I think they key point here is "proprietary". So you buy a Drobo to back up your Drobo. One bad firmware update and you have two bricks. And frankly - I'm looking for hassle free. If I wanted to stage Firmware revisions and test and then rollout I'd be a sysadmin. Or cut my wrists. Whichever came first. They have great marketing "Yep, Callie is very cute" - but the execution isn't even close.
A "quarter" is a term we in the real world use to describe a period of three months. There are four of them in the year. On average 1 of the 4 drives fails per quarterly period. Yes, it is rather high.
A contrary opinion. I have had a Drobo since the original release and it has been nothing but a disappointment. Drive incompatibilities, an extraordinarily high drive failure rate (at least 1/quarter)and a very confused partitioning scheme. Not something I'll repeat in the future. Oh, and data loss that had to be corrected via a firmware update. In short if I'm spending the money for Raid - I don't want to lose data. Period.
There's really two different capabilities being discussed here. One (the Northwestern example) is the actual generation of prose from an underlying data asset. There are certain well structured domains of information (baseball games, earnings announcements, etc) where this will most likely work quite well.
The second capability is automating the analysis of new content. NewsScope falls into that category. It takes raw news (written by humans) and extracts key terms, entities and events to make that content more easily consumable by machines. If you're interested you can use the same Thomson Reuters tools that are under NewsScope on your own content. My site uses them to analyze news from feeds, throw most of it away and put the rest in the right places. Thomson makes this capability available to anybody for free at a project called OpenCalais (see http://viewer.opencalais.com/ to play with it). Another group has built it into a complete publishing platform called OpenPublish.
Great point. I was over-focusing on the economic / hassle factor. You're correct that a potentially even greater impact is the fragmentation of our society based on profiles and stereotypes. I travel to Israel regularly where profiling (say - at a club or the airport) is a 100% accepted practice. Why - it works. The downside - a 2 tier society.
It's important to remember that the goal here is not to bring down planes or buildings - it's to create turmoil and terror. Simple actions like this cause millions to billions of dollars of cost to our economy for the investment of a can of lighter fluid and a firecracker. Because of one case of semi-successful action by one clown millions of us will now be subject to ineffective additional screening, more TSA invasions of privacy and general police state tactics, more delays.
I don't have the answer - but I know the ROI from a terrorist perspective is outstanding.
If you're in the world of investigative journalism I'd encourage you to take a look at a new class of semantic data generation tools.
New capabilities like Calais (www.opencalais.com) from Thomson Reuters allow you to ingest unstructured text (news articles, press releases, FOIA documents, whatever) and automatically extract semantic metadata like people, companies, management changes, natural disasters and hundreds of others.
You can take the output of these tools and load them directly into databases to query. You could take news stories and build a social network of family relationships then play news events against the network.
We're already seeing some initial uses in the area of investigative journalism and would love to see more. Jump in and give it a try.
Ummh, I think that's the point. The concept - first advocated by Tim Berners Lee - has been around for a long time. The technology to make it real has not. This is a big step in that direction. It's not the whole answer - but services like this will help overcome one of the key constraining factors: ubiquitous metadata tagging of content.
You're a little unclear on the concept of an RDF graph. It's not a graph like your intro algebra class - it's a RDF (thats Resource Description Framework) representation of the semantics of a document. Check Wikipedia for Semantic Web or RDF.
All might be interested in taking a look at http://sws.clearforest.com/. These guys offer the high-end natural language processing that Twine claims as a simple API available to all.
It's not the "real" semantic web - but it's an open-access starting point.
The also have a firefox plugin at http://gnosis.clearforest.com/ that does semantic analysis real time as you browse. I use this constantly while reading business news or browsing Wikipedia.
What they clearly don't have is Twine's marketing budget.
What is it with technology advances and people? Is there an old-fart gene operating here? Every damn time someone talks about a new technology someone has to pipe up with the "I build systems out of sand an raw electrons" argument as if that somehow is attached to great achievement and moral superiority.
Use the tools you pretentious Luddites.
I actually worked with a number of counties in California in the mid to late 80's. At the time I worked for a large systems integration vendor that was implementing a statewide system that impacted each of the counties.
