As others have mentioned, age does matter. I'm still fairly young (32), but I understand that. It took me a long time to understand why.
I started programming when I was 10, like many of you. I started working in the field when I was 19 and by the age of 20, I was even consulting.
I'm a pretty good programmer and always have been. But business is something else altogether. I've had managers who are idiots and I've had managers who really knew their stuff. But one thing they all understood better than me was business.
I've recently moved into management. I'm the director of development for a software company. I got there by watching my managers and learning what worked and what didn't. I learned the skills that made them good managers and stood by quietly as people who were older, and probably more mature than I, got promoted above me.
While they were more mature and better at, say managing their time, and managing money, most didn't really understand how to manage people. That's was hard for me to understand when they were working for someone who did it so well. Surely they should have taken his/her as an example of how to manage.
What it comes down to though, is that it takes time and it takes experience and it takes maturity before people start to respect you in the business world.
I was lucky and took advantage of my skills early. I wrote articles in my field, I wrote a book in my field. I worked for some top notch people and I learned a lot. But in the end, it took maturity to get me where I am today.
One person wrote: You'll understnad when you get older. It was moderated as funny, but it's actually pretty true. I look back on my early days as a programmer, and I WAS brash. I DID think I was smarter than my managers. I DID feel under-appreciated.
That's life. Few people in school, or right out of school, really have the maturity to be respected when it comes to business. I don't mean that as an insult, it's simply a fact.
I have one programmer right out of school working under me. She's really smart and she works her butt off. She has my respect for that, but when it comes to management and business decisions, I give more weight to the older people who have more experience. In fact, one guy working under me is a year or so older than me, and I have to admit, a good deal more mature than I am. I value his opinion on almost every aspect of what our company does. In fact, I will usually defer to his judgement rather than my initial decision because he has earned that respect.
This is a brilliant move. I can see it now, 5 minutes before this 100km wide asteroid smashes the Earth to smithereens, one NASA scientist will say to the other, "Hey, did you calculate that trajectory in metric or English units?"
I don't think I want scientists trying to move the planet just yet, let alone, sending 100km wide asteroids any closer than they already are. If they can test it out on, say Titan, first, and get it into it's own orbit, and maneuver it around for a few hundred years without doing any damage, then maybe.
But hey, what do we care? We'll all be dead and gone before anyone even writes the check to research this.
I said out of print. Not unavailable. I'm sure there are tons of copies still around... That would explain why my royalty checks are still in the negative;-)
Once burned, twice shy. It's a safe bet there won't be any other books authored by me.
I reverse engineered quite a few MS file formats (see my out-of-print book Undocumented Windows File Formats) and never had any hassles from MS regarding the reverse engineering.
In fact, MS tried to hire me to provide them with the specs for one of their file formats. Apparently the author of the code never documented the file format. MS had released specs for it, but they were completely wrong.
After being told by several friends that MS was notorious for delaying payment with contractors, I asked for half the money up-front. They refused and I never did the work.
But I digress. I reverse engineered a number of file formats that were "proprietary" Microsoft files. If they're going to go after anyone for it, surely they would have gone after me since I was publishing them left and right in magazines and my book.
I've figured ever since then that MS must have known that the whole thing about reverse engineering in their licenses must be unenforceable.
You can also look at all the work Andrew Schulman and Matt Pietrek did reverse engineering Windows code and the PE file format and neither of them ever got hassled either, as far as I know.
This just happened to some ex-employees from my company that all went to work for another company. They had 7 laptops stolen from their office. Not only did they lose the laptops, but they lost all the source code to an entire application that will have to be rewritten from scratch.
For developers out there, I can't stress the need to use a version control system for your source code enough. Ours gets backed up every day.
For this reason, we also keep all of our documentation (proposals, product documentation, development documents, etc) in a version control system as well. Not really necessary other than it ensures that we'll always have it (we keep a regular rotation of backups off-site).
As for protecting the data, our company didn't have any real policies on passwords before I came. I've helped to change that a lot.
