+ REALLY FREAKIN' ACCURATE. trains to 10x better than human. + REALLY FREAKIN' FAST. 20-50 milliseconds/posting without even being demonized. + REALLY OPEN SOURCE. GPLed. Free forever. + REALLY FLEXIBLE. Has about a dozen built-in classifiers, most of which work on any human language (including
chinese, japanese, korean, etc in their native formats).
- Arcane control language. "like 'awk' on meth". "grep bitten by a radioactive spider". You get my drift here? - Not a drop-in solution for blogposting. You'll have to do some coding. - Needs to be trained, with both positive and negative examples. When it wakes up, it knows _nothing_.
It's at "crm114.sourceforge.net"; there's mailing lists as well as an IRC channel (#crm114) on freenode.
Same here: learned Greek in middle school, haven't touched it since ('cept that I could recite the Greek alphabet for frat initiation with _correct_ pronunication and chewed out the brothers who didn't).
Learned German in middle school, never used it except once when traveling in Egypt, when a bunch of German tourists were being absolute Aryan jerks, I chewed them out. I finished the chewing out by shouting "You are a disgrace to the Fatherland!" THAT shamed 'em into behaving rationally (i.e. not cutting into line in front of the "ugly americans", who were standing in line like good Canadians.:)
Learned some Japanese while working for Mitsubishi. Fun, bizarre. Half of that language is the language, half of it is the culture underlying the language. At least for Japanese, you cannot learn one without the other. I'd occasionally use it (and my wife and I watch our anime DVDs with the Japanese soundtrack on audio and the subtitles turned on.
BUT- _none_ of these languages is by itself a win or lose. Especially in the case of non-European languages, the culture _also_ needs to be integrated in. That's fun too.
But as to business / career, unless the language or the country or the culture _especially_ interests you, you are better off doing a grad-level course or a killer thesis than taking one or two semesters of a language that you don't find _personally_ interesting.
- Dr. Crash (been in the research biz for 20 years)
Actually, this system was developed at MERL (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories); the MIT and ETH linkage is that some of the interns working on it were MIT and ETH Zurich.
The arsenic-in-ground-water-converted-to-steam idea is a good one - EXCEPT that meteorites, when striking, are not hot. They are very, very cold; ( a freshly-fallen meteorite is usually covered with frost); the glow of reentry is compression heating of the air in front of the meteorite, not the meteorite itself.
So, in the absence of other evidence, I have to call "bull****" on a "steam cloud loaded with arsenic" explanation.
A friend took a job with Microsoft a few months ago. Before that, he worked with me on an open-source system that is moderately widely deployed. We even got a paper into a decent technical conference on the open-source system.
MICROSOFT WOULD NOT PERMIT HIM TO PRESENT THE PAPER. They flat-out refused to permit it. This is dispite the fact that all of the work that was done quite a while before he joined MS, and made no mention of MS.
Apparently, even "acknowledging the exixtence" of open source software is something MS is not willing to countenance in the rank and file employees.
This is not "friend of a friend". I was also an author on that paper, and this happened after Jan 1, 2006, so it's not "stale data" either; it's current policy.
Let that be a warning. Sign NOTHING with Microsoft. NOTHING!
Note that every claim is either a "base claim", that is, that starts a new description, or is a "subsidiary claim" that depends or extends another claim.
Lesson 2: READ THE BASE CLAIMS TWICE.
The base claims are the patent's "weak spots" - if you can just dodge every base claim, then the patent doesn't apply to you.
Notice that in this patent every base claim says "electrical" on both power inputs. That's a major flaw; this patent has no claims that cover the case of only one electrical power input and one of a totally other kind of power.
Lesson 3: THERE IS NO INFRINGEMENT IF NONE OF THE CLAIMS APPLY.
The Prius driveline doesn't use an electrical motor on BOTH inputs, only on one. Hence it does not infringe.
General Electric built the same damn thing, but back in 1970. (yes, 35 years ago... they called them Man Amplifiers, and the GE design could lift a full metric ton). All hydraulic, beautiful Dural girderwork, steel hydraulic motors and joints. They had stand-erect versions and "walking jeeps" as well, and got a big article in Popular Science, including "in action" photos with white-shirted, pocket-protectored, bow-tied engineers heaving railroad ties like broomsticks.
When I got my first job and started working as an engineer at GE, 15 years later, I saw the remains of them - rusting, on the junk pile, outside of the main R&D building in Schenectady NY.
