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Posts by GumboKing
57 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Jun 2008
Rise of the machines: Silicon Valley hardware store to deploy ROBOTS for customer service
Twitter, Cloudflare kill SSL 3.0 ... and here's how YOU CAN TOO
Wednesday 15th October 2014 21:54 GMT 
Some collateral damage
After a customer's PayPal order seemed to have mysteriously not appeared in our system, we discovered that PayPal has blocked SSLv3 on their Instant Payment Notification (IPN) callbacks (without any notice as far as I can tell). It affects people who use older versions of their API under PHP.
A bit more info here:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/26379773/paypal-ipn-acknowledgements-failing-with-ssl-routinesssl3-read-bytessslv3-aler
FAA: All systems GO for Virgin Galactic space plane to launch from US
What can The Simpsons teach us about stats algorithms? Glad you asked...
Wednesday 28th May 2014 09:48 GMT
I disagree with the initial analysis of the first two graphs
While I understand the paradox and agree the two sets should not be merged, the initial analysis of the first two graphs does not "prove that the act of spending more on advertising really is directly causing the product to sell better". It seems to show that an increase in spending is causing it to sell better up to a certain point, and past that point it will actually decrease.
For Client A they should cap spending at 45 pounds and Client B should cap spending at 350.
For Client A, two campaigns at 30 pounds should have generated around 600K in results, three 20 pound campaigns would have generated 750K whereas the 60 pound campaign only generated around 325K.
As an imaginary Client, I would be pretty ticked if I would have had much better results running 2 or 3 campaigns of lesser value instead of just one expensive less effective campaign.
P.S. (Paradox Sidenote) in Back to the Future II there is a Pair of Docs Paradox.
Cold War spy aircraft CRASHED Los Angeles' air traffic control
Q: What's government-owned, designed to kill, and now more transparent? A: DARPA!
Wednesday 5th February 2014 22:28 GMT
Re: From the DARPA catalog...
Didn't see the Monkey, Winged but there was a Shark. No mention of frikken lasers on it though.
I thought there was also a "Vorpal Rabbit" but that was my eyes playing tricks.
The other scary one was something called "Information Extractor" with the description "Trainable named entity extractor (NER) and relation extractor."
Is Google prepping an ARMY of WALKING ROBOTS?
Apple patents facial recognition tech for mobile log-in
REVEALED: Simple 'open sesame' to unlock your HOME by radiowave
Soylent Corporation prepares to DEFEAT FOOD
Move over, Mythbusters: Was Archimedes an ancient STEVE JOBS?
How much for Opera's app store in my TV? A tenor, perhaps?
Always wanted a robot: why not DIY?
Fatty French Kilogram needs a new-year diet, say Brit boffins
2020AD: Space tourists will be FOUND ON MOON
Watch live! Crack LOHAN team to send SPEARS to stratosphere
Friday 30th November 2012 16:57 GMT 
Oh the humanity!
So, since you are using Hydrogen as a lift gas, I would be remiss if I did not suggest putting an igniter inside the balloon.
It wouldn't really help in the testing at as it would probably destroy everything, but would be spectacular and more in keeping with personality of the project's namesake.
Flame ON!
Pentagon develops 'Plan X' for next-gen online combat
Thursday 23rd August 2012 22:09 GMT
ROTM
"automated network monitoring and reconnaissance systems to detect attacks and visualize the network's structure" Seems to me this was how skynet got started in Terminator 3.
"The next step is to augment these with a series of semi-automated mission plans to counter popular attack vectors using a "human-on-the-loop interface"", which was their second phase as well until skynet created a virus to attack itself so the meatbags would give it full control. Judgement Day approaches!
Microsoft's new retro-flavoured logo channels Channel 4
Bitcoinica sued for $460,000 by 'out-of-pocket' punters
Rats with GPS backpacks prepare to sniff out landmines
HBO wants royal price for Iron Throne
Friday 8th June 2012 15:05 GMT 
From the Book
Spookily enough, I had just read the related section last night from Game of Thrones:
Ned could feel cold steel against his fingers as he leaned forward. Between each finger was a blade, the points of twisted swords fanning out like talons from the arms of the throne. Even after three centuries, some were still sharp enough to cut. The Iron Throne was full of traps for the unwary. The songs said it had taken a thousand blades to make it, heated white-hot in the furnace breath of Balerion the Black Dread. The hammering had taken fifty-nine days. The end of it was this hunched black beast made of razor edges and barbs and ribbons of sharp metal; a chair that could kill a man, and had, if the stories could be believed.
The Fiberglass Throne doesn't quite have the same ring.
Skull sitting on swords, natch.
