> If you'd bought apple stock and google stock at the time google went IPO, your apple stock would have outperformed your google stock by 3 or 4 times.
Not even close; see chart.
I am a UIMA user within IBM (but not an official spokesperson), so I can take an unofficial stab at answering that question. The UIMA framework (now on Sourceforge) is primarily a Software Developers Kit. It is not really intended to "do" anything out of the box; it does come with a handful of illustrative example applications but does not really provide direct end-user functionality (any more than a Java SDK does). Instead it provides a variety of interfaces and framework code to enable programmers to build applications that analyze unstructured information such as text (or images, audio, video, etc.).
Some key capabilities provided by the UIMA framework include:
1) A data structure, known as the Common Analysis Structure (CAS), that holds the results of analysis. It is essentially a big bag structure that has a lot convenient methods for using that bag to hold a "subject of analysis" (e.g., a text string) and information about that subject of analysis (e.g., annotations over character spans in a text string). Also included are methods for serializing and deserializing the CAS into an XML format.
2) A set of interfaces for components that manipulate CAS's. For example, an "Annotator" takes a CAS that contains an existing subject of analysis and adds more information about that subject of analysis into that CAS. Developers are expected to implement those interfaces to build analysis capabilities.
3) An XML format for providing metadata about those components and aggregates of those components.
4) A "collection processing manager" that takes a metadata specification of an aggregate component and executes those components, either locally or remotely, via SOAP or some other protocol.
So why use UIMA? If you are building some specialized analysis component, the UIMA framework provides common structures and interfaces for building and deploying these components. If you are building an end user application, basing the application on the UIMA framework allows you to draw on whatever "best of breed" UIMA components are available for providing the various elements of functionality that you want.
The range of applications that can potentially benefit from a combination of analysis components is virtually limitless. The parent post mentions a few (e.g., semantic grep, natural-language question answering). There are many others such as machine translation, summarization, etc. Many of these applications can benefit from common primitive subcomponents such as being able to identify the subject and verb of an English sentence. A common framework like UIMA can help developers to build, share, and reuse these components.
Re:Where to find info (and some personal favs)
on
Fun Tabletop Games?
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· Score: 1
1 8.494 Puerto Rico 2 7.865 Euphrat & Tigris 3 7.756 Die Siedler von Catan 4 7.742 Die Fursten von Florenz 5 7.504 Modern Art 6 7.503 El Grande 7 7.451 Carcassonne 8 7.409 Ohne Furcht und Adel 9 7.399 Goa 10 7.387 Vinci
I particularly like this list so I wanted to put my two cents in regarding the entries on it. First note that Puerto Rico's rating (8.494) is farther ahead of the #2 game than #2 is ahead of #9. This enormous margin is truly well earned; if you are only going to buy one of these games, it should definitely be Puerto Rico.
I've played Tigris and Euphrates a few times but have never really liked it too much. Maybe this one just takes some more time than I've devoted to it to start to appreciate the strategic alternatives.
Settler's of Catan is of course a classic with enormous replay value. I've played many of the variants/expansions, and none of the ones I've played are nearly as good as the original. That's not to say that their not worth trying as a change of pace, but if you buy them, you should plan to play the variants rarely and the base game far more often.
Princes of Florence is a great game that combines resource gathering, auctions, and a variety of strategic alternatives. It's similar to Puerto Rico, but not quite as good; for example, there is a little less diversity in the viable styles of play.
Modern Art is the only one on that list I've never played, but I've heard that it's an excellent auction game. I'm also told that it's similar to Ra (another classic auction game), which is a great game that I also highly recommend.
El Grande is a fine game involving occupying territory. It combines a play style similar to Puerto Rico or Princes of Florence with objectives and scoring that resemble Web of Power (the latter being another game I recommend highly; a bit faster paced than most of the ones on this list).
Carcassonne is another territory occupying game, with the additional twist that the board is constantly growing (players draw random tiles and then choose where to add them to the board). Like Settler's of Catan, it is a classic with a large base of existing players.
Citidels is a terrible game; I don't understand how it made this list. It is too random to be an interesting strategic game and too complicated to be a fun party game. It does have one upside, however, that it can be played with many, many players (up to 7 in the base game, and I think up to 9 with the optional cards that are included in the English edition). Thus if you have a really large group and you really want to all play together (instead of doing the sensible thing and splitting into 2-3 groups to play good games), then this may be the best option out there.
Goa seems like a fun new game with a style resembling Puerto Rico. I haven't played it enough to give a firm opinion though.
Vinci is a classic in the civilization-building genre. It captures a lot of the feel of Advanced Civ (recommended in the parent post), without taking nearly as long. A major drawback of Advanced Civ is that it is very easy for a couple of players to fall behind very early and be virtually eliminated from competition; there is little that's more frustrating than being 30 minutes into a 10-14 hour game and knowing that you have almost no hope of catching up. In constrast, Vinci does not do nearly as much to punish players who have fallen behind early on.
