As most websites are no longer self contained, but require numerous dependencies to other websites for data, content, analytics and js libraries, China's gated internet will become more isolated from the rest of the world.
Perhaps Hong Kong may face similar issues with regards to net access and online freedom in the near future? There has been talks about that recently.
Maybe web developers will need to write a "China mode" for front end sites, in addition to "Desktop" or "Mobile" mode that will only use old school 1990's style HTML look and feel. Bring back the frames:)
In addition to very strict gun laws (pretty much the only guys with hunting licenses got them > 50 years ago), there are other laws which are a lot more strict compared to other countries.
For example, if a gaijin resident is caught with light marijuana -> Jail time or deportation. Drinking and driving, even one beer, will cause one to lose his job in a country that prides itself of life long employment.
The methodology deepmind used for training the game player is based on a classical reinforcement learning algorithm called Q Learning (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-learning), developed in the late 1980's. This approach of maximizing expected future rewards for the agent to select an action in a current state has some parallels with studies of how the basal ganglia region of our brain conduct reward learning (basal ganglia).
What has been done is to approximate the reward function Q (which originally used a look up table) by a more general function to approach larger problems with much larger (or infinite) number of states. The approach here was to use a function which can fit large amounts of data, in this case a multi layered neural network (with convnet layers to preprocess the raw image input first to identify features) to attempt to learn the game.
This has actually been done a while ago, by Tesauro (now at IBM research) who used the same approach to create a Q Learning agent to play Back Gammon at an advanced level.
The reason why this is new is because in recent years we can employ cheap GPU's to learn exponentially more quicker than conventional cpu's and can construct much larger and deeper networks to learn from more complicated systems. Also many new 'tricks' have been developed to optimize learning in recent years (sigmoid functions replaced by simplified rect linear function, and dropout, etc), so we are going to see better and more amazing uses for this relatively old technology.
This is old stuff. Chow Yun-Fat and his cronies have used this technology (in glasses and contact lenses form) to cheat poker over 20 years ago at a private casino event on a yacht near the shores of Hong Kong to get revenge on the man who nearly destroyed him!
How can google profit from this venture?
The article doesn't say what kind of "premium services" they are going to charge for, but I wouldn't see what services the average google-wifi user will pay for that the non-google wifi user won't.
Yeah, tru that! hahaha...
Can you imagine taking the machines on the trading floor with NT/2000, excel, bloomberg, and then... formatting them, installing linux and "X Windows", with... GNUmeric???
you won't make it out of the trading floor alive.. or with any clothes on!
I don't think the dude's referring to our market risk managers... it's true they get paid just to look at VaR numbers and stuff like that. I think he's referring to someone more general, in any company who looks at operational risks (also useless.. haha)
Nah... the Wall Street industry standard for derivatives pricing is still C++ (none of this.net garbage that IT guys push for...)
Part of my job involves using math to price the newest fixed income derivatives, and implementing a model in C++ that get's compiled into an "xll" library that everyone on the trading floor can use within their excel library.
The math I use is not too advanced... if you come from a math background, then you probably studied numerical analysis, and some formal probability theory (not that statistics garbage, but measure theoretic approach to probability).
You see... as the months go by, there is just way too much legacy code being written and still used everyday by traders. We are too busy making money and have no time for upgrades... I have a feeling that this will hurt us in the long run.
I work as a quant in an investment bank, and believe me, huge trades (i'm talking about billion dollar derivative trades) are booked into Excel and rely solely on VB/VBA scripts to function properly day to day.
If VBA ceased to work tomorrow, there may very well be chaos in the financial markets causing some huge operational mistakes and huge losses. You cannot imagine how deeply dependent global banks are to excel and VBA.
The ability to cheat well is a valuable skill in the modern world, often overlooked by those who believe hard work is directly proportional to one's wealth.
CIOs must bring a certain number of offshore developers to their U.S. headquarters to analyze the technology and architecture before those developers can head back to their home country to begin the actual work. And CIOs must pay the prevailing U.S. hourly rate to offshore employees on temporary visas, so obviously there's no savings during that period of time, which can take months. And the offshore employees have to work in parallel with similarly costly in-house employees for much of this time. Basically, it's costing the company double the price for each employee assigned to the outsourcing arrangement (the offshore worker and the in-house trainer). In addition, neither the offshore nor in-house employee is producing anything during this training period.
