Time again to post a link to Roger Russell's excellent site debunking "audiophile" speaker wire once and for all. The "cable elevators" about 2/3 down the page (just below the $8,900 / pair speaker cables) are a personal favorite of mine.;-)
You may be right, unfortunately. There was a time when the majority thought slavery was a good idea too, but that didn't mean they were right.
Going down Obama's road, there won't be anyone left to pay for all of the entitlements for the "people who are tired of getting fucked." The government will own everything by default -- the liberal wet dream. You can't ask / force the "rich" to do too much more, or they're just going to start picking up their toys and move elsewhere. I forsee record numbers of people establishing their residency and businesses in FL, NV, TX and other non-income tax states, as spending and taxes here in the NE and out west continue to spiral out of control and those who actually want to keep what they earn run the fuck away. And people can attack Joe the Plumber all they want, but wealth redistribution and collective ownership are still key tenets of socialistic regimes in the history of our world.
Furthermore, it is a marginal tax increase. That means it doesn't apply to any of the $250K that you took as income in order to get to the $250K point. At roughly 3% it really is quite minor in absolute dollars for anything under $300K or so - roughly $1,500 extra taxes on $300K than now.
Very true. It's the changes to capital gains and (especially) meddling with the SS contribution cap the really scares the bejeezus out of a lot of us small business owners. Allowing people to prematurely withdrawal from their 401(k)s / IRAs without penalty, especially when everything is underwater right now, doesn't sit too well with me either.
. . . if lack of "real-world throughput" might have to do with other parts of the system which haven't yet caught up or been optimized for these huge new drives. E.g., OS, disk controller, etc. Just my.02.
Before launching into the predictable McCain / Palin rant and canned Republican-bashing, do just a little research: I live in Maryland. Maryland has a Democrat for a governor and our state legislature has been controlled by the Dems for the better part of 40 years. We're a solid-blue, one-party state in the truest sense of the word. We don't even get any presidential advertising because the state is such a lock for Obama (due to the huge black majorities in Baltimore City and Prince Georges County). Of course, almost all of the activity took place in Baltimore City and during the tenure of Democrat Mayor (now Governor) Martin O'Malley (conveniently pleading ignorance, of course). The same Governor O'Malley who created a "structural deficit" last year and called an unprecedented special session of the legislature last year in order to raise the sales tax, institute a $2 / pack cig tax, etc., after he promised during his campaign to only tax the rich (sound familiar?) The same Martin O'Malley who is threatening to raise taxes again if he doesn't get is precious slot machines approved during the upcoming referendum. We Marylanders are living in fear of losing what little is left of our financial freedom at the hands of the insatiable spending in Annapolis. Because, of course, O'Malley and his comrades in Annapolis know better than us serfs what is Good for The State.
If you think the Republicans are the only ones who'd love to remove your civil liberties, or even the most likely to do it, you're a complete retard. Loss of freedom, indeed -- MD is one of the last states where it's impossible for someone without government connections to get a concealed carry weapon -- unless you submit as part of your application documentation of the violent crimes *already* committed against you. Yeah, thank God the Dems are watching out for us Marylanders' civil liberties!
Agreed . . . part of the problem is lack of algorithms, especially for complex cursive handwriting with no prior "training." However, OCR is tremendously resource-intensive. I'd actually put it up there with video editing as one of the most resource-hungry things you can do with a computer. E.g., we do a lot of 35mm newspaper microfilm conversion to searchable PDFs. Your average roll of newspaper microfilm will take *hours* to OCR -- that's on our eight-core dual quad-Xeon box with 8 GB RAM running the latest version of ABBYY's engine, multithreaded, 100% CPU utilization. Part of the time is consumed for simply opening the large amount of image data and having ABBYY set up the job. Part of it is layout analysis. Part of it is the actual OCR. The remainder is the output stage -- writing all of that stuff to disk in different file formats. Now, let be honest: no one's going to pony up the cash to for an "at home"-type network for OCR. So while theoretically it may be possible to do the processing now, it's only been in the last few years that it's been technically possible and commercially *practical* to do this type of work, quickly, on a large scale. E.g., we're currently OCRing 2.1 million HR docs. It's going to take us approximately four months to complete the job with the above machine running 24 x 7 (multiple PDFs have a tremendous amount of overhead to open, read, and write).
