Cody Taylor

BillyG noted an RMS interview where he says “‘Software as a service’ means that you think of a particular server as doing your computing for you. If that’s what the server does, you must not use it! If you do your computing on someone else’s server, you hand over control of your computing to whoever controls the server. It is like running binary-only software, only worse: it’s even harder for you to patch the program that’s running on someone else’s server than it is to patch a binary copy of a program running on your own computer. Just like non-free software, ‘software as a service’ is incompatible with your freedom.”

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If the program designed by I.B.M. can beat human contestants, the field of artificial intelligence will have made a leap forward.

We’ve been down this path countless times, but rumors are once again heating up that Apple and Verizon are actively discussing the possibility of creating an iPhone to work on Big Red’s airwaves, according to USA Today’s infamous “people familiar with the situation.” Could the iPhone come to Verizon Wireless next year?!

“Microsoft’s model is not working anymore,” thundered trade journal InformationWeek. “Netbooks hammer Windows revenues for second straight quarter,” declared Greg Keizer of ComputerWorld, another respected trade weekly. – Also, trying to vendor-lock users to the IE browser by making web-apps that only work well with it, is a “Losing Strategy”.

Because all of it seems pretty abstract to innitiates, many people experience difficulties at the start. Even those that would call themselves ‘advanced users’ often don’t know even half of what’s possible.

longacre writes “I.B.M. plans to announce Monday that it is in the final stages of completing a computer program to compete against human ‘Jeopardy!’ contestants. If the program beats the humans, the field of artificial intelligence will have made a leap forward. … The team is aiming not at a true thinking machine but at a new class of software that can ‘understand’ human questions and respond to them correctly. Such a program would have enormous economic implications. … The proposed contest is an effort by I.B.M. to prove that its researchers can make significant technical progress by picking “grand challenges” like its early chess foray. The new bid is based on three years of work by a team that has grown to 20 experts in fields like natural language processing, machine learning and information retrieval. … Under the rules of the match that the company has negotiated with the ‘Jeopardy!’ producers, the computer will not have to emulate all human qualities. It will receive questions as electronic text. The human contestants will both see the text of each question and hear it spoken by the show’s host, Alex Trebek. … Mr. Friedman added that they were also thinking about whom the human contestants should be and were considering inviting Ken Jennings, the ‘Jeopardy!’ contestant who won 74 consecutive times and collected .52 million in 2004.”

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An anonymous reader writes “We have a T1 line coming into our satellite office and we rely fairly heavily on it to transfer large amounts of data over a VPN to the head office across the country. Recently, we decided to upgrade to a 20 Mbit line. Being the lone IT guy here, it fell on me to run cable from the ISP’s box to our server room so I went out and bought a spool of Cat6. I mentioned the purchase and the plan to run the cable myself to my boss in head office and in an emailed response he stated that it’s next to impossible to create quality cable (ie: cable that will pass a Time Domain Reflectometer test) by hand without expensive dies, special Ethernet jacks and special cable. He even went so far as to say that handmade cable couldn’t compare to even the cheapest Belkin cables. I’ve never once ran into a problem with handmade patch cables. Do you create your own cable or do you bite the bullet and buy it from some place?”

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