NeXT look to the point that NeXT could have sued Microsoft).
It is sad to think that if Redhat decided to throw its weight behind GNUStep instead of GNOME, we probably would have had a full-fledged, slick NeXTStep/OpenStep/Macos X clone right now layered on top of any UNIX kernel. This is just too bad. I think pretty soon I will reinstall OpenStep 4.2 on my Intel box, and I'm definately investing in one of those G4's to find out what those old NeXT developers (considered some of the most innovative and talented GUI developers in the world) have been up to.
From the page describing one of their utilities, called FIREHOSE (it stripes network data accross different NICs as a means of increasing bandwidth):
The FIREHOSE package contains a simple library allowing any application wishing to stream data across striped networks to do so with just a few function calls. Also included is a file transfer utility and a pipe utility. Pipe gigabytes of uncompressed video, CD-R images, scientific data, tar archives, and porn all with the greatest of ease.
While I don't disagree with your points, the main idea of this article is to use old PC hardware *as X terminals*, and having a half-decent modern machine act as the application server for these terminals.
I think this scheme could work, given two amendments:
-Use high quality, modern video cards.
-Use highest quality keyboard and mouse (you know, the latest and greatest logitech optical stuff)
-By the best monitors (at least 17", flat screen triniton sort of monitors)
-HIDE the ugly beige P100 from 1995 from the user.
I agree that I would be bummed out if a dusty old 486 or early pentium was sitting at my desk. I probably wouldn't work as hard. But, this way, they never see this ugly machine, and to top it off the components that the user is actually exposed to are top notch.
Retailers do this to protect themselves.
on
$1200 Cheap!
·
· Score: 2
Seems like the anti-Microsoft sentiment here is starting to cloud everyone's judgement.
Retailers often require that you buy games with a new console to protect themselves. This is because, besides the fact that Microsoft is losing a significant amount of money on each console, there is usually very little to no store markup on these systems. Given that most people buy these systems with credit cards, the retailer is sure to lose money selling a standalone console. On top of this, most of these people buying consoles at a loss to the retailer are the ones who are putting them on ebay and making a mean profit. Its just not fair.
So, to boil it all down, selling packages like this is nothing new, and it protects the retailer probably more than it does Microsoft.
The programming blueprints, or source code, for the kernel--the heart of Linux--is included on the DVD, Sony said. But the source code for a proprietary "runtime environment" that lets games play on the system is not.
I know its slashdot, but I can't believe being a blind, mad, and paranoid GPL zealot will still score you +5.
Another one of Knuth's major contributions is the creation of the TeX text formatting package.
The mathematical expression output of TeX is incredibly elegant and has yet been matched by any other text formatting package, especially the (comparably) utter filth produced by Microsoft.
In a pre-TeX world, mathematical typesetting was extremely costly and time consuming. TeX had in fact revolutionized the world of creating scientific documents. It is to mathematic/scientific writing what C is to software development. Its use is widespread that in most universities, it is absolutely required that any kind of academic paper in a science faculty be produced with a TeX-derived formatting package.
The coolest thing is, inventing TeX is something Knuth hardly mentions, let alone brags about. It seems to me that Knuth considers TeX as "something he cooked up a few years ago".
Once again, John Katz continues to exploit and over-glorify so-called "geeks" and "geek teens". After this and another recent article of his I read in Shift, I'm convinced that Katz's opportunism has truly peaked.
Here are some realities that Katz needs to grasp:
-The grand majority of "geeks" he is placing on a pedestal are merely antisocial teens who play too much Quake and spend most their time in UNIX changing their window managers. I know this because I was a wise-cracking teenaged "UNIX geek" only a few years ago.
-The most knowledgeable (sp?), clever, annd innovative computer people out there are the same people who are married with children; the normal men and women who don't get a great deal of attention in the media. This is mainly because "computer smarts" comes mainly from knowledge built from years of experience, not any kind of magical teenaged link to the wonders of bits and bytes. Anyone with both an academic and production backgroun in software will confirm this.
Please, Katz, realize the above points and move on. A couple articles a couple years ago was OK, but you've been milking this for far too long. Just move on and find some other subculture you can leech on; at the very least teen geeks arent even worth it.
