Legally, this is not a tempting option for telcos, since the WLAN frequency may be used by anyone as long as they don't block others using it.
Technically, it's going to be hard for them as well, since people will be using directed antennas, as you pointed out. Also, the protocol is pretty robust.
The major problems are fog and obstacles like trees (especially when their leaves are wet). I wouldn't mind about telcos showing their environmentally friendship by planting trees, but I guess they have the same problem with GSM signals...
This is exactly what's happening in Leiden, the Netherlands. (English version here)
The idea is to make sure there's an open and free (as in beer) network of interconnected 802.11b WLAN hubs, before telcos or other commercial initiatives eat up the available bandwidth. Getting a stable network with good coverage is first priority. Getting BBS-like applications (or video distribution, or grid computing, or...) is second. Using it for last-mile internet access has a relatively low priority, but is not ruled out.
-- The memory management on the PowerPC can be used to frighten small children -- Linus Torvalds
> Making the technology is fine, but if we know that it could be used for ill, aren't we bound to not sell to some countries and companies?
In other news, ZurichPrague said: "Making weapons of mass destruction is fine, but if we know that they could be used for ill, aren't we bound to not sell to some countries and companies? Nothing wrong with Iraq building nukes, as long as they don't sell them to the U.S. (the only country ever to nuke civilian population)."
-- Facts are stupid things -- President Ronald Reagan (a blooper from his speeach at the '88 GOP convention)
I'm not sure about ThinkTank23, but isn't Google news maintained by human droids? IMHO there's some really interesting NLP research going on at Google, but its all very pragmatic: focus is on assisting manual labor and getting proven, but simple, techniques to work on larger and larger problems.
Nothing wrong with being pragmatic, but in the spectrum of unsupevised-NLP to automatic-aids-for-jobs-that-humans-find-tedious, only the left-most extreme is a cheap solution in the long run. And it's these unsuperviced techniques that just don't take off. Persoanlly, I tend to agree with the popular opinion that this will take a very long time - mainly because NLs are just intrinsically very complex, compared to the problems faced by mainstream computer science.
But I certainly agree that NLP research has contributed to some killer apps.
-- If pro is the opposite of con, what is the opposite of progress?
True. But even in MSN8, it's not the "killer app" that boosts NLP into the front page media. Rather, a "geek" feature that many perceive as anoying as "Clippy the happy Word-wizzard" - primarily due to its immaturity.
1) Wonder WHY someone would attack you. Is it plain vandalism, or are you in some kind of business which make people angry (politics, weaponery, multinational), or you may live in a country that makes people angry (iraq, usa, israel, taiwan,...)
2) Talk to you opponents, or if you can't reach them, someone representative for their opinion. Convince them with sound arguments that they're doing the wrong thing, listen to their explanation of why they think you're doing the wrong thing. Ie. Communicate. This crucial stage solves 90% of the problems people tend to have.
3) Adopt to your new understanding of the situation, and see what happens. Stay calm, be patient. Remember that your life isn't on the line (yet).
4) If none of the above work leave some common sense out: switch to diplomacy, laws, threats, or technological defenses. (Note however, that more agressive tactics don't necessarily tackle the remaining 10% of the problems, but rather 10% of 10%.)
5) Wait for a totalitarian system of corporate control to take care of all of our daily lives, as well as those of our attackers.
And databases, math and [graphical] user interfaces are not?
Indeed. As a language, "math" was designed to exclude many important aspects that evidentally exist in all human languages, like ambiguity, intonation,
Databases and GUI existed before we learned how to use them: we simultaneously discovered the technique and adopted to using it. Language has been with us for (at least) tens of thousands of year. It has evolved and is constantly changing still. There was never a clean design, it was just there for as long as we can remember. Successful human-computer interaction, in the "2001 Space Odyssee" sci-fi sense can only be achieved if we build machines that can reason, handle paradoxes, and the whole trick we currenly call NLP.
...For now and in the forseable future the only way to build a machine like that is to have children.