I own a microfilm digitization / OCR shop. We work with tons of old records such as the ones referenced in this story, as well as old HR docs, check stubs, time cards, architectural drawings, you name it. If you OCR cursive, you don't get back 80%, or 70%, or even 30% accuracy . . . you get back a bunch of pseudo-random (to our eyes) characters which are in NO WAY related to what the actual text is. About the only handwriting recognizable using today's tech is block-print, like you find on engineering diagrams. The technique in this article is pretty standard operating procedure, and has been for some time -- much easier to put a few hundred people on the project and grind through it (and cheaper too compared to data entry rates here in the US -- about 1/3 the price). That usually includes double-keying to check everything and a 99.99999% accuracy guarantee.
Just FYI, there are only a few OCR engines out there. Probably the most commonly used is the ABBYY engine, which is both OEMed and sold directly as desktop- and server-based products by ABBYY. There are a few others as well, and despite their differences, most have pretty much the same capabilities and accuracy. But OCR of cursive, especially of the docs cited in the article where you don't have someone sit down and "train" the machine first with handwriting samples, is still one of the great "unsolved" computing problems. I expect we'll have the capability in the next decade or so as processor core density, memory, and storage continues to increase at their current rate -- eventually, the machine will be able to "brute-force" through the docs just like the Chinese data entry folks in this article.
Yeah, given the choice I'd rather live here than over there
That's good, because you left out probably the most important comparison: you can make your Slashdot post over here without ANY fear of government reprisal whatsoever, but over there, it'll get you hauled off for "re-education," prison, or worse, to be a participant in the next BodyWorlds exhibit. No country's perfect, but the Chinese have a loooooong way to go.
Honestly, I think that a pretty large proportion of our presidents should have left office at the end of a hangman's noose, and none that I can think of deserve that end more so than Bush Jr.
Nah, we 21st century Americans have it waaaaaay too easy. James Buchanan was much, much worse. As Wikipedia says, "His inability to avert the Civil War has subsequently been assessed as the worst single failure by a United States President."
well, first off, all of NASA's research and technology should be freely available in the public domain.
Uh, NO. I don't want space technology developed with my tax dollars made freely available to the governments of Iran or North Korea (unfriendly governments who are trying to develop / have developed nukes), let alone Cuba or Venezuela for that matter. It's one thing to share it with US companies / individuals who are specifically trying to compete in the private space industry in this country, but this country has enough problems right now without giving away tech to our enemies.
I gave you a solution -- quit bailing out people and companies who make terrible financial decisions, and we'll be much more stable in the long run. Without consequences, where's the incentive for individuals and businesses to play by the rules? Do you really think it's fair for the woman in the link I previously posted to have a judge reset her principal and be allowed to live in a half million dollar house she never paid a dime on? If that shit starts to happen, I know a bunch of people who will be marching on Annapolis and DC with torches and pitchforks. Sorry, but I'm carrying too much dead weight already. And who's next -- the airlines? The Detroit carmakers? That's the problem -- there are no consequences, so it never ends.
We obviously disagree on several key points, like the percentage of freeloaders versus unfortunate borrowers and even whether not bailing out the banks would "torpedo the whole economy," so I'll just leave it at that.
Ahhh, but the government *mandated* that the banks had to make mortgages available to low-income people after the Jesse Jacksons and Al Sharptons of the country screamed racism years ago, and forced the financial institutions to change the rules to make credit available for these folks. Now, they're screaming racism again when the "homeowners" (they're not really homeowners as they never had any equity in the real estate in the first place) inevitably defaulted. Here in Baltimore, the city is suing Wells Fargo for $5 million for "unfairly" targeting blacks to take these loans. No one wants to talk about why these people were even eligible in the first place, but a lot of the original blame rests on "advocates" like Jackson lobbying for credit for people would couldn't pay. And of course, fucking greedy Wall Street and the stupid and / or greedy borrowers (yes -- the borrowers, like the single mom with four kids running her home daycare center out of "her" $545k house on the front page of the Baltimore Sun -- fuck her and take her house). What should really happen is that the banks be allowed to fail and the execs be thrown in jail, and people learn some responsibility by going back to living in an apartment for awhile. The reason this shit keeps happening is because the government keeps stepping in and removing the consequences of peoples' decisions, and then sticks us responsible folks with the bill. FUCK THAT. No more.
Seriously, if you sign a mortgage and don't understand what you're signing, you're a fucking idiot, and I have absolutely no sympathy for you. We have a 30 year fixed mortgage and still hired a lawyer to look everything over before doing the deal.
and still results in common people being foreclosed upon.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but no one put a gun to anyone's head and made them sign a mortgage they couldn't afford. I'm sick of paying for the mistakes of the stupid / greedy, whether they're Wall Street execs or "common people" who can't / won't pay their mortgage. The "common people" you refer to are just as guilty as the Wall Streeters, and that it's even being considered to *reset* their mortgage principals is blatantly shocking. Where's the handout for those of us who follow the rules and live within our means?