While any Top N games of all time list is going to be biased and controversial, it just makes my jaw drop that pretty much no real adventure games were mentioned. Have these guys ever played a Sierra or LucasArts game? You mention modern 3D CPU hog garbage like Asheron's Call, Ultima Online and Deus Ex and you don't mention masterpieces like Maniac Mansion 2, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Quest for Glory, Space Quest, King's Quest, LSL, Rise of the Dragon or Monkey Island?
This list is completely devoid of heart and soul. There were some good picks, like Wing Commander, Starcraft, X-COM and Doom, but generally it appears they have no fucking clue what they're talking about.
that's funny, my first AI prof told us the exact same anecdote. It seems to be pretty popular in AI circles, as I've seen it on several machine learning websites as well.:)
Checksums do not change gracefully given different inputs. As in, if there's the slightest change in a spam email, let's say the date and sendto in the email header change, the entire checksum will appear completely different. Therefore the checksums will only apply to specific spam messages, and not entire classes of similar spam emails (this would be the desirable solution). And most spam mails these days are smart enough to put your name or something in the email subject and body.
A more robust method of spam detection, IMHO, would be to develop an algorithm that would take emails, and encode them in a way that they could be input to a neural network. the output of the network would be 0=not spam/1=spam... there's definately enough examples out there for it to learn from. The hardest part, as usual, would be to find a way to encode the emails. So let's say you receive an email. Your client then encodes it, and sends the encoding to a local or remote server with the trained neural net. It returns with the results, and your client either dumps the email to your inbox or your spam folder.
If anyone with some machine learning experience wants to work on a project like this with me, send me an email!
while, in theory, your fears do have a basis, in practice, i wouldn't worry about it. most big corporations out there are extremely paranoid about making any kind of internal legal/licensing errors. these are the same people who spend thousands on licensing C compilers and making sure that every single windows installation is 100% legit. they're just as afraid of lawyers and such as any of us (if not moreso). and chances are that their source code is constantly under review, and it is often licensed/sold to other companies and/or universities (even microsoft lets universities and such look at some of their source). for a big company, it is extremely important to make sure your source is legally self-contained, because you never know when you'll be selling it. and what if you inadvertently hired an RMS-like zealot to work on your shady source code? there's just too many risks, so its just not worth it.
what i would worry about, however, are the many small software/hardware companies who are illegally abusing, and profiting from GPL'ed code. there's no way of knowing if they're in the wrong. additionally, they have the protection of anonymity.
personally, i don't give a damn. while the GPL has its place, too many people are slapping the GPL on their projects simply because its fashionable. i release any of my personal projects under no license whatsoever, so if some poor schmuck really wants to use my code for his employer's closed source project, he can. maybe it will let him come home an hour earlier to spend time with his kids, watch tv, smoke crack, or whatever. seriously, who cares? in a truly Free world, no one should be forced to collaborate.
Brento is correct, this experiment is essentially uninformative. Danny Yee basically posts his text ads, and when they prove ineffective he draws the conclusion that text ads in general are not as good as other types of internet advertisement. There is simply not enough information to determine whether this type of advertisement is good or not.
I personally think they'll prove "just as" effective as normal graphic ads. People will be more appreciative of the lack of cheesy graphics and such, but not enough to actually click on them.:)
Most ML algorithms attempt to find a function f(x) from a sampling of x and f(x) values.
This is only if you're dealing with a two dimensional space, and you're trying to estimate a function f(x). You're simply talking about using a neural net as an interpolation algorithm. This is indeed one use of neural nets (and has proven more accurate than many interpolation/regression methods), but it is IMHO the least interesting use of NNs. People in general need to start thinking of more clever ways to encode problems for neural nets; I'm sure everyone will be quite surprised with the results.
For example, I think you would prefer your airplane pilot to be able to fly the plane than to be able to explain aerodynamics.
You might be getting confused here. If we created some neural net to learn how to fly airplanes, and it did so with excellent reliability and precision, we still will not have The Solution To Flying Airplanes, as in an algorithm or some differential equation that flies airplanes perfectly. Even with a very complete training set, and a network whose outputs are consistently correct, we still will never know whether we have a case of data under- or overfitting.
