I have to ask: who would actually be interested in pursuing this case? It is quite clear that there will be no noteworthy changes to the original settlement, so any interested parties (mostly Microsoft's competitors) don't have anything to gain. It is also quite clear that the main loser is going to be the taxpayer. So who is the winner of this case (other than the army of lawyers)? The answer is that a bunch of people (e.g. the attorney generals of these states) gain some free press and cheap popularity from the ongoing coverage of the case. The important thing to notice is that the case itself is absolutely irrelevant, these people would attach themselves to any other high-profile case just as quickly. So don't ever think this is about "freedom" or any other nice ideas, it's only about buying votes and personal agendas.
What does speech recognition have to do with the Turing test?
Proper speech recognition has been proven to be AI-complete, similar to "The Vision Problem" (building a system that can see as well as a human), and many others. Perhaps not proven as rigorously as mathematical theorems but all data is pointing this way. Therefore, correctly solving the speech recognition problem is equivalent to solving the Turing test. So if anybody predicts good speech recognition in some near future, it is usually a sign of uninformedness and that person probably shouldn't be taken seriously.
I can call the fact that you're reading this comment a theft. It doesn't make it any more official than some totally random company calling me running ad-blocking software a theft. Can we PLEASE just post the news, without any sensationalist crap, on/. front page?
So you're asking a bunch of nerds who by definition don't have too many friends and who are rapidly hidden in their workplaces when guests arrive, whether they have any use of personal data organizers, so you could make a conclusion that PDAs are worthless? ROFL.
This being said, I use my Pocket PC rather extensively, but my favorite app by far is Pocket Excel, which I use to keep track of my historical gas mileage, expenses, soccer game scores and many other things, and calculate all sorts of statistics from those. Rather geeky... Playing Doom comes second, and looking up phone numbers comes third.
The Delta rockets have a pretty good (98%+?) success rate
But imagine if the civilian airplanes had a 98% success rate, wouldn't call that good, huh? Just illustrates the fact that our space technology has long ways to go before even thinking about cool stuff like colonization, space mining etc.
You don't require your cell phone or PDA to be waterproof, so neither should the wristwatch
But of course I need my PDA/cell be waterproof! My first Palm was killed by someone accidentally pouring orange juice on it, cost me quite a lot of money. Sometimes I think the gadget manufacturers make them as fragile as possible on purpose, so that people could break them more often and they could sell more units.
Please read my post again, and then its parent. The parent was claiming that out of thousands of products, only two were profitable (a ratio of about 1/1000). I was merely pointing out that the ration is much, much higher, probably well over 50%. I fail to see how you think 1/1000 is closer to the truth than 50%. The actual number of products is very hard to count because they often share 90% of the functionality (e.g. different editions of SQL server). The idea to count product groups, not individual apps, came also from the parent.
MSR provides nothing to the Windows internals. What a ridiculous statement.
OK, so all the recent multimedia capabilities in Windows have been just invented by random coders. I guess someone has lied to me. Depends of course how exactly you define internals.
This only means that you don't pay income tax on that particular amount. It most certainly doesn't mean that R&D is free, it is just discounted by some small percentage. If your claims were true then everybody would spend all the tax money on R&D, and not pay taxes at all.
Again, when your entire multi-billion-dollar monopoly which has widespread penetration in many markets is being supported by two out of thousands of products... that's abuse.
And arbitrarily changing numbers... that's lying. First, MS does not produce thousands of products. If you consider Office to be one product (although it actually consists of more than ten different apps) then by this logic the number is way less than one hundred. Second, Windows servers (quite different from your home windows) are profitable. SQL Server is profitable. Exchange server is profitable. Most of the other server apps (Biztalk, SharePoint etc.) are also profitable. All the development tools are profitable. MS Press is profitable. Hardware (other than XBox) is profitable. PC Games are profitable. etc. etc. I don't remember all the different products. You may dislike Microsoft, there's nothing wrong with that but lying is just plain childish and unethical.
Of course, the poster doesn't mention that 1) The server applications are also strongly in black. 2) These numbers do not reflect the cost of MS Research. MSR is costing Microsoft a hefty sum every year, and they actually do provide many interesting things, especially for Windows internals. 3) All the segments that are in red are relatively new (except MSN). In the tech industry it is very common for new products to produce a loss for the first few years. Why should be any different for MS?
But hey, don't let a few insignificant facts distract you from waging a holy war;-)
You would have been jumping up and down with excitement, had the results been the other way around. Let's try to have at least an illusion of objectivity, OK?
The beast most of us have sitting on our desk these days is so fast as to make language performance not such an issue
Troll, troll, troll... I write server applications for living. Performance is absolutely critical to customers because it translates directly into money. Enterprise servers are usually running near peak thruput, making something to perform twice as fast means that the customer needs to spend just half the money (which is often hundreds of thousands of dollars) on their servers.
The best Tetris game that I remember playing was Super Tetris. It had a bunch of extra features compared to classic Tetris, and 10 different levels that you could complete. The best feature was the ability to save/reload the game, so in higher levels I would just reload the game every time I made a bad move, and completed the game this way. You may be able to find it on some abandonware site, it is lots of fun.
roughly the same orbit around the sun, a much smaller mass has to travel MUCH slower than the Earth to maintain that orbit.