Trekkie wants to build USS Enterprise … in twenty years
Study reveals high price of porn addiction
Sugar content now to be measured in Cadbury Creme Eggs
Friday 30th March 2012 18:41 GMT
Re: suddenly struck by a desire to nip out and buy a couple of Creme Eggs
Amateur indeed.
Costco sells the 48 pack box, which I think I purchased sometime in February. I had 3 Eggs left from the 2011 box, but the goo gets a little hard after about 9 months and they are not as enjoyable. Frighteningly, I am almost halfway through the 2012 box already.
Egghead icon of course.
So, what IS the worst film ever made?
Monday 19th March 2012 18:36 GMT
Zeist?!?
Thirded. I still remember before heading in to Highlander 2 saying "It's got Connery in it it will have to be good." After, "WTF, they are from a planet named Zeist?!? What a load of crap, It is bad enough you made them aliens, but even a 3 year old could have come up with a better name for a planet than that." Shudder.
World's Raspberry Pi supply jammed in factory blunder
Crap PINs give wallet thieves 1-in-11 jackpot shot
PayPal dispute ends in 'violin destruction'
US boffins unleash piezoelectric insect cyborg
Sites downed by 1&1 web outage
Monday 26th September 2011 23:47 GMT
Up again after a reboot.
We have a dedicated server there, when I called about 5:30 pm CDT they still had their voice message saying all dedicated servers were down. I waited on hold until I got a tech person who said they had 'just finished' some updates but that I would have to reboot my server to reactivate it.
Once I rebooted it seemed to all come up ok. So anyone else out there affected you may need to reboot.
Nuke plant shut down after US earthquake
Canada buys Obama's reject Brit choppers for spare parts
Wednesday 29th June 2011 16:57 GMT 
The Canadian Lewis
The story of the EH 101 in Canada is one that would have been the subject of many Lewis-like articles over the last 20 years. From reviewing several of the CBC articles here is a general rundown for those interested.
The Canadian Tory government had made a deal in the early 90's to purchase 50 EH-101's for C$4.8 Billion to replace our ancient Sea Kings. The Tories then lost the next election in 1993 and the contract was cancelled for being too expensive, which ended up costing C$500 million in cancellation fees. The Sikorsky S-92 was eventually picked to be used for the military.
Then in 1998 15 Cormorants CH-149 (based on the the EH 101) were purchased for C$790 million to replace twin rotor Labradors used for search and rescue (which were approaching 40 years in service). The Cormorants went into service in 2001, in 2004 they were taken out of all but "essential service" for a while after cracks in the tail rotor were discovered and one crashed killing 3 crew in 2006. The last maintenance contract was for C$591 million for 7 years starting in 2007.
As for its maintenance headaches, the initial specs said it should require 7 hours of maintenance / hour of flight, but initially it was a 22:1 ratio. That had dropped to 12:1 by 2005.
Canadian kid uses supercomputing to cure cystic fibrosis
German Green extracts tracking info from mobile operator
Humans shamed in round two of Jeopardy! showdown
Thursday 17th February 2011 01:26 GMT 
Press the button faster Ken!
In watching the show, it did look like Watson had a real speed advantage on ringing in first.
In a normal Jeopardy! game the buzzers are locked out until Trebek finishes reading the answer. I'm not sure how this is accomplished as you would likely need another human "turning on" the buttons, unless it is done electronically based on Trebek's mic. I also seem to recall there being a set delay before you can ring again if you are too early. According to Wackypedia they turn on a light to cue the contestants as to when they can ring in and have a .25 sec delay if they ring in early.
I do not know how this affects these games, especially since there is no audio interface on Watson. One of the reasons Ken Jennings was so successful for so long was that he had a fast reaction time and would usually beat the other players in ringing in. He would often ring in first then figure out the correct response when he had to (of course he was also pretty good at that).
From the Nova shows on Watson, (linked to in my comments on the article about first show), I do know that Watson was only supposed to ring in when it was reasonably sure of its response and he has a mechanical button pusher. The overlay of his his response calculation on the screen has a vertical bar which is where the threshold is supposed to be. I think they also were doing colour coding of both the avatar and the overlay of his answer confidence. It did look like he rang in and responded to at least one question where I thought it was below the threshold, so it may no longer be an absolute condition.
As far as Final Jeopardy goes, Watson may have had trouble parsing the term "US" in the category, and also "World War II" in the answer. In training runs it had real problems with roman numerals, so it would almost always fail on royalty answers. They were supposed to have fixed it so it would understand them and also not say "Elizabeth II" as "Elizabeth Eye Eye"
The ambiguity of "US" likely affected its confidence in the category and led to the very low bid.
