The result, 2 of 17 does not strike me as a very statistically reliable.
With a simple confidence interval calculation we get that with a sample size of 17 from a population of 1000 we get that with 95% confidence the results are 2+-2.6 of 17. Obviously 0 is within the error margin, so it is quite possible the results are just by chance.
I have been trying to locate some information on what the motivation was for releasing such a weak result - in case I had missed something. I have failed to find any mention at all of a confidence interval or any statistical justification. At best the results are naive, at worst dishonest. Please correct me if I am wrong.
The graphics card can be used for computation - something we're not doing currently, but are planning to test. As for several dual-cores, it wouldn't do much good as the computations are sequential and can't easily be parallelized.
And I said that the rig was not intended for gaming - that doesn't mean it actually never will be used for that. As for the clueless person signing the purchase, that would be me (being the co-founder/VP). Unaccountability is a beautiful thing;-)
Well, you get a working computer out of the box and you get a warranty on the thing. When you build one yourself, you are completely on your own - there's no guarantee that the hardware you choose will work well together etc.
As for luxury, I would say that per definition it is something that doesn't give you value for money. That's what makes it luxury. You can look at luxury cars as an example of terrible value for money. Buy a Ferrari and it will most likely break down twice a week. Cost efficiency and even practicality go very much against the idea of luxury which is one of an unnecessary indulgence.
I more or less just finished building my new PC and it is fairly similar to the Alienware as components go:
X6800 CPU
4 GB 800 MHz Corsair Memory
Asus P5b Deluxe Mobo
Asus Nvidia 7900GTX
1x150 GB WD Raptor
4x320 GB Seagate 7200.10 (RAID-0)
SB XFi E.Pro
It is stronger on some points (memory and disk) and weaker on some other mobo, gfx, but overall of comparable performance.
The Alienware costs according to the article £3000 = 4400 EUR . My home-built rig set me back roughly 3800 EUR = £2600. So they are a bit more expensive, but not much - and it's supposed to be a luxury computer - an indulgence for the rich and the delinquent;)
And no, before you ask me, the rig is not intended for gaming, but is a heavy duty computation workstation whose work will to 90% consist of mulitplying very large matrices (while training neural networks). And most importantly, no I didn't pay for it, my company did;)
"Google Trends analyzes a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you enter relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time."
The diversification and especially the decline of technical stuff is a rather obvious consequence of a still exponentially increasing number of Internet users. Average people, to be precise - i.e not computer enthusiasts, engineers and scientists. Hence while in absolute terms a technical keyword is probably also increasing exponentially, in relative terms it is losing ground to the non-technical stuff. Slashdotters and similar creatures are becoming rare as the Internet demographics gets more and more similar to real-world demographics.
Bayesian filters are way to primitive and have only two good features: they're fast and they're easy to implement.
There are far better methods such as neural nets or support vector machines. You can for instance see a comparison of classifiers on a simple visual 2-d problem to see how inferior Bayesian filters are to other more sophisticated algorithms.
Don't treat your employees like children and it will reduce their urge to rebel against you. For example if the company profits (usually because of mismanagement at the top) is turned for the worse, don't reduce the trivial employee benefits (like free soda and sandwiches) to make a rhetoric point on how everybody needs to realize that things are not going well. You are not saving any money and you will just be pissing people off.
Now, if you excuse me, I need to feed the code monkeys some bananas;-)
It does not bode well when a company calls "computer manufacturers may add shortcuts to the start menu" a philosophical principle. It is such a sad statement of no core beliefs or belief in the future. Compare it to Google's naive, but uplifting "Do no evil".
Microsoft badly needs a reboot with people in charge who can give this company a real vision.
How about a complete revolution of computer architecture as we know it? No more slow disk reading; no more start up time for applications. The traditional architecture of the dual use of RAM/HDD will be gone, replaced by a single medium.
This will happen, because it must. Whether it will be MRAM or something else remains to be seen, but it will certainly be something having the same features.