Password protect your stuff. If it's really sensitive, encrypt. It doesn't get much simpler than that. Do it, because it's the right thing to do.
Well, if you're going to be a loser and not vote, fine. If you want to change things, try to change them. Sitting in your house on election day doesn't do anything. All a third party needs (as one person already mentioned) is 5% of the vote to get going.
You say you don't like any of the existing parties? Create your own or change an existing one, or at least try. Don't sit around like a lazy bastard and say "This country doesn't work the way I like."
That's a loser's attitude. If you don't like the way the government works, there's free speech. Try to push your cause. Get a candidate. If you haven't at least tried to fix something, then you're just blowing hot air.
We are, by most standards, the most free nation in the world. People can change the system. They have. If our forefathers took your lazy attitude and said, "I choose not to do anything", we'd all still be British subjects. That'd sure be nice, eh?
And that would probably mean we'd be the largest province in the German empire.
The fact that we broke away from Britian and created what has been the longest running democracy in modern history, is what has made us THE leader of the free world. It took people with guts who said, "I don't like the way this is working." To go our and actually do something about it. Not sit around and whine sour grapes and ignore an election.
I think people who don't vote to make some sort of statement are just complete idiots. It makes no statement at all. It's what a loser does. If you want to make a statement, then you have to actively do it. Do something to change the system if you don't like it. Otherwise be quiet and go uncounted, because that's what you're doing in the election.
I'm not strongly in favor of any one candidate in this election. But more importantly, I'm strongly against two of the candidates. One who's not qualified to be a student government president of a high school and another is an ego maniac. The third choice may not be a Thomas Jefferson, but I think he's a smart guy with a good heart and a lot of experience. He won't make all the problems go away, but of my choices, he is the safest bet that our country won't go to shit, and that's enough reason for me to go out and vote for him.
Now, I could sit around and bitch that the process didn't produce my perfect hero, but I didn't go out and try to find my perfect hero and try to change the system. I accept the system for what it is, because as far as I'm concerned, it's the best in the world.
If you're really so sick of the system, leave the country. Find one more to your liking. I did leave the country for a few years, and it's definately changed my opinion of politics.
People bitch and moan about how shitty politics are here. Try living in a third world country for a little while and get a little fucking perspective. You have no idea what you've got.]
Personally, I think anyone who "chooses" not to vote should be given exit papers and sent on their merry way to Iraq or some other place where your choice not to vote is actually encouraged.
Okay, stupid question. Clearly they're very good lawyers. They realize they have no legal leg to stand on, so don't even bother to site any specific laws broken or what specific pieces of information violated those laws.
For this very reason they're intentionally vague and unresponsive to his query because they know that they have no legal answer.
I love their list of partners and counsels. Man, all those people and that two page threat is the best they could do? Surely they could have dug up some vague little piece of law to scare these people off a bit better.
Of course, with CueCat's business in a nose-dive, they probably can't afford for much more than one of the firm's secretaries to come up with their threat.
True, it may not happen tomorrow, but if it does, we're all dead. That kinda makes it a bit more important than say, an earthquake, which poses NO danger of wiping out ALL of humanity.
Sure, the chances are quite slim it would happen in my lifetime, but still, I'd like to feel somewhat protected on the off-chance that some 50km wide rock decides to come slamming into my backyard.
It occurs to me that if I owned Yahoo, Google, Infoseek, Alta Vista, or any other search engine, I'd be quaking in my pants right about now. Time to do a little content check. 1 page down only 99 billion to go.
I'm curious... Would one way around this be to link to a site which then links to the illegal material? Technically (and the law is oh so technical), that wouldn't be linking to the site with the illegal material.
Simply put a link to a site in a foreign country (outside of Kaplan's bonehead jurisdiction) and have that site re-direct you to the "offending" material. People outside the U.S., take note, there may be a good business in this.
When are idiots like this going to realize that trying to impose local (or national) restrictions on internet content is just totally absurd? What are we going to do? Go bomb countries with "offensive" web content? Geez...
