I’ve seen a lot of stupid comments on my YouTube videos, but this one really made my day (here’s the video it was from). I know I talk fast, and that might be challenging for some, but my actual use of the language? Apparently my spoken English is so poor, this fellow from Portland, Oragon, USA, just couldn’t make out what I was saying. 😉
I didn’t get the full context right from the start – basically, it looks like the singers ask the name of the woman they’re chatting with, then sing their catchy song using that name. You can tell their aren’t native English speakers because they pronounce it “Deeeana” in the song, but I doubt the woman on the other end cared – she was clearly thrilled with a bunch of strangers singing her a song.
Anyone that remembers registering a domain in the ’90s from Network Solutions – I think they were basically the only game in town back then – will recall paying $100 for a standard .com domain. Now you can get the same thing for $10 or less from a variety of sources. When you paid $100 for a domain, unless you were a wealthy person, you’d only sit on a few domains that weren’t being used. Paying $100 a year for something you’re not using was a waste. Now that domains are $10, people sit on domains for years and years, never using them, and not feeling compelled to either because the domains are so cheap. If you’re someone looking to launch a new Web site, it’s extremely difficult to get a domain name for your new project because of domain squatters.
I say this myself as someone who has a few different un-used domains (MMA Thoughts.com, Photography Thoughts.com), but I’d be willing to pay $100 a year for those domains if it would force some of these squatters off their domains – I looked up one domain earlier today that was registered back in 2000 and still has nothing on it. If you can’t get your Web site launched in 11 years, guess what, it’s time to give up…
I have to admit that I’ve made an about face on this issue: earlier in the year I was arguing that bandwidth caps weren’t a big deal, because most people never went over them, but since then I’ve done some research on the bandwidth caps in place and am appalled at the trend I’ve seen: bandwidth caps at one of the major ISPs in my part of Canada have either stayed the same, or gone up moderately, while prices have either stayed the same or gone up. This isn’t the typical trend we’re used to with technology, where prices go down over time and the functionality/performance goes up. I’m all for companies making money, but there’s something very wrong with the current state of competition in Internet access in Canada – we have among the slowest and most expensive Internet access in the world, and that needs to change.
If you’re in Canada, stand up and make your voice heard.
Today I watched something that completely and totally captured my attention: IBM’s supercomputer, dubbed Watson, took on two Jeopardy champions (Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter). Watson is packing some serious hardware:
“The 360 Power7 chips that make up Watson’s brain represent IBM’s best and brightest processor technology. Each Power7 is capable of over 500 GB/second of aggregate bandwidth, making it particularly adept at manipulating data at high speeds. FLOPS-wise, a 3.55 GHz Power7 delivers 218 Linpack gigaflops. For comparison, the POWER2 SC processor, which was the chip that powered cyber-chessmaster Deep Blue, managed a paltry 0.48 gigaflops, with the whole machine delivering a mere 11.4 Linpack gigaflops.” – via HPCwire
So how did it go? In short, Watson got off to a commanding lead and was crushing it early on…until the humans adapted. You see, Watson is extremely accurate when it comes to coming up with the right question to fit the answer to the clue. There were a couple of flubs, but for the most part I’d say Watson was as good or better than the human champions. Where Watson truly shone though was reaction time. You could just tell watching the humans madly pressing the buzzer that Watson had them beat when it came to triggering the buzzer when it knew the answer. I noticed something though about halfway through: I think that the humans started buzzing in without knowing the answer.
This is pure speculation, but to me it looked like the two human champs switched to triggering the buzzer before the clue was even partly finished – I think they both realized that if they waited until they heard the full clue, Watson would continue to beat them. By the end of the game Rutter was at $5000, Watson was at $5000, and Jennings was at $2000. This is a far cry from the first 5 minutes where Watson was snagging all the questions.
I don’t know the mechanics of Jeopardy very well, but it looks like the contestant can buzz in at any time after the clue has started to be read aloud. It’s a risk buzzing in on something that you might not know the answer to, but it’s a call that a human can make on the fly – and one that a machine would be hard-pressed to make.