When you boil it all down, neural nets are just fancy statistical analysis tools. Its like the difference between the true expected value of some phenomenon, and the sample expected value. No matter how large your sample size is, your result is always just an educated guess, it lacks any true scientific rigor.
So yeah, I hope the above is coherent and/or correct, I'm watching Simpsons as I type this so my concentration is not currently 100% optimal:)
One of the main problems with using machine learning is a fundamental lack of trust, and this lack of trust actually has a theoretical basis. Take a neural network that attempts to learn problem X, given a specific set of inputs, it learns to always give the correct answers. The point to emphasize here is that this type of AI only learns how to give good results to a given problem, machine learning does not provide coherent solutions to problems!
Thus, on a fundamental level, machine learning cannot be trusted. The state of a neural network, for example, is a black box from which no real insight can be gained... it just gives the right results (most of the time).
Imagine a neural network whose training set is the raw molecular structure data of different diseases (input) and their cures (output). The network trains on this data until the error reduces to zero. Then you feed in the raw molecular data of some new badass disease, and as output you have the structure of a working cure! The problem goes away, even though no one really knows how the solution was found, since a neural network contains no real data to understand -- it is a black box.
This is why scientists are so skeptical when it comes to AI techniques, it is essentially an affront to the scientific method. I personally believe that machine learning can be effectively used to improve our lives... scientists will have to find new day jobs, however.:) Seriously, though, this NASA mission is important to me because it shows that scientists are not afraid to employ machine learning techniques instead of spending a great deal of time and money trying to solve a set of problems and then develop expert systems for each little situation.
First of all, I'm surprised no one has yet mentioned the old program "DR. SBAITSO" (Sound Blaster Artificial Inteligent something or other) that came along with really old SoundBlaster sound cards (it came with my 8-bit SoundBlaster PRO). The voice sounds almost the same as this bell labs program, so I'm assuming it used the same algorithm. Anyone know where to download Dr. SBAITSO?
On to how text-to-voice works. This was an excellent situation for using an artificial neural network. I don't recall the exact topology of the net, but the lower (input) neurons contained different letter combinations often found in the english language. The output neurons were, obviously, the sound that needed to be produced.
Neural Networks, being the excellent statistical analysis tools they are, would train on many words and determine their "error" by comparing the network output to the actual pronunciation of said words. The network would then adjust the weights through many iterations to reduce this error to zero. Then, new words are fed to the input neurons, and then we have the voice you hear on the Bell Lab site.
This technique for text-to-voice lent a lot of weight to neural network programming. The people demonstrating the algorithm were particularly clever, in that as the neural network was training (i.e. adjusting internal weight values to reduce error to zero), they would test different words on the network in a child's voice. This basically gave the effect of sounding like a child slowly learning to speak. One can imagine how impressive this would be for someone who doesn't really know how the algorithm works.
If you're going to post a halfassed "story", at least do it right.
Many gaming sites, like IGN have full PS2 launch game overviews, and they at least aren't forgetting games like Ridge Racer V or Tekken Tag Tournament. The newsworthiness of this story is, um, sketchy at best.
having the GNOME development layer available on windows is a big deal. basically it means that you can now develop an application using the high quality, open source GNOME platform, and then copy the source on to a windows machine and have it compile and run just as it would on a linux box. if the program is written entirely over GNOME, porting it to windows will basically cost nothing.
as an obviously devoted linux advocate (i think i read the word "war" at least a couple times in your message...), you should at least know that GNOME isn't just a window manager, or even just a desktop environment. it is a software development platform, and because of this it means a lot if someone ports the platform itself to a very popular operating system.
i honestly don't think people should be allowed to advocate a platform (whether its linux, gnome, kde, mozilla, etc) until they've actually written code for it.
One problem with this is that GNOME for Windows requires an X server presence on the Windows machine. Because of this, the port, while still pretty cool, loses some technical merit. Using an X server means that they had all the standard X libraries available on UNIX systems; they didn't need to port any low level Xlib stuff to Windows.