Judging by the responses to this post (or rather the lack thereof), NLP is not a very hot topic. Most of natural language processing research is in a very academic stage. Quite some universities study some NLP related small little subtopic, but there are hardly any real large departments - say the size of a computer science faculty.
With Lernhout & Hauspie - the one major commercial software supplier in this field - gone bankrupt, there are only some small companies, trying to get by. Some have success in a very specialized sub-subject, like OCR, voice response or information retrieval.
As a former Computational Linguistics student, I'd say the main problem is either the lack of computational power or the lack of manual labour. Ie.: even a very well defined liguistic area needs to be defined with too many rules (in a complex system) or needs too much data and CPU time (in a brute force) to be feaible, commercially viable, interesting in the Turing-sense... too much effort to just make it work.
Where you'd expect high-level NLP to work, simpler techniques usually work better. Ask Jeeves and Q-go are great, but most people agree no search engine currently beats Google, even when it's taylored for a very small subject. NLP is just way immature, compared to most other computational topics - primarily because it is intrinsically complicated.
I guess we'll have to wait for the killer-app for another decenium or two, though I'm a pessimist. Until that time I'd agree all institutions to collaborate as much as possible, and I really don't understand where some universities are going with their closed source research projects.
Hmm. Either 1440 mAh (standard) or 3400 mAh (optional) Li-Ion rechargeables; but a back-lit screen, 400MHz XScale, 64MB ram, and a Microsoft OS. Will this thing be usable for more than one hour without an adapter one year after I've bought it, or is this yet another handheld that's supposed to remain at my desktop?
-- In theory there is no difference between practice and theory But in practice there is
> If a vital component is guaranteed to fail after, say, eighteen months and yet the overall length of the project is sixteen months, NASA won't bother to find an alternative (despite there, on occaision, being a cheaper and longer-lasting solution) as time is the motivating money factor.
Isn't it the same for cars? Refrigerators? Any stuff that's been here long enough to be optimized economically? Sure, cars have become boring - especially from a maintenance/repair perspective - over the years, but they are safer, cheaper, less poluting,... better.
> Usually small subsets of commersial CPUs are used for the truly innovate designs....As well as in my humble opinion - could not agree with you more.
And you are right about SPARC, MIPS as well. In addition to some interesting tech features, Sparc has the advantage of being an (almost) true clear and open architecture, rather than a concrete chip design. If I remember correctly, MIPS is great in its context-insensitive structure (no condition bits). Then Crusoe (and PowerPC, for that matter) are great in that they were intended for emulation, but allow native code, thus migrating away from the obvious enventual x86-dead end.
However, a feature that only ARM and Transmeta incorporated in design (from the beginning), is the performance / transistor -ratio. Being a low cost 32 bit alternative to the 16 bit dominated market of the late eigties, Acorn's choice for a RISC architecture was probably a pragmatic matter, rather than a philosophical one. And inside an Archimedes desktop computer it did not primarily minimize power consumption, but rather maximize performance / research cost.
Well anyway. Ever since Acorn let go of the ARM processor, it's been pretty popular in actual devices as well as in design experiments.
In line with the low-power paradigm gaining momentum within CPU designs, asynchronuous design is often mentioned in the context of battery life. Apparently, the ARM processor seems to be the (only) architecture used for innovative CPU designs.
Is this really the case, and if so, why? (Obviously CISC architectures are far too complicated to fine-tune in a drastic manner - other than building a Crusoe-like RISC chip and emulating the whole thing.)
Moreover, is power consumption (and not primarily performance) after all those years, going to be the criterium that's going to decide the RISC-CISC issue in favour of RISC?
Slashdot Mirror
Calling it a "Probabilistic Finite State Network", and denying it has anything to do with Markov models? Screw them patent bastards!
--
drug, n: A substance that, injected into a rat, produces a scientific paper
Legally, this is not a tempting option for telcos, since the WLAN frequency may be used by anyone as long as they don't block others using it.