In addition, the in-house employee will be quite pissed for being forced to train his replacement, and will not do so as a result.
I have no idea what the pay rate was. But, when they send three guys over to be trained to replace the work of one person (me) you know they could not have been making too much overall.
The problem as I see it seems to be a difference in how people think. Most of the people that I find are good coders are very logical thinkers. They spend the time to research the problem, and can think outside the box. The people that can't seem to code very well, have trouble thinking about logical patterns and 'consequences'.
By 'consequences' I am refering to the concept that if action A is done it will interact with action Z. However if action B is done it will affect action Y. I am sure some of you understand this even though I am being very loose in my description.
I understand exactly what you mean. I noticed the same pattern in good programmers myself.
I feel for you man. Being replaced by new overseas monkeys really suck. On thing they really do can't do is communicate with management effectively.
One thing I learned is we gotta find something we can do that they can't do that well. Maybe consulting, or business software design is something is an example of that. I mean, someone has to write the specs (this is where logical thinking is really important). For myself, I went back to school to study financial engineering and try to stay away from monkey-type coding jobs.
I heard a lot of these stories about offshore monkey's lack of skill. I actually worked with many (they were shipped in to do a consulting project.. very hardworking, very sloppy code). Mind you, the good ones are _really_ good, but the bad ones just suck.
Just curious.. so you guys sent them the specs they were required to meet, but they failed to meet them. Did they actually get paid afterwards? How was their compensation structure like?
I bet if the banana was only at the top of the tree the monkey will be forced to learn to make better code;) win win situation!
OPC stands for "OLE for Process Control"... (if you did some COM/DCOM windows programm you will be familiar with this).
It's the same technology targeted by the W32.Blaster worm that is crawling around the web.
It won't suprise me if some of those computers responsible for failover/grid isolation actually hung themselves on the worm.
In case you don't know what the worm does, not much, but a side effect (because of sloppy coding) it causes the machine to restart very frequently (it also attempts to attack microsoft.com in a DoS attack, I guess that's why microsoft shut down windowsupdate).
what do you think?
Re:Sorry to be pedantic, but..
on
Wall Street Meat
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Not so bullshit:)
A specialist on the NYSE is a market maker. He is also paid my NYSE to keep an orderly market in addition to his market making duties since he must give a bid and ask price for the market that he is guaranteed to trade at.
Market makers function in the market to provide liquidity (ie, you can buy and sell even if currently no or very few sellers or buyers) for ther market they operate on. They make a profit off the bid-ask spread (they buy at a low price and sell at a higher price).
Market making can be quite technical and sophisticated, especially when one is making a market in the interest-rate, or derivatives (ie options, futures, swaps, exotics etc..) markets. In the more complicated markets the bid-ask spread can be bigger and he can earn a higher fee.
I remember going to the public library to play commander keen everyday back in elementary school with a bunch of friends... That was also when I bought the shareware version of wolfenstein 3d on a 5-1/4 inch disk! Damn, I'm beginning to feel old...
Public libraries these days really suck, even with their new computers and internet terminals.
It's one thing to mirror someone else's content for "caching" purposes. It's another thing to save someone else's content and charge for viewing that content though.
Wow-you really know your stuff from your comments!!
I'll get my BSEE in about two months... It's refreshing, I actually understand all this stuff! (but I don't think most of my classmates do.)
I actually find this GNU radio REALLY cool, I wish they introduced something like this in school earlier. It would be much more interesting to code something that grabs a TV/FM signal digitizes it _AND_ play it on the computer. It wouldn't be thar hard to do with the proper libraries as well, plus the $1300 receiver pales in comparison to other lab equipment.
It sure beats doing repetitive MATLAB/Simulink simulations (don't learn ANYTHING, just cut and paste graphs!). I bet things were a lot more hardcore 13 years ago.
Most of my classmates don't care about learning this stuff, and they will likely graduate without understanding stuff like SSB/VSB, noise shaping, or C (blame Java). Only a few of us are actually interested in this stuff sigh...
