I like my job security and relatively decent money I make. Let's dilute some other job market instead. I heard folks in the medical and legal field make a lot more per hour and it wouldn't necessarily hurt anybody if their services became just a bit cheaper. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Kthxbye. Back to coding.
You know, there are hundreds of hungry VPs in Redmond and they have buddies who they might not mind seeing in Tellme's general manager seat. They're a lot better connected than he is.
Bungie refused to be fucked. They're a relatively small, tightly knit team with strong leadership. They were never assimilated. They had their own building, used an open plan (instead of separate offices traditional at Microsoft), they were as un-Microsoft as it gets. That's one of the reasons why they could leave so easily.
Yahoo will trade at ten bucks a share if that happens. And Yahoo is fucked if Microsoft acquires them, so institutional shareholders might as well use the opportunity and sell shares RFN. There are very few companies, even much smaller than Yahoo, that Microsoft acquired and did not fuck up.
And I work on AI and machine learning day in and day out. I'd put the goal post at 50 years, and that's an optimistic estimate. There are scant few research centers that do "general AI" research. Even fewer actually talk to neuroscientists, thus dismissing one viable (though extremely complex and costly) avenue of research. The fact remains, however, that at this point we don't have the required sophistication in any of the areas that presumably would be required to build a "thinking" machine. We can't process human language well enough (and therefore speech recognition and textual information sources are pretty much useless), we can't process visual information well enough either (segmentation, recognition, prediction, handling a continuous visual stream), we don't know the cognitive mechanisms below high level abstract reasoning, and even at a high level our abilities are weak (try to build a classifier that will recognize sarcasm, for example), finally even if we could do all that, we wouldn't be able to store the resulting data efficiently enough (in terms of required space and retrieval speed), because we have no idea how to do it.
That said, a lot of stuff can happen in 50 years, and I bet that once some of the major problems get solved, there will be an insane stream of money pouring into this field to accelerate the research. Just imagine the benefits an "omniscient" AI trader would bring to a bank. The question is, do we want this to happen? This will be far more disruptive a technology than anything you've ever seen.
These days it's planes vs rockets, tanks vs rockets and RPGs and aircraft carriers vs anti-ship missiles. In real combat, neither of the three kinds of offense stands any chance against state of the art defense systems.
I have excluded ICBMs because there are NO effective countermeasures, and there won't be any anytime soon.
Just remember, defense is always cheaper than offense (with the possible exception of nuclear weapons). Once this is done, and billions of dollars of taxpayer's money gets spent on the project, Russians will come up with a countermeasure that shoots it down at 1/100th of the cost, and sell it to everyone else.
There's no more "intelligence" in AI than in a can of Campbell soup. It's basically statistics, linear algebra and (sometimes) handcoded rules for reasoning. It doesn't evolve. It doesn't build upon what it "knows". It has no self-awareness or consciousness and its reasoning capabilities, if present, are extremely weak compared to even children.
We're so early in the development of this field that no one can even define what "self awareness" or "consciousness" really is, let alone how to create it or scale it. Folks try. There's Cycorp, there's Powerset, there are a lot of people in academia who work on NLP, Machine Vision, classification, neuroscience, etc. There is, however, no unifying vision or theory/understanding what is it we're trying to build, and the current methods have nothing in common with "intelligence" per se. They do learn, in a sense that they figure out the hidden structure of a given set of data by approximating it using a mathematical model. Even though this model sometimes closely matches what a human brain does (e.g. in multilayer neural nets), they don't come anywhere close to what one would call "intelligence". What they lack is scale (and speed), and advanced cognitive mechanisms required to become self-learning.
It's also interesting to note, that at this point humans know on a high level how their brain works. Neocortex is a six layer neural net with links going cross-layer and neurons organized into columns. Trouble is, there's hundred billion neurons. We sorta know how vision works, too. Trouble is, we can't work with it in real time (because, naturally, you'd need a chunk of those hundred billion neurons). Heck, even human language is a pain in the ass if you don't have advanced cognition (AKA strong AI), with ability to understand euphemisms, sarcasm and idioms, paraphrase, generalize and specialize. Heck, even anaphora resolution is not solved yet (i.e. what does he/she/it in the current sentence refer to in the previous text). It's as if you had a bunch of parts and no manual and someone asked you to assemble a spaceship out of what you have, warning you that some parts are broken and may require you to make your own replacements. Without blueprints. Blindfolded. With your hands tied behind your back.