First off, half of what I do requires that the hardware be CHEAP. A dollar per CPU is too much if you're making something that retails for under twenty bucks.
Second, I (and various people I trust implicitly) -have- been through "write once, debug everywhere". Sure, you can say "wrong JVM, tough luck". - but what if the target platform doesn't HAVE that nice shiny (closed source) JVM your binary (commercial) package uses.
It doesn't even need to be _costly_- just closed source. For example, Frink (the programming language) is free to use, but closed source. It's also in Java. And I can't run it on my NEW Zaurus PDA, because it was compiled against an OLDER (?) Different (certainly) JVM. So, I'll probably end up re-implementing Frink in C. Or just not using it.
Or worse... two packages, both commercial, both closed source. Different JVMs. Been there. Done that. Cancelled the project. With C there _is_ a chance that it might work. With Java, good luck.
And - if you can't handle multiple inheritance, well, you aren't a Real Programmer. Or rather, you might be a fine coder, but you're no System Architect.
Consider the following Real Life Scenario: Rare bug manifests itself in a method. You fix it. But did you fix the other N bazillion places where that same method is implemented (mostly by cut and paste, because most programmers are lazy)? Heck, can you even _find_ all those places?
You're just fallen into a version-skew hell dimension and there's no easy way back.
With MI, you fix the bug ONCE, in ONE place, and the problem is fixed.
And yes, I was dealing with this 17 days ago, according to the changelog. This isn't a theoretical scenario, I ended up hand-reviewing about three thousand lines of code. Not fun.
Very simply, I have no place appropriate for Java.
It doesn't fit on a microcontroller (like a PIC), it doesn't have multiple inheritance, it requires the right JVM, it doesn't have a #include to keep parameterizations in one file, it is actually write-once-debug-everywhere, too many things in Java are only available as precompiled packages (open source in Java is a very rare thing) and doing anything interesting in Java requires a native method anyway (hello, C!).
I use C instead. It's truly run-anywhere.
(for those that claim that "multiple inheritance is obsolete and I should be using "implements", remember that "implements" really means is "here is a routine with the same name, that we gaurantee is _different_ source code and will therefore NOT be bug-for-bug equivalent to the code you thought you were getting. Have a nice day and thank you for using Java".)
I've had Concentric DSL here in Boston for the
last 6 months or so.
No problems. Works fine. No congestion, even
during brownouts on cablemodems.
Note- Bell Titanic (er... "Verizon" claimed I
was too far away from the C.O. to get DSL, but
Concentric said "no problem". Apparently they
second-source the actual wiring to a company named
"Covad" but it all works just fine.
I even get four _static_ IP addresses and they
don't care if I run servers.
-Dr. Crash
The Real Story (I've been on the show)
on
More Junkyard Wars
·
· Score: 5
I've been on the show. I'm Dr. Crash, captain of
the NERDS (season 3, you may not have seen us yet)
but we're here
Is the yard "salted"? Depends on what you mean by "salted".... They do
make sure that a grand excess of random parts to
make do are available. But there's
no pre-defined set of detail plans; I've seen
what the "experts" planned out for us in one of
our Challenges: there were three different ideas,
each one on one sheet of lined notebook paper, no details,
no dimensions.... and our result looked like
nothing on any of these three "expert's plans".
Some of the most "fun" challenges have been
where a critical part is intentionally _purged_
from the 'heap- the challenge becomes to construct
that critical mechanism from random iron, and get it to work!
Improvization is absolutely key on the 'heap.
I can't emphasize this enough.
With ONE exception (safety-related equipment),
you will NOT find ANY of your key parts "brand
new, in box, with doc set" on the heap. What
you will find are numerous broken vehicles,
trashed
appliances, industrial and construction junk, and machine-shop cutoffs/remnants, which may or may not have been placed on the heap because of the
challenge, and may or may not
have a functional whateveritis you were looking
for. (we know that they in general do _NOT_ clean
the 'heap out of helpful bits, because we found
previous challenger's machine
parts on the 'heap )
The "Experts" are people who've worked with
purpose-made machinery in their area of expertise
for literally decades. Back in their shops, they have all the proper
parts, the right tools and alloys, testing equipment, CAD
software, the whole shebang. In short, they have
the tools, they have the technology.
