Watson is, fundamentally, no different from that rock. Sure, it follows a very complex "path" indeed (though laid down by humans), but the only difference between the rock and Watson is the *kind* of path. In fact, Watson's path is less complex than the path of the rock (which isn't entirely a fair comparison, since the rock's path is practically infinitely complex)
It seems that you are assuming Watson is as deterministic (if not more) as the act of rock throwing. It is not. Watson is a lot more heuristic than algorithmic. We are only scratching the surface of what neural networks can do, and many times we do not understand why they behave the way they do. And we built them.
If all you wanna do is code, then you don't need a computer science degree. There are plenty of companies looking for people to do form plumbing.
Now, if you wanna do real computer science, yes you will need a degree. By real computer science I mean things like improving performance using algorithm complexity analysis (Big O), knowing when to utilize the best data structures, architectural optimizations, AI, writing your own lexers and parsers - the list is endless.
Computer science is different than coding. Whereas coding is a tool, computer science is the study of any kind of computation. You can implement a quicksort algorithm on C++ or while sorting your own clothes in the closet. Both are computer science.
As said in TFA, engineers usually don't want to "move up" in the company, but my experience tells me that a good portion of us day dream about making an app that will make them millionaires. For me, that is a inherent sense of entrepreneurship.
Simply put: why are you going to take in more responsibility to enrich someone else while you can work on your own projects during your spare time and hit the jackpot?
Of course, that mindset might not be realistic: the cruel reality is that most of us will never become millionaires. But if corporations were willing to change the "take this fixed amount of money and I'll try the hardest I can to suck the life out of you" to "you and your team own this project, and your compensation will contain part of that project's profits", then maybe more engineers would be willing to manage.
That's why we need more people using languages like this: http://haxe.org/
I discovered it a couple of months ago. It has its quirks, but not having to worry about rewriting your entire app for another platform is a blessing. And no messy VMs needed.
Almost sounds like something coming from Douglas Adams. From the wikipedia article:
The magnitude of many of the units comprising the SI system of measurement, including most of those used in the measurement of electricity and light, are highly dependent upon the stability of a 135-year-old, golf ball-size cylinder of metal stored in a vault in France.
You know, I like C# and Visual Studio - if I could easily write code that would run across not just all the Windows platforms, but Android and IOS too - and with a UI that looks native on each platform, like QT does - that would be a wonderful thing.
Recently I fell in love with this, which seems to do exactly what you describe: haxe
The consistent UI seems to be the only thing missing; everything else is there.
Agreed. Used a laptop for 3-4 years, then realized I ended up using it always at the same spot, plugged into a 27" monitor. Ditched it for a desktop that is twice the power and half as expensive. Now I just use my laptop when I wanna pretend to be a hipster at starbucks.
Yes, just dump more money into it, and see it vanish into the pockets of those who are in power while they build a clinic that costs as much as three hospitals. And one year later, even that will start to fall apart, because the dictator's/president's/king's yacht has priority over the budget.
Poverty is not an economic/health issue, it is a cultural one. If you don't change how the people and their leaders think, countries will remain poor.
I came from a poor country, and lived there for 23 years. Enough time to see how things truly work.
I spend at least 8 to 10 hours at work staring at a screen every day. Then, I come home to stare at another big screen for a couple of hours. The last thing I want to do is to stare at yet another screen to fall asleep.
E-readers are nice, up to a certain point. Contrast is still too low for my particular taste. I had a kindle for about an year, until I unconsciously would reach for printed books because it was just more pleasurable to read without having to fiddle with font sizes to compensate for the lack of contrast. Flashing page turns also broke my immersion.
But again, I am 26 - maybe I'm just too old to get into the e-book scene.
- No pictures. Again, please, no pictures.
- The current dark green "boxes" work very well to delimiter articles. It's hard to distinguish between articles in the new version
- Put back the fluid layout. We are all geeks. Many of us run in resolutions like 5760x1080 across three monitors, and we assume you guys know CSS enough to make a good fluid layout. The current one is not bad at all in that respect.
- Remove hover on top menu. When moving my mouse from the url bar to the page, it is very easy to trigger a massive menu that covers the entire top of the page
Brazilian here. It has to do with censoring what people post on facebook.
Recently, there have been waves of protests in Brazil, where all the traditional media companies - newspapers, magazines, radio, and TV - barely took notice even though at some instances there were almost one million people screaming outside. The reason they are so biased is because they are being bought by the government, in a monthly basis, where Rede Globo, the Brazilian equivalent of BBC, takes half the money and the rest is distributed to the other smaller media outlets. That's taxpayer money we are talking about - rampant corruption is one of the main points of these protests.
The only way that these protests gained wide support was through facebook events. Since Dilma has no control over facebook, she could not censor it. Hence, the excuse to store all brazilian data in brazilian servers: so that she and her government can put a stop to the riots.
Simple. Each 30 to 40 years, get all the rods, put in a rocket, and send them to the sun. To cover the launch costs, offer politicians seats in the rocket as space tourism - just don't tell them the destination. Win, win.
Brasil is a communal society; we could care less for individual rights. Heck, if the entire country goes out on the streets naked every February, there is no need for individualism.
