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Comment Re:Slashvertisment (Score 1) 63

Yes, and I had read that before posting my comment. I want to believe, but find it harder to do so recently. To state the obvious: Dice have a credibility problem with some of the slashdot crowd. They need to go out of their way to avoid the *appearance* of paid-for-journalism. IMHO they didn't get this one right. However well intentioned it may or may not have been; it doesn't *appear* to be well intentioned. It's not the first time, and I dare say it won't be the last. They should be worried when their audience stops calling them out on it because we'll have given up caring at that point. I don't want to give up caring, but sometimes they make it hard.

Comment Crashy (Score 3, Interesting) 237

I remember waybackwhen I last used Autonomy's categorisation and search engine. It wasn't very reliable and I never thought it did a very good job - neither the categorisation nor the searching. It always felt like a triumph of sales over engineering. I was amazed at the sale price to HP when it happened. Maybe this is something different, but somehow it rings true.

Comment Innovation (Score 5, Insightful) 105

This isn't a bad thing. Good companies (not just apple) take risks and try out new things. It only takes one in ten to be a good product, and one in twenty to be a great product to keep the company going. The trick is to make sure they're not *too* ludicrous before you launch them, and if they don't work out, make sure you realise this quickly and fail fast If you don't keep moving and innovate, some other bugger out there will and you'll get left behind. I'm looking at you Microsoft. [standard imnotafanbois disclaimer; believe what you will; ymmv]

Comment Re:What? (Score 2) 206

I pay my TV licence (ok TV tax) in the UK gladly.

The BBC is one of the few things I think we do well in the world - the journalism and news reporting is beyond world class - it's world beating. Impartial reporting, truly global coverage. That can be hard to believe sitting in England, but as soon as you spend long enough abroad to try any other country it makes you appreciate how good the Beeb really is. Just try any southern-mediterranean broadcaster, Chinese state television, Russian state television, Fox News in the US (ok extreme example, but the rest of the local and national US news is also worth taking a look at while you're visiting) and compare it with the Beeb. It's simply in a different class.

This may come across as slightly anti US-TV. It's not meant to be, but you've gotten me angry and ranting now. It is meant to be scornful of someone stealing content from my favourite broadcaster, and because I have paid for it: stealing from me. Now get off my lawn, persuade your native/adopted/temporarily-visiting country to get better television, and get a pro-piracy story off the front page of slashdot.

Comment He was never a programmer (Score 5, Informative) 120

Mike Bloomberg was always the business/sales guy at the company. Tom Secunda was (one of the) original programmer of the first terminals. That was all in Fortran back then. A fair chunk of it probably still is. You can read this and oh so much more in his not-very-gripping autobiography, which was required reading for all team leads and managers at Bloomberg. [Ex Bloomberger].

Comment Surely it's a rising demand for brains (Score 2) 622

If the article is explaining how lawyers are being replaced with programmers. Someone's got to create and maintain the software that replaces these "educated" people. Surely these are just a different set of educated people? That really does sound similar to the Luddites. It's not that there's no longer any demand for skills, it's that there's a demand for different skills.

And just to take an (only half joking ) swipe at lawyers, surely this means an increase in demand for brains?

The Internet

Meet NELL, the Computer That Learns From the Net 272

bossanovalithium writes "Carnegie Mellon University has taught a computer how to read and learn from the internet. According to Dennis Baron at the Oxford University press blog, the computer is called NELL and it is reading the internet and learning from it in much the same way that humans learn language and acquire knowledge. Basically by soaking it all up and figuring it out. NELL is short for Never Ending Language Learner and apparently it is getting brainier every day."

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