It must because we're reaching the practical limits of how much you can pack on hard disk platters. You can only squeeze in so many bits per cm^2.
Also, read speed and access time is severely limited by the simple fact that it's a mechanical construction with a read/write head having to move over the platters.
As software and media is progressively becoming larger in terms of storage space, the current drives are being increasingly responsible for slowing it down due to excessive loading times.
The current HDD technology is the last remnant of the electro-mechanical approach to computing. Its death warrant was signed by the transistor, but the dinosaur managed to live on as there was no alternative.
The HDD is the most antiquated, out-of date technology found in a modern computer and MRAM is a good candidate for a future replacement. It won't happen in two or three years, but in the 5-10 years range, HDDs will be replaced with some form of fast, non-volatile semiconductor memory.
Unfortunately technology has little to do with it. Basically the domain of computer users has in the recent years been rapidly expanding into the domain of people who don't know the first thing about computer technology. Having a technologically superior product doesn't mean at all as much being able to sell your product to the great masses.
For an illustration, look at
this Google Trends graph
.
This doesn't mean that less people are interested in Linux but that a smaller percentage of internet users (computer users) are. You can compare it for instance to something that the average non-technical computer user might
search for.
The bottom line is that a commercial success lies in appealing to the huge uninformed and uneducated masses ("Now with 25% more PONIES!"). Microsoft has economic resources for marketing that will for sure work better than the technological arguments from semi-fanatical Linux followers. At this point I only think Apple has some form of chance as they have been successful at mainstream branding (mostly thanks to the iPod).
Well, you have to accept rulings from a judge in Brussels because you are members of this little thing called the European Union. And believe it or not, a majority of the British think that the UK membership of the EU is a good thing according to polls.
Now, why UK citizens should be accountable to US law is a different question. The obvious answer is that computer crime is apparently regarded as breaking the local law, even if you are physically in another country. If that's the case then it is a no-brainer. He committed a crime in the US and was extradited.
As for getting locked up in Guantanamo Bay, not likely. You see, one of the basic elements of EU membership is following the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights and signing the European Convention on Human Rights. And these judges sitting in Brussels have ruled that extradition of a person to a foreign state if they are likely to be subjected there to torture, if they risk execution or if there are questions about getting a fair trial and sentencing. So there's no chance he'll be deported to Gitmo as has that been a possibility, he would have not been extradited.
The Americans are perfectly aware of all this and at each extradition they are required to give official assurances that the human rights, as defined by the ECHR, of the person extradited won't be violated. Of course, they could lie, but then they wouldn't get any more extraditions from Europe.
Not to mention that had the data been the target, that computer would have never been returned. It would have been degaussed, torched and thrown into a lake or something similar...unless of course they were really sneaky and made sure that they left no forensic evidence (physical or virtual) and returned it for the FBI to conclude that the data had not been accessed..
In an age where it has become apparent that information retrieval is alpha
and omega, they decide to cut one of the few features that would put them ahead
of the competition in the field?
I really don't get it - are they so out of phase with reality where:
Search is the norm (web search, desktop search etc)
There is a clear trend of moving desktop based apps to web based apps
(hence reducing the importance of which OS you are running)
The scope of Vista has been so severely cut that in in many ways is
inferior to existing competing products - even before it has been released
Microsoft's other golden cow, the office suite is under serious threat
from significantly more free web-based software
Anybody involved in search application development will tell you that the current systems are in their infancy and that they are inadequate due to the lack of a relational structure and most importantly a query language.
WinFS was Microsoft's chance of actually being ahead with a technology. Given both the bad press that Vista has been receiving as well as the fierce competition they are facing, they really needed this.
It won't happen in Europe, at least not any time soon. The EU has recently introduced legislation that will forbid marked priced roaming charges for mobile networks because the high and uneven prices reduce communications in Europe. The commission et al are very keen on maximizing communication between people in the member states and are as such very much against any scheme that would limit or impair free communication.