I do believe that in 50 years we will have strong AI, though. I work in a science lab, however, and many researchers don't share my optimism.
There's no way to make this phone dirt cheap, and there's no way Dell puts out anything cool. Combine this with "barely working" state of a typical Google client software beta, and you have a turd of gargantuan proportions.
If I owned any stock in Dell, I'd put in a sell order on this rumor.
Because you can't prove that god does not exist. Therefore you accept something without proof. Therefore, by definition, atheism is a faith. One might call it religion even.
So I choose the point of view that pisses off both camps. Since I have no proof either way, I choose to ignore the issue altogether. This pisses off religious people because I don't believe in god, and atheists - because I don't believe god doesn't exist.
>> What one would expect from a religious leader? To behave like an scientist?
To not justify burning other scientists at the stake, perhaps?
Hopefully they fix the joins
on
Sun Buys MySQL
·
· Score: 1
I've run a comparo between Postgres and MySQL on my (moderately complex) DB and MySQL sucked real bad on joins and didn't properly support subselects. Hopefully folks at Sun fix these issues. In the meanwhile, PostgreSQL beats the crap out of MySQL on anything non-trivial. PGSQL FTW!
You don't understand - even if Blu Ray disks are $15, I won't be buying them anyway. I will maybe want to watch each movie once, there's no point in me owning it. And Netflix doesn't actually enforce the 2 per month rule (at least not on me). And even if they did, assuming Blu Ray disks are $15 and I watch each movie once, renting is 6 times less expensive.
I don't buy disks anymore. With disks costing $30 a pop, a $5/mo Netflix subscription makes a heck of a lot more sense. And in the rental scenario, I don't really care if the movies are protected or not. I wouldn't want to copy them even if I could - I'll maybe watch each movie a couple of times in my life. The exception is cartoons for my kid, but there SD seems to be perfectly adequate.
One thing I'd like to see is reimbursements of licensing fees that were already collected on pending patents if patents are rejected. That'd (a) Make companies think twice before they file obvious bullshit, (b) Make the patent system more fair in case obvious bullshit is rejected. I'd genuinely enjoy seeing Amazon reimburse the licensing fees for their "one click" patent.
If you count IP infringements made by software vendors. Face it, in the world where One Click patent can even exits, you're _guaranteed_ to infringe on someone's intellectual property if your code is more complicated than "Hello world". And software vendors can't guarantee non-infringement, either, because there are tens of thousands of vaguely worded patents.
"Judge: You see, we know this guy owes you money and doesn't want to pay it, but he's really well connected and we can't do anything about it. In return we allow you to steal property from him with no legal repercussions. Let's hope that before you steal it all he'll pay you back."
A contrived example, but you get the point (I hope). How can a court even allow something like this?
They employ something like seven hundred people in Microsoft Research alone. And MSR produces some top notch scientific work. Take nearly any top scientific conference related to CS, AI or linguistics and you'll find some good papers from MSR there, every year. Some of it makes its way into Microsoft products (Clear Type,.NET Generics, a bunch of search related stuff, some SQL related stuff, speech technologies, video/audio compression, some stuff in XBox), but about 95% of the output is, sadly, wasted for all practical purposes. The only benefit to the company is patents.
So I'm not surprised at all that the portfolio is strong. Everything MSR invents gets patented. Patents are its raison d'etre. It's just that the consumer rarely sees the ideas implemented.
Slashdot Mirror
I do. I was commenting on another site about Open Office.
There are few things less sexy to work on than office apps. I don't see why anyone would give a rat's ass.