Slashdot Mirror
Well Said :-)
As most websites are no longer self contained, but require numerous dependencies to other websites for data, content, analytics and js libraries, China's gated internet will become more isolated from the rest of the world.
Perhaps Hong Kong may face similar issues with regards to net access and online freedom in the near future? There has been talks about that recently.
Maybe web developers will need to write a "China mode" for front end sites, in addition to "Desktop" or "Mobile" mode that will only use old school 1990's style HTML look and feel. Bring back the frames :)
In addition to very strict gun laws (pretty much the only guys with hunting licenses got them > 50 years ago), there are other laws which are a lot more strict compared to other countries.
For example, if a gaijin resident is caught with light marijuana -> Jail time or deportation. Drinking and driving, even one beer, will cause one to lose his job in a country that prides itself of life long employment.
The methodology deepmind used for training the game player is based on a classical reinforcement learning algorithm called Q Learning (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-learning), developed in the late 1980's. This approach of maximizing expected future rewards for the agent to select an action in a current state has some parallels with studies of how the basal ganglia region of our brain conduct reward learning (basal ganglia).
What has been done is to approximate the reward function Q (which originally used a look up table) by a more general function to approach larger problems with much larger (or infinite) number of states. The approach here was to use a function which can fit large amounts of data, in this case a multi layered neural network (with convnet layers to preprocess the raw image input first to identify features) to attempt to learn the game.
This has actually been done a while ago, by Tesauro (now at IBM research) who used the same approach to create a Q Learning agent to play Back Gammon at an advanced level.
The reason why this is new is because in recent years we can employ cheap GPU's to learn exponentially more quicker than conventional cpu's and can construct much larger and deeper networks to learn from more complicated systems. Also many new 'tricks' have been developed to optimize learning in recent years (sigmoid functions replaced by simplified rect linear function, and dropout, etc), so we are going to see better and more amazing uses for this relatively old technology.
This is old stuff. Chow Yun-Fat and his cronies have used this technology (in glasses and contact lenses form) to cheat poker over 20 years ago at a private casino event on a yacht near the shores of Hong Kong to get revenge on the man who nearly destroyed him!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-sliAVtxSE
Our friend Mr. Rosen has given his blessing MicroSoft, a taiwanese motherboard manufacturing company
I see your point but I fail to see the "irony"
How can google profit from this venture? The article doesn't say what kind of "premium services" they are going to charge for, but I wouldn't see what services the average google-wifi user will pay for that the non-google wifi user won't.
LOL
:)
spoken like a true philosophy major
yeah you are right mate got confused... they look similar
I walked by Regent street yesterday
Is this the same gadget that they have a store devoted to promoting? There was even a night club beneath the store with bouncers
portable PS is pretty big in the UK for 200 quid, don't know how well this thing will sell here...
Yeah, tru that! hahaha... Can you imagine taking the machines on the trading floor with NT/2000, excel, bloomberg, and then... formatting them, installing linux and "X Windows", with... GNUmeric??? you won't make it out of the trading floor alive.. or with any clothes on! I don't think the dude's referring to our market risk managers... it's true they get paid just to look at VaR numbers and stuff like that. I think he's referring to someone more general, in any company who looks at operational risks (also useless.. haha)
Nah... the Wall Street industry standard for derivatives pricing is still C++ (none of this .net garbage that IT guys push for...)
Part of my job involves using math to price the newest fixed income derivatives, and implementing a model in C++ that get's compiled into an "xll" library that everyone on the trading floor can use within their excel library.
The math I use is not too advanced... if you come from a math background, then you probably studied numerical analysis, and some formal probability theory (not that statistics garbage, but measure theoretic approach to probability).
You see... as the months go by, there is just way too much legacy code being written and still used everyday by traders. We are too busy making money and have no time for upgrades... I have a feeling that this will hurt us in the long run.
I work as a quant in an investment bank, and believe me, huge trades (i'm talking about billion dollar derivative trades) are booked into Excel and rely solely on VB/VBA scripts to function properly day to day.
If VBA ceased to work tomorrow, there may very well be chaos in the financial markets causing some huge operational mistakes and huge losses. You cannot imagine how deeply dependent global banks are to excel and VBA.
The ability to cheat well is a valuable skill in the modern world, often overlooked by those who believe hard work is directly proportional to one's wealth.