BUT
NONE of that is available on the Scrapheap. The Experts themselves have to learn to scavenge and improvise; anything you can't find or manufacture
yourself does not exist, even if you have half
a dozen of them back in the stockroom at the
company (yes, I've seen an expert nearly tearing
their hair out in just this situation).
Bearings have to be scavenged; we ripped some out
of a Moped. Need a bigger bearing, with a strong shaft? Use
a steering knuckle and CV joint off that crashed Citroen. Box girder? If you can't find cutoffs from
someone elses project, cut them out of that shed
roof. Heavy electrical cable? Scavenge it from
one of the big junked excavators.
The ONE EXCEPTION - wherever safety on the set or British safety law
(the equivalent of OSHA) is involved, new parts
and tools are always salted. For example, safety valves
are always new, freshly tested, with certification papers up in the Director's cupola. If you
manage to scavenge a safety-related part that
isn't one of the certificated ones, an assistant
director will let you know- and won't let you
build using the unsafe part- they'll send you
back out onto the heap with a hint on where to
find the safe part that does the same job.
We aren't
allowed to change our own grinding wheel or cutoff
disks, for the same reason (they have to be spin
tested before use, in a safe area). Explosives
and high-flammability materials (and fuel tanks) are likewise
covered and there are a platoon
of Britain's Finest Firemen standing by for the
whole day, as well as paramedics and an ambulance, Just In Case (and my thanks to them!).
By it's nature, the show
can be dangerous and everyone
on set, contestant or not, has to be on gaurd all
the time. There hasn't been a serious injury
yet (sprains and strains, that's all), and everyone on the show works to keep it
that way. Even if it messes up continuity (and
you can see this occasionally, where safety gaurds get added to a machine after "TIME" is called) a safety issue
trumps any other consideration of the show.
Slashdot Mirror
CRM114 is an option you might want to consider.
Plusses and minuses:
+ REALLY FREAKIN' ACCURATE. trains to 10x better than human.
+ REALLY FREAKIN' FAST. 20-50 milliseconds/posting without even being demonized.
+ REALLY OPEN SOURCE. GPLed. Free forever.
+ REALLY FLEXIBLE. Has about a dozen built-in classifiers, most of which work on any human language (including
chinese, japanese, korean, etc in their native formats).
- Arcane control language. "like 'awk' on meth". "grep bitten by a radioactive spider". You get my drift here?
- Not a drop-in solution for blogposting. You'll have to do some coding.
- Needs to be trained, with both positive and negative examples. When it wakes up, it knows _nothing_.
It's at "crm114.sourceforge.net"; there's mailing lists as well as an IRC channel (#crm114) on freenode.
No, you're missing the point.
The point is to tell the PC games industry that
the game is over. Give people what they want
(that is, no hassles) and you'll get business.
Give them hassles, and they will walk away from
your billion-polygons-amazing-detail wrechedness,
because it's just not worth it any more.
We're tired of having to repair the damage things
like game rootkits and SecuROM does to our
systems. OUR systems, mind you. NOT _your_
systems.
Or do you want to drive business to VALVE and
Nintendo?
Vote with your wallets, folks.
Same here: learned Greek in middle school, haven't touched it since ('cept that I could recite the Greek alphabet for frat initiation with _correct_ pronunication and chewed out the brothers who didn't).
Learned German in middle school, never used it except once when traveling in Egypt, when a bunch of German tourists were being absolute Aryan jerks, I chewed them out. I finished the chewing out by shouting "You are a disgrace to the Fatherland!" THAT shamed 'em into behaving rationally (i.e. not cutting into line in front of the "ugly americans", who were standing in line like good Canadians. :)
Learned some Japanese while working for Mitsubishi. Fun, bizarre. Half of that language is the language, half of it is the culture underlying the language. At least for Japanese, you cannot learn one without the other. I'd occasionally use it (and my wife and I watch our anime DVDs with the Japanese soundtrack on audio and the subtitles turned on.
BUT- _none_ of these languages is by itself a win or lose. Especially in the case of non-European languages, the culture _also_ needs to be integrated in. That's fun too.
But as to business / career, unless the language or the country or the culture _especially_ interests you, you are better off doing a grad-level course or a killer thesis than taking one or two semesters of a language that you don't find _personally_ interesting.
- Dr. Crash (been in the research biz for 20 years)
Actually, this system was developed at MERL (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories); the MIT and ETH
linkage is that some of the interns working on it were MIT and ETH Zurich.
Check the paper authorships to see this.