It was not a pretty sight. While the vast majority of county employees were *trying* hard to do a good job - their working with the large hardware vendors was like shooting fish in a barrel, clubbing baby seals... pick your metaphor. These hardware vendors were slick, quick talking and promised the world. This was almost 20 years ago and technology decisions were much more decentralized and the buyers were *much* less sophisticated.
I saw loading docks full of "client server systems". When we asked what they were going to be used for the answer was "client server systems" - they were purchased with literally no idea of what was going to run on them or who was going to run it. When talking to the IBM guys their general attitude was "Can you believe it? Isn't life great!".
I agree that stupid decisions were made here. I am also certain that this is at least partly the responsibility of the vendor for taking advantage of a naive buyer or buyers.
Aaaargh. OK. Wake up. Smell the roses. Apple isn't trying to deploy a browser, OS, mail client or anything else for the 0.5% of the population that use every bell, whistle and widget inside tools. They're trying to deploy a set of products that do what they are intended to do - very very well - with enough functionality for 99.5% of the user base.
Simple effective solutions. Don't underestimate it. BaseCamp, 30 Boxes, etc are pitiable in the functionality department. They just do 1-2 things very well and very simply.
Take a look at Gnosis (http://gnosis.clearforest.com/ or @ Mozilla add-ons site).
Gnosis makes you smarter by adding people, company, organization and geography based navigation to any web page. Reading the news and want to find out about a person or company - just hover and click!
It's quite cool and a very different kind of tool to those mentioned here. They focus on making your browser better - Gnosis tries to make browsing better
Slightly OT - but if you're interested in a new and interesting way to navigate Wikipedia (or any of the new-age online reference sources mentioned) check out the Firefox extension Gnosis. It processes the pages you read and automatically highlights and hyperlinks all the people, places, products, companies, organizations and all that stuff. Those hyperlinks lead to Technorati, Google and other sources.
This is one of the reasons my company's approach is to go into the actual content of the text and extract metadata ourselves. Available as a Firefox extension at http://sws.clearforest.com/Blog/?page_id=32 and as a full web service at http://sws.clearforest.com./
Give it a try - it's not the full semantic web - but it's a step in the right direction. Rather than relying on the site's owners to tag correctly - you can at least rely on the site's content.
Combine these three things:
1) "I work for a global IT consulting company."
2) "I have the task of investigating"
with the unstated
3) "I am on the bench and un-billable"
Bye!
I hate the idea of filters, key stroke loggers, etc. What are you going to do with the results? Telling the kid you caught them doing "x" also reveals the fact that you are monitoring them.
My geeky answer has worked for me. I run a squid proxy server in the house. I showed my son how cool it was that I could generate reports on all websites visited, etc. He got the message.
Twice in four years I've had to sit him down and say "x" is not OK and no - normal people don't do "a", "b" or "c" - especially with barnyard animals.
OK, let's say 450,000 servers at 500 watts each (just a guess) + 100 watts of cooling requirements per server (I have no idea). That gives us 250 Megawatts which is the output of a fair sized nuclear power plant. To run queries. That's just really really wierd.
What about the other 5,000,000 or so?
on
Back to the Bunker
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
First, my personal observation is that about 98% of Federal employees are dedicated and hardworking. Unfortunately the 2% that are not tend to be a) executives or b) customer-facing.
Second, if we can provide essential services with 4,000 people - why are we paying for millions?
Hmmm, I might buy the Russian part of this comment - but China? Are you nuts? You've clearly had no experience with the state of outsourcing in China. The current lack of skills of the average Chinese IT worker looks like India in 1981. 1,000's of bodies at extraordinarily low wages with essentially no skills.
The biggest scam going right now is onshore U.S. companies fronting for these masses of "programmers" through mergers with Chinese companies. If you think organizations have been disappointed by outsourcing to India - you haven't seen anything yet.
This will be the next big scam - unfortunately the workers and the investors will take the shaft while the dealmakers take the money. Not one of these deals goes down with a few $'s making their way to a Hong Kong "subsidiary" of the company.
I think the poster is just looking for a reason to buy a new toy.
There are plenty of no brainer solutions out there: 1) SSH whatever to a grown up machine (this is what I do), 2) Get a Mac86 Mini, 3) Get another laptop, 4) Carve out some space on your primary laptop.
I've used remote SSH + Xnest + scheduled synchronizations from my laptop to my server for quite a while. If the link dies - I can still keep working locally as well as on planes & trains.
