I guess they'll just let Powerset become the next Google. Face it, "keywordese" language is often not adequate. Questions constitute a significant fraction of search engine traffic, and all search engines fail miserably on anything but "how to" queries. Just yesterday I was looking for a comparison between two products on the web. I've found it, eventually, but there's no real reason why it shouldn't be the first hit after I enter "comparison between X and Y". It's not a question in itself, yet it's a distinctly natural phrase. I bet people would use things like this quite a bit if they actually worked well. Looking further into the future, quite often I'm looking for an answer, not for a set of hits I have to read and summarize myself. In 20-30 years from now I won't have to waste my time. I want the computer to become my "secretary". I give it a task (find relevant information about topics X and Y, summarize, present) and off it goes. In a minute or so I have a page of concentrated information to digest.
The reason why Google won't focus on NL queries is because there are a lot of unsolved problems and those may take decades to solve. Disambiguation/polysemy, summarization, knowledge representation, reasoning - you need all of them be anywhere close to a human in language understanding, and none of this is really "solved" yet. This even ignores purely technical issues (i.e. issues that can be solved today with a bit of elbow grease) such as extracting salient bits from the pages, storing linguistic data in index efficiently and retrieving it from there in a meaningful way in real time.
Is it hopeless, then? I don't think so, for two reasons. Reason one, it won't get done unless someone does it. Reason two, there are working implementations of language-aware search that for certain types of queries yield substantially better results. If Google doesn't do it, someone else will. And you can bet a billion bucks they'll patent the heck out of it.
That said, I don't see keyword search going away anytime soon. It works well for a lot of things and it'll live side by side with NL queries. But next time you click a link after link after link in Google's results page, think whether it'd be easier to just type a natural language phrase and have Google "understand what you mean".
You can't realistically expect someone to read each of the 3500 books more than once. Therefore, most of them will just sit there collecting dust and taking up space. I don't see how this is preferable to donating them to a library, I'm sorry.
The value in donating them is this: 1. You free up space (space is _expensive_ these days) 2. You get a tax write off 3. You don't have to maintain them (dust them off, repair shelves, keep inventory) 4. Someone else will get some mileage out of your books
And best of all, 5. If you need one of your books, you can loan it from the library anytime
Why not donate, say, 3400 of them that you will never read again to a local public library? I have quite a few books myself and I'm contemplating doing exactly this (except for about 50 books that are rare, super-expensive or used often).
...when I was just starting out professionally, and I must say it looks pretty darn good. The key to not be embarrassed about your code is to not cut corners when writing it. If you know you're writing crap, stop and think how to make it better. Don't write crap against a deadline, writing good code doesn't take that much longer. Don't be afraid to refactor/rewrite, just do it during your development/testing cycle, not right before shipping.
...the idea is still dumb. It may be OK for countries like Argentina or Brazil (which, coincidentally, could buy OLPC laptops without external monetary help), but for most African countries you need books, teachers and schools first, in that order. A laptop is not going to replace any of this. There's just no overcoming this simple fact, even if you hypocritically push African governments to waste money on the project the only true purpose of which is to get you the Nobel Peace Prize.
It's sort of like HTML for true apps, except: 1. You have a "real" programming language backing it, you can do whatever you want with it, even processor heavy computations. It's FAST. 2. All HTML niggles are fixed. You don't have to dig around in Google to figure out how to lay out a piece of UI. It's just obvious. 3. You can deploy your apps as *.xbap pages. As simple as that. If the user has.NET Framework 3.5, XBAP link will open a sandboxed instance of a full-blown app. This means you don't have to fake it in HTML anymore. 4. Modern UI things that were a giant pain in the ass now don't require much coding aptitude - you can focus on the guts instead. Reflections, halos and transparency out the wazoo.
All of the above assumes you only want things to run on Windows, however. But the new crop of Microsoft dev technologies (updated ASP.NET AJAX, WPF, WCF) and Visual Studio 2008 are really good. Add to this a blockbuster release of SQL Server, an OS and a web server with fewer vulnerabilities than Linux counterparts (Windows 2003 and IIS 6), and you begin to see a worrisome picture. Worrisome to the open source community, that is.
