Freebase makes their data available as free CC-licensed data dumps. You can import this into any database you want. There's no requirement for Metaweb's technology to use the data. It's just a very convenient way to do so!
Early on, we knew we'd have to make a UI so that users could have as close to a free-text experience as possible while still contributing structured data. Freebase lets you create a topic that is generic, and then co-type it with multiple specific types later. It allows ontology geeks to do their thing, and regular users to just work where they are comfortable. It's a tough balance to strike, but Metaweb's Freebase was populated by a small team of data wranglers using a mix of automated methods and coordinated manual cleanup and entry, along with power users who were especially interested in particular data domains.
At one point I was really interested in submarines. I created a type describing the key characterists of subs and then spent a few days finding all the generic topics in Freebase on subs (many from Wikipedia) and filling them in. Others, either at Metaweb or outside, have done similar efforts on other domains.
Few contributors ever say or even have to consider ontologies. If they want to dig in, it's there, but almost never presented in a way that requires a PhD and a pipe.
This is a good point. I don't know if this was a factor in Google's acquisition, but Powerset (acquired by Microsoft and now part of Bing) uses Metaweb's Freebase.
I was on the founding team at Metaweb when we spun out of Applied Minds. I can answer some questions here, but first I wanted to congratulate the team that brought this company all the way to acquisition.
So, from the beginning we knew that semantic this and ontology that would be a non-starter for most contributors from Planet Earth. While Freebase is a complex system under the hood, the user interface makes contributing data to an existing type (schema) pretty easy. You can add content from a browser window and never know that all of your entries are typed by the system. You can upload a spreadsheet of data and not have to do anything more than say which column is linked to what field in Freebase.
My startup, 24 Hr. Diner, uses Freebase to demo our artist to artist recommendation engine, Jukebox. We have recommendations for 100k artists, and for each of them, we can look up their genre info and photo on Freebase without having to maintain all of that data ourselves.
And if anyone on Slashdot is working for a co. that could use an excellent recommendation engine that handles music, videos, and general web content, ping me!
I switched from MS Office to OpenOffice, and then from OpenOffice to Google Docs.
I now use Google Docs for 99% of my word processing.
The main draw for me is that I can share docs with co-authors more easily via Google Docs than with email. Essentially, Google Docs is a Wiki with a decent editor GUI and sharing controls.
Same here. I applied in January and got a note that they had run out of funding, and would notify me if any existing coupons expired. I doubt I'm going to receive the coupons before the changeover.
Which is OK with me, but it's also likely that, if I have to go without TV for a while, I'm going to switch over ever more to Youtube and the internet. If there are a lot of other people like this, it's going to really reduce the audience for broadcast TV.
I was pretty apprehensive when Best Buy bought Speakeasy, but I've been getting the same good level of service as before. I think I've had one multi-day outage in the past two years, and Speakeasy was on top of the issue (which IIRC was the local phone company deciding to do central office maintenance, swapping hardware around, without any notice).
I trust Google to run their service well. You may not trust them as much as I do, and I understand that. Really, I turned from skeptic to believer after using gmail for a few years with no problems. Google knows how to run servers, and they've earned my trust.
For my situation, Google Docs works well, and lets me spend more time on building things for customers.
You may of course be comfortable with something else, and that's fine.
You're right, we could set up a Linux server for this. The main savings is not Windows vs Linux, it's not having to set up an internal server for document sharing. Our time and effort can instead go into our external servers.
A larger company, with more tolerance for overhead, might reasonably make a different choice.
I started a company last year, and I could have chosen to either: a) set up a Windows Server and buy multiple Office licenses, or b) sign up for Google Docs.
Last time I checked (~3 years ago) Knoppix booted amazingly quickly off a CD. The distro people clearly worked very hard to optimize layout on the CD for optimal boot times. If I remember correctly, it was in the same ballpark as booting of a hard drive.
Businesses come in many sizes. The majority of businesses are small - so small that they cannot afford an IT person.