Slashdot Mirror
I think they key point here is "proprietary". So you buy a Drobo to back up your Drobo. One bad firmware update and you have two bricks. And frankly - I'm looking for hassle free. If I wanted to stage Firmware revisions and test and then rollout I'd be a sysadmin. Or cut my wrists. Whichever came first. They have great marketing "Yep, Callie is very cute" - but the execution isn't even close.
A "quarter" is a term we in the real world use to describe a period of three months. There are four of them in the year. On average 1 of the 4 drives fails per quarterly period. Yes, it is rather high.
A contrary opinion. I have had a Drobo since the original release and it has been nothing but a disappointment. Drive incompatibilities, an extraordinarily high drive failure rate (at least 1/quarter)and a very confused partitioning scheme. Not something I'll repeat in the future. Oh, and data loss that had to be corrected via a firmware update. In short if I'm spending the money for Raid - I don't want to lose data. Period.
There's really two different capabilities being discussed here. One (the Northwestern example) is the actual generation of prose from an underlying data asset. There are certain well structured domains of information (baseball games, earnings announcements, etc) where this will most likely work quite well. The second capability is automating the analysis of new content. NewsScope falls into that category. It takes raw news (written by humans) and extracts key terms, entities and events to make that content more easily consumable by machines. If you're interested you can use the same Thomson Reuters tools that are under NewsScope on your own content. My site uses them to analyze news from feeds, throw most of it away and put the rest in the right places. Thomson makes this capability available to anybody for free at a project called OpenCalais (see http://viewer.opencalais.com/ to play with it). Another group has built it into a complete publishing platform called OpenPublish.
Great point. I was over-focusing on the economic / hassle factor. You're correct that a potentially even greater impact is the fragmentation of our society based on profiles and stereotypes. I travel to Israel regularly where profiling (say - at a club or the airport) is a 100% accepted practice. Why - it works. The downside - a 2 tier society.
It's important to remember that the goal here is not to bring down planes or buildings - it's to create turmoil and terror. Simple actions like this cause millions to billions of dollars of cost to our economy for the investment of a can of lighter fluid and a firecracker. Because of one case of semi-successful action by one clown millions of us will now be subject to ineffective additional screening, more TSA invasions of privacy and general police state tactics, more delays. I don't have the answer - but I know the ROI from a terrorist perspective is outstanding.
If you're in the world of investigative journalism I'd encourage you to take a look at a new class of semantic data generation tools. New capabilities like Calais (www.opencalais.com) from Thomson Reuters allow you to ingest unstructured text (news articles, press releases, FOIA documents, whatever) and automatically extract semantic metadata like people, companies, management changes, natural disasters and hundreds of others. You can take the output of these tools and load them directly into databases to query. You could take news stories and build a social network of family relationships then play news events against the network. We're already seeing some initial uses in the area of investigative journalism and would love to see more. Jump in and give it a try.
Ummh, I think that's the point. The concept - first advocated by Tim Berners Lee - has been around for a long time. The technology to make it real has not. This is a big step in that direction. It's not the whole answer - but services like this will help overcome one of the key constraining factors: ubiquitous metadata tagging of content.
Perfect! A concise reasonable explanation. Thanks.
You're a little unclear on the concept of an RDF graph. It's not a graph like your intro algebra class - it's a RDF (thats Resource Description Framework) representation of the semantics of a document. Check Wikipedia for Semantic Web or RDF.
Some very cool apps have already been built on top of it like http://newsatseven.com/, http://www.squadinfo.com/, http://www.optevi.net/newstracker and many others.
It's not the "real" semantic web - but it's an open-access starting point.
The also have a firefox plugin at http://gnosis.clearforest.com/ that does semantic analysis real time as you browse. I use this constantly while reading business news or browsing Wikipedia.
What they clearly don't have is Twine's marketing budget.
What is it with technology advances and people? Is there an old-fart gene operating here? Every damn time someone talks about a new technology someone has to pipe up with the "I build systems out of sand an raw electrons" argument as if that somehow is attached to great achievement and moral superiority. Use the tools you pretentious Luddites.
I actually worked with a number of counties in California in the mid to late 80's. At the time I worked for a large systems integration vendor that was implementing a statewide system that impacted each of the counties.
... pick your metaphor. These hardware vendors were slick, quick talking and promised the world. This was almost 20 years ago and technology decisions were much more decentralized and the buyers were *much* less sophisticated.