People defined as liberal are rarely if ever the ones shouting down the opposition.
That's funny . . . why are liberals the ones always getting kicked out of Republican events for chanting some anti-war slogan? Strange how you don't EVER see conservatives getting kicked out of Democrat events . ..
Gads, who on earth would run a 64-core Windows box?
The ABBYY OCR engine (Windows only) in any of its latest versions (either direct from ABBYY or OEM'd into someone else's product) will multithread during recognition -- one thread for each core. We currently use a dual quad-core Xeon Windows Server box and I wish I had more cores -- when you get a project to OCR 2.1 million docs in a timeframe of less than a few years, you will too.;-)
ABBYY's own server-level product (Recognition Server) will span multiple boxes and use any designated cores available on those boxes -- and it scales linerally with the number of cores available (distributed or local). So yeah, there are still some Windows-only applications where a truly monster box would be great.
OCR is one of those apps where you can absolutely NEVER have enough resources for big jobs.
Does he verify / update the data from time to time? Given the atrocious life expectancy of your typical Chinese wall-wart power supply that comes with the standard Best Buy / Circuit City-bought router and Americans' propensity to simply buy a new router when their old one appears to die (when 90% of the time it's just a dead power supply), I'd think this data would get stale pretty quickly.
Ahhhhh, classic lines from a classic movie. Too bad Hollywood today would crucify Clint for even intimating something along those lines.
When I worked for an Israeli company, the Israelis had a great saying: "You're allowed to offend. You're not allowed to be offended." They found a great deal of humor in the concept of 21st century American political correctness.
Seriously, why do we need a bloated, plodding DHTML frontend on a glorified forum? Between that and the ever-increasing ads, the user experience is really starting to suck lately. Please stop.
Slashdot Mirror
"Battery operation is inherently selftimed, in that when the battery dies, the FryBaby output stops." Someone had fun writing this one. :-D
"Break in" in your cables for the best sound! Heheh . . . good call, but it's already been done for awhile:
Cable Cooker
FryBaby
There's a sucker born every minute.
Time again to post a link to Roger Russell's excellent site debunking "audiophile" speaker wire once and for all. The "cable elevators" about 2/3 down the page (just below the $8,900 / pair speaker cables) are a personal favorite of mine. ;-)
Who can forget this guy who claimed to be able to boost the speed of data transmission across plain copper wires by 1000x, even 4x faster than fiber? He'd "prove" his invention by apparently streaming perfect, full-motion video across ordinary modem lines, and received millions in funding. Later, it was found out that he was simply using VCR playback on a very long cable. :-)
You may be right, unfortunately. There was a time when the majority thought slavery was a good idea too, but that didn't mean they were right.
Going down Obama's road, there won't be anyone left to pay for all of the entitlements for the "people who are tired of getting fucked." The government will own everything by default -- the liberal wet dream. You can't ask / force the "rich" to do too much more, or they're just going to start picking up their toys and move elsewhere. I forsee record numbers of people establishing their residency and businesses in FL, NV, TX and other non-income tax states, as spending and taxes here in the NE and out west continue to spiral out of control and those who actually want to keep what they earn run the fuck away. And people can attack Joe the Plumber all they want, but wealth redistribution and collective ownership are still key tenets of socialistic regimes in the history of our world.
Furthermore, it is a marginal tax increase. That means it doesn't apply to any of the $250K that you took as income in order to get to the $250K point. At roughly 3% it really is quite minor in absolute dollars for anything under $300K or so - roughly $1,500 extra taxes on $300K than now.
Very true. It's the changes to capital gains and (especially) meddling with the SS contribution cap the really scares the bejeezus out of a lot of us small business owners. Allowing people to prematurely withdrawal from their 401(k)s / IRAs without penalty, especially when everything is underwater right now, doesn't sit too well with me either.
. . . if lack of "real-world throughput" might have to do with other parts of the system which haven't yet caught up or been optimized for these huge new drives. E.g., OS, disk controller, etc. Just my .02.