In addition, the in-house employee will be quite pissed for being forced to train his replacement, and will not do so as a result.
The problem as I see it seems to be a difference in how people think. Most of the people that I find are good coders are very logical thinkers. They spend the time to research the problem, and can think outside the box. The people that can't seem to code very well, have trouble thinking about logical patterns and 'consequences'.
By 'consequences' I am refering to the concept that if action A is done it will interact with action Z. However if action B is done it will affect action Y. I am sure some of you understand this even though I am being very loose in my description.
I understand exactly what you mean. I noticed the same pattern in good programmers myself.
I feel for you man. Being replaced by new overseas monkeys really suck. On thing they really do can't do is communicate with management effectively.
One thing I learned is we gotta find something we can do that they can't do that well. Maybe consulting, or business software design is something is an example of that. I mean, someone has to write the specs (this is where logical thinking is really important). For myself, I went back to school to study financial engineering and try to stay away from monkey-type coding jobs.
good luck to us all!
I heard a lot of these stories about offshore monkey's lack of skill. I actually worked with many (they were shipped in to do a consulting project.. very hardworking, very sloppy code). Mind you, the good ones are _really_ good, but the bad ones just suck.
;) win win situation!
Just curious.. so you guys sent them the specs they were required to meet, but they failed to meet them. Did they actually get paid afterwards? How was their compensation structure like?
I bet if the banana was only at the top of the tree the monkey will be forced to learn to make better code
Apparently the US National power grid uses "OPC"
OPC stands for "OLE for Process Control"... (if you did some COM/DCOM windows programm you will be familiar with this).
It's the same technology targeted by the W32.Blaster worm that is crawling around the web.
It won't suprise me if some of those computers responsible for failover/grid isolation actually hung themselves on the worm.
In case you don't know what the worm does, not much, but a side effect (because of sloppy coding) it causes the machine to restart very frequently (it also attempts to attack microsoft.com in a DoS attack, I guess that's why microsoft shut down windowsupdate).
what do you think?
Not so bullshit :)
A specialist on the NYSE is a market maker. He is also paid my NYSE to keep an orderly market in addition to his market making duties since he must give a bid and ask price for the market that he is guaranteed to trade at.
Market makers function in the market to provide liquidity (ie, you can buy and sell even if currently no or very few sellers or buyers) for ther market they operate on. They make a profit off the bid-ask spread (they buy at a low price and sell at a higher price).
Market making can be quite technical and sophisticated, especially when one is making a market in the interest-rate, or derivatives (ie options, futures, swaps, exotics etc..) markets. In the more complicated markets the bid-ask spread can be bigger and he can earn a higher fee.
just my 2.8-2.9 cdn cents............
I remember going to the public library to play commander keen everyday back in elementary school with a bunch of friends... That was also when I bought the shareware version of wolfenstein 3d on a 5-1/4 inch disk! Damn, I'm beginning to feel old...
Public libraries these days really suck, even with their new computers and internet terminals.
Some of us have been reading slashdot since before it had user names, when 10 comments per story was huge stuff... and I'm still in college.
/. in grade nine from a link on mp3.com... on my 486 ahh the good old days... I should have registered for an ID the first moment!
I discovered
What do you think will happen in another few years when the last generation of geeks get older?
It's one thing to mirror someone else's content for "caching" purposes. It's another thing to save someone else's content and charge for viewing that content though.
here.
Wow-you really know your stuff from your comments!!
I'll get my BSEE in about two months... It's refreshing, I actually understand all this stuff! (but I don't think most of my classmates do.)
I actually find this GNU radio REALLY cool, I wish they introduced something like this in school earlier. It would be much more interesting to code something that grabs a TV/FM signal digitizes it _AND_ play it on the computer. It wouldn't be thar hard to do with the proper libraries as well, plus the $1300 receiver pales in comparison to other lab equipment.
It sure beats doing repetitive MATLAB/Simulink simulations (don't learn ANYTHING, just cut and paste graphs!). I bet things were a lot more hardcore 13 years ago.
Most of my classmates don't care about learning this stuff, and they will likely graduate without understanding stuff like SSB/VSB, noise shaping, or C (blame Java). Only a few of us are actually interested in this stuff sigh...