That being said, it's really hard to enforce a law in Brasil, mostly because it is a matter of national pride to find a way around the rules. They can put as many transponders as they want, but if all the population gets are tickets, then even the dealerships will have an "unofficial" - official - system to remove the tags.
The same thing happened with DVD players way back. Companies tried to force consumers to only get players for region 7. Except that, when you bought a DVD player, the salesman himself would write a code in a piece of paper that you could use to unlock all the regions.
Of course, if the system is used properly, then people won't bother. They could care less if some random guy knows if they are going to churches or brothels.
- loop recursively through all the files in the hard drives
- symlink them to another folder with the same structure
- share that folder
lather, rinse, and repeat every time you add/remove a drive. Not the most efficient or fancy solution in the world, but if you now bash you can write that in 10 lines of code
In another study, scientists put the accelerometer on kid's right hands. There was a dramatically increase in exercise activity, specially between 11:00pm and 2:00am. Researches are still puzzled why this has been only observed on boys.
is a GUI app for which they have neither the source code nor the ability to rewrite it. So this setup might be effective for them -- a server with GUI capability. If their server didn't have GUI capability, they would be constrained by their local bandwidth limitations
This is a cultural issue. In the *NIX world, this process could be possibly automated because, as a CLI app, pipes could be used. Now, Windows users think that using RDP and doing things manually by dragging and dropping icons every monday after lunch is better than an automated bash script on cron. Windows has a lower barrier to entry because of the dumbed down interface and heavy corporate marketing, but in the long run, I wonder how much time and money this approach actually saves.
So it may or may not "require" a GUI in an absolute sense. But in the real world governed by budgets and limited availability of things we need, yes, a company may "require" a GUI in that sense.
And the PHP community has been doing this for a long time. Except that most their GUIs are mostly free and, of course, web based. I often find it a lot easier and cheaper to just load up a PHP app in a LAMP box than set up a GUI app in windows and access it through RDP.
Thats because for a long time *nix has standardized people to not be able to write on other directories other than their home. On Windows, that was different: before XP (NT), everything was pretty much world writable, and it seems that the user directory name/structure changes every couple of versions. Also, directories names are very ambiguous and too nested; configurations can be store in Local Settings, Application Data, and now some are being put directly into (my) documents folder. If microsoft sticks to the KISS principle, then they might have more success in this area.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe God is an atheist.
Watson is, fundamentally, no different from that rock. Sure, it follows a very complex "path" indeed (though laid down by humans), but the only difference between the rock and Watson is the *kind* of path. In fact, Watson's path is less complex than the path of the rock (which isn't entirely a fair comparison, since the rock's path is practically infinitely complex)
It seems that you are assuming Watson is as deterministic (if not more) as the act of rock throwing. It is not. Watson is a lot more heuristic than algorithmic. We are only scratching the surface of what neural networks can do, and many times we do not understand why they behave the way they do. And we built them.
The Fappenning. Now in 3D.
If all you wanna do is code, then you don't need a computer science degree. There are plenty of companies looking for people to do form plumbing.
Now, if you wanna do real computer science, yes you will need a degree. By real computer science I mean things like improving performance using algorithm complexity analysis (Big O), knowing when to utilize the best data structures, architectural optimizations, AI, writing your own lexers and parsers - the list is endless.
Computer science is different than coding. Whereas coding is a tool, computer science is the study of any kind of computation. You can implement a quicksort algorithm on C++ or while sorting your own clothes in the closet. Both are computer science.
You just have to stuff enough mass in one place to overflow the mass counter!
The US and McDonalds are actively working on that proof.
As said in TFA, engineers usually don't want to "move up" in the company, but my experience tells me that a good portion of us day dream about making an app that will make them millionaires. For me, that is a inherent sense of entrepreneurship.
Simply put: why are you going to take in more responsibility to enrich someone else while you can work on your own projects during your spare time and hit the jackpot?
Of course, that mindset might not be realistic: the cruel reality is that most of us will never become millionaires. But if corporations were willing to change the "take this fixed amount of money and I'll try the hardest I can to suck the life out of you" to "you and your team own this project, and your compensation will contain part of that project's profits", then maybe more engineers would be willing to manage.
Agreed. The strength of haxe is definitely not it's syntax, but the fact that you can compile to whatever other language you want.
That's why we need more people using languages like this: http://haxe.org/
I discovered it a couple of months ago. It has its quirks, but not having to worry about rewriting your entire app for another platform is a blessing. And no messy VMs needed.
The magnitude of many of the units comprising the SI system of measurement, including most of those used in the measurement of electricity and light, are highly dependent upon the stability of a 135-year-old, golf ball-size cylinder of metal stored in a vault in France.
You know, I like C# and Visual Studio - if I could easily write code that would run across not just all the Windows platforms, but Android and IOS too - and with a UI that looks native on each platform, like QT does - that would be a wonderful thing.
Recently I fell in love with this, which seems to do exactly what you describe: haxe
The consistent UI seems to be the only thing missing; everything else is there.