All major search engines use click-throughs as one of the features in their rankers. I.e. if for a certain set of query terms people mostly click on fifth link in the results, this link will soon move up to be the first or second link. Of course, since this is not the only feature in the ranker, there's no "hard" guarantee of that happening, but on average relevant links get boosted pretty heavily that way.
You don't understand. In the past 20 years or so, folks were subjected to so much political BS, they can't take it anymore. They care about more basic things, such as whether they can put bread on the family table, whether their elderly parents can sustain themselves on their state pension, whether they can go to a restaurant or a movie every now and then with their wife/husband/girl-/boyfriend. Politics comes after the basic needs and wants are met, not before.
I don't see the contradiction. They have the right to assemble peacefully, "regular" folks have the right to use the streets and not get beaten up by protesters for no reason. That's why "regular" folks are protected from this thousand or so demonstrators by the riot police and that's why the city government issues permits (rather freely, I might add). They got a permit to use a certain set of streets for that. Then they started provoking the riot police and trying to break through the cordons. Some folks got beaten up. Some got some jail time.
As far as Putin is concerned, I believe he was appointed by folks in the Russian FSB/GRU - (which would be FBI/CIA in the US). This community is traditionally very strong in Russia, and it has dossiers on all of the nuveau rich, so they couldn't do anything about it. He also played some of them (Berezovsky) by promising them everything and then kicking them out of the country. During Yeltsin's rule, Berezovsky (as well as Khodorkovsky, Gusinsky and Abramovich) could pretty much open Kremlin doors with his foot. This is not the case anymore. So you can bet they weren't the ones who appointed Putin.
Under Russian law, one must obtain a permission to do an event of this magnitude in a public place. The center of Moscow qualifies as a public place I believe. The event must then stay within the bounds outlined in the permission. Any provocations towards law enforcement personnel are met with sometimes asymmetric response, just like here in the US.
This is exactly what happened - some people in the crowd thought they were above the law (or just wanted some adrenaline), so a few folks (including Kasparov) were picked from the crowd and sent to a local jail for a few days. Kasparov got five days, for example. This is EXACTLY what would happen in Seattle (where I live) under the same circumstances.
Putin is far less "mafia" than Yeltsin & Co were. Yeltsin just carved up Russia and gave it away for pennies on the dollar to a few folks who are billionaires now. Compared to this, Putin is actually a HUGE improvement. And if you think that Russian "democratic" forces are acting on their own, you're naive beyond belief.
This doesn't even happen in the US - the self professed "bastion of democracy". Corporations pay to get folks elected, and then lobby the heck out of them to pass the laws they want. President and vice president simply work as representatives of the military industrial complex in exchange for a "consultancy" contract with multimillion dollar salary after their term ends. This goes right across party boundaries, too. And the TV just shows the right thing, because it's in their best monetary interest to do so.
Weights are trained and they'll be different depending on the connections and on the training. The rough structure of long-range connections is actually fundamental to how the brain works. This is essential to explain long and short term memory, fear, involuntary reactions to stimuli, perception of the world as a coherent audio/visual picture as opposed to a set of disparate inputs, etc.
Kasparov is a smart man, but somehow he bought right into left wing propaganda and he now _believes_ it. In US there are neocons, in Russia there are neolibs. They don't really give a shit about the most important thing for Russia - putting the economy back on its feet. They're more concerned about the abstract, Moscow-only bullshit like democracy (where "democracy" is defined much more radically than here in the US) and freedom of speech (which in their understanding is the freedom of the owner of a TV station to force the talking heads to constantly slam the president).
There are two problems with their plan, however: 1. 90% of the population in Russia are pretty poor. They aren't starving, most of them actually live good lives, but they're by no means economically active business class the country needs. So for them GDP growth and controlled inflation at this point in history easily outweighs the fact that TV stations and certain strategic companies are no longer controlled by a bunch of Jewish folks hammering their own agenda and buying up the democratically elected parliament. Think Maslow's pyramid, it explains a lot. Once there's something resembling a healthy proportion of middle class, you will get democracy and all that comes with it. This is WAY in the future for Russia, however. 2. The only thing they're good at is bashing the current president. Putin actually isn't that bad. The brown nosing around him is bad, but I don't think he enjoys it. For the first time in decades Russia decides on issues while keeping its interest in mind. Both Gorbachev and Yeltsin would just sign anything that the US gave them, just to please the rich white man from the West. These days, Russia is much more sane in this respect. They sign things they like and don't sign the ones they don't. This is exactly like any other sane country approaches international relations.