They aren't running their own mail servers, and if they are, chances are very good that they're doing it badly - no backups, no patches, unplanned downtime, etc.
Most are instead currently using their ISP for services like email accounts.
So the question they ask isn't 'why should I trust Google,' it's 'do I trust Google more than my low-cost DSL/Cable ISP?'
As someone pointed out elsewhere, Hasbro can either go DMCA, or offer to license the game. Given the popularity of Bogglific on Facebook (and the high quality of the implementation) it seems like Hasbro's legal team is cutting Hasbro out of a good opportunity to promote their game.
The US used a system like this for the Nike missile system - the computer, a gigantic analog one, was in a cargo container. I believe this was back in the 1950s.
Basically, it's just like Google's containerized server concept, except the packets are really, really large and the payload is somewhat more dangerous.
That "tradition" has nothing to do with stealth technology and everything to do with historical accident. The first two stealth aircraft were a light bomber and a heavy bomber. And both of them are produced by a country that hasn't had to defend its own territory since the nineteenth century. While the US hasn't been invaded in some time, it has built significant defenses since the 19th century. For example, the US deployed the Nike missile system around many major US cities (not just coastal ones - Chicaco too) beginning in 1953. At Nike's peak, there were 240 launch sites in the US, and many remained in operation until 1974.
Soldiers stationed at these sites received combat pay, and, at least for the coastal installations around San Francisco, the sites were probed by Soviet fighters and bombers.
So I would say that, even post-WWII, the US has at times deployed significant resources to defend its territory.
jd writes, in the parent post, "PGCC was rejected utterly by the GCC developers... it typically produced greatly superior code for Intel-specific processors."
I really wish gcc developers would choose performance over, well, whatever it is that they went for here.
Two years ago, I compared C compilers for the AMD64 using the stream benchmark (I was developing an application that had similar performance characteristics to stream). The compiled code that gcc generated was, if I remember correctly, 30% slower than code generated by two closed-source compilers. In looking at the assembly, the chief difference was that the closed-source compilers were aware of the AMD64 series caches, and generated code that would disable or enable the caches as appropriate, resulting in much higher write speeds. gcc's code, on the other hand, appeared to be entirely unaware of the AMD64's capabilities, even with AMD64-specific command line flags enabled.
If anyone in the gcc community is working on an Intel or AMD64-oriented performance fork, I would love to hear about it.
You can get to areas of the Wikipedia where the hyperlinks mostly lead to other deep-geek articles. I've been researching protein data recently, and every Wikipedia entry I've found appears to be written by and for protein biologists. A typical reader would have to follow a lot of hyperlinks to know what the article was saying.
There are two isoforms known as LXR and LXR. The liver X receptors are classified into the subfamily 1 (thyroid hormone receptor-like) of the nuclear receptor superfamily, and are given nuclear receptor nomenclature as NR1H3 (LXR) and NR1H2 (LXR) respectively. LXR and LXR were discovered seperately between 1994-1995 and later known as isoform to each other. LXR isoform was identified by two groups and named RLD-1 [1] and LXR [2], whereas four groups identified the LXR isoform and named as UR [3], NER [4], OR-1 [5], and RIP-15 [6]. The human LXR gene is located on chromosome 11p11.2, while the LXR gene is located on chromosome 19q13.3.
I find this to be pretty common in the biomedical and bioscience articles.
I'm not putting the article down - I'm glad someone has taken the time to write it. But the intro paragraphs are well above even a Scientific American level, and I hope that someone with more spare time (and domain knowledge) than I have will take the time to add a simpler introduction.
Slashdot Mirror
Netscape Navigator had the What's Related button in 2001.
Here you go. Except it was translated by a burly English dude.
Pong!
Freebase makes their data available as free CC-licensed data dumps. You can import this into any database you want. There's no requirement for Metaweb's technology to use the data. It's just a very convenient way to do so!