Because of this, I find that the Windows port of Gimp has more technical merit; it does not require an X server - it is a full-fledged port of the GTK library to the Windows platform.
Now I'm not a GNOME expert, but aren't most of the graphics aspects of GNOME built on top of GTK? Why not port GNOME to Windows using this available library? This way, an X server will not be required. (Of course, I'm assuming that non-graphical libraries, ORBit, glib, etc, that GNOME uses are easy to port to Windows).
Re:I Agree With "Cripping" The Genes
on
Golden Rice
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· Score: 1
i was joking. thanks for coming out though.
I Agree With "Cripping" The Genes
on
Golden Rice
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· Score: 2
When the genetic makeup of a plant is altered, and its seeds planted, you're essentially introducing an alien organism into the environment. At least by crippling it, you are in a sense isolating it from its biological surroundings. What if the plant crossbreeds with another plant and creates a new breed that has unknown (i.e. possibly dangerous) nutritional properties? What if the plant proves to be too resilient and ends up killing all the crops around it?
There are many more issues involved with genetically altered plants. I personally am all for it; the possible benefits are simply too great to pass up. But in the meantime I'll feel safer knowing that these things cannot reproduce.
Unless of course, like in Jurassic Park these plants were implanted with African Toad DNA, and end up growing functional reproductive organs. On second thought that would be pretty damn funny.
Slashdot Mirror
so i've revised it for you:
/.ers) * (fraction of /.ers who will actually get off their asses to support any cause) * $15 = negligible to no lost revenue
(# of
That is just a product page that has been up for weeks, if not months. The news about how it will be released today/friday/saturday morning is in fact, quite a recent development, and mentioned nowhere on the Apple site (except for maybe the support discussion boards :)).
KOffice does offer some benefits over StarOffice. KOffice is natively compiled for the machine platform on which it is executing, whereas StarOffice is a Java-based application. This means KOffice responds much faster and is less memory-intensive than StarOffice.
... since when?
Uh
Not even close, ZDNet, but thanks for coming out!
I remember watching the development of GNUStep from back when I just started using Linux (95? 96?). It seems to be a project that has been slowly in development for years now, yet unfortunately hampered by a lack of support from the OSS community.
I wouldn't blame anyone, though. Most people are not familiar or even interested in the NeXTStep/OpenStep platform. The technology is definately strange, based on Objective-C and a postscript-based rendering engine, but this platform was (is) years ahead of its time.
I have OpenStep 4.2 for intel, and it is probably the coolest OS ever. At one point I got a copy of an early OS X beta for intel, and it was basically OpenStep 4.2 recompiled with a Macos-looking widget set and a menubar instead of the Wharf ("Dock" in WindowMaker land). The look and feel of OpenStep is far and beyond any UNIX or Windows desktop in terms of sheer quality and useability (many believe the Windows widget set is imitative of the NeXT look to the point that NeXT could have sued Microsoft).
It is sad to think that if Redhat decided to throw its weight behind GNUStep instead of GNOME, we probably would have had a full-fledged, slick NeXTStep/OpenStep/Macos X clone right now layered on top of any UNIX kernel. This is just too bad. I think pretty soon I will reinstall OpenStep 4.2 on my Intel box, and I'm definately investing in one of those G4's to find out what those old NeXT developers (considered some of the most innovative and talented GUI developers in the world) have been up to.
From the page describing one of their utilities, called FIREHOSE (it stripes network data accross different NICs as a means of increasing bandwidth):
The FIREHOSE package contains a simple library allowing any application wishing to stream data across striped networks to do so with just a few function calls. Also included is a file transfer utility and a pipe utility. Pipe gigabytes of uncompressed video, CD-R images, scientific data, tar archives, and porn all with the greatest of ease.
While I don't disagree with your points, the main idea of this article is to use old PC hardware *as X terminals*, and having a half-decent modern machine act as the application server for these terminals.
I think this scheme could work, given two amendments:
-Use high quality, modern video cards.
-Use highest quality keyboard and mouse (you know, the latest and greatest logitech optical stuff)
-By the best monitors (at least 17", flat screen triniton sort of monitors)
-HIDE the ugly beige P100 from 1995 from the user.