Russia is shifting to Chinese model. In the Chinese model, you can be a capitalist for as long as you don't try to buy up the legislative and/or executive branch of the government. If you do, you go to prison, like Khodorkovsky (you didn't really think he's in the labor camp only for tax evasion, right?).
As far as I'm concerned, their only remaining issue is that the court system is in the crapper. A lot of issues would simply go away if this wasn't the case. If I were running the country, this is what I'd focus on, not on abstract issues related to whether the country conforms to the "american" model of democracy.
Kasparov merely got caught in the crossfire here. He doesn't play chess anymore, but he needs adrenaline - so he gets his adrenaline through other means. It was always "romantic" to be a dissident in Russia, even if you're the only one who cares about your particular set of issues.
Give it a shot, I wasn't expecting much, but if I was in the market for an ipod-type device, it'd probably get my bucks, simply because it has FM radio and I like the naviation.
All of the above relates to Zune 80. Flash Zunes look like crap and simply can't compete with cutesy flash iPods.
Excuse me? $46 a month for my Comcast connection is not exactly "free". In fact as far as I'm concerned, that's about $20 too much. Now if I had a free (as in beer) connection, I might give up my torrent rights, but as long as I pay for it (and pay dearly, including through taxes) I insist that I should be able to use it in whatever way I deem necessary. Whether I want to download the latest Fedora DVD, or a gig of porn - I've paid for the privilege.
Using a garbage collected language for this is really stupid. To add to the choir, this is not memory leak, so C# is not really at fault here. There's another issue with GC languages, however. Every now and then runtime will suspend all application threads and run garbage collector. Your program is _stopped_ during GC, which means the car doesn't "see" anything through its cameras, doesn't control throttle, brakes or steering wheel. In a desktop or a web app, you won't notice a few milliseconds of interruption. Choice of C# for this particular application, however, strikes me as odd. You need a language where you can control everything and which doesn't get interrupted unpredictably - C, C++, Ada - there are a number of different languages people use for realtime computing.
And then rotate through three major search engines every quarter. This quarter it'll be Yahoo, next - Microsoft, then Google again. I'm sure both Yahoo and Microsoft will be delighted to participate.
>> I'd also willingly give them details about working at Google if they asked
Your employment contract clearly states that you can't solicit your old co-workers to join your new employer for a period of one year after you leave the company. "Giving the details" could be considered a violation of your contract.
The latest release (October one) of Live Search doesn't suck nearly as much as it used to. For all intents and purposes it's equivalent to Google now and has a substantially larger index to boot. I like the looks, too. It's about time Google saw more competition, be it through Yahoo, Microsoft or Ask. When search engines compete everyone wins. Believe me, you don't want to end up with entrenched Microsoft-style search monopoly on your hands.
The only DVDs I ever buy are cartoons for my kid, because he watches them every day. I rent everything else on Netflix. I simply don't see a good reason to buy movies anymore because Netflix is so cheap.
That way you will enjoy the biggest library of HD content available and if Blu-Ray goes titsup, you still have a console you can play. If HD-DVD goes titsup, though, standalone players will be worthless.
Hillary - Clinton legacy, woman, a bit of an extremist nutcase, too much into Bush bashing Obama - too young, black (South won't vote for a black dude), has a name that sounds vaguely like "Osama". Everyone else on D side of things is too unpopular to gain any traction. R side is also lousy this election. The choice there is between rabid neocon nutcases and slightly less rabid Ron Paul (who's not at all popular).
Colbert could just win this whole thing as the only non-rabid, popular white male in the race. And imagine the debates - he'd just destroy his opponents without even trying hard.