Technically, it's going to be hard for them as well, since people will be using directed antennas, as you pointed out. Also, the protocol is pretty robust.
The major problems are fog and obstacles like trees (especially when their leaves are wet). I wouldn't mind about telcos showing their environmentally friendship by planting trees, but I guess they have the same problem with GSM signals...
This is exactly what's happening in Leiden, the Netherlands. (English version here)
The idea is to make sure there's an open and free (as in beer) network of interconnected 802.11b WLAN hubs, before telcos or other commercial initiatives eat up the available bandwidth. Getting a stable network with good coverage is first priority. Getting BBS-like applications (or video distribution, or grid computing, or...) is second. Using it for last-mile internet access has a relatively low priority, but is not ruled out.
--
The memory management on the PowerPC can be used to frighten small children -- Linus Torvalds
Check it out!
> Making the technology is fine, but if we know that it could be used for ill, aren't we bound to not sell to some countries and companies?
In other news, ZurichPrague said: "Making weapons of mass destruction is fine, but if we know that they could be used for ill, aren't we bound to not sell to some countries and companies? Nothing wrong with Iraq building nukes, as long as they don't sell them to the U.S. (the only country ever to nuke civilian population)."
--
Facts are stupid things -- President Ronald Reagan (a blooper from his speeach at the '88 GOP convention)
Wow. These Intel guys are fast: Three new C++ compilers within 48 hours!
...And the're all binary compatible - at least to each other.
--
The right to be heard does not include the right to be taken seriously
> The so-called strange quark matter is so dense that a piece the size of a human cell would weigh a tonne.
What kind of human cell would that be, exactly? A large one or a small one? (Well I guess even large human cells are pretty small, right?)
---
Why tell a story once if you can tell it twice and still get lame response?
I'm not sure about ThinkTank23, but isn't Google news maintained by human droids? IMHO there's some really interesting NLP research going on at Google, but its all very pragmatic: focus is on assisting manual labor and getting proven, but simple, techniques to work on larger and larger problems.
Nothing wrong with being pragmatic, but in the spectrum of unsupevised-NLP to automatic-aids-for-jobs-that-humans-find-tedious, only the left-most extreme is a cheap solution in the long run. And it's these unsuperviced techniques that just don't take off. Persoanlly, I tend to agree with the popular opinion that this will take a very long time - mainly because NLs are just intrinsically very complex, compared to the problems faced by mainstream computer science.
But I certainly agree that NLP research has contributed to some killer apps.
--
If pro is the opposite of con, what is the opposite of progress?
True. But even in MSN8, it's not the "killer app" that boosts NLP into the front page media. Rather, a "geek" feature that many perceive as anoying as "Clippy the happy Word-wizzard" - primarily due to its immaturity.
What Should You Do When Attacked Online?
1) Wonder WHY someone would attack you. Is it plain vandalism, or are you in some kind of business which make people angry (politics, weaponery, multinational), or you may live in a country that makes people angry (iraq, usa, israel, taiwan,...)
2) Talk to you opponents, or if you can't reach them, someone representative for their opinion. Convince them with sound arguments that they're doing the wrong thing, listen to their explanation of why they think you're doing the wrong thing. Ie. Communicate. This crucial stage solves 90% of the problems people tend to have.
3) Adopt to your new understanding of the situation, and see what happens. Stay calm, be patient. Remember that your life isn't on the line (yet).
4) If none of the above work leave some common sense out: switch to diplomacy, laws, threats, or technological defenses. (Note however, that more agressive tactics don't necessarily tackle the remaining 10% of the problems, but rather 10% of 10%.)
5) Wait for a totalitarian system of corporate control to take care of all of our daily lives, as well as those of our attackers.
--
Just my $0.02 as a hippie
And databases, math and [graphical] user interfaces are not?