The arsenic-in-ground-water-converted-to-steam idea is a good one - EXCEPT
that meteorites, when striking, are not hot. They are very, very cold; (
a freshly-fallen meteorite is usually covered with frost); the
glow of reentry is compression heating of the air in front of the meteorite,
not the meteorite itself.
So, in the absence of other evidence, I have to call "bull****" on a "steam
cloud loaded with arsenic" explanation.
- Dr. Crash
I have found that a Flash website is like a bunch of un-related words
in an email message - it's an indicator of "I am crap".
I don't load a Flash renderer intentionally. It saves me so much time
(and soon, so many exploits) to simply Say No.
Why people *bother* with Flash is... beyond me. Possibly it's because
they like watching pretty lights.
"Flash -- How to hide that you don't have anything of Substance"
A friend took a job with Microsoft a few months ago. Before that, he worked with me on
an open-source system that is moderately widely deployed. We even got a paper into a
decent technical conference on the open-source system.
MICROSOFT WOULD NOT PERMIT HIM TO PRESENT THE PAPER. They flat-out refused to permit it.
This is dispite the fact that all of the work that was done quite a while before he joined MS, and
made no mention of MS.
Apparently, even "acknowledging the exixtence" of open source software is something MS
is not willing to countenance in the rank and file employees.
This is not "friend of a friend". I was also an author on that paper, and this happened
after Jan 1, 2006, so it's not "stale data" either; it's current policy.
Let that be a warning. Sign NOTHING with Microsoft. NOTHING!
Lesson 1: READ THE CLAIMS.
:)
Note that every claim is either a "base claim", that is, that starts a new description, or is a
"subsidiary claim" that depends or extends another claim.
Lesson 2: READ THE BASE CLAIMS TWICE.
The base claims are the patent's "weak spots" - if you can just dodge every base claim, then
the patent doesn't apply to you.
Notice that in this patent every base claim says "electrical" on both power inputs. That's
a major flaw; this patent has no claims that cover the case of only one electrical power
input and one of a totally other kind of power.
Lesson 3: THERE IS NO INFRINGEMENT IF NONE OF THE CLAIMS APPLY.
The Prius driveline doesn't use an electrical motor on BOTH inputs, only on one. Hence it does
not infringe.
Next?
General Electric built the same damn thing, but back in 1970. (yes, 35 years
8 22186-6189639?v=glance&n=283155
ago... they called them Man Amplifiers, and the GE design could lift a full metric
ton). All hydraulic, beautiful Dural girderwork, steel hydraulic motors and joints.
They had stand-erect versions and "walking jeeps" as well, and got a big article
in Popular Science, including "in action" photos with white-shirted, pocket-protectored,
bow-tied engineers heaving railroad ties like broomsticks.
When I got my first job and started working as an engineer at GE, 15 years later,
I saw the remains of them - rusting, on the junk pile, outside of the main R&D building
in Schenectady NY.
Now, even GE didn't *invent* them; read _Starship Troopers_ by Robert Heinlein; he talks
about the whole thing, including power limitations, but back in 1956:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0441783589/002-4
First off, half of what I do requires that the hardware be CHEAP. A dollar per CPU is too much if you're making something that retails for under twenty bucks.
Second, I (and various people I trust implicitly) -have- been through "write once, debug everywhere". Sure, you can say "wrong JVM, tough luck". - but what if the target platform doesn't HAVE that nice shiny (closed source) JVM your binary (commercial) package uses.
It doesn't even need to be _costly_- just closed source. For example, Frink (the programming language) is free to use, but closed source. It's also in Java. And I can't run it on my NEW Zaurus PDA, because it was compiled against an OLDER (?) Different (certainly) JVM. So, I'll probably end up re-implementing Frink in C. Or just not using it.
Or worse... two packages, both commercial, both closed source. Different JVMs. Been there. Done that. Cancelled the project. With C there _is_ a chance that it might work. With Java, good luck.
And - if you can't handle multiple inheritance, well, you aren't a Real Programmer. Or rather, you might be a fine coder, but you're no System Architect.
Consider the following Real Life Scenario: Rare bug manifests itself in a method. You fix it. But did you fix the other N bazillion places where that same method is implemented (mostly by cut and paste, because most programmers are lazy)? Heck, can you even _find_ all those places?
You're just fallen into a version-skew hell dimension and there's no easy way back.
With MI, you fix the bug ONCE, in ONE place, and the problem is fixed.