After the very public declaration of war on the telecommunication companies it's unlikely that they'll start moving in the opposite direction. As a matter of fact there are several suggestions for laws that are being debated that would declare sufficient access to communication (internet & telephone) as a human right. As such it could lead to the government picking up your broadband bill.
The European Parliament has from the beginning been uncomfortable with the idea of private corporations running the communications infrastructure and a lot of Europe's centre-left governments see it that way too. I doubt we'll see 'nationalizations' of ISPs, but that idea would have far more support than commercializing interent providing even more.
What I can't understand is WTF the Americans are doing. How can they shoot themselves in the foot this way? The reason why the net is so successful is because of its egalitarian nature. It is as close as you can come to an ideal market where quality of content dictates rather than how much you bribe the carrier of that content. It is the diversity that comes with full freedom of choice that drives the global economy and how one could want to sabotage this for its own citizens and companies is beyond me.
One more reason why the EU should be more involved in regulating that kind of stuff. With many more parties involved there's much less of a chance of one state getting carried away with an insane law.
What the article doesn't mention is that the European Parliament would have to approve it, which won't happen. It's a typical EU Commission vs. Parliament situation. The Commission would like us all to wear mandatory RFID tags and tracking devices while being urine tested twice a day. Then the Parliament steps in and passes water on their plans. The Parliament was very reluctant to approve the data storage directive in the first place - the final version was a very reduced version of the original proposal. They placed an emphasis on that data mining without a court order was strictly forbidden, so it's extremely unlikely that they would allow the Americans to do what they are not allowing their own law enforcement agencies.
Ultimately this will end like the US-EU air passenger data deal - with no data being turned over.
You can fight technology with technology, but people will remain as gullible as ever. If anything social engineering is the only viable path today as the technology providing the security is very good and only getting better.
While these methods have a proven track record, and I'm sure this will bring improvement to Microsoft's products, but really, everybody else has been using it for a while.
What's next? "Microsoft announced that its upcoming release of the Windows 2012 operating system (formerly known as "Vista"), they have used a devlopment technology called "for-loops"..."
"Fuck the government. Democracy is bullshit, our president is incompetent, and we should go communist. Our whole system is wrong."
"Now, I personally don't believe any of that. Not to troll, but to everyone posting about how the US is just like the PRC on censorship - read the above again. I can say that. All I want. Without fear of retribution from the government. I can talk about socialism, communism, monarchy, even anarchy. I can even encourage them - peacefully, of course."
Ah, but you are triggering the wrong keywords here. Nobody is going to be interested if you are a communist sympathizer - perhaps 40 years ago, but not today. If you want a government agency to watch you more closely, try an islamistic rant with some heavy anti-Western rhetoric. Then you'll get some attention. And had you done it in the days after the 9/11 attacks, it would have not been very surprising had you been taken in for questioning or worse..
It's all about perceived threat. The PRC are just on average more paranoid than the western world.
The big question is if the simulation has a certain ethical framework that the player is rewarded for following, will it positively reinforce a child's social development? If it will, one might also ask what effects games that reward anti-social behaviour have on children.
While I am hesitant to support any censorship, I think you are right. We in the west consider our rights as individuals holy and our governments morally superior because they do not infringe (too much) on those rights.
What we are conveniently forgetting is that those rights have cost others dearly. The cultural difference is all about change. Not even during the Roman empire was Europe as centralized and hierarchically organized as China has been. Individual achievement has been a central method for a person's role in society. On a higher level, European nations (including former colonies, such as America) have always been in competition. Change and individuality brings innovation, which gives you a competitive edge.
China on the other hand has always been massive. With limited communications, you need a strong hierarchical society to set the rules to prevent it from collapsing. Change throughout the whole country is difficult, and change in individual parts of the country is dangerous.
It's not a coincidence that many of the cool stuff the Chinese invented (gunpowder, compass etc) were used in a very limited fashion by themselves. They used gunpowder for fireworks and the compass as a child's toy - nothing that would bring about radical change. Europeans on the other hand, striving for individual and national power built boats and cannons and conquered the world.