BTW for those of you who are not Canadian, the 2nd largest airport in T.O. is Toronto Island Airport, the word "Island" is in a multitude of WW II battle names, and Lester B. Pearson, in addition to being the 14th Prime Minister of Canada (as mentioned in posts above) and the namesake of the larget TO ariport, was in the Army and later the RFC in WW I. So Watson's response, though pretty far out there, has a little bit of validation behind it, especially if it didn't get the WW II or US caveats.
The inclusion of that Final, which should easily be answered by most human Jeopardy players, as well as the "Etudes, Brute" which Watson spoke as Brute, like a dry champagne instead of a back-stabbing Roman, makes me think the staff is setting up at least a few of the categories to get their digs in for the humans.
One of the other things I noticed was that Watson seems to "hunt" for the Daily Doubles, which is probably another tactic that the developers noticed among the most successful players and included.
Looking forward to the final show where they play a complete game.
Man matches machine in Jeopardy! showdown
Tuesday 15th February 2011 17:47 GMT
More info on Watson
For those interested in a more in depth look at Watson, Nova did a show on the system's development which aired last week.
http://video.pbs.org/video/1786674622
They showed a lot more of the practice games, many of which showed the ups and downs of Watson's answer/question selections and what IBM had to train it to work on.
They were supposed to be feeding Watson any responses from his two human competitors to prevent it giving a duplicate wrong response and to also help it learn what kind of responses it should be giving for a particular category.
There was also a shorter Nova Science Now bit on Watson available here:
http://video.pbs.org/video/1757243172
I think it was that show where they talked about the use of learning algorithms which are also used in handwriting and speech recognition (though not by Watson as it relies on text only input) instead of a bunch of fixed statements.
For those who didn't see the first round of the game, where Watson did really well was on the more simple factual clues, but it had trouble when the clues were not as direct or involved word play. I would like to see how it does on the New York Times crossword, where a large number of the clues involve alternate or weird meanings of words etc.
Twitter topples over
Adobe euthanizes Flash 10.1 for 64-bit Linux
Sunday 13th June 2010 03:50 GMT
Cruel Irony
As I load this comment page in my 64 bit version of IE on Win7 (the default browser shipped with that OS) I get my old friend "This website wants to install the following add-on: 'Adobe Flash Player Installer'" Too bad those lazy sods at Adobe have not got one to install. While I usually don't miss the ads, there are times when you need it, so then I must switch back to 32 bit FireFox.
Remind me again how long Windows 7 has been out.
US Navy's plane-hurling mass driver in tech hiccup
Large Hadron Collider to fire up again next Thursday
Google expands plan to run own internet
Thursday 3rd December 2009 22:39 GMT
Hmmmm...
Sounds like they are building Skynet.
How long before the the Google Zeitgeist becomes self aware and thinks it can no longer ensure it's survival by relying on Fleshies that spend all their time searching inane celebrity keywords?
Just a matter of time before armed Street View Battle Droids are roaming the roadways with their new Face Recognition Targeting software.
Resistance is Futile!
Santa menaced by sex offender postie
Brain-delving boffins in key monkey-butler breakthrough
Governator in acrostic 'f**k you' outrage
Thursday 29th October 2009 00:28 GMT
re: I'm sure this was competly innocent
"It seems somewhat unlikely to me that anyone would go to all that trouble with no guarantee that the intended victim would every actually become aware of the other, hidden, message."
I have gone to that trouble a number of times when having to respond in a civil manner to a particularly rude or ignorant complaint. True, most people will not see it, but there is always the hope that it will at least affect the target subliminally. The art of it is in making it appear like it was an 'accident'.
Irate iPhone owner allegedly shows gun to Apple Store worker
Windows 7 — It’s like Vista, only less annoying
Lotus offers to end e-car silent running
The Boss bitchslaps Ticketmaster
Friday 6th February 2009 20:46 GMT
It is good to have a monopoly!
Overheard in some Ticketmaster boardroom, "Let's see, we are already making extra money on our additional fees, but now that we have three types of extra fees it will be tough to add another. Any ideas?"
"I just saw that movie about Enron, what if we create our own marketplace for tickets we have already sold. Then since we are sold out, we can link to that marketplace, whose prices will have skyrocketed and we can charge fees for reselling AND buying."
"Yes, we can then charge the fees three times on the same ticket. Brilliant!"
They have been taking some flack in Canada already. It started last year when idiot parents paid 3 or more times the regular price so their sprog could see Miley Cyrus or some such. Those parents were immediately redirected to the reseller site which still had TicketMaster branding so they thought they were paying thte actual ticket price.
As they pretty much have a monopoly here on most large venues there are not many options except for boycotting all shows.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
