Teachers have it tough. Some are threatened by parents because their 'good' kid is failing. Why should not doing homework and failing tests keep the child from passing and moving to the next grade? Until we stop self entitled BS (i.e. suing if kid fails, suing if kid gets removed from class, promoting failed students, etc), schools in the US will never go anywhere but downhill.
>The goal of the project is to stop the damn email image spammers. > > among other things, sure, but it's got to be a high priority for google.
OCRs application to image spam is useful but limited without lots of tweaking. OCR is geared toward dealing with readable text. Image spammers are already doing font swapping, kerning tweaks, applying image rotation to subsections, random backgrounds, etc. Warping text similar to CAPCHAs isn't that much further along.
Also, OCR is much more computationally expensive than other text/image recognition methods. Anti-CAPCHA algorithms can be used to segment and recognize warped text, but its much more problematic (and expensive) than plain OCR. OCR may be an OK last resort, but there are other less finicky, faster methods that work on most image spam.
I haven't read everything in detail yet, but one of the things that stands out is that their 'gold standard' representing the best result consists of 9,038 ham messages (18.4%) 40,048 spams (81.6%). While large, the dataset is unbalanced. One of the things that is recommended by many of the filters is training on equal proportions of ham/spam in order to prevent biasing (overfitting).
Their train on errors approach may simulate what goes on with some filters it doesn't reflect the scenario where there is a initial dataset to be trained on _before_ new messages are processed. Instead, each message is in essence 'new'. So in their tests the machine learning filters start out knowing nothing, but SpamAssassin starts out with its inbuilt ruleset. Not exactly fair.
Take this with a grain of salt if you will. But on the list of his 2001-02 campaign contributors:
RIAA - $15,000.00 Sony Pictures Ent. Inc. - $5,000.00 Howard S. Welinsky (Warner Brothers Sr. VP) - $4,000.00 MPAA - $2,000.00 Paramount Pictures Group - $2,500.00 The Walt Disney Company - $2,500.00 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation - $2,000.00 Universal Studios, Inc. - $2,000.00 Alan F. Horn (Warner Brothers CEO) - $1,000.00 MGM And UA Services Company - $1000.00
Note that these amounts are only a small portion of about $12 million US in contributions. The largest portion of contributions comes from other big business (Telecom, etc), law firms, and casinos.
A simple solution might be to place things you worry about (such as hard drives) in a lead lined bag. They're generally sold to protect film, but there's no reason you can't stick other things in. Most likely anything inside won't be completely shielded, but it might help some.
Then of course, one can always request that your bag be hand searched.
I agree as well. If one accounts for inflation, gas has overall become much cheaper in the US over time. Complaining about two dollars a gallon is nothing since in many European countries, costs are over $4/gallon.
It is not so much that the oil companies are totally unwilling to switch to non-petroleum fuels. Perhaps part of it is getting what one can before the cash-cow dries up. At today's usage levels, oil reserves will run out in 20-40 years (depending on who you ask). One could say its a slowly sinking ship, better start making some lifeboats (ie. alternate fuels). Something that at least some companies are doing.
What it part of it comes down to is a business choice. Make money now with less upfront investment, or throw lots of money at research and hope something useful comes out of it.
As web design has moved from writing HTML by hand to using tools such as FrontPage and Dreamweaver one major change is in the designers. With less technical knowledge necessary to design a site, some webheads simply aren't aware of things such as file size, bandwidth, browser and crossplatform issues.
The point is for such designers is that it gets the job done and for the artists out there it looks good. Another part of this trend may be sheer ignorance on the those who hire others to design. After all, if bossman says "I want...", and you say "No, thats lame," you might not be around the next day. How many times have you visited a site whose links fail because they use a line of JavaScript instead of <a href...>?
Though I've been doing HTML by hand for years, I do know that as a web designer my days are in a way numbered. Purely because the medium is changing in a way that may not agree with my design goals (low bandwidth, cross platform etc). The direction may take a sharp about face, it may not.
Ending this rambling note, if it takes too long to load a site or it needs special attention, forget them. After all how many web sites can claim truly unique content? While things cannot always work this way, it is an option.
-Greg
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Teachers have it tough. Some are threatened by parents because their 'good' kid is failing. Why should not doing homework and failing tests keep the child from passing and moving to the next grade? Until we stop self entitled BS (i.e. suing if kid fails, suing if kid gets removed from class, promoting failed students, etc), schools in the US will never go anywhere but downhill.