However, that came at a significant cost to others. Numerous populations were wiped out and enslaved for the benefit of our individual achievement.
China may be censoring a politically vocal minority to defend its way of life. They didn't however invade Iraq and kill tens or hundreds of thousnads of people - as America recently did, in the good old Euro-centric fashion. China may be guilty of historically imposing a strict hierarchy on the population, but on the other hand, they didn't go off to Africa, kidnap people and use them as slaves - as we did. So our claim of moral superiority is very questionable. We just don't talk about the not-so-nice parts of our system.
Finally, it is difficult to discuss China with Americans as they have been brain-washed during the cold war. Communism = evil = osama bin laden = bad bad bad bad. However, if we look beyond our Communism = evil automatic response, there is an actual ideology behind communism and it is the welfare of the many. And for all practical purposes a stable China is better for the many than a politically free China.
Well, the missile defense part was a joke, but you are absolutely right that the law has only recently come into effect.
And it's sort of the point why I brought it up. Since they're now forced by law to recycle in the EU, they might as well do it in America too. They will have to invest in the infrastructure either way, so extending the recycling to the US won't cost them that much.
Slashdot Mirror
With a simple confidence interval calculation we get that with a sample size of 17 from a population of 1000 we get that with 95% confidence the results are 2+-2.6 of 17. Obviously 0 is within the error margin, so it is quite possible the results are just by chance.
I have been trying to locate some information on what the motivation was for releasing such a weak result - in case I had missed something. I have failed to find any mention at all of a confidence interval or any statistical justification. At best the results are naive, at worst dishonest. Please correct me if I am wrong.
In Russia you fire away emails, in Soviet Radio Shack email fires you!
And I said that the rig was not intended for gaming - that doesn't mean it actually never will be used for that. As for the clueless person signing the purchase, that would be me (being the co-founder/VP). Unaccountability is a beautiful thing ;-)
As for luxury, I would say that per definition it is something that doesn't give you value for money. That's what makes it luxury. You can look at luxury cars as an example of terrible value for money. Buy a Ferrari and it will most likely break down twice a week. Cost efficiency and even practicality go very much against the idea of luxury which is one of an unnecessary indulgence.
X6800 CPU
4 GB 800 MHz Corsair Memory
Asus P5b Deluxe Mobo
Asus Nvidia 7900GTX
1x150 GB WD Raptor
4x320 GB Seagate 7200.10 (RAID-0)
SB XFi E.Pro
It is stronger on some points (memory and disk) and weaker on some other mobo, gfx, but overall of comparable performance.
The Alienware costs according to the article £3000 = 4400 EUR . My home-built rig set me back roughly 3800 EUR = £2600. So they are a bit more expensive, but not much - and it's supposed to be a luxury computer - an indulgence for the rich and the delinquent ;)
And no, before you ask me, the rig is not intended for gaming, but is a heavy duty computation workstation whose work will to 90% consist of mulitplying very large matrices (while training neural networks). And most importantly, no I didn't pay for it, my company did ;)
"Google Trends analyzes a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you enter relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time."
The diversification and especially the decline of technical stuff is a rather obvious consequence of a still exponentially increasing number of Internet users. Average people, to be precise - i.e not computer enthusiasts, engineers and scientists. Hence while in absolute terms a technical keyword is probably also increasing exponentially, in relative terms it is losing ground to the non-technical stuff. Slashdotters and similar creatures are becoming rare as the Internet demographics gets more and more similar to real-world demographics.
What do you mean by "new"?
There are far better methods such as neural nets or support vector machines. You can for instance see a comparison of classifiers on a simple visual 2-d problem to see how inferior Bayesian filters are to other more sophisticated algorithms.
Now, if you excuse me, I need to feed the code monkeys some bananas ;-)
Microsoft badly needs a reboot with people in charge who can give this company a real vision.