Before launching into the predictable McCain / Palin rant and canned Republican-bashing, do just a little research: I live in Maryland. Maryland has a Democrat for a governor and our state legislature has been controlled by the Dems for the better part of 40 years. We're a solid-blue, one-party state in the truest sense of the word. We don't even get any presidential advertising because the state is such a lock for Obama (due to the huge black majorities in Baltimore City and Prince Georges County). Of course, almost all of the activity took place in Baltimore City and during the tenure of Democrat Mayor (now Governor) Martin O'Malley (conveniently pleading ignorance, of course). The same Governor O'Malley who created a "structural deficit" last year and called an unprecedented special session of the legislature last year in order to raise the sales tax, institute a $2 / pack cig tax, etc., after he promised during his campaign to only tax the rich (sound familiar?) The same Martin O'Malley who is threatening to raise taxes again if he doesn't get is precious slot machines approved during the upcoming referendum. We Marylanders are living in fear of losing what little is left of our financial freedom at the hands of the insatiable spending in Annapolis. Because, of course, O'Malley and his comrades in Annapolis know better than us serfs what is Good for The State.
If you think the Republicans are the only ones who'd love to remove your civil liberties, or even the most likely to do it, you're a complete retard. Loss of freedom, indeed -- MD is one of the last states where it's impossible for someone without government connections to get a concealed carry weapon -- unless you submit as part of your application documentation of the violent crimes *already* committed against you. Yeah, thank God the Dems are watching out for us Marylanders' civil liberties!
Agreed . . . part of the problem is lack of algorithms, especially for complex cursive handwriting with no prior "training." However, OCR is tremendously resource-intensive. I'd actually put it up there with video editing as one of the most resource-hungry things you can do with a computer. E.g., we do a lot of 35mm newspaper microfilm conversion to searchable PDFs. Your average roll of newspaper microfilm will take *hours* to OCR -- that's on our eight-core dual quad-Xeon box with 8 GB RAM running the latest version of ABBYY's engine, multithreaded, 100% CPU utilization. Part of the time is consumed for simply opening the large amount of image data and having ABBYY set up the job. Part of it is layout analysis. Part of it is the actual OCR. The remainder is the output stage -- writing all of that stuff to disk in different file formats. Now, let be honest: no one's going to pony up the cash to for an "at home"-type network for OCR. So while theoretically it may be possible to do the processing now, it's only been in the last few years that it's been technically possible and commercially *practical* to do this type of work, quickly, on a large scale. E.g., we're currently OCRing 2.1 million HR docs. It's going to take us approximately four months to complete the job with the above machine running 24 x 7 (multiple PDFs have a tremendous amount of overhead to open, read, and write).
No.
I own a microfilm digitization / OCR shop. We work with tons of old records such as the ones referenced in this story, as well as old HR docs, check stubs, time cards, architectural drawings, you name it. If you OCR cursive, you don't get back 80%, or 70%, or even 30% accuracy . . . you get back a bunch of pseudo-random (to our eyes) characters which are in NO WAY related to what the actual text is. About the only handwriting recognizable using today's tech is block-print, like you find on engineering diagrams. The technique in this article is pretty standard operating procedure, and has been for some time -- much easier to put a few hundred people on the project and grind through it (and cheaper too compared to data entry rates here in the US -- about 1/3 the price). That usually includes double-keying to check everything and a 99.99999% accuracy guarantee.
Just FYI, there are only a few OCR engines out there. Probably the most commonly used is the ABBYY engine, which is both OEMed and sold directly as desktop- and server-based products by ABBYY. There are a few others as well, and despite their differences, most have pretty much the same capabilities and accuracy. But OCR of cursive, especially of the docs cited in the article where you don't have someone sit down and "train" the machine first with handwriting samples, is still one of the great "unsolved" computing problems. I expect we'll have the capability in the next decade or so as processor core density, memory, and storage continues to increase at their current rate -- eventually, the machine will be able to "brute-force" through the docs just like the Chinese data entry folks in this article.
Back to the Mach 5 ha ha!
Problem solved. I thought this was standard operating procedure in most corporate IT shops by now anyway.
Yeah, given the choice I'd rather live here than over there
That's good, because you left out probably the most important comparison: you can make your Slashdot post over here without ANY fear of government reprisal whatsoever, but over there, it'll get you hauled off for "re-education," prison, or worse, to be a participant in the next BodyWorlds exhibit. No country's perfect, but the Chinese have a loooooong way to go.
Honestly, I think that a pretty large proportion of our presidents should have left office at the end of a hangman's noose, and none that I can think of deserve that end more so than Bush Jr.
Nah, we 21st century Americans have it waaaaaay too easy. James Buchanan was much, much worse. As Wikipedia says, "His inability to avert the Civil War has subsequently been assessed as the worst single failure by a United States President."
well, first off, all of NASA's research and technology should be freely available in the public domain.
Uh, NO. I don't want space technology developed with my tax dollars made freely available to the governments of Iran or North Korea (unfriendly governments who are trying to develop / have developed nukes), let alone Cuba or Venezuela for that matter. It's one thing to share it with US companies / individuals who are specifically trying to compete in the private space industry in this country, but this country has enough problems right now without giving away tech to our enemies.