Early on, we knew we'd have to make a UI so that users could have as close to a free-text experience as possible while still contributing structured data. Freebase lets you create a topic that is generic, and then co-type it with multiple specific types later. It allows ontology geeks to do their thing, and regular users to just work where they are comfortable. It's a tough balance to strike, but Metaweb's Freebase was populated by a small team of data wranglers using a mix of automated methods and coordinated manual cleanup and entry, along with power users who were especially interested in particular data domains.
At one point I was really interested in submarines. I created a type describing the key characterists of subs and then spent a few days finding all the generic topics in Freebase on subs (many from Wikipedia) and filling them in. Others, either at Metaweb or outside, have done similar efforts on other domains.
Few contributors ever say or even have to consider ontologies. If they want to dig in, it's there, but almost never presented in a way that requires a PhD and a pipe.
This is a good point. I don't know if this was a factor in Google's acquisition, but Powerset (acquired by Microsoft and now part of Bing) uses Metaweb's Freebase.
I was on the founding team at Metaweb when we spun out of Applied Minds. I can answer some questions here, but first I wanted to congratulate the team that brought this company all the way to acquisition.
So, from the beginning we knew that semantic this and ontology that would be a non-starter for most contributors from Planet Earth. While Freebase is a complex system under the hood, the user interface makes contributing data to an existing type (schema) pretty easy. You can add content from a browser window and never know that all of your entries are typed by the system. You can upload a spreadsheet of data and not have to do anything more than say which column is linked to what field in Freebase.
My startup, 24 Hr. Diner, uses Freebase to demo our artist to artist recommendation engine, Jukebox. We have recommendations for 100k artists, and for each of them, we can look up their genre info and photo on Freebase without having to maintain all of that data ourselves.
And if anyone on Slashdot is working for a co. that could use an excellent recommendation engine that handles music, videos, and general web content, ping me!
I switched from MS Office to OpenOffice, and then from OpenOffice to Google Docs.
I now use Google Docs for 99% of my word processing.
The main draw for me is that I can share docs with co-authors more easily via Google Docs than with email. Essentially, Google Docs is a Wiki with a decent editor GUI and sharing controls.
Same here. I applied in January and got a note that they had run out of funding, and would notify me if any existing coupons expired. I doubt I'm going to receive the coupons before the changeover.
Which is OK with me, but it's also likely that, if I have to go without TV for a while, I'm going to switch over ever more to Youtube and the internet. If there are a lot of other people like this, it's going to really reduce the audience for broadcast TV.
I was pretty apprehensive when Best Buy bought Speakeasy, but I've been getting the same good level of service as before. I think I've had one multi-day outage in the past two years, and Speakeasy was on top of the issue (which IIRC was the local phone company deciding to do central office maintenance, swapping hardware around, without any notice).
I trust Google to run their service well. You may not trust them as much as I do, and I understand that. Really, I turned from skeptic to believer after using gmail for a few years with no problems. Google knows how to run servers, and they've earned my trust.
For my situation, Google Docs works well, and lets me spend more time on building things for customers.
You may of course be comfortable with something else, and that's fine.
You're right, we could set up a Linux server for this. The main savings is not Windows vs Linux, it's not having to set up an internal server for document sharing. Our time and effort can instead go into our external servers.
A larger company, with more tolerance for overhead, might reasonably make a different choice.
Letting Google run the server means we don't have to, decreasing our overhead.
In a small shop, that's a big savings.
And we get collaborative editing, which is a huge win.
I started a company last year, and I could have chosen to either: a) set up a Windows Server and buy multiple Office licenses, or b) sign up for Google Docs.
Docs has worked out really well for us.
The parent post's quote says something very interesting.
This test does not strictly detect whether the cow has BSE. It detects whether there are an abnormally high number of prions.
But you get the disease from the prions, so I presume that beef with an abnormally high level of prions is the most dangerous of all.
In other words, running this test on 100% of beef would eliminate the most dangerous beef from the supply.