Speaking of which, one of the ingredients of Russian solid rocket fuel (for military rockets) was rice husk - a byproduct of rice production. They actually cultivated short grain rice that would have a disproportionate amounts of husk specifically for this, and grew it in Southern Russia near Krasnodar. The grain itself was edible, of course, but it was not particularly good from the culinary point of view.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess they'll just let Powerset become the next Google. Face it, "keywordese" language is often not adequate. Questions constitute a significant fraction of search engine traffic, and all search engines fail miserably on anything but "how to" queries. Just yesterday I was looking for a comparison between two products on the web. I've found it, eventually, but there's no real reason why it shouldn't be the first hit after I enter "comparison between X and Y". It's not a question in itself, yet it's a distinctly natural phrase. I bet people would use things like this quite a bit if they actually worked well. Looking further into the future, quite often I'm looking for an answer, not for a set of hits I have to read and summarize myself. In 20-30 years from now I won't have to waste my time. I want the computer to become my "secretary". I give it a task (find relevant information about topics X and Y, summarize, present) and off it goes. In a minute or so I have a page of concentrated information to digest.
The reason why Google won't focus on NL queries is because there are a lot of unsolved problems and those may take decades to solve. Disambiguation/polysemy, summarization, knowledge representation, reasoning - you need all of them be anywhere close to a human in language understanding, and none of this is really "solved" yet. This even ignores purely technical issues (i.e. issues that can be solved today with a bit of elbow grease) such as extracting salient bits from the pages, storing linguistic data in index efficiently and retrieving it from there in a meaningful way in real time.
Is it hopeless, then? I don't think so, for two reasons. Reason one, it won't get done unless someone does it. Reason two, there are working implementations of language-aware search that for certain types of queries yield substantially better results. If Google doesn't do it, someone else will. And you can bet a billion bucks they'll patent the heck out of it.
That said, I don't see keyword search going away anytime soon. It works well for a lot of things and it'll live side by side with NL queries. But next time you click a link after link after link in Google's results page, think whether it'd be easier to just type a natural language phrase and have Google "understand what you mean".
Merely a suggestion.
You can't realistically expect someone to read each of the 3500 books more than once. Therefore, most of them will just sit there collecting dust and taking up space. I don't see how this is preferable to donating them to a library, I'm sorry.
The value in donating them is this:
1. You free up space (space is _expensive_ these days)
2. You get a tax write off
3. You don't have to maintain them (dust them off, repair shelves, keep inventory)
4. Someone else will get some mileage out of your books
And best of all,
5. If you need one of your books, you can loan it from the library anytime
Why not donate, say, 3400 of them that you will never read again to a local public library? I have quite a few books myself and I'm contemplating doing exactly this (except for about 50 books that are rare, super-expensive or used often).
...when I was just starting out professionally, and I must say it looks pretty darn good. The key to not be embarrassed about your code is to not cut corners when writing it. If you know you're writing crap, stop and think how to make it better. Don't write crap against a deadline, writing good code doesn't take that much longer. Don't be afraid to refactor/rewrite, just do it during your development/testing cycle, not right before shipping.
...the idea is still dumb. It may be OK for countries like Argentina or Brazil (which, coincidentally, could buy OLPC laptops without external monetary help), but for most African countries you need books, teachers and schools first, in that order. A laptop is not going to replace any of this. There's just no overcoming this simple fact, even if you hypocritically push African governments to waste money on the project the only true purpose of which is to get you the Nobel Peace Prize.
And see for yourself.
It's fucking awesome.
.NET Framework 3.5, XBAP link will open a sandboxed instance of a full-blown app. This means you don't have to fake it in HTML anymore.
It's sort of like HTML for true apps, except:
1. You have a "real" programming language backing it, you can do whatever you want with it, even processor heavy computations. It's FAST.
2. All HTML niggles are fixed. You don't have to dig around in Google to figure out how to lay out a piece of UI. It's just obvious.
3. You can deploy your apps as *.xbap pages. As simple as that. If the user has
4. Modern UI things that were a giant pain in the ass now don't require much coding aptitude - you can focus on the guts instead. Reflections, halos and transparency out the wazoo.
All of the above assumes you only want things to run on Windows, however. But the new crop of Microsoft dev technologies (updated ASP.NET AJAX, WPF, WCF) and Visual Studio 2008 are really good. Add to this a blockbuster release of SQL Server, an OS and a web server with fewer vulnerabilities than Linux counterparts (Windows 2003 and IIS 6), and you begin to see a worrisome picture. Worrisome to the open source community, that is.
Yet not only you don't have any control over how it's spent, you don't even control the amount in any way.