I gave you a solution -- quit bailing out people and companies who make terrible financial decisions, and we'll be much more stable in the long run. Without consequences, where's the incentive for individuals and businesses to play by the rules? Do you really think it's fair for the woman in the link I previously posted to have a judge reset her principal and be allowed to live in a half million dollar house she never paid a dime on? If that shit starts to happen, I know a bunch of people who will be marching on Annapolis and DC with torches and pitchforks. Sorry, but I'm carrying too much dead weight already. And who's next -- the airlines? The Detroit carmakers? That's the problem -- there are no consequences, so it never ends.
We obviously disagree on several key points, like the percentage of freeloaders versus unfortunate borrowers and even whether not bailing out the banks would "torpedo the whole economy," so I'll just leave it at that.
Ahhh, but the government *mandated* that the banks had to make mortgages available to low-income people after the Jesse Jacksons and Al Sharptons of the country screamed racism years ago, and forced the financial institutions to change the rules to make credit available for these folks. Now, they're screaming racism again when the "homeowners" (they're not really homeowners as they never had any equity in the real estate in the first place) inevitably defaulted. Here in Baltimore, the city is suing Wells Fargo for $5 million for "unfairly" targeting blacks to take these loans. No one wants to talk about why these people were even eligible in the first place, but a lot of the original blame rests on "advocates" like Jackson lobbying for credit for people would couldn't pay. And of course, fucking greedy Wall Street and the stupid and / or greedy borrowers (yes -- the borrowers, like the single mom with four kids running her home daycare center out of "her" $545k house on the front page of the Baltimore Sun -- fuck her and take her house). What should really happen is that the banks be allowed to fail and the execs be thrown in jail, and people learn some responsibility by going back to living in an apartment for awhile. The reason this shit keeps happening is because the government keeps stepping in and removing the consequences of peoples' decisions, and then sticks us responsible folks with the bill. FUCK THAT. No more.
Seriously, if you sign a mortgage and don't understand what you're signing, you're a fucking idiot, and I have absolutely no sympathy for you. We have a 30 year fixed mortgage and still hired a lawyer to look everything over before doing the deal.
and still results in common people being foreclosed upon.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but no one put a gun to anyone's head and made them sign a mortgage they couldn't afford. I'm sick of paying for the mistakes of the stupid / greedy, whether they're Wall Street execs or "common people" who can't / won't pay their mortgage. The "common people" you refer to are just as guilty as the Wall Streeters, and that it's even being considered to *reset* their mortgage principals is blatantly shocking. Where's the handout for those of us who follow the rules and live within our means?
People defined as liberal are rarely if ever the ones shouting down the opposition.
That's funny . . . why are liberals the ones always getting kicked out of Republican events for chanting some anti-war slogan? Strange how you don't EVER see conservatives getting kicked out of Democrat events . . .
So if McDonalds named a product the McHammer, they get to forcibly take MCHammer.com on the basis of they own mc*?
God, let's hope so.
O .
Gads, who on earth would run a 64-core Windows box?
The ABBYY OCR engine (Windows only) in any of its latest versions (either direct from ABBYY or OEM'd into someone else's product) will multithread during recognition -- one thread for each core. We currently use a dual quad-core Xeon Windows Server box and I wish I had more cores -- when you get a project to OCR 2.1 million docs in a timeframe of less than a few years, you will too. ;-)
ABBYY's own server-level product (Recognition Server) will span multiple boxes and use any designated cores available on those boxes -- and it scales linerally with the number of cores available (distributed or local). So yeah, there are still some Windows-only applications where a truly monster box would be great.
OCR is one of those apps where you can absolutely NEVER have enough resources for big jobs.
Does he verify / update the data from time to time? Given the atrocious life expectancy of your typical Chinese wall-wart power supply that comes with the standard Best Buy / Circuit City-bought router and Americans' propensity to simply buy a new router when their old one appears to die (when 90% of the time it's just a dead power supply), I'd think this data would get stale pretty quickly.
Ahhhhh, classic lines from a classic movie. Too bad Hollywood today would crucify Clint for even intimating something along those lines. When I worked for an Israeli company, the Israelis had a great saying: "You're allowed to offend. You're not allowed to be offended." They found a great deal of humor in the concept of 21st century American political correctness.
Seriously, why do we need a bloated, plodding DHTML frontend on a glorified forum? Between that and the ever-increasing ads, the user experience is really starting to suck lately. Please stop.