I've only had one relationship with a geek girl. It was one of my shorter relationships. It didn't have to do with the fact that she was a geek. She was just a woman and seemed to think I always had some hidden meaning in everything I said (ex. me:"What a nice day." her:"What do you mean by that?") Gets old after a while.
Most of my relationships have been long term. I've had maybe 15 or so. Certainly doesn't put me in the stud category. I grew up with two cousins (guys) who are in the stud category. They always got all the women they wanted and I was generally jealous. We were like brothers growing up, but I was always the odd one out.
Things change as you get older, though. I'm no longer the odd one out. One of my cousins is a lawyer and successful (as I was when I was back in the states, I'm semi-retired now, at a young age), the other is a bartender and has no idea what he wants. So, he sorta became the odd one out.
Up until a few months ago we were all in long term relationships. Mine ended, one of my cousins' is about to end his, but the other may get married.
I haven't dated in about 3 months, except for a 1 night fling (my first) that was to bizarre to get into. I live in a town now where I am the only real geek. Part of the reason I moved here is because it's a tropical paradise. There are topless women on the beaches and beautiful women from all over the world here all the time.
A big part of my problem is me, though. I, I think maybe like a lot of geeks, tend to look for long term relationships. Those are harder to come by than one night stands. I have to be really careful not to let on that that's what I'm thinking when I first start dating a girl, but the truth is, if I don't see long-term potential, I won't invest any time in it. If I'm not attracted to a girl's brain, I'm not attracted to her enough to date her. Sure, if she's on the beach topless, I'll look, but if we went out on a date, I'd drop her off at her front door and say goodnight.
I have, in this town, the best friends I've had in my life. None of them are really geeks (although one of them does have a pretty good knowledge of quantum mechanics and we talk about that a lot, though he used to be a lawyer).
Most of them are very cool and get all the chicks they want (especially the ex-lawyer, he is a stud). I kinda wish some of that would rub off on me. I've been wanting that most of my life from my cousins, but it just doesn't happen.
When they were 12-15 developping their social skills, I was sitting in front of a computer writing assembler code. There's no question where the difference stems from...
All in all, I have no regrets. I have a skill that I like. I've had some wonderful, very meaningful relationships. Some of my ex girlfriends are my greatest friends. That said, it would be kinda nice to get the pick of the crop;-)
It seems to me that you're being a little forgetful of the past. Here's what I remember: Right after Barnes and Nobles finally got around to getting online, the first thing they did was go out, and I'm talking about, within DAYS, and sue Amazon for advertising themselves as the largest online bookstore.
My opinion is, good for Amazon. They were small and Barnes and Nobles came and tried to kick around the little guy. I'm not a big believer in software patents, but I'm a believer in justifiable revenge.
Good for Amazon. I hope they kick Barnes and Noble's butt on this. I've refused to shop at B&N since they sued Amazon. Amazon was ground breaking and I have a tremendous amount of respect for that. They'll have to do a lot worse to get me on their bad side.
There are a lot of times animal testing has no place, I'll agree with that. But when it comes to something that could provide sight for the blind, or other corrective surgeries that can improve people's lives in huge ways like this has the potential, I'm sorry, but I'd rather they test with cats than people. I like animals, but I also eat meat...