I like my job security and relatively decent money I make. Let's dilute some other job market instead. I heard folks in the medical and legal field make a lot more per hour and it wouldn't necessarily hurt anybody if their services became just a bit cheaper. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Kthxbye. Back to coding.
It's an 80K+ people company. Couple dozen folks leave - big deal. Makes it easier to move these jobs to Hyderabad.
You know, there are hundreds of hungry VPs in Redmond and they have buddies who they might not mind seeing in Tellme's general manager seat. They're a lot better connected than he is.
Then how does it "get no monetary credit"?
Bungie refused to be fucked. They're a relatively small, tightly knit team with strong leadership. They were never assimilated. They had their own building, used an open plan (instead of separate offices traditional at Microsoft), they were as un-Microsoft as it gets. That's one of the reasons why they could leave so easily.
Yahoo will trade at ten bucks a share if that happens. And Yahoo is fucked if Microsoft acquires them, so institutional shareholders might as well use the opportunity and sell shares RFN. There are very few companies, even much smaller than Yahoo, that Microsoft acquired and did not fuck up.
And I work on AI and machine learning day in and day out. I'd put the goal post at 50 years, and that's an optimistic estimate. There are scant few research centers that do "general AI" research. Even fewer actually talk to neuroscientists, thus dismissing one viable (though extremely complex and costly) avenue of research. The fact remains, however, that at this point we don't have the required sophistication in any of the areas that presumably would be required to build a "thinking" machine. We can't process human language well enough (and therefore speech recognition and textual information sources are pretty much useless), we can't process visual information well enough either (segmentation, recognition, prediction, handling a continuous visual stream), we don't know the cognitive mechanisms below high level abstract reasoning, and even at a high level our abilities are weak (try to build a classifier that will recognize sarcasm, for example), finally even if we could do all that, we wouldn't be able to store the resulting data efficiently enough (in terms of required space and retrieval speed), because we have no idea how to do it.
That said, a lot of stuff can happen in 50 years, and I bet that once some of the major problems get solved, there will be an insane stream of money pouring into this field to accelerate the research. Just imagine the benefits an "omniscient" AI trader would bring to a bank. The question is, do we want this to happen? This will be far more disruptive a technology than anything you've ever seen.
These days it's planes vs rockets, tanks vs rockets and RPGs and aircraft carriers vs anti-ship missiles. In real combat, neither of the three kinds of offense stands any chance against state of the art defense systems.
I have excluded ICBMs because there are NO effective countermeasures, and there won't be any anytime soon.
Just remember, defense is always cheaper than offense (with the possible exception of nuclear weapons). Once this is done, and billions of dollars of taxpayer's money gets spent on the project, Russians will come up with a countermeasure that shoots it down at 1/100th of the cost, and sell it to everyone else.
There's no more "intelligence" in AI than in a can of Campbell soup. It's basically statistics, linear algebra and (sometimes) handcoded rules for reasoning. It doesn't evolve. It doesn't build upon what it "knows". It has no self-awareness or consciousness and its reasoning capabilities, if present, are extremely weak compared to even children.
We're so early in the development of this field that no one can even define what "self awareness" or "consciousness" really is, let alone how to create it or scale it. Folks try. There's Cycorp, there's Powerset, there are a lot of people in academia who work on NLP, Machine Vision, classification, neuroscience, etc. There is, however, no unifying vision or theory/understanding what is it we're trying to build, and the current methods have nothing in common with "intelligence" per se. They do learn, in a sense that they figure out the hidden structure of a given set of data by approximating it using a mathematical model. Even though this model sometimes closely matches what a human brain does (e.g. in multilayer neural nets), they don't come anywhere close to what one would call "intelligence". What they lack is scale (and speed), and advanced cognitive mechanisms required to become self-learning.