I agree that I would be bummed out if a dusty old 486 or early pentium was sitting at my desk. I probably wouldn't work as hard. But, this way, they never see this ugly machine, and to top it off the components that the user is actually exposed to are top notch.
Seems like the anti-Microsoft sentiment here is starting to cloud everyone's judgement.
Retailers often require that you buy games with a new console to protect themselves. This is because, besides the fact that Microsoft is losing a significant amount of money on each console, there is usually very little to no store markup on these systems. Given that most people buy these systems with credit cards, the retailer is sure to lose money selling a standalone console. On top of this, most of these people buying consoles at a loss to the retailer are the ones who are putting them on ebay and making a mean profit. Its just not fair.
So, to boil it all down, selling packages like this is nothing new, and it protects the retailer probably more than it does Microsoft.
From http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1006-200-5756218.html, linked in the slashdot story:
The programming blueprints, or source code, for the kernel--the heart of Linux--is included on the DVD, Sony said. But the source code for a proprietary "runtime environment" that lets games play on the system is not.
I know its slashdot, but I can't believe being a blind, mad, and paranoid GPL zealot will still score you +5.
Another one of Knuth's major contributions is the creation of the TeX text formatting package.
The mathematical expression output of TeX is incredibly elegant and has yet been matched by any other text formatting package, especially the (comparably) utter filth produced by Microsoft.
In a pre-TeX world, mathematical typesetting was extremely costly and time consuming. TeX had in fact revolutionized the world of creating scientific documents. It is to mathematic/scientific writing what C is to software development. Its use is widespread that in most universities, it is absolutely required that any kind of academic paper in a science faculty be produced with a TeX-derived formatting package.
The coolest thing is, inventing TeX is something Knuth hardly mentions, let alone brags about. It seems to me that Knuth considers TeX as "something he cooked up a few years ago".
Once again, John Katz continues to exploit and over-glorify so-called "geeks" and "geek teens". After this and another recent article of his I read in Shift, I'm convinced that Katz's opportunism has truly peaked.
Here are some realities that Katz needs to grasp:
-The grand majority of "geeks" he is placing on a pedestal are merely antisocial teens who play too much Quake and spend most their time in UNIX changing their window managers. I know this because I was a wise-cracking teenaged "UNIX geek" only a few years ago.
-The most knowledgeable (sp?), clever, annd innovative computer people out there are the same people who are married with children; the normal men and women who don't get a great deal of attention in the media. This is mainly because "computer smarts" comes mainly from knowledge built from years of experience, not any kind of magical teenaged link to the wonders of bits and bytes. Anyone with both an academic and production backgroun in software will confirm this.
Please, Katz, realize the above points and move on. A couple articles a couple years ago was OK, but you've been milking this for far too long. Just move on and find some other subculture you can leech on; at the very least teen geeks arent even worth it.
While any Top N games of all time list is going to be biased and controversial, it just makes my jaw drop that pretty much no real adventure games were mentioned. Have these guys ever played a Sierra or LucasArts game? You mention modern 3D CPU hog garbage like Asheron's Call, Ultima Online and Deus Ex and you don't mention masterpieces like Maniac Mansion 2, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Quest for Glory, Space Quest, King's Quest, LSL, Rise of the Dragon or Monkey Island?
This list is completely devoid of heart and soul. There were some good picks, like Wing Commander, Starcraft, X-COM and Doom, but generally it appears they have no fucking clue what they're talking about.
Leave it to a bunch of FPS nerds to fumble this.
that's funny, my first AI prof told us the exact same anecdote. It seems to be pretty popular in AI circles, as I've seen it on several machine learning websites as well. :)
Checksums do not change gracefully given different inputs. As in, if there's the slightest change in a spam email, let's say the date and sendto in the email header change, the entire checksum will appear completely different. Therefore the checksums will only apply to specific spam messages, and not entire classes of similar spam emails (this would be the desirable solution). And most spam mails these days are smart enough to put your name or something in the email subject and body.
... there's definately enough examples out there for it to learn from. The hardest part, as usual, would be to find a way to encode the emails. So let's say you receive an email. Your client then encodes it, and sends the encoding to a local or remote server with the trained neural net. It returns with the results, and your client either dumps the email to your inbox or your spam folder.