Still no support for foreign keys in partitioned tables. Makes partitioning pretty much worthless in most real world deployments.
> How do you sleep at night?
Do you really need to ask that of a no good 56er?
>The goal of the project is to stop the damn email image spammers.
>
> among other things, sure, but it's got to be a high priority for google.
OCRs application to image spam is useful but limited without lots of tweaking. OCR is geared toward dealing with readable text. Image spammers are already doing font swapping, kerning tweaks, applying image rotation to subsections, random backgrounds, etc. Warping text similar to CAPCHAs isn't that much further along.
Also, OCR is much more computationally expensive than other text/image recognition methods. Anti-CAPCHA algorithms can be used to segment and recognize warped text, but its much more problematic (and expensive) than plain OCR. OCR may be an OK last resort, but there are other less finicky, faster methods that work on most image spam.
-Greg
Huh, since when did spammers start playing fair!. This is about winning, not software political correctness.
The point about fairness is that for a meaningful in a performance comparison, one must have fairness.
-Greg
I haven't read everything in detail yet, but one of the things that stands out is that their 'gold standard' representing the best result consists of 9,038 ham messages (18.4%) 40,048 spams (81.6%). While large, the dataset is unbalanced. One of the things that is recommended by many of the filters is training on equal proportions of ham/spam in order to prevent biasing (overfitting).
Their train on errors approach may simulate what goes on with some filters it doesn't reflect the scenario where there is a initial dataset to be trained on _before_ new messages are processed. Instead, each message is in essence 'new'. So in their tests the machine learning filters start out knowing nothing, but SpamAssassin starts out with its inbuilt ruleset. Not exactly fair.
-Greg
Wireless access to streaming MP3s (i.e. all those Internet radio stations) would be nice.
Take this with a grain of salt if you will. But on the list of his 2001-02 campaign contributors:
RIAA - $15,000.00
Sony Pictures Ent. Inc. - $5,000.00
Howard S. Welinsky (Warner Brothers Sr. VP) - $4,000.00
MPAA - $2,000.00
Paramount Pictures Group - $2,500.00
The Walt Disney Company - $2,500.00
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation - $2,000.00
Universal Studios, Inc. - $2,000.00
Alan F. Horn (Warner Brothers CEO) - $1,000.00
MGM And UA Services Company - $1000.00
Note that these amounts are only a small portion of about $12 million US in contributions. The largest portion of contributions comes from other big business (Telecom, etc), law firms, and casinos.
-Greg
A simple solution might be to place things you worry about (such as hard drives) in a lead lined bag. They're generally sold to protect film, but there's no reason you can't stick other things in. Most likely anything inside won't be completely shielded, but it might help some.
Then of course, one can always request that your bag be hand searched.
-Greg
I agree as well. If one accounts for inflation, gas has overall become much cheaper in the US over time. Complaining about two dollars a gallon is nothing since in many European countries, costs are over $4/gallon.
It is not so much that the oil companies are totally unwilling to switch to non-petroleum fuels. Perhaps part of it is getting what one can before the cash-cow dries up. At today's usage levels, oil reserves will run out in 20-40 years (depending on who you ask). One could say its a slowly sinking ship, better start making some lifeboats (ie. alternate fuels). Something that at least some companies are doing.
What it part of it comes down to is a business choice. Make money now with less upfront investment, or throw lots of money at research and hope something useful comes out of it.
-Greg
The point is for such designers is that it gets the job done and for the artists out there it looks good. Another part of this trend may be sheer ignorance on the those who hire others to design. After all, if bossman says "I want...", and you say "No, thats lame," you might not be around the next day. How many times have you visited a site whose links fail because they use a line of JavaScript instead of <a href...>?
Though I've been doing HTML by hand for years, I do know that as a web designer my days are in a way numbered. Purely because the medium is changing in a way that may not agree with my design goals (low bandwidth, cross platform etc). The direction may take a sharp about face, it may not.
Ending this rambling note, if it takes too long to load a site or it needs special attention, forget them. After all how many web sites can claim truly unique content? While things cannot always work this way, it is an option.
-Greg
archive.netscape.com is not open for anon connects anymore, but you can still grab older versions via their web site. Check out: http://home.netscape.com/download/archive/client_i ndex2.html