Now let's invest some more tax money on finding UFOs, the Loch Ness Monster and inventing the perpetuum mobile!
This will happen, because it must. Whether it will be MRAM or something else remains to be seen, but it will certainly be something having the same features.
It must because we're reaching the practical limits of how much you can pack on hard disk platters. You can only squeeze in so many bits per cm^2.
Also, read speed and access time is severely limited by the simple fact that it's a mechanical construction with a read/write head having to move over the platters. As software and media is progressively becoming larger in terms of storage space, the current drives are being increasingly responsible for slowing it down due to excessive loading times.
The current HDD technology is the last remnant of the electro-mechanical approach to computing. Its death warrant was signed by the transistor, but the dinosaur managed to live on as there was no alternative.
The HDD is the most antiquated, out-of date technology found in a modern computer and MRAM is a good candidate for a future replacement. It won't happen in two or three years, but in the 5-10 years range, HDDs will be replaced with some form of fast, non-volatile semiconductor memory.
Unfortunately technology has little to do with it. Basically the domain of computer users has in the recent years been rapidly expanding into the domain of people who don't know the first thing about computer technology. Having a technologically superior product doesn't mean at all as much being able to sell your product to the great masses.
For an illustration, look at this Google Trends graph . This doesn't mean that less people are interested in Linux but that a smaller percentage of internet users (computer users) are. You can compare it for instance to something that the average non-technical computer user might search for.
The bottom line is that a commercial success lies in appealing to the huge uninformed and uneducated masses ("Now with 25% more PONIES!"). Microsoft has economic resources for marketing that will for sure work better than the technological arguments from semi-fanatical Linux followers. At this point I only think Apple has some form of chance as they have been successful at mainstream branding (mostly thanks to the iPod).
Now, why UK citizens should be accountable to US law is a different question. The obvious answer is that computer crime is apparently regarded as breaking the local law, even if you are physically in another country. If that's the case then it is a no-brainer. He committed a crime in the US and was extradited.
As for getting locked up in Guantanamo Bay, not likely. You see, one of the basic elements of EU membership is following the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights and signing the European Convention on Human Rights. And these judges sitting in Brussels have ruled that extradition of a person to a foreign state if they are likely to be subjected there to torture, if they risk execution or if there are questions about getting a fair trial and sentencing. So there's no chance he'll be deported to Gitmo as has that been a possibility, he would have not been extradited.
The Americans are perfectly aware of all this and at each extradition they are required to give official assurances that the human rights, as defined by the ECHR, of the person extradited won't be violated. Of course, they could lie, but then they wouldn't get any more extraditions from Europe.
Not to mention that had the data been the target, that computer would have never been returned. It would have been degaussed, torched and thrown into a lake or something similar. ..unless of course they were really sneaky and made sure that they left no forensic evidence (physical or virtual) and returned it for the FBI to conclude that the data had not been accessed..
I really don't get it - are they so out of phase with reality where:
Anybody involved in search application development will tell you that the current systems are in their infancy and that they are inadequate due to the lack of a relational structure and most importantly a query language.
WinFS was Microsoft's chance of actually being ahead with a technology. Given both the bad press that Vista has been receiving as well as the fierce competition they are facing, they really needed this.
After the very public declaration of war on the telecommunication companies it's unlikely that they'll start moving in the opposite direction. As a matter of fact there are several suggestions for laws that are being debated that would declare sufficient access to communication (internet & telephone) as a human right. As such it could lead to the government picking up your broadband bill.
The European Parliament has from the beginning been uncomfortable with the idea of private corporations running the communications infrastructure and a lot of Europe's centre-left governments see it that way too. I doubt we'll see 'nationalizations' of ISPs, but that idea would have far more support than commercializing interent providing even more.
What I can't understand is WTF the Americans are doing. How can they shoot themselves in the foot this way? The reason why the net is so successful is because of its egalitarian nature. It is as close as you can come to an ideal market where quality of content dictates rather than how much you bribe the carrier of that content. It is the diversity that comes with full freedom of choice that drives the global economy and how one could want to sabotage this for its own citizens and companies is beyond me.