A more robust method of spam detection, IMHO, would be to develop an algorithm that would take emails, and encode them in a way that they could be input to a neural network. the output of the network would be 0=not spam/1=spam
If anyone with some machine learning experience wants to work on a project like this with me, send me an email!
while, in theory, your fears do have a basis, in practice, i wouldn't worry about it. most big corporations out there are extremely paranoid about making any kind of internal legal/licensing errors. these are the same people who spend thousands on licensing C compilers and making sure that every single windows installation is 100% legit. they're just as afraid of lawyers and such as any of us (if not moreso). and chances are that their source code is constantly under review, and it is often licensed/sold to other companies and/or universities (even microsoft lets universities and such look at some of their source). for a big company, it is extremely important to make sure your source is legally self-contained, because you never know when you'll be selling it. and what if you inadvertently hired an RMS-like zealot to work on your shady source code? there's just too many risks, so its just not worth it.
what i would worry about, however, are the many small software/hardware companies who are illegally abusing, and profiting from GPL'ed code. there's no way of knowing if they're in the wrong. additionally, they have the protection of anonymity.
personally, i don't give a damn. while the GPL has its place, too many people are slapping the GPL on their projects simply because its fashionable. i release any of my personal projects under no license whatsoever, so if some poor schmuck really wants to use my code for his employer's closed source project, he can. maybe it will let him come home an hour earlier to spend time with his kids, watch tv, smoke crack, or whatever. seriously, who cares? in a truly Free world, no one should be forced to collaborate.
Brento is correct, this experiment is essentially uninformative. Danny Yee basically posts his text ads, and when they prove ineffective he draws the conclusion that text ads in general are not as good as other types of internet advertisement. There is simply not enough information to determine whether this type of advertisement is good or not.
:)
I personally think they'll prove "just as" effective as normal graphic ads. People will be more appreciative of the lack of cheesy graphics and such, but not enough to actually click on them.
Most ML algorithms attempt to find a function f(x) from a sampling of x and f(x) values.
:)
This is only if you're dealing with a two dimensional space, and you're trying to estimate a function f(x). You're simply talking about using a neural net as an interpolation algorithm. This is indeed one use of neural nets (and has proven more accurate than many interpolation/regression methods), but it is IMHO the least interesting use of NNs. People in general need to start thinking of more clever ways to encode problems for neural nets; I'm sure everyone will be quite surprised with the results.
For example, I think you would prefer your airplane pilot to be able to fly the plane than to be able to explain aerodynamics.
You might be getting confused here. If we created some neural net to learn how to fly airplanes, and it did so with excellent reliability and precision, we still will not have The Solution To Flying Airplanes, as in an algorithm or some differential equation that flies airplanes perfectly. Even with a very complete training set, and a network whose outputs are consistently correct, we still will never know whether we have a case of data under- or overfitting.
When you boil it all down, neural nets are just fancy statistical analysis tools. Its like the difference between the true expected value of some phenomenon, and the sample expected value. No matter how large your sample size is, your result is always just an educated guess, it lacks any true scientific rigor.
So yeah, I hope the above is coherent and/or correct, I'm watching Simpsons as I type this so my concentration is not currently 100% optimal
One of the main problems with using machine learning is a fundamental lack of trust, and this lack of trust actually has a theoretical basis. Take a neural network that attempts to learn problem X, given a specific set of inputs, it learns to always give the correct answers. The point to emphasize here is that this type of AI only learns how to give good results to a given problem, machine learning does not provide coherent solutions to problems!
... it just gives the right results (most of the time).
... scientists will have to find new day jobs, however. :) Seriously, though, this NASA mission is important to me because it shows that scientists are not afraid to employ machine learning techniques instead of spending a great deal of time and money trying to solve a set of problems and then develop expert systems for each little situation.
Thus, on a fundamental level, machine learning cannot be trusted. The state of a neural network, for example, is a black box from which no real insight can be gained
Imagine a neural network whose training set is the raw molecular structure data of different diseases (input) and their cures (output). The network trains on this data until the error reduces to zero. Then you feed in the raw molecular data of some new badass disease, and as output you have the structure of a working cure! The problem goes away, even though no one really knows how the solution was found, since a neural network contains no real data to understand -- it is a black box.