I just got in a big argument with a close friend about all this. I suppose I've always been: Technology and Science for the sake of technology and science. He, of course, sees the day the governement is using the future of this technology to read our minds.... I see the following: 1: Record your dreams and be able to play them back. For someone who has trouble remembering his/her dreams, this is a beautiful thing 2: And this is in no particular order, sight for those blinded by eye problems (be them from birth or accident). Let's face it, if you can read the synapses, you can write to them, to use a computer ROM/RAM point of view, but for synapses, it's so much more so. It's just electrical impulses, and if you can read them, you don't even have to understand them completely to reproduce them. (Example: Mice wired with a button that provided sexual stimulation. The exact mechanics weren't understood, but the basics was all that was needed.) 3: If you can record sight, you can record sound and smell, touch, etc. Okay, it's not "there and now", but it sure can't be too far off. This is VR like we dreamed of years ago.. 4: These guys aren't reading the images from the visual receptors, they're about half-way into the chain of visual reception. That's a big difference from tapping right into the nerves of the visual cortex. These guys are half-way (probably in an exponential way of speaking, but light years ahead of where I thought all this technology was) into the visual interpretation. That's a hop skip and a jump from reading AND recording dreams... 5: Okay, what did my friend and I argue about? I used to work as a programmer for some guys that made equipment for spooks. They had a PCMCIA card with a little "antenna" wire that could pick up ethernet traffic from about 3 feet away from the actual cable. It just picked up the "induced" current which cause magnetism or something like that (electronics ain't my thing). Okay, so my friend is say, if they can do that with ethernet, don't you think the government can do that with brains? My answer, yeah, sure, and what are we looking at? Maybe a future of no lies. Maybe a future where we're all wearing goofy "brain jamming" helmets. All in all, science and technology for science and technology. I can find a million things bad about any scientific advance, but I can find two million things good about it. When it comes to the day of $10,000 to get a brain implant to record my dreams, I'll be the first guy in line. Sorry, you guys are gonna have to wait...
Actually, with current technology (IBM's ViaVoice, for example), you can actually achieve rates of higher than 95% accuracy. While still a bit of a problem, it's much better than just two or three years ago. Also, that's speaking at around 60 words per minute, which is faster than I believe I normally speak. I've done quite a bit of work with ViaVoice and have been very impressed with it's abilities. From reading the article, I didn't get the impression that it only works well in a noisy environment, though they didn't get strong numbers either, so it remains to be seen what it can really do. Being able to pick out a voice in a crowd is a huge problem in speech recognition right now. The slightest noise, much of produced by cheap microphones, or simply background noise (maybe music in the background) severely hampers the current technology from being truly useful day to day. Microsoft (I know, everyone hates them here, but credit where it's due and all) has been doing a lot of work in voice recognition on their research website. http://research.microsoft.com/srg/ Personally, I believe it's a real up-and-coming technology whose time has come. I've written quite a few voice recognition-enabled apps and it can be a tremendous time saver, IMHO.
You are absolutely correct. Almost every case of CT that I've heard of has been from people who learned how to type "correctly." I was fortunate enough to have taught myself. There's a world of difference between my typing style and that of my friends who took typing. One thing is that my hands are always moving when I type. Sometimes a hand will jump to the other side of the keyboard. Might not be the most efficient, but I can still do about 60 words per minute and don't have carpal after 20 years of programming. Second thing, I don't know what this was and never went to a doctor for it, but about 5 years ago I started developping a really sharp pain in the back of my right shoulder. I started to notice that this was VERY mouse related, as I am a righty and it killed me to use a mouse for more than an hour. I finally switched to one of the logitech thumb trackballs and man, what a difference. The pain is only comes back if I'm forced to use a mouse on another computer for extended periods. Just my 2 cents. Pedrito
I assume all of the products you tested were facial recognition based on photography. Have you tried any based on ultrasonic imaging? I'd quote from the book directly, but I didn't bring many of my books when I moved down here to Mexico from the States. I had a book on Neural Networks, and the authors of one of the articles in the book had used a neural network and an ultrasonic imaging system to do facial recognitions. Based on a small training set, it was quite amazing what this program could do. It had something like a 95% success rate of recognizing the sex of "unknown" faces and about a 90% success rate of recognizing expressions on unknown faces. For known faces it had, as I recall, a 99% recognition accuracy. Part of the nice thing was that it didn't matter if the face was right side up, upside down, or sideways (thought it did have to be, more or less, head on.) Essentially, the neural network was fed the waveform of the echo from a single ultrasonic transducer (which has no information about up or down). It was then told the name, sex, and facial expression of the person being "photographed" (for lack of a better term). I don't recall what the training set size was, but it was quite small. This was also quite a few years ago. My guess is this would be much better these days with faster computers and using larger N-Nets....