And yes, I was dealing with this 17 days ago, according to the changelog. This isn't a theoretical scenario, I ended up hand-reviewing about three thousand lines of code. Not fun.
Very simply, I have no place appropriate for Java.
It doesn't fit on a microcontroller (like a PIC),
it doesn't have multiple inheritance,
it requires the right JVM,
it doesn't have a #include to keep parameterizations in one file,
it is actually write-once-debug-everywhere,
too many things in Java are only available as precompiled packages (open source in Java is a very rare thing)
and doing anything interesting in Java requires a native method anyway (hello, C!).
I use C instead. It's truly run-anywhere.
(for those that claim that "multiple inheritance is obsolete and I should be using "implements", remember that "implements" really means is "here is a routine with the same name, that we gaurantee is _different_ source code and will therefore NOT be bug-for-bug equivalent to the code you thought you were getting. Have a nice day and thank you for using Java".)
I've had Concentric DSL here in Boston for the
last 6 months or so.
No problems. Works fine. No congestion, even
during brownouts on cablemodems.
Note- Bell Titanic (er... "Verizon" claimed I
was too far away from the C.O. to get DSL, but
Concentric said "no problem". Apparently they
second-source the actual wiring to a company named
"Covad" but it all works just fine.
I even get four _static_ IP addresses and they
don't care if I run servers.
-Dr. Crash
Is the yard "salted"? Depends on what you mean by "salted".... They do make sure that a grand excess of random parts to make do are available. But there's no pre-defined set of detail plans; I've seen what the "experts" planned out for us in one of our Challenges: there were three different ideas, each one on one sheet of lined notebook paper, no details, no dimensions.... and our result looked like nothing on any of these three "expert's plans".
Some of the most "fun" challenges have been where a critical part is intentionally _purged_ from the 'heap- the challenge becomes to construct that critical mechanism from random iron, and get it to work!
Improvization is absolutely key on the 'heap. I can't emphasize this enough. With ONE exception (safety-related equipment), you will NOT find ANY of your key parts "brand new, in box, with doc set" on the heap. What you will find are numerous broken vehicles, trashed appliances, industrial and construction junk, and machine-shop cutoffs/remnants, which may or may not have been placed on the heap because of the challenge, and may or may not have a functional whateveritis you were looking for. (we know that they in general do _NOT_ clean the 'heap out of helpful bits, because we found previous challenger's machine parts on the 'heap )
The "Experts" are people who've worked with purpose-made machinery in their area of expertise for literally decades. Back in their shops, they have all the proper parts, the right tools and alloys, testing equipment, CAD software, the whole shebang. In short, they have the tools, they have the technology. BUT NONE of that is available on the Scrapheap. The Experts themselves have to learn to scavenge and improvise; anything you can't find or manufacture yourself does not exist, even if you have half a dozen of them back in the stockroom at the company (yes, I've seen an expert nearly tearing their hair out in just this situation).
Bearings have to be scavenged; we ripped some out of a Moped. Need a bigger bearing, with a strong shaft? Use a steering knuckle and CV joint off that crashed Citroen. Box girder? If you can't find cutoffs from someone elses project, cut them out of that shed roof. Heavy electrical cable? Scavenge it from one of the big junked excavators.
The ONE EXCEPTION - wherever safety on the set or British safety law (the equivalent of OSHA) is involved, new parts and tools are always salted. For example, safety valves are always new, freshly tested, with certification papers up in the Director's cupola. If you manage to scavenge a safety-related part that isn't one of the certificated ones, an assistant director will let you know- and won't let you build using the unsafe part- they'll send you back out onto the heap with a hint on where to find the safe part that does the same job.
We aren't allowed to change our own grinding wheel or cutoff disks, for the same reason (they have to be spin tested before use, in a safe area). Explosives and high-flammability materials (and fuel tanks) are likewise covered and there are a platoon of Britain's Finest Firemen standing by for the whole day, as well as paramedics and an ambulance, Just In Case (and my thanks to them!).
By it's nature, the show can be dangerous and everyone on set, contestant or not, has to be on gaurd all the time. There hasn't been a serious injury yet (sprains and strains, that's all), and everyone on the show works to keep it that way. Even if it messes up continuity (and you can see this occasionally, where safety gaurds get added to a machine after "TIME" is called) a safety issue trumps any other consideration of the show.
Hope this helps...
-Dr. Crash (Captain, NERDS, season 3)