This is why scientists are so skeptical when it comes to AI techniques, it is essentially an affront to the scientific method. I personally believe that machine learning can be effectively used to improve our lives
Aside from pressing on different parts of a button doing different things, there is no gesture control in blender.
What exactly are referring to?
First of all, I'm surprised no one has yet mentioned the old program "DR. SBAITSO" (Sound Blaster Artificial Inteligent something or other) that came along with really old SoundBlaster sound cards (it came with my 8-bit SoundBlaster PRO). The voice sounds almost the same as this bell labs program, so I'm assuming it used the same algorithm. Anyone know where to download Dr. SBAITSO?
On to how text-to-voice works. This was an excellent situation for using an artificial neural network. I don't recall the exact topology of the net, but the lower (input) neurons contained different letter combinations often found in the english language. The output neurons were, obviously, the sound that needed to be produced.
Neural Networks, being the excellent statistical analysis tools they are, would train on many words and determine their "error" by comparing the network output to the actual pronunciation of said words. The network would then adjust the weights through many iterations to reduce this error to zero. Then, new words are fed to the input neurons, and then we have the voice you hear on the Bell Lab site.
This technique for text-to-voice lent a lot of weight to neural network programming. The people demonstrating the algorithm were particularly clever, in that as the neural network was training (i.e. adjusting internal weight values to reduce error to zero), they would test different words on the network in a child's voice. This basically gave the effect of sounding like a child slowly learning to speak. One can imagine how impressive this would be for someone who doesn't really know how the algorithm works.
If you're going to post a halfassed "story", at least do it right.
Many gaming sites, like IGN have full PS2 launch game overviews, and they at least aren't forgetting games like Ridge Racer V or Tekken Tag Tournament. The newsworthiness of this story is, um, sketchy at best.
umm ... no. thanks for coming out though.
...), you should at least know that GNOME isn't just a window manager, or even just a desktop environment. it is a software development platform, and because of this it means a lot if someone ports the platform itself to a very popular operating system.
having the GNOME development layer available on windows is a big deal. basically it means that you can now develop an application using the high quality, open source GNOME platform, and then copy the source on to a windows machine and have it compile and run just as it would on a linux box. if the program is written entirely over GNOME, porting it to windows will basically cost nothing.
as an obviously devoted linux advocate (i think i read the word "war" at least a couple times in your message
i honestly don't think people should be allowed to advocate a platform (whether its linux, gnome, kde, mozilla, etc) until they've actually written code for it.
One problem with this is that GNOME for Windows requires an X server presence on the Windows machine. Because of this, the port, while still pretty cool, loses some technical merit. Using an X server means that they had all the standard X libraries available on UNIX systems; they didn't need to port any low level Xlib stuff to Windows.
Because of this, I find that the Windows port of Gimp has more technical merit; it does not require an X server - it is a full-fledged port of the GTK library to the Windows platform.
Now I'm not a GNOME expert, but aren't most of the graphics aspects of GNOME built on top of GTK? Why not port GNOME to Windows using this available library? This way, an X server will not be required. (Of course, I'm assuming that non-graphical libraries, ORBit, glib, etc, that GNOME uses are easy to port to Windows).
i was joking. thanks for coming out though.
When the genetic makeup of a plant is altered, and its seeds planted, you're essentially introducing an alien organism into the environment. At least by crippling it, you are in a sense isolating it from its biological surroundings. What if the plant crossbreeds with another plant and creates a new breed that has unknown (i.e. possibly dangerous) nutritional properties? What if the plant proves to be too resilient and ends up killing all the crops around it?
There are many more issues involved with genetically altered plants. I personally am all for it; the possible benefits are simply too great to pass up. But in the meantime I'll feel safer knowing that these things cannot reproduce.
Unless of course, like in Jurassic Park these plants were implanted with African Toad DNA, and end up growing functional reproductive organs. On second thought that would be pretty damn funny.
Last I checked, Kasparov was beaten a while back by a computer.