It's also interesting to note, that at this point humans know on a high level how their brain works. Neocortex is a six layer neural net with links going cross-layer and neurons organized into columns. Trouble is, there's hundred billion neurons. We sorta know how vision works, too. Trouble is, we can't work with it in real time (because, naturally, you'd need a chunk of those hundred billion neurons). Heck, even human language is a pain in the ass if you don't have advanced cognition (AKA strong AI), with ability to understand euphemisms, sarcasm and idioms, paraphrase, generalize and specialize. Heck, even anaphora resolution is not solved yet (i.e. what does he/she/it in the current sentence refer to in the previous text). It's as if you had a bunch of parts and no manual and someone asked you to assemble a spaceship out of what you have, warning you that some parts are broken and may require you to make your own replacements. Without blueprints. Blindfolded. With your hands tied behind your back.
I do believe that in 50 years we will have strong AI, though. I work in a science lab, however, and many researchers don't share my optimism.
There's no way to make this phone dirt cheap, and there's no way Dell puts out anything cool. Combine this with "barely working" state of a typical Google client software beta, and you have a turd of gargantuan proportions.
If I owned any stock in Dell, I'd put in a sell order on this rumor.
Because you can't prove that god does not exist. Therefore you accept something without proof. Therefore, by definition, atheism is a faith. One might call it religion even.
So I choose the point of view that pisses off both camps. Since I have no proof either way, I choose to ignore the issue altogether. This pisses off religious people because I don't believe in god, and atheists - because I don't believe god doesn't exist.
And have a Pope justify it three hundred years from now. How do you like this line of discussion? Or maybe you should be drawn and quartered?
>> What one would expect from a religious leader? To behave like an scientist?
To not justify burning other scientists at the stake, perhaps?
I've run a comparo between Postgres and MySQL on my (moderately complex) DB and MySQL sucked real bad on joins and didn't properly support subselects. Hopefully folks at Sun fix these issues. In the meanwhile, PostgreSQL beats the crap out of MySQL on anything non-trivial. PGSQL FTW!
You don't understand - even if Blu Ray disks are $15, I won't be buying them anyway. I will maybe want to watch each movie once, there's no point in me owning it. And Netflix doesn't actually enforce the 2 per month rule (at least not on me). And even if they did, assuming Blu Ray disks are $15 and I watch each movie once, renting is 6 times less expensive.
I don't buy disks anymore. With disks costing $30 a pop, a $5/mo Netflix subscription makes a heck of a lot more sense. And in the rental scenario, I don't really care if the movies are protected or not. I wouldn't want to copy them even if I could - I'll maybe watch each movie a couple of times in my life. The exception is cartoons for my kid, but there SD seems to be perfectly adequate.
One thing I'd like to see is reimbursements of licensing fees that were already collected on pending patents if patents are rejected. That'd (a) Make companies think twice before they file obvious bullshit, (b) Make the patent system more fair in case obvious bullshit is rejected. I'd genuinely enjoy seeing Amazon reimburse the licensing fees for their "one click" patent.
Current screen is too tiny to really be useful and it looks ridiculous.
If you count IP infringements made by software vendors. Face it, in the world where One Click patent can even exits, you're _guaranteed_ to infringe on someone's intellectual property if your code is more complicated than "Hello world". And software vendors can't guarantee non-infringement, either, because there are tens of thousands of vaguely worded patents.
"Judge: You see, we know this guy owes you money and doesn't want to pay it, but he's really well connected and we can't do anything about it. In return we allow you to steal property from him with no legal repercussions. Let's hope that before you steal it all he'll pay you back."
A contrived example, but you get the point (I hope). How can a court even allow something like this?
I bet this guy drives a Prius and talks about reducing his carbon footprint all the time, too. ;-)
They employ something like seven hundred people in Microsoft Research alone. And MSR produces some top notch scientific work. Take nearly any top scientific conference related to CS, AI or linguistics and you'll find some good papers from MSR there, every year. Some of it makes its way into Microsoft products (Clear Type, .NET Generics, a bunch of search related stuff, some SQL related stuff, speech technologies, video/audio compression, some stuff in XBox), but about 95% of the output is, sadly, wasted for all practical purposes. The only benefit to the company is patents.
So I'm not surprised at all that the portfolio is strong. Everything MSR invents gets patented. Patents are its raison d'etre. It's just that the consumer rarely sees the ideas implemented.