The RCA DRC7005N Personal Video Recorder/DVD Player is another DVR that provides a 30 second skip ahead feature on the remote control. It describes that feature as "commercial skip" but it doesn't do any ReplayTV-style automated detection of commercials. On the whole, however, it seems like a fine product that provides the usual DVR features (pause live TV, record from on-screen program guide, etc.) without any subscription fee. I have one and am not affiliated with RCA:-).
Slashdot Mirror
> If you'd bought apple stock and google stock at the time google went IPO, your apple stock would have outperformed your google stock by 3 or 4 times. Not even close; see chart.
I am a UIMA user within IBM (but not an official spokesperson), so I can take an unofficial stab at answering that question. The UIMA framework (now on Sourceforge) is primarily a Software Developers Kit. It is not really intended to "do" anything out of the box; it does come with a handful of illustrative example applications but does not really provide direct end-user functionality (any more than a Java SDK does). Instead it provides a variety of interfaces and framework code to enable programmers to build applications that analyze unstructured information such as text (or images, audio, video, etc.).
Some key capabilities provided by the UIMA framework include:
1) A data structure, known as the Common Analysis Structure (CAS), that holds the results of analysis. It is essentially a big bag structure that has a lot convenient methods for using that bag to hold a "subject of analysis" (e.g., a text string) and information about that subject of analysis (e.g., annotations over character spans in a text string). Also included are methods for serializing and deserializing the CAS into an XML format.
2) A set of interfaces for components that manipulate CAS's. For example, an "Annotator" takes a CAS that contains an existing subject of analysis and adds more information about that subject of analysis into that CAS. Developers are expected to implement those interfaces to build analysis capabilities.
3) An XML format for providing metadata about those components and aggregates of those components.
4) A "collection processing manager" that takes a metadata specification of an aggregate component and executes those components, either locally or remotely, via SOAP or some other protocol.
So why use UIMA? If you are building some specialized analysis component, the UIMA framework provides common structures and interfaces for building and deploying these components. If you are building an end user application, basing the application on the UIMA framework allows you to draw on whatever "best of breed" UIMA components are available for providing the various elements of functionality that you want.
The range of applications that can potentially benefit from a combination of analysis components is virtually limitless. The parent post mentions a few (e.g., semantic grep, natural-language question answering). There are many others such as machine translation, summarization, etc. Many of these applications can benefit from common primitive subcomponents such as being able to identify the subject and verb of an English sentence. A common framework like UIMA can help developers to build, share, and reuse these components.
I particularly like this list so I wanted to put my two cents in regarding the entries on it. First note that Puerto Rico's rating (8.494) is farther ahead of the #2 game than #2 is ahead of #9. This enormous margin is truly well earned; if you are only going to buy one of these games, it should definitely be Puerto Rico.
I've played Tigris and Euphrates a few times but have never really liked it too much. Maybe this one just takes some more time than I've devoted to it to start to appreciate the strategic alternatives.
Settler's of Catan is of course a classic with enormous replay value. I've played many of the variants/expansions, and none of the ones I've played are nearly as good as the original. That's not to say that their not worth trying as a change of pace, but if you buy them, you should plan to play the variants rarely and the base game far more often.
Princes of Florence is a great game that combines resource gathering, auctions, and a variety of strategic alternatives. It's similar to Puerto Rico, but not quite as good; for example, there is a little less diversity in the viable styles of play.
Modern Art is the only one on that list I've never played, but I've heard that it's an excellent auction game. I'm also told that it's similar to Ra (another classic auction game), which is a great game that I also highly recommend.
El Grande is a fine game involving occupying territory. It combines a play style similar to Puerto Rico or Princes of Florence with objectives and scoring that resemble Web of Power (the latter being another game I recommend highly; a bit faster paced than most of the ones on this list).
Carcassonne is another territory occupying game, with the additional twist that the board is constantly growing (players draw random tiles and then choose where to add them to the board). Like Settler's of Catan, it is a classic with a large base of existing players.
Citidels is a terrible game; I don't understand how it made this list. It is too random to be an interesting strategic game and too complicated to be a fun party game. It does have one upside, however, that it can be played with many, many players (up to 7 in the base game, and I think up to 9 with the optional cards that are included in the English edition). Thus if you have a really large group and you really want to all play together (instead of doing the sensible thing and splitting into 2-3 groups to play good games), then this may be the best option out there.
Goa seems like a fun new game with a style resembling Puerto Rico. I haven't played it enough to give a firm opinion though.
Vinci is a classic in the civilization-building genre. It captures a lot of the feel of Advanced Civ (recommended in the parent post), without taking nearly as long. A major drawback of Advanced Civ is that it is very easy for a couple of players to fall behind very early and be virtually eliminated from competition; there is little that's more frustrating than being 30 minutes into a 10-14 hour game and knowing that you have almost no hope of catching up. In constrast, Vinci does not do nearly as much to punish players who have fallen behind early on.
The RCA DRC7005N Personal Video Recorder/DVD Player is another DVR that provides a 30 second skip ahead feature on the remote control. It describes that feature as "commercial skip" but it doesn't do any ReplayTV-style automated detection of commercials. On the whole, however, it seems like a fine product that provides the usual DVR features (pause live TV, record from on-screen program guide, etc.) without any subscription fee. I have one and am not affiliated with RCA :-).