One of the things they didn’t explain fully was how Watson go the clue: they said it was “delivered as a text file”, but what does that mean exactly? Is there someone pressing a SUBMIT key on a keyboard as Alex Trebek finishes the clue? No, there would be too much latency with that approach. Does Watson get permission to read a text file as Trebek finished the question? That seems equally problematic – it would have to be machine driven somehow. Voice recognition would seem to be the only fair way to tackle this problem, but if Watson mis-recognized a word, it would throw the whole game off. This is something I hope they explain more about later on.
This was some fascinating TV! I’m looking forward to watching the next two episodes.
UPDATE: This article says that Watson is “fed the answer in text form at the same time the answer panel appears to the two human players.” That explains Watson’s edge in buzzing in – it can parse the text file faster than a human being can read the clue. The only way for the humans to win then is to buzz in before they read the clue. Gutsy!
I have my personal email configured in a very particular way; I have set it up so that anything@ sent to jasondunn.com will come to me (unless it’s been previously blocked). Why do I do this? The key problem with the way email works today is that once you give someone your email address, you lose control over it – they can sell it, share it, spam you with it, etc. Worse, unlike the telephone system where the caller is identified with a number that can be blocked (with the exception of hidden caller ID of course), there’s little you can do to protect yourself from incoming spam…if you block one sender, it will just come at you from a different one. The sender on the email is rarely the person or company actually generating the email.
By using a unique email address for every newsletter I sign up for, every company I buy from, and every account I register online, I have a system for figuring out who is spamming me, who is selling my email address, and I can turn off an alias if need be. There are some negatives to this approach mind you: it doesn’t keep me completely spam free, because eventually my real email address gets out there in the wild – likely from compromised email accounts or the malware-laden PCs of people that I correspond with – but it does afford me some granular control over how companies correspond with me.
I’ve turned off more than a few aliases over the years and that kills 100% of the spam that was coming in via that alias. This method does leave me vulnerable to dictionary-based email domain attacks, or domain reply-to hijackings, but both are exceedingly rare (say, three times in the past five years). People using Gmail can do something similar to my method, though it’s not quite the same because it still exposes your real email address.
Continue reading Email Spam, Database Hacking, and Customer Trust: A Tale of Battdepot and Rupaz
It’s somewhat laughable that in 2010, Outlook still lacks the basic software intelligence to help make the lives of its users easier. If there are known elements (day of the week, day of the month, a time, and a time zone) it shouldn’t be difficult to create a function in the software that would automatically parse and order that data into an appointment – all that would be missing is a description and location (though the latter could be part of the data points). Despite everyone embracing the cloud, I still stand by Outlook as my pain productivity weapon for email, calender, tasks, contacts, etc. It works extremely well for me – far better than any cloud-based solution I’ve tried.
I should add that I’ve seen some Outlook add-ins that do some things like this – specifically with contacts – but I don’t like loading up Outlook with add-ins. The core functionality of Outlook needs to improve.
For all the junk on YouTube, there are some real gems – truly talented people who just want to share with the world. I admire the guts it takes to do something like this, especially knowing how harsh people can be on YouTube!
Figure 1: What is this, 1994 all over again?
Whenever bandwidth is discussed, there’s always lots of finger pointing because there are so many variables, and players involved, that it’s rarely a simple issue. My particular bandwidth bugaboo this morning? I was ticked off that Dropbox [referral] was only uploading at 10 KB/s. I left a 900 MB transfer running all night and it wasn’t finished in the morning, and that’s when I discovered the awful speed. My first instinct was to point a finger at Dropbox, thinking there was some sort of bandwidth throttling going on. I did a speed test with a tool my ISP provides (speedtest.shaw.ca) and was shocked to see 1.7 Mbps downloads and 107 kbps uploads (Figure 1). It’s normally 20x that on downloads and 10x that on uploads, so I knew something was wrong beyond just Dropbox. Continue reading Busting Bandwidth Bugaboos: Troubleshooting ISP Speed Problems
I can’t understand a word of this video, but the visuals are hilarious! It’s fascinating watch some users turn on Apple – they’re a company that has specialized in giving users a specific, highly controlled experience that for the most part works really well. But it seems Apple has finally crossed the line with the iPhone 4 “Antennagate” in terms of being too pushy with their users (“You’re holding it wrong”), and some people are lashing back. It’s very interesting to watch this play out.