Forgot your password?

typodupeerror

Comment: Reality check (Score 1) 807

by BananaBender (#43760671) Attached to: Rice Professor Predicts Humans Out of Work In 30 Years
I think, the professor in TFA is pretty much wrong. For a reality check, please look at this Wikipedia link. It describes the current research status in the field of object recognition, a typical task in computer vision. From the article, it should become clear that there are numerous approaches to the problem, but there is not one really capable approach that solves the problem. This is independent of computing power - we just don't know yet how to make a machine recognize non-trivial objects under real-life conditions, not matter how many CPUs it has. This fact currently limits the development of autonomic cars already.

Comment: Point is moot (Score 1) 210

by BananaBender (#41546759) Attached to: Quantum Measurements Leave Schrödinger's Cat Alive
According to Quantum_decoherence, there is no superposition of quantum states. As the radioactive element interacts with the cat and the box, its decoherence time becomes very short, so the wave function collapses almost instantly. The cat is either dead or alive, but there is no extended state of superposition.
Microsoft

+ - Scammers intentionally use bad spelling->

Submitted by
ndogg
ndogg writes "Nigerian scammers intentionally point out that they are from Nigeria, and intentionally use bad spelling and grammar. An article in Computerworld points out a paper by Cormac Herley at Microsoft Research that points out that this weeds out all the skeptical people so that they can more easily focus on the gullible."
Link to Original Source

+ - Cold War Nuclear Missiles and Analog Computers->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "From the 1950s until the 1970s hundreds of Nike batteries guarded urban centers and military installations against Soviet bombers. Nike Hercules surface to air missiles were armed with nuclear warheads to guarantee the destruction of any attacking airplanes. The missiles were guided from the ground by analog electro-mechanical computers.

Most of the batteries were dismantled in the mid 1970s because they were ineffective against the newer Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles. Nowadays most of the former missile sites are empty concrete shells with rusting steel doors here and there.

Nike Missile Site SF-88 near San Francisco may be the only battery left that looks the way it did when it was in operation. The place has several Nike Hercules missiles and the associated launch equipment, including an analog servo computer. Most if it looks as if it could be used tomorrow:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/26020895@N04/7382396608/in/set-72157630151662170/lightbox/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/26020895@N04/7382405212/in/set-72157630151662170/lightbox/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/26020895@N04/7382344392/in/set-72157630151662170/lightbox/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/26020895@N04/7382405212/in/set-72157630151662170/lightbox/"

Link to Original Source
Spam

+ - Minecraft troll calls SWAT on mod, cries murder->

Submitted by dotarray
dotarray writes "A disgruntled gamer sent the cops around to a moderator's house after being kicked out of an online chat. Law enforcement personnel from four different agencies arrived at the Washington state home late Saturday night, after receiving reports that a man had shot his 14 year-old daughter who had just told him she was pregnant.

The problem? There was no pregnancy, and there was no daughter. The handcuffed man lying on the ground, Dave Neumann, only had sons — one of whom, Jake, was a moderator in a Minecraft serve"

Link to Original Source
Apple

+ - US Judge Has Outbreak of Common Sense in Apple/Motorola Patent War->

Submitted by sl4shd0rk
sl4shd0rk writes "Federal Judge Richard Posner seems to be a man who "gets" the screwed up patent system in the US. As Apple pressed for more injunctions against Motorola regarding alleged patent infringement, Judge Posner has stressed the two companies should just "get along" and pay each other royalties. A jury trial set to start last week was cancelled when Posner ruled that neither side could prove damages, and grilled Apple's legal team saying an injunction against Motorola would be "contrary to the public interest,". Furthermore, as Apple tried to plead its injunction case concerning four patents, Posner called the U.S. patent system "chaos" and said an order barring the sale of Motorola phones could have "catastrophic effects."."
Link to Original Source

+ - The Rise and Consequences of Economic Inequality-> 1

Submitted by BananaBender
BananaBender writes "Alan Krueger, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, gave a very informative speech on economic inequality that should have received more press than it did. Much of it was stuff that inequality mavens already know, but he had one striking result: a clear negative relationship between inequality at a point in time and intergenerational social mobility (see http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/the-great-gatsby-curve/). Mr. Krueger went on to outline how growing inequality and a shrinking middle class are at the root of U.S. economic problems. These trends mean less stable consumption, unsustainable debt, a concentration of power in the hands of the few, and the unraveling of the American Dream that portrays the United States as a land of opportunity for anyone who works hard and plays by the rules."
Link to Original Source

Comment: Principal-Agent Dilemma (Score 1) 545

by BananaBender (#38696058) Attached to: How To Get Developers To Document Code
In a situation where your company outsources code generation to some external IT consultancy, it might be beneficial for that external developer not to document his code. After all, who are they going to call when they need to understand the code or extend its functionality?
This also work down the road - if they should get several offers for future coding work in an RFP, the original programmer can still price very aggressively, as he knows all the pitfalls of the solution that he wrote in the past.

Comment: Re:Pseudoscience? (Score 1) 250

by BananaBender (#34299000) Attached to: Traffic Jams In Your Brain
Maybe I did not make myself clear enough - I never made the assumption or the claim that the brain resembles a computer in any way.
Recognition tasks are knowledge-driven; they are based on experience. Humans have to learn to see; a major input in the visual recognition process is experience. The brain has found a way to store years of learning in its structures. So I think it is fair to say that the brain has a vast amount of storage capacity.
The aforementioned conscious calculations are an emulation. The 7-item limit would not apply, if the calculations were executed subconsciously (by whatever algorithm).

Comment: Re:Pseudoscience? (Score 1) 250

by BananaBender (#34290510) Attached to: Traffic Jams In Your Brain
I think this line of reasoning is not convincing.
The brain masters computations (e.g. visual recognition tasks, speech recognition etc.) that require enourmous amounts of memory when implemented in a conventional computer system. Under the assumption that those recogntition tasks are inherently memory-intensive, the brain has to have similar amounts of memory at its disposal.
So, obviously, the brain is not lacking memory to execute complex calculations, but it seems to disallow the conscious control of brain structures to execute multiplications. Each single neuron could execute such multiplications with ease.

Comment: Non-story without more data (Score 1) 706

by BananaBender (#32707974) Attached to: Women Dropping Out of IT
This story tries to impress us with its "IT-is-not-for-girls" spin. But honestly, you would need a lot more data to draw such a conclusion. For instance, what is the current ratio of men leaving the IT profession in general and in the middle of their career in special? There might not even be a significant difference...
Moreover, what kind of women /people are leaving the industry? As far as I know, parts of the IT market are shrinking due to Offshoring and on-going automation, so a lot of simpler IT jobs are simply vanishing right now. So the loss of those jobs might also contribute to the observation of women leaving the industry.
Unfortunately, TFA does not provide more information to put the numbers in the right context...

If the ends don't justify the means, then what does? -- Robert Moses

Working...