It was not a pretty sight. While the vast majority of county employees were *trying* hard to do a good job - their working with the large hardware vendors was like shooting fish in a barrel, clubbing baby seals
I saw loading docks full of "client server systems". When we asked what they were going to be used for the answer was "client server systems" - they were purchased with literally no idea of what was going to run on them or who was going to run it. When talking to the IBM guys their general attitude was "Can you believe it? Isn't life great!".
I agree that stupid decisions were made here. I am also certain that this is at least partly the responsibility of the vendor for taking advantage of a naive buyer or buyers.
Aaaargh. OK. Wake up. Smell the roses. Apple isn't trying to deploy a browser, OS, mail client or anything else for the 0.5% of the population that use every bell, whistle and widget inside tools. They're trying to deploy a set of products that do what they are intended to do - very very well - with enough functionality for 99.5% of the user base. Simple effective solutions. Don't underestimate it. BaseCamp, 30 Boxes, etc are pitiable in the functionality department. They just do 1-2 things very well and very simply.
Take a look at Gnosis (http://gnosis.clearforest.com/ or @ Mozilla add-ons site). Gnosis makes you smarter by adding people, company, organization and geography based navigation to any web page. Reading the news and want to find out about a person or company - just hover and click! It's quite cool and a very different kind of tool to those mentioned here. They focus on making your browser better - Gnosis tries to make browsing better
I've been using it a couple of weeks now and it is seriously cool. Get it at http://gnosis.clearforest.com/
So, exactly how much did TNN pay for this great viral marketing campaign of blinkenlights that absolutely no one noticed for two weeks? Idiots.
This is one of the reasons my company's approach is to go into the actual content of the text and extract metadata ourselves. Available as a Firefox extension at http://sws.clearforest.com/Blog/?page_id=32 and as a full web service at http://sws.clearforest.com./ Give it a try - it's not the full semantic web - but it's a step in the right direction. Rather than relying on the site's owners to tag correctly - you can at least rely on the site's content.
Combine these three things: 1) "I work for a global IT consulting company." 2) "I have the task of investigating" with the unstated 3) "I am on the bench and un-billable" Bye!
I hate the idea of filters, key stroke loggers, etc. What are you going to do with the results? Telling the kid you caught them doing "x" also reveals the fact that you are monitoring them. My geeky answer has worked for me. I run a squid proxy server in the house. I showed my son how cool it was that I could generate reports on all websites visited, etc. He got the message. Twice in four years I've had to sit him down and say "x" is not OK and no - normal people don't do "a", "b" or "c" - especially with barnyard animals.
OK, let's say 450,000 servers at 500 watts each (just a guess) + 100 watts of cooling requirements per server (I have no idea). That gives us 250 Megawatts which is the output of a fair sized nuclear power plant. To run queries. That's just really really wierd.
First, my personal observation is that about 98% of Federal employees are dedicated and hardworking. Unfortunately the 2% that are not tend to be a) executives or b) customer-facing. Second, if we can provide essential services with 4,000 people - why are we paying for millions?
Hmmm, I might buy the Russian part of this comment - but China? Are you nuts? You've clearly had no experience with the state of outsourcing in China. The current lack of skills of the average Chinese IT worker looks like India in 1981. 1,000's of bodies at extraordinarily low wages with essentially no skills.
The biggest scam going right now is onshore U.S. companies fronting for these masses of "programmers" through mergers with Chinese companies. If you think organizations have been disappointed by outsourcing to India - you haven't seen anything yet.
This will be the next big scam - unfortunately the workers and the investors will take the shaft while the dealmakers take the money. Not one of these deals goes down with a few $'s making their way to a Hong Kong "subsidiary" of the company.
Just my opinions of course.
Aaaargh, that is: http://www.gumstix.com/ Get about 20 of em.
I think the poster is just looking for a reason to buy a new toy.
There are plenty of no brainer solutions out there: 1) SSH whatever to a grown up machine (this is what I do), 2) Get a Mac86 Mini, 3) Get another laptop, 4) Carve out some space on your primary laptop.
I've used remote SSH + Xnest + scheduled synchronizations from my laptop to my server for quite a while. If the link dies - I can still keep working locally as well as on planes & trains.
Or, how about http.gumstix.com/