Slashdot Mirror
As others have mentioned, age does matter. I'm still fairly young (32), but I understand that. It took me a long time to understand why.
I started programming when I was 10, like many of you. I started working in the field when I was 19 and by the age of 20, I was even consulting.
I'm a pretty good programmer and always have been. But business is something else altogether. I've had managers who are idiots and I've had managers who really knew their stuff. But one thing they all understood better than me was business.
I've recently moved into management. I'm the director of development for a software company. I got there by watching my managers and learning what worked and what didn't. I learned the skills that made them good managers and stood by quietly as people who were older, and probably more mature than I, got promoted above me.
While they were more mature and better at, say managing their time, and managing money, most didn't really understand how to manage people. That's was hard for me to understand when they were working for someone who did it so well. Surely they should have taken his/her as an example of how to manage.
What it comes down to though, is that it takes time and it takes experience and it takes maturity before people start to respect you in the business world.
I was lucky and took advantage of my skills early. I wrote articles in my field, I wrote a book in my field. I worked for some top notch people and I learned a lot. But in the end, it took maturity to get me where I am today.
One person wrote: You'll understnad when you get older. It was moderated as funny, but it's actually pretty true. I look back on my early days as a programmer, and I WAS brash. I DID think I was smarter than my managers. I DID feel under-appreciated.
That's life. Few people in school, or right out of school, really have the maturity to be respected when it comes to business. I don't mean that as an insult, it's simply a fact.
I have one programmer right out of school working under me. She's really smart and she works her butt off. She has my respect for that, but when it comes to management and business decisions, I give more weight to the older people who have more experience. In fact, one guy working under me is a year or so older than me, and I have to admit, a good deal more mature than I am. I value his opinion on almost every aspect of what our company does. In fact, I will usually defer to his judgement rather than my initial decision because he has earned that respect.
But that's just my opinion.
Pete Davis
This is a brilliant move. I can see it now, 5 minutes before this 100km wide asteroid smashes the Earth to smithereens, one NASA scientist will say to the other, "Hey, did you calculate that trajectory in metric or English units?"
I don't think I want scientists trying to move the planet just yet, let alone, sending 100km wide asteroids any closer than they already are. If they can test it out on, say Titan, first, and get it into it's own orbit, and maneuver it around for a few hundred years without doing any damage, then maybe.
But hey, what do we care? We'll all be dead and gone before anyone even writes the check to research this.
Pete Davis
Hasn't everyone cracked RSA? I did a long time ago. Read about it in my out-of-print book Undocumented Cryptographic Algorithm Cracks.
Pete Davis
I said out of print. Not unavailable. I'm sure there are tons of copies still around... That would explain why my royalty checks are still in the negative ;-)
Once burned, twice shy. It's a safe bet there won't be any other books authored by me.
Pete Davis
I reverse engineered quite a few MS file formats (see my out-of-print book Undocumented Windows File Formats) and never had any hassles from MS regarding the reverse engineering.
In fact, MS tried to hire me to provide them with the specs for one of their file formats. Apparently the author of the code never documented the file format. MS had released specs for it, but they were completely wrong.
After being told by several friends that MS was notorious for delaying payment with contractors, I asked for half the money up-front. They refused and I never did the work.
But I digress. I reverse engineered a number of file formats that were "proprietary" Microsoft files. If they're going to go after anyone for it, surely they would have gone after me since I was publishing them left and right in magazines and my book.
I've figured ever since then that MS must have known that the whole thing about reverse engineering in their licenses must be unenforceable.
You can also look at all the work Andrew Schulman and Matt Pietrek did reverse engineering Windows code and the PE file format and neither of them ever got hassled either, as far as I know.
Pete Davis
This just happened to some ex-employees from my company that all went to work for another company. They had 7 laptops stolen from their office. Not only did they lose the laptops, but they lost all the source code to an entire application that will have to be rewritten from scratch.