One more reason why the EU should be more involved in regulating that kind of stuff. With many more parties involved there's much less of a chance of one state getting carried away with an insane law.
Ultimately this will end like the US-EU air passenger data deal - with no data being turned over.
You can fight technology with technology, but people will remain as gullible as ever. If anything social engineering is the only viable path today as the technology providing the security is very good and only getting better.
Norton started using neural networks in 1999 in their anti-virus software. Any number of adaptive systems will do the job quite nicely.
While these methods have a proven track record, and I'm sure this will bring improvement to Microsoft's products, but really, everybody else has been using it for a while.
What's next? "Microsoft announced that its upcoming release of the Windows 2012 operating system (formerly known as "Vista"), they have used a devlopment technology called "for-loops"..."
"Now, I personally don't believe any of that. Not to troll, but to everyone posting about how the US is just like the PRC on censorship - read the above again. I can say that. All I want. Without fear of retribution from the government. I can talk about socialism, communism, monarchy, even anarchy. I can even encourage them - peacefully, of course."
Ah, but you are triggering the wrong keywords here. Nobody is going to be interested if you are a communist sympathizer - perhaps 40 years ago, but not today. If you want a government agency to watch you more closely, try an islamistic rant with some heavy anti-Western rhetoric. Then you'll get some attention. And had you done it in the days after the 9/11 attacks, it would have not been very surprising had you been taken in for questioning or worse..
It's all about perceived threat. The PRC are just on average more paranoid than the western world.
The big question is if the simulation has a certain ethical framework that the player is rewarded for following, will it positively reinforce a child's social development? If it will, one might also ask what effects games that reward anti-social behaviour have on children.
While I am hesitant to support any censorship, I think you are right. We in the west consider our rights as individuals holy and our governments morally superior because they do not infringe (too much) on those rights.
What we are conveniently forgetting is that those rights have cost others dearly. The cultural difference is all about change. Not even during the Roman empire was Europe as centralized and hierarchically organized as China has been. Individual achievement has been a central method for a person's role in society. On a higher level, European nations (including former colonies, such as America) have always been in competition. Change and individuality brings innovation, which gives you a competitive edge.
China on the other hand has always been massive. With limited communications, you need a strong hierarchical society to set the rules to prevent it from collapsing. Change throughout the whole country is difficult, and change in individual parts of the country is dangerous.
It's not a coincidence that many of the cool stuff the Chinese invented (gunpowder, compass etc) were used in a very limited fashion by themselves. They used gunpowder for fireworks and the compass as a child's toy - nothing that would bring about radical change. Europeans on the other hand, striving for individual and national power built boats and cannons and conquered the world.
However, that came at a significant cost to others. Numerous populations were wiped out and enslaved for the benefit of our individual achievement.
China may be censoring a politically vocal minority to defend its way of life. They didn't however invade Iraq and kill tens or hundreds of thousnads of people - as America recently did, in the good old Euro-centric fashion. China may be guilty of historically imposing a strict hierarchy on the population, but on the other hand, they didn't go off to Africa, kidnap people and use them as slaves - as we did. So our claim of moral superiority is very questionable. We just don't talk about the not-so-nice parts of our system.
Finally, it is difficult to discuss China with Americans as they have been brain-washed during the cold war. Communism = evil = osama bin laden = bad bad bad bad. However, if we look beyond our Communism = evil automatic response, there is an actual ideology behind communism and it is the welfare of the many. And for all practical purposes a stable China is better for the many than a politically free China.
Well, the missile defense part was a joke, but you are absolutely right that the law has only recently come into effect.
And it's sort of the point why I brought it up. Since they're now forced by law to recycle in the EU, they might as well do it in America too. They will have to invest in the infrastructure either way, so extending the recycling to the US won't cost them that much.