All major search engines use click-throughs as one of the features in their rankers. I.e. if for a certain set of query terms people mostly click on fifth link in the results, this link will soon move up to be the first or second link. Of course, since this is not the only feature in the ranker, there's no "hard" guarantee of that happening, but on average relevant links get boosted pretty heavily that way.
You don't understand. In the past 20 years or so, folks were subjected to so much political BS, they can't take it anymore. They care about more basic things, such as whether they can put bread on the family table, whether their elderly parents can sustain themselves on their state pension, whether they can go to a restaurant or a movie every now and then with their wife/husband/girl-/boyfriend. Politics comes after the basic needs and wants are met, not before.
I don't see the contradiction. They have the right to assemble peacefully, "regular" folks have the right to use the streets and not get beaten up by protesters for no reason. That's why "regular" folks are protected from this thousand or so demonstrators by the riot police and that's why the city government issues permits (rather freely, I might add). They got a permit to use a certain set of streets for that. Then they started provoking the riot police and trying to break through the cordons. Some folks got beaten up. Some got some jail time.
As far as Putin is concerned, I believe he was appointed by folks in the Russian FSB/GRU - (which would be FBI/CIA in the US). This community is traditionally very strong in Russia, and it has dossiers on all of the nuveau rich, so they couldn't do anything about it. He also played some of them (Berezovsky) by promising them everything and then kicking them out of the country. During Yeltsin's rule, Berezovsky (as well as Khodorkovsky, Gusinsky and Abramovich) could pretty much open Kremlin doors with his foot. This is not the case anymore. So you can bet they weren't the ones who appointed Putin.
Under Russian law, one must obtain a permission to do an event of this magnitude in a public place. The center of Moscow qualifies as a public place I believe. The event must then stay within the bounds outlined in the permission. Any provocations towards law enforcement personnel are met with sometimes asymmetric response, just like here in the US.
This is exactly what happened - some people in the crowd thought they were above the law (or just wanted some adrenaline), so a few folks (including Kasparov) were picked from the crowd and sent to a local jail for a few days. Kasparov got five days, for example. This is EXACTLY what would happen in Seattle (where I live) under the same circumstances.
Putin is far less "mafia" than Yeltsin & Co were. Yeltsin just carved up Russia and gave it away for pennies on the dollar to a few folks who are billionaires now. Compared to this, Putin is actually a HUGE improvement. And if you think that Russian "democratic" forces are acting on their own, you're naive beyond belief.
This doesn't even happen in the US - the self professed "bastion of democracy". Corporations pay to get folks elected, and then lobby the heck out of them to pass the laws they want. President and vice president simply work as representatives of the military industrial complex in exchange for a "consultancy" contract with multimillion dollar salary after their term ends. This goes right across party boundaries, too. And the TV just shows the right thing, because it's in their best monetary interest to do so.
Weights are trained and they'll be different depending on the connections and on the training. The rough structure of long-range connections is actually fundamental to how the brain works. This is essential to explain long and short term memory, fear, involuntary reactions to stimuli, perception of the world as a coherent audio/visual picture as opposed to a set of disparate inputs, etc.
Kasparov is a smart man, but somehow he bought right into left wing propaganda and he now _believes_ it. In US there are neocons, in Russia there are neolibs. They don't really give a shit about the most important thing for Russia - putting the economy back on its feet. They're more concerned about the abstract, Moscow-only bullshit like democracy (where "democracy" is defined much more radically than here in the US) and freedom of speech (which in their understanding is the freedom of the owner of a TV station to force the talking heads to constantly slam the president).
There are two problems with their plan, however:
1. 90% of the population in Russia are pretty poor. They aren't starving, most of them actually live good lives, but they're by no means economically active business class the country needs. So for them GDP growth and controlled inflation at this point in history easily outweighs the fact that TV stations and certain strategic companies are no longer controlled by a bunch of Jewish folks hammering their own agenda and buying up the democratically elected parliament. Think Maslow's pyramid, it explains a lot. Once there's something resembling a healthy proportion of middle class, you will get democracy and all that comes with it. This is WAY in the future for Russia, however.