For developers out there, I can't stress the need to use a version control system for your source code enough. Ours gets backed up every day.
For this reason, we also keep all of our documentation (proposals, product documentation, development documents, etc) in a version control system as well. Not really necessary other than it ensures that we'll always have it (we keep a regular rotation of backups off-site).
As for protecting the data, our company didn't have any real policies on passwords before I came. I've helped to change that a lot.
Password protect your stuff. If it's really sensitive, encrypt. It doesn't get much simpler than that. Do it, because it's the right thing to do.
Well, if you're going to be a loser and not vote, fine. If you want to change things, try to change them. Sitting in your house on election day doesn't do anything. All a third party needs (as one person already mentioned) is 5% of the vote to get going.
You say you don't like any of the existing parties? Create your own or change an existing one, or at least try. Don't sit around like a lazy bastard and say "This country doesn't work the way I like."
That's a loser's attitude. If you don't like the way the government works, there's free speech. Try to push your cause. Get a candidate. If you haven't at least tried to fix something, then you're just blowing hot air.
We are, by most standards, the most free nation in the world. People can change the system. They have. If our forefathers took your lazy attitude and said, "I choose not to do anything", we'd all still be British subjects. That'd sure be nice, eh?
And that would probably mean we'd be the largest province in the German empire.
The fact that we broke away from Britian and created what has been the longest running democracy in modern history, is what has made us THE leader of the free world. It took people with guts who said, "I don't like the way this is working." To go our and actually do something about it. Not sit around and whine sour grapes and ignore an election.
I think people who don't vote to make some sort of statement are just complete idiots. It makes no statement at all. It's what a loser does. If you want to make a statement, then you have to actively do it. Do something to change the system if you don't like it. Otherwise be quiet and go uncounted, because that's what you're doing in the election.
I'm not strongly in favor of any one candidate in this election. But more importantly, I'm strongly against two of the candidates. One who's not qualified to be a student government president of a high school and another is an ego maniac. The third choice may not be a Thomas Jefferson, but I think he's a smart guy with a good heart and a lot of experience. He won't make all the problems go away, but of my choices, he is the safest bet that our country won't go to shit, and that's enough reason for me to go out and vote for him.
Now, I could sit around and bitch that the process didn't produce my perfect hero, but I didn't go out and try to find my perfect hero and try to change the system. I accept the system for what it is, because as far as I'm concerned, it's the best in the world.
If you're really so sick of the system, leave the country. Find one more to your liking. I did leave the country for a few years, and it's definately changed my opinion of politics.
People bitch and moan about how shitty politics are here. Try living in a third world country for a little while and get a little fucking perspective. You have no idea what you've got.]
Personally, I think anyone who "chooses" not to vote should be given exit papers and sent on their merry way to Iraq or some other place where your choice not to vote is actually encouraged.
Okay, stupid question. Clearly they're very good lawyers. They realize they have no legal leg to stand on, so don't even bother to site any specific laws broken or what specific pieces of information violated those laws.
For this very reason they're intentionally vague and unresponsive to his query because they know that they have no legal answer.
I love their list of partners and counsels. Man, all those people and that two page threat is the best they could do? Surely they could have dug up some vague little piece of law to scare these people off a bit better.
Of course, with CueCat's business in a nose-dive, they probably can't afford for much more than one of the firm's secretaries to come up with their threat.
True, it may not happen tomorrow, but if it does, we're all dead. That kinda makes it a bit more important than say, an earthquake, which poses NO danger of wiping out ALL of humanity.
Sure, the chances are quite slim it would happen in my lifetime, but still, I'd like to feel somewhat protected on the off-chance that some 50km wide rock decides to come slamming into my backyard.
It occurs to me that if I owned Yahoo, Google, Infoseek, Alta Vista, or any other search engine, I'd be quaking in my pants right about now. Time to do a little content check. 1 page down only 99 billion to go.