Agreed. Used a laptop for 3-4 years, then realized I ended up using it always at the same spot, plugged into a 27" monitor. Ditched it for a desktop that is twice the power and half as expensive. Now I just use my laptop when I wanna pretend to be a hipster at starbucks.
Yes, just dump more money into it, and see it vanish into the pockets of those who are in power while they build a clinic that costs as much as three hospitals. And one year later, even that will start to fall apart, because the dictator's/president's/king's yacht has priority over the budget.
Poverty is not an economic/health issue, it is a cultural one. If you don't change how the people and their leaders think, countries will remain poor.
I came from a poor country, and lived there for 23 years. Enough time to see how things truly work.
I spend at least 8 to 10 hours at work staring at a screen every day. Then, I come home to stare at another big screen for a couple of hours. The last thing I want to do is to stare at yet another screen to fall asleep.
E-readers are nice, up to a certain point. Contrast is still too low for my particular taste. I had a kindle for about an year, until I unconsciously would reach for printed books because it was just more pleasurable to read without having to fiddle with font sizes to compensate for the lack of contrast. Flashing page turns also broke my immersion.
But again, I am 26 - maybe I'm just too old to get into the e-book scene.
- No pictures. Again, please, no pictures.
- The current dark green "boxes" work very well to delimiter articles. It's hard to distinguish between articles in the new version
- Put back the fluid layout. We are all geeks. Many of us run in resolutions like 5760x1080 across three monitors, and we assume you guys know CSS enough to make a good fluid layout. The current one is not bad at all in that respect.
- Remove hover on top menu. When moving my mouse from the url bar to the page, it is very easy to trigger a massive menu that covers the entire top of the page
Brazilian here. It has to do with censoring what people post on facebook.
Recently, there have been waves of protests in Brazil, where all the traditional media companies - newspapers, magazines, radio, and TV - barely took notice even though at some instances there were almost one million people screaming outside. The reason they are so biased is because they are being bought by the government, in a monthly basis, where Rede Globo, the Brazilian equivalent of BBC, takes half the money and the rest is distributed to the other smaller media outlets. That's taxpayer money we are talking about - rampant corruption is one of the main points of these protests.
The only way that these protests gained wide support was through facebook events. Since Dilma has no control over facebook, she could not censor it. Hence, the excuse to store all brazilian data in brazilian servers: so that she and her government can put a stop to the riots.
Make the robot be a real douche to the soldiers so that they don't mind it blowing up.
No. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
Just make a machine to fill out DMCA forms. Follow that path and soon enough, we will have machines suing other machines.
Simple. Each 30 to 40 years, get all the rods, put in a rocket, and send them to the sun. To cover the launch costs, offer politicians seats in the rocket as space tourism - just don't tell them the destination. Win, win.
Brasil is a communal society; we could care less for individual rights. Heck, if the entire country goes out on the streets naked every February, there is no need for individualism.
That being said, it's really hard to enforce a law in Brasil, mostly because it is a matter of national pride to find a way around the rules. They can put as many transponders as they want, but if all the population gets are tickets, then even the dealerships will have an "unofficial" - official - system to remove the tags.
The same thing happened with DVD players way back. Companies tried to force consumers to only get players for region 7. Except that, when you bought a DVD player, the salesman himself would write a code in a piece of paper that you could use to unlock all the regions.
Of course, if the system is used properly, then people won't bother. They could care less if some random guy knows if they are going to churches or brothels.
- loop recursively through all the files in the hard drives
- symlink them to another folder with the same structure
- share that folder
lather, rinse, and repeat every time you add/remove a drive. Not the most efficient or fancy solution in the world, but if you now bash you can write that in 10 lines of code
Most. Badass. Article. Title. Ever.
In another study, scientists put the accelerometer on kid's right hands. There was a dramatically increase in exercise activity, specially between 11:00pm and 2:00am. Researches are still puzzled why this has been only observed on boys.
is a GUI app for which they have neither the source code nor the ability to rewrite it. So this setup might be effective for them -- a server with GUI capability. If their server didn't have GUI capability, they would be constrained by their local bandwidth limitations
This is a cultural issue. In the *NIX world, this process could be possibly automated because, as a CLI app, pipes could be used. Now, Windows users think that using RDP and doing things manually by dragging and dropping icons every monday after lunch is better than an automated bash script on cron. Windows has a lower barrier to entry because of the dumbed down interface and heavy corporate marketing, but in the long run, I wonder how much time and money this approach actually saves.
So it may or may not "require" a GUI in an absolute sense. But in the real world governed by budgets and limited availability of things we need, yes, a company may "require" a GUI in that sense.
And the PHP community has been doing this for a long time. Except that most their GUIs are mostly free and, of course, web based. I often find it a lot easier and cheaper to just load up a PHP app in a LAMP box than set up a GUI app in windows and access it through RDP.
Thats because for a long time *nix has standardized people to not be able to write on other directories other than their home. On Windows, that was different: before XP (NT), everything was pretty much world writable, and it seems that the user directory name/structure changes every couple of versions. Also, directories names are very ambiguous and too nested; configurations can be store in Local Settings, Application Data, and now some are being put directly into (my) documents folder. If microsoft sticks to the KISS principle, then they might have more success in this area.