Indeed. As a language, "math" was designed to exclude many important aspects that evidentally exist in all human languages, like ambiguity, intonation,
Databases and GUI existed before we learned how to use them: we simultaneously discovered the technique and adopted to using it. Language has been with us for (at least) tens of thousands of year. It has evolved and is constantly changing still. There was never a clean design, it was just there for as long as we can remember. Successful human-computer interaction, in the "2001 Space Odyssee" sci-fi sense can only be achieved if we build machines that can reason, handle paradoxes, and the whole trick we currenly call NLP.
...For now and in the forseable future the only way to build a machine like that is to have children.
Judging by the responses to this post (or rather the lack thereof), NLP is not a very hot topic. Most of natural language processing research is in a very academic stage. Quite some universities study some NLP related small little subtopic, but there are hardly any real large departments - say the size of a computer science faculty.
With Lernhout & Hauspie - the one major commercial software supplier in this field - gone bankrupt, there are only some small companies, trying to get by. Some have success in a very specialized sub-subject, like OCR, voice response or information retrieval.
As a former Computational Linguistics student, I'd say the main problem is either the lack of computational power or the lack of manual labour. Ie.: even a very well defined liguistic area needs to be defined with too many rules (in a complex system) or needs too much data and CPU time (in a brute force) to be feaible, commercially viable, interesting in the Turing-sense... too much effort to just make it work.
Where you'd expect high-level NLP to work, simpler techniques usually work better. Ask Jeeves and Q-go are great, but most people agree no search engine currently beats Google, even when it's taylored for a very small subject. NLP is just way immature, compared to most other computational topics - primarily because it is intrinsically complicated.
I guess we'll have to wait for the killer-app for another decenium or two, though I'm a pessimist. Until that time I'd agree all institutions to collaborate as much as possible, and I really don't understand where some universities are going with their closed source research projects.
--
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive
Hmm. Either 1440 mAh (standard) or 3400 mAh (optional) Li-Ion rechargeables; but a back-lit screen, 400MHz XScale, 64MB ram, and a Microsoft OS. Will this thing be usable for more than one hour without an adapter one year after I've bought it, or is this yet another handheld that's supposed to remain at my desktop?
--
In theory there is no difference between practice and theory
But in practice there is
> If a vital component is guaranteed to fail after, say, eighteen months and yet the overall length of the project is sixteen months, NASA won't bother to find an alternative (despite there, on occaision, being a cheaper and longer-lasting solution) as time is the motivating money factor.
... better.
Isn't it the same for cars? Refrigerators? Any stuff that's been here long enough to be optimized economically? Sure, cars have become boring - especially from a maintenance/repair perspective - over the years, but they are safer, cheaper, less poluting,
> Usually small subsets of commersial CPUs are used for the truly innovate designs. ...As well as in my humble opinion - could not agree with you more.
And you are right about SPARC, MIPS as well. In addition to some interesting tech features, Sparc has the advantage of being an (almost) true clear and open architecture, rather than a concrete chip design. If I remember correctly, MIPS is great in its context-insensitive structure (no condition bits). Then Crusoe (and PowerPC, for that matter) are great in that they were intended for emulation, but allow native code, thus migrating away from the obvious enventual x86-dead end.
However, a feature that only ARM and Transmeta incorporated in design (from the beginning), is the performance / transistor -ratio. Being a low cost 32 bit alternative to the 16 bit dominated market of the late eigties, Acorn's choice for a RISC architecture was probably a pragmatic matter, rather than a philosophical one. And inside an Archimedes desktop computer it did not primarily minimize power consumption, but rather maximize performance / research cost.
Well anyway. Ever since Acorn let go of the ARM processor, it's been pretty popular in actual devices as well as in design experiments.
In line with the low-power paradigm gaining momentum within CPU designs, asynchronuous design is often mentioned in the context of battery life. Apparently, the ARM processor seems to be the (only) architecture used for innovative CPU designs.
Is this really the case, and if so, why? (Obviously CISC architectures are far too complicated to fine-tune in a drastic manner - other than building a Crusoe-like RISC chip and emulating the whole thing.)
Moreover, is power consumption (and not primarily performance) after all those years, going to be the criterium that's going to decide the RISC-CISC issue in favour of RISC?