I'm curious... Would one way around this be to link to a site which then links to the illegal material? Technically (and the law is oh so technical), that wouldn't be linking to the site with the illegal material.
Simply put a link to a site in a foreign country (outside of Kaplan's bonehead jurisdiction) and have that site re-direct you to the "offending" material. People outside the U.S., take note, there may be a good business in this.
When are idiots like this going to realize that trying to impose local (or national) restrictions on internet content is just totally absurd? What are we going to do? Go bomb countries with "offensive" web content? Geez...
Most of my relationships have been long term. I've had maybe 15 or so. Certainly doesn't put me in the stud category. I grew up with two cousins (guys) who are in the stud category. They always got all the women they wanted and I was generally jealous. We were like brothers growing up, but I was always the odd one out.
Things change as you get older, though. I'm no longer the odd one out. One of my cousins is a lawyer and successful (as I was when I was back in the states, I'm semi-retired now, at a young age), the other is a bartender and has no idea what he wants. So, he sorta became the odd one out.
Up until a few months ago we were all in long term relationships. Mine ended, one of my cousins' is about to end his, but the other may get married.
I haven't dated in about 3 months, except for a 1 night fling (my first) that was to bizarre to get into. I live in a town now where I am the only real geek. Part of the reason I moved here is because it's a tropical paradise. There are topless women on the beaches and beautiful women from all over the world here all the time.
A big part of my problem is me, though. I, I think maybe like a lot of geeks, tend to look for long term relationships. Those are harder to come by than one night stands. I have to be really careful not to let on that that's what I'm thinking when I first start dating a girl, but the truth is, if I don't see long-term potential, I won't invest any time in it. If I'm not attracted to a girl's brain, I'm not attracted to her enough to date her. Sure, if she's on the beach topless, I'll look, but if we went out on a date, I'd drop her off at her front door and say goodnight.
I have, in this town, the best friends I've had in my life. None of them are really geeks (although one of them does have a pretty good knowledge of quantum mechanics and we talk about that a lot, though he used to be a lawyer).
Most of them are very cool and get all the chicks they want (especially the ex-lawyer, he is a stud). I kinda wish some of that would rub off on me. I've been wanting that most of my life from my cousins, but it just doesn't happen.
When they were 12-15 developping their social skills, I was sitting in front of a computer writing assembler code. There's no question where the difference stems from...
All in all, I have no regrets. I have a skill that I like. I've had some wonderful, very meaningful relationships. Some of my ex girlfriends are my greatest friends. That said, it would be kinda nice to get the pick of the crop ;-)
My opinion is, good for Amazon. They were small and Barnes and Nobles came and tried to kick around the little guy. I'm not a big believer in software patents, but I'm a believer in justifiable revenge.
Good for Amazon. I hope they kick Barnes and Noble's butt on this. I've refused to shop at B&N since they sued Amazon. Amazon was ground breaking and I have a tremendous amount of respect for that. They'll have to do a lot worse to get me on their bad side.
There are a lot of times animal testing has no place, I'll agree with that. But when it comes to something that could provide sight for the blind, or other corrective surgeries that can improve people's lives in huge ways like this has the potential, I'm sorry, but I'd rather they test with cats than people. I like animals, but I also eat meat...