2. The only thing they're good at is bashing the current president. Putin actually isn't that bad. The brown nosing around him is bad, but I don't think he enjoys it. For the first time in decades Russia decides on issues while keeping its interest in mind. Both Gorbachev and Yeltsin would just sign anything that the US gave them, just to please the rich white man from the West. These days, Russia is much more sane in this respect. They sign things they like and don't sign the ones they don't. This is exactly like any other sane country approaches international relations.
Russia is shifting to Chinese model. In the Chinese model, you can be a capitalist for as long as you don't try to buy up the legislative and/or executive branch of the government. If you do, you go to prison, like Khodorkovsky (you didn't really think he's in the labor camp only for tax evasion, right?).
As far as I'm concerned, their only remaining issue is that the court system is in the crapper. A lot of issues would simply go away if this wasn't the case. If I were running the country, this is what I'd focus on, not on abstract issues related to whether the country conforms to the "american" model of democracy.
Kasparov merely got caught in the crossfire here. He doesn't play chess anymore, but he needs adrenaline - so he gets his adrenaline through other means. It was always "romantic" to be a dissident in Russia, even if you're the only one who cares about your particular set of issues.
Give it a shot, I wasn't expecting much, but if I was in the market for an ipod-type device, it'd probably get my bucks, simply because it has FM radio and I like the naviation.
All of the above relates to Zune 80. Flash Zunes look like crap and simply can't compete with cutesy flash iPods.
Wait for the final version, then measure.
Excuse me? $46 a month for my Comcast connection is not exactly "free". In fact as far as I'm concerned, that's about $20 too much. Now if I had a free (as in beer) connection, I might give up my torrent rights, but as long as I pay for it (and pay dearly, including through taxes) I insist that I should be able to use it in whatever way I deem necessary. Whether I want to download the latest Fedora DVD, or a gig of porn - I've paid for the privilege.
Using a garbage collected language for this is really stupid. To add to the choir, this is not memory leak, so C# is not really at fault here. There's another issue with GC languages, however. Every now and then runtime will suspend all application threads and run garbage collector. Your program is _stopped_ during GC, which means the car doesn't "see" anything through its cameras, doesn't control throttle, brakes or steering wheel. In a desktop or a web app, you won't notice a few milliseconds of interruption. Choice of C# for this particular application, however, strikes me as odd. You need a language where you can control everything and which doesn't get interrupted unpredictably - C, C++, Ada - there are a number of different languages people use for realtime computing.
And then rotate through three major search engines every quarter. This quarter it'll be Yahoo, next - Microsoft, then Google again. I'm sure both Yahoo and Microsoft will be delighted to participate.
>> I'd also willingly give them details about working at Google if they asked
Your employment contract clearly states that you can't solicit your old co-workers to join your new employer for a period of one year after you leave the company. "Giving the details" could be considered a violation of your contract.
The latest release (October one) of Live Search doesn't suck nearly as much as it used to. For all intents and purposes it's equivalent to Google now and has a substantially larger index to boot. I like the looks, too. It's about time Google saw more competition, be it through Yahoo, Microsoft or Ask. When search engines compete everyone wins. Believe me, you don't want to end up with entrenched Microsoft-style search monopoly on your hands.
The only DVDs I ever buy are cartoons for my kid, because he watches them every day. I rent everything else on Netflix. I simply don't see a good reason to buy movies anymore because Netflix is so cheap.
That way you will enjoy the biggest library of HD content available and if Blu-Ray goes titsup, you still have a console you can play. If HD-DVD goes titsup, though, standalone players will be worthless.
Hillary - Clinton legacy, woman, a bit of an extremist nutcase, too much into Bush bashing
Obama - too young, black (South won't vote for a black dude), has a name that sounds vaguely like "Osama".
Everyone else on D side of things is too unpopular to gain any traction. R side is also lousy this election. The choice there is between rabid neocon nutcases and slightly less rabid Ron Paul (who's not at all popular).
Colbert could just win this whole thing as the only non-rabid, popular white male in the race. And imagine the debates - he'd just destroy his opponents without even trying hard.
Speaking of which, one of the ingredients of Russian solid rocket fuel (for military rockets) was rice husk - a byproduct of rice production. They actually cultivated short grain rice that would have a disproportionate amounts of husk specifically for this, and grew it in Southern Russia near Krasnodar. The grain itself was edible, of course, but it was not particularly good from the culinary point of view.