Wtf? Orbital velocity is a constant that depends only on the mass of the parent body, as long as the orbiting body is significantly lighter. After all, geosynchronous satellites are all at approximately same height, although they have the same speed (to maintain synch), but different mass.
The formula for calculating orbits is: T=2*pi*(a+h)/v where T = period, a = radius of the parent body, h = orbit height, and v = satellite velocity, which can be calculated from: v = sqrt(g/(a+h)), where g is gravitational acceleration of the parent body. You don't see the mass of the satellite anywhere here.
The problem with this is that defining "perfect play" is next to impossible in chess. Different players have very different playing styles, and if player A is strong against player B, and B is strong against C then it doesn't necessarily mean that A could defeat C. Computers are strong in tactical play, humans in positional; people have argued for ages, which is better, so far both styles have their proponents among grandmasters. And we can't really find an answer to this question unless we compute the entire game tree of chess, but this is impossible, even if you used all the atoms in the Universe to track the nodes in your tree.
Btw, the concern that chess as a game will exhaust itself and in the future grandmasters will always tie, has been expressed many times in the past. So far they have all been proven wrong, usually when some prodigy (Tal, Fischer, Kasparov) has come forward and brought new innovations with him. Computer chess is in a similar position, bringing many new ideas to the chess world, and countless new chess theories have been created by analyzing how computers play. So I am quite optimistic about the future of chess, there is certainly no end in sight for now.
Not exactly an error message but still funny
on
Gnarly Error Messages
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· Score: 3, Funny
The article says "The 15-inch screen is all of 1.4 millimeters thick -- about the size of two quarters back-to-back," but a SINGLE quarter is 1.75mm, so says [usmint.gov] the U.S. Mint.
Which makes it 0.14 inches. Which sounds reasonable to me. I guess someone mixed up metric and imperial here.
It is actually $1m-$700k-$500k. But the interesting fact is that for Fritz these numbers are $500k-$300k-$0(zero). I guess that even though computers are getting close to humans when playing chess, humans are still way better negotiators;)
Slashdot Mirror
I have to ask: who would actually be interested in pursuing this case?
It is quite clear that there will be no noteworthy changes to the original settlement, so any interested parties (mostly Microsoft's competitors) don't have anything to gain. It is also quite clear that the main loser is going to be the taxpayer. So who is the winner of this case (other than the army of lawyers)?
The answer is that a bunch of people (e.g. the attorney generals of these states) gain some free press and cheap popularity from the ongoing coverage of the case. The important thing to notice is that the case itself is absolutely irrelevant, these people would attach themselves to any other high-profile case just as quickly.
So don't ever think this is about "freedom" or any other nice ideas, it's only about buying votes and personal agendas.
What does speech recognition have to do with the Turing test?
Proper speech recognition has been proven to be AI-complete, similar to "The Vision Problem" (building a system that can see as well as a human), and many others. Perhaps not proven as rigorously as mathematical theorems but all data is pointing this way.
Therefore, correctly solving the speech recognition problem is equivalent to solving the Turing test. So if anybody predicts good speech recognition in some near future, it is usually a sign of uninformedness and that person probably shouldn't be taken seriously.
I mean, going after those who actually possess and distribute something that they have not legally purchased? Sounds legitimate to me.
I can call the fact that you're reading this comment a theft. It doesn't make it any more official than some totally random company calling me running ad-blocking software a theft. /. front page?
Can we PLEASE just post the news, without any sensationalist crap, on
So you're asking a bunch of nerds who by definition don't have too many friends and who are rapidly hidden in their workplaces when guests arrive, whether they have any use of personal data organizers, so you could make a conclusion that PDAs are worthless? ROFL.
This being said, I use my Pocket PC rather extensively, but my favorite app by far is Pocket Excel, which I use to keep track of my historical gas mileage, expenses, soccer game scores and many other things, and calculate all sorts of statistics from those. Rather geeky...
Playing Doom comes second, and looking up phone numbers comes third.
The Delta rockets have a pretty good (98%+?) success rate
But imagine if the civilian airplanes had a 98% success rate, wouldn't call that good, huh?
Just illustrates the fact that our space technology has long ways to go before even thinking about cool stuff like colonization, space mining etc.
You don't require your cell phone or PDA to be waterproof, so neither should the wristwatch
But of course I need my PDA/cell be waterproof! My first Palm was killed by someone accidentally pouring orange juice on it, cost me quite a lot of money. Sometimes I think the gadget manufacturers make them as fragile as possible on purpose, so that people could break them more often and they could sell more units.
Please read my post again, and then its parent.
The parent was claiming that out of thousands of products, only two were profitable (a ratio of about 1/1000).
I was merely pointing out that the ration is much, much higher, probably well over 50%.
I fail to see how you think 1/1000 is closer to the truth than 50%.
The actual number of products is very hard to count because they often share 90% of the functionality (e.g. different editions of SQL server). The idea to count product groups, not individual apps, came also from the parent.
Actually, you said:
So the costs of R&D are probably nicely offset by the tax benefits.