I just got in a big argument with a close friend about all this. I suppose I've always been: Technology and Science for the sake of technology and science. He, of course, sees the day the governement is using the future of this technology to read our minds.... I see the following: 1: Record your dreams and be able to play them back. For someone who has trouble remembering his/her dreams, this is a beautiful thing 2: And this is in no particular order, sight for those blinded by eye problems (be them from birth or accident). Let's face it, if you can read the synapses, you can write to them, to use a computer ROM/RAM point of view, but for synapses, it's so much more so. It's just electrical impulses, and if you can read them, you don't even have to understand them completely to reproduce them. (Example: Mice wired with a button that provided sexual stimulation. The exact mechanics weren't understood, but the basics was all that was needed.) 3: If you can record sight, you can record sound and smell, touch, etc. Okay, it's not "there and now", but it sure can't be too far off. This is VR like we dreamed of years ago.. 4: These guys aren't reading the images from the visual receptors, they're about half-way into the chain of visual reception. That's a big difference from tapping right into the nerves of the visual cortex. These guys are half-way (probably in an exponential way of speaking, but light years ahead of where I thought all this technology was) into the visual interpretation. That's a hop skip and a jump from reading AND recording dreams... 5: Okay, what did my friend and I argue about? I used to work as a programmer for some guys that made equipment for spooks. They had a PCMCIA card with a little "antenna" wire that could pick up ethernet traffic from about 3 feet away from the actual cable. It just picked up the "induced" current which cause magnetism or something like that (electronics ain't my thing). Okay, so my friend is say, if they can do that with ethernet, don't you think the government can do that with brains? My answer, yeah, sure, and what are we looking at? Maybe a future of no lies. Maybe a future where we're all wearing goofy "brain jamming" helmets. All in all, science and technology for science and technology. I can find a million things bad about any scientific advance, but I can find two million things good about it. When it comes to the day of $10,000 to get a brain implant to record my dreams, I'll be the first guy in line. Sorry, you guys are gonna have to wait...
Actually, with current technology (IBM's ViaVoice, for example), you can actually achieve rates of higher than 95% accuracy. While still a bit of a problem, it's much better than just two or three years ago. Also, that's speaking at around 60 words per minute, which is faster than I believe I normally speak. I've done quite a bit of work with ViaVoice and have been very impressed with it's abilities. From reading the article, I didn't get the impression that it only works well in a noisy environment, though they didn't get strong numbers either, so it remains to be seen what it can really do. Being able to pick out a voice in a crowd is a huge problem in speech recognition right now. The slightest noise, much of produced by cheap microphones, or simply background noise (maybe music in the background) severely hampers the current technology from being truly useful day to day. Microsoft (I know, everyone hates them here, but credit where it's due and all) has been doing a lot of work in voice recognition on their research website. http://research.microsoft.com/srg/ Personally, I believe it's a real up-and-coming technology whose time has come. I've written quite a few voice recognition-enabled apps and it can be a tremendous time saver, IMHO.
You are absolutely correct. Almost every case of CT that I've heard of has been from people who learned how to type "correctly." I was fortunate enough to have taught myself. There's a world of difference between my typing style and that of my friends who took typing. One thing is that my hands are always moving when I type. Sometimes a hand will jump to the other side of the keyboard. Might not be the most efficient, but I can still do about 60 words per minute and don't have carpal after 20 years of programming. Second thing, I don't know what this was and never went to a doctor for it, but about 5 years ago I started developping a really sharp pain in the back of my right shoulder. I started to notice that this was VERY mouse related, as I am a righty and it killed me to use a mouse for more than an hour. I finally switched to one of the logitech thumb trackballs and man, what a difference. The pain is only comes back if I'm forced to use a mouse on another computer for extended periods. Just my 2 cents. Pedrito
I assume all of the products you tested were facial recognition based on photography. Have you tried any based on ultrasonic imaging? I'd quote from the book directly, but I didn't bring many of my books when I moved down here to Mexico from the States. I had a book on Neural Networks, and the authors of one of the articles in the book had used a neural network and an ultrasonic imaging system to do facial recognitions. Based on a small training set, it was quite amazing what this program could do. It had something like a 95% success rate of recognizing the sex of "unknown" faces and about a 90% success rate of recognizing expressions on unknown faces. For known faces it had, as I recall, a 99% recognition accuracy. Part of the nice thing was that it didn't matter if the face was right side up, upside down, or sideways (thought it did have to be, more or less, head on.) Essentially, the neural network was fed the waveform of the echo from a single ultrasonic transducer (which has no information about up or down). It was then told the name, sex, and facial expression of the person being "photographed" (for lack of a better term). I don't recall what the training set size was, but it was quite small. This was also quite a few years ago. My guess is this would be much better these days with faster computers and using larger N-Nets....