Thanks, USDA.
Last time I checked (~3 years ago) Knoppix booted amazingly quickly off a CD. The distro people clearly worked very hard to optimize layout on the CD for optimal boot times. If I remember correctly, it was in the same ballpark as booting of a hard drive.
Businesses come in many sizes. The majority of businesses are small - so small that they cannot afford an IT person.
They aren't running their own mail servers, and if they are, chances are very good that they're doing it badly - no backups, no patches, unplanned downtime, etc.
Most are instead currently using their ISP for services like email accounts.
So the question they ask isn't 'why should I trust Google,' it's 'do I trust Google more than my low-cost DSL/Cable ISP?'
And the answer is probably "yes."
Cool that someone's thinking about Nanotech, but it sounds like what RainX does, and RainX is a really simple, fairly inexpensive solution.
As someone pointed out elsewhere, Hasbro can either go DMCA, or offer to license the game. Given the popularity of Bogglific on Facebook (and the high quality of the implementation) it seems like Hasbro's legal team is cutting Hasbro out of a good opportunity to promote their game.
The US used a system like this for the Nike missile system - the computer, a gigantic analog one, was in a cargo container. I believe this was back in the 1950s.
Basically, it's just like Google's containerized server concept, except the packets are really, really large and the payload is somewhat more dangerous.
--Pat
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nike_Ajax#Nike_Ajax
Soldiers stationed at these sites received combat pay, and, at least for the coastal installations around San Francisco, the sites were probed by Soviet fighters and bombers.
So I would say that, even post-WWII, the US has at times deployed significant resources to defend its territory.
--Pat
I have a Via C7-M machine - an OQO 02 - running Vista. It's as stable as an Intel or AMD machine. So, yes, they have their act together.
jd writes, in the parent post, "PGCC was rejected utterly by the GCC developers ... it typically produced greatly superior code for Intel-specific processors."
I really wish gcc developers would choose performance over, well, whatever it is that they went for here.
Two years ago, I compared C compilers for the AMD64 using the stream benchmark (I was developing an application that had similar performance characteristics to stream). The compiled code that gcc generated was, if I remember correctly, 30% slower than code generated by two closed-source compilers. In looking at the assembly, the chief difference was that the closed-source compilers were aware of the AMD64 series caches, and generated code that would disable or enable the caches as appropriate, resulting in much higher write speeds. gcc's code, on the other hand, appeared to be entirely unaware of the AMD64's capabilities, even with AMD64-specific command line flags enabled.
If anyone in the gcc community is working on an Intel or AMD64-oriented performance fork, I would love to hear about it.
Not that it necessarily answers the question, but Knoll is not on the current list of major insider stockholders:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ir?s=ADBE
For example, here's the entry for Liver X Receptor. The liver X receptor (LXR), a member of the orphan receptor of the huge nuclear receptor family, is a transcription factor related to some other nuclear receptor PPAR, FXR and RXR. Liver X receptors (LXRs) are important regulators of cholesterol, fatty acid, and glucose homeostasis.
There are two isoforms known as LXR and LXR. The liver X receptors are classified into the subfamily 1 (thyroid hormone receptor-like) of the nuclear receptor superfamily, and are given nuclear receptor nomenclature as NR1H3 (LXR) and NR1H2 (LXR) respectively. LXR and LXR were discovered seperately between 1994-1995 and later known as isoform to each other. LXR isoform was identified by two groups and named RLD-1 [1] and LXR [2], whereas four groups identified the LXR isoform and named as UR [3], NER [4], OR-1 [5], and RIP-15 [6]. The human LXR gene is located on chromosome 11p11.2, while the LXR gene is located on chromosome 19q13.3.
I find this to be pretty common in the biomedical and bioscience articles.I'm not putting the article down - I'm glad someone has taken the time to write it. But the intro paragraphs are well above even a Scientific American level, and I hope that someone with more spare time (and domain knowledge) than I have will take the time to add a simpler introduction.