This sounded pretty much like 100% to me.
MSR provides nothing to the Windows internals. What a ridiculous statement.
OK, so all the recent multimedia capabilities in Windows have been just invented by random coders. I guess someone has lied to me.
Depends of course how exactly you define internals.
Well, why don't you work out the numbers and let us know. So far, you are just making wild assertions with no support.
Well, why don't you read the article, all the numbers are in there.
you can claim research costs for tax benefits
This only means that you don't pay income tax on that particular amount. It most certainly doesn't mean that R&D is free, it is just discounted by some small percentage. If your claims were true then everybody would spend all the tax money on R&D, and not pay taxes at all.
Again, when your entire multi-billion-dollar monopoly which has widespread penetration in many markets is being supported by two out of thousands of products... that's abuse.
And arbitrarily changing numbers... that's lying.
First, MS does not produce thousands of products. If you consider Office to be one product (although it actually consists of more than ten different apps) then by this logic the number is way less than one hundred.
Second, Windows servers (quite different from your home windows) are profitable.
SQL Server is profitable.
Exchange server is profitable.
Most of the other server apps (Biztalk, SharePoint etc.) are also profitable.
All the development tools are profitable.
MS Press is profitable.
Hardware (other than XBox) is profitable.
PC Games are profitable.
etc. etc. I don't remember all the different products.
You may dislike Microsoft, there's nothing wrong with that but lying is just plain childish and unethical.
Of course, the poster doesn't mention that
;-)
1) The server applications are also strongly in black.
2) These numbers do not reflect the cost of MS Research. MSR is costing Microsoft a hefty sum every year, and they actually do provide many interesting things, especially for Windows internals.
3) All the segments that are in red are relatively new (except MSN). In the tech industry it is very common for new products to produce a loss for the first few years. Why should be any different for MS?
But hey, don't let a few insignificant facts distract you from waging a holy war
You forgot the last one: ..."
Software engineer: "1 is odd and prime, 3 is odd and prime, 3 is odd and prime, 3 is odd and prime, 3 is odd and prime
You would have been jumping up and down with excitement, had the results been the other way around. Let's try to have at least an illusion of objectivity, OK?
The beast most of us have sitting on our desk these days is so fast as to make language performance not such an issue
Troll, troll, troll... I write server applications for living. Performance is absolutely critical to customers because it translates directly into money. Enterprise servers are usually running near peak thruput, making something to perform twice as fast means that the customer needs to spend just half the money (which is often hundreds of thousands of dollars) on their servers.
How the hell do you win at tetris?
The best Tetris game that I remember playing was Super Tetris. It had a bunch of extra features compared to classic Tetris, and 10 different levels that you could complete. The best feature was the ability to save/reload the game, so in higher levels I would just reload the game every time I made a bad move, and completed the game this way.
You may be able to find it on some abandonware site, it is lots of fun.
roughly the same orbit around the sun, a much smaller mass has to travel MUCH slower than the Earth to maintain that orbit.
Wtf? Orbital velocity is a constant that depends only on the mass of the parent body, as long as the orbiting body is significantly lighter.
After all, geosynchronous satellites are all at approximately same height, although they have the same speed (to maintain synch), but different mass.
The formula for calculating orbits is:
T=2*pi*(a+h)/v
where T = period, a = radius of the parent body, h = orbit height, and v = satellite velocity, which can be calculated from:
v = sqrt(g/(a+h)),
where g is gravitational acceleration of the parent body.
You don't see the mass of the satellite anywhere here.
Can't make up your mind of which system to use, huh? :)
The problem with this is that defining "perfect play" is next to impossible in chess. Different players have very different playing styles, and if player A is strong against player B, and B is strong against C then it doesn't necessarily mean that A could defeat C.
Computers are strong in tactical play, humans in positional; people have argued for ages, which is better, so far both styles have their proponents among grandmasters.
And we can't really find an answer to this question unless we compute the entire game tree of chess, but this is impossible, even if you used all the atoms in the Universe to track the nodes in your tree.
Btw, the concern that chess as a game will exhaust itself and in the future grandmasters will always tie, has been expressed many times in the past. So far they have all been proven wrong, usually when some prodigy (Tal, Fischer, Kasparov) has come forward and brought new innovations with him. Computer chess is in a similar position, bringing many new ideas to the chess world, and countless new chess theories have been created by analyzing how computers play.
So I am quite optimistic about the future of chess, there is certainly no end in sight for now.
Earth Rotates in Wrong Direction
The article says "The 15-inch screen is all of 1.4 millimeters thick -- about the size of two quarters back-to-back," but a SINGLE quarter is 1.75mm, so says [usmint.gov] the U.S. Mint.
Which makes it 0.14 inches. Which sounds reasonable to me. I guess someone mixed up metric and imperial here.
1 cup cornstarch
1 cup baking soda
3/4 cup water
N drops of food coloring
At least that's the way I have done it.
It is actually $1m-$700k-$500k. ;)
But the interesting fact is that for Fritz these numbers are $500k-$300k-$0(zero).
I guess that even though computers are getting close to humans when playing chess, humans are still way better negotiators