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<title>Haaze.com / batteryfast / All</title>
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<pubDate>Fri, 17 Jun 2011 07:10:15 +0000</pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Well-equipped 15-inch HP laptop drops to $349]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=well-equipped-15-inch-hp-laptop-drops-to-349</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=well-equipped-15-inch-hp-laptop-drops-to-349</comments>
<pubDate>Fri, 17 Jun 2011 07:10:15 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>batteryfast</dc:creator>
<category>Technology</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=well-equipped-15-inch-hp-laptop-drops-to-349</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Best Buy and Staples are selling well-configured but inexpensive 15-inch laptops from Hewlett-Packard and Acer based on AMD dual-core processors.This HP 15-inch laptop at Best Buy is a fairly well-equipped system for $349. (Credit:Best Buy)The specifications on the 15.6-inch HP laptop (model: 2000-219DX) are respectable for a $349 system, includingWindows 7 Home Premium, 3GB of memory, a 320GB hard-disk drive (5400rpm), a Webcam, Wi-Fi, Ethernet, and an optical drive. Under the hood, the marquee feature is the 1.6GHz E-350 processor from Advanced Micro Devices. The all-in-one chip integrates AMD's Radeon 6310 graphics silicon onto the main dual-core processor, yielding good performance for its price class. AMD's claim to fame is its graphics silicon (formerly branded as ATI), which offers better performance than the graphics silicon found in processor offerings from Intel. Staples is selling a similarly configured Acer laptop (model: LX.RD502.032) for the same price--$349, sporting a dual-core AMD C-50 processor with Radeon HD 6250 graphics. The price breaks on these two machines herald systems based on newer AMD A series processors. These laptops are expected to become available in the coming weeks from PC makers like HP and Toshiba. Smaller laptops starting at $329 are also available at stores like Costco. That store is selling an 11.6-inch Acer laptop for $329 with the AMD C-50 processor. <br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Taking IBM's supercomputer to Final 'Jeopardy' (Q&A)]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=taking-ibms-supercomputer-to-final-jeopardy-qa</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=taking-ibms-supercomputer-to-final-jeopardy-qa</comments>
<pubDate>Thu, 16 Dec 2010 08:11:02 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>batteryfast</dc:creator>
<category>Gaming</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=taking-ibms-supercomputer-to-final-jeopardy-qa</guid>
<description><![CDATA[When you consider mashing up supercomputers and games, there's little doubt that many people think of IBM's Deep Blue Grand Challenge project--which beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a famous 1997 showdown--as the standard by which all future projects would be judged.Now, IBM is trying to outdo itself with Watson, another supercomputer Grand Challenge that, this time, will attempt to beat the world's most successful players of the long-running hit TV game show &quot;Jeopardy.&quot;Eric Brown, a manager on IBM Research's Watson project, talked with CNET about building the computer that could beat the world's best 'Jeopardy' players.(Credit:IBM Research)And while &quot;Jeopardy&quot; might not be the first game show to cross your mind as being worthy of a full-scale four-year IBM Research project, Big Blue thinks that the Alex Trebek-hosted show offers one of the most important natural-language processing challenges it has ever come across.IBM has been working on--and talking about--the project, code-named Watson (see video below), for some time. And this fall, it conducted dozens of tests, pitting Watson against a series of former &quot;Jeopardy&quot; players to see if it was prepared to take on the best in the world.And now, IBM has decided Watson is ready. On Monday, the company announced that Watson will take on two of the most successful &quot;Jeopardy&quot; players in history, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, next February, in a bid to see if its computer is good enough to beat the best humans at this most abstract of word games, and demonstrate its natural-language processing utility for a wealth of other fields as well.Yesterday, Watson Research Manager Eric Brown, sat down for a 45 Minutes on IM interview to talk about the program, and to tout the computer's chances of beating &quot;Jeopardy&quot; kingpins like Jennings and Rutter, who between them, won more than $5.75 million.Q: Well, I want to thank you for taking the time to do this. To start, I wonder if you could quickly sum up the Watson project from your perspective for those readers that aren't familiar with itBrown: The Watson project is a Grand Challenge project being pursued by IBM to build a computer system that can compete on &quot;Jeopardy&quot; at the level of a human grand champion. To solve this Grand Challenge, we have built an automatic open domain question answering system, called Watson. Watson is built on top of IBM's DeepQA (for Deep Question Answering) technology. Why is &quot;Jeopardy&quot; a game worthy of being the follow-up to Deep Blue I understand why--but I wonder if a lot of people would think of &quot;Jeopardy&quot; being worthy of being put alongside chess as an intellectual challenge.Brown: Before Deep Blue, people though it was impossible to build a computer system that could beat a grand master at chess, which made that a very interesting Grand Challenge problem. But chess is fairly mathematical and well defined--each game state and the corresponding possible moves can be easily represented by a computer. &quot;Jeopardy&quot; requires understanding natural human language, which, unlike chess, is completely open-ended, is often ambiguous, and requires context to understand. Although humans can easily understand language, building computer systems that understand natural human language is extremely challenging. &quot;Jeopardy&quot; is a fantastic way to push the limits of this technology.I watched the &quot;Why Jeopardy&quot; video, and I was struck by something someone said--the idea of Don't answer a question if you don't think you've got it right. Does that happen with Watson And if so, why would it not know the answerBrown: That's a key element of &quot;Jeopardy&quot;--if you get the answer wrong, you are penalized and the value of the clue is subtracted from your score--not unlike in business where, if you make wrong decisions with bad information, you will get penalized. This means that not only must Watson come up with the correct answer but also a meaningful confidence in the answer to decide whether or not to even attempt the clue. As to whey Watson would not know the answer, perhaps the question should be, how could Watson know any of the answersHere are a few things to consider. First, when playing &quot;Jeopardy,&quot; Watson must be completely self contained--it cannot be connected to the Web. All of the content Watson uses to answer questions is identified ahead of time, before seeing the questions.Second, &quot;Jeopardy&quot; clues can cover any topic. In fact, we analyzed a random sample of 20,000 clues and found 2,500 different kinds of things the clues ask about. With such a broad domain, we couldn't possibly predict every clue &quot;Jeopardy&quot; might ask and build a database of answers. Instead, the DeepQA technology that underpins Watson reads millions of pages of text and uses deep natural language processing techniques to generate candidate answers and evaluate those answers along many different dimensions.Finally, the &quot;Jeopardy&quot; clues are expressed using complex, often tricky, natural human language. Just understanding what the clue is asking for is a challenge.Briefly, what is the source of the content Watson uses to answer questionsBrown: Watson uses encyclopedias, dictionaries, news stories, books, and Web content, among other resources.So, how did the Watson team decide that Watson was ready to take on the top &quot;Jeopardy&quot; championsBrown: Over the last four years of developing Watson, we've evaluated the system in two major ways. First, we run large test sets--say, 3,000 questions--in batch mode to evaluate system performance, conduct error analysis, and improve the system. Results over this many questions give us a statistically significant performance measurement.The second way we've evaluated Watson is by competing in &quot;sparring&quot; matches against former &quot;Jeopardy&quot; players. Last winter we played 79 games against people that had appeared on &quot;Jeopardy,&quot; and this past fall, we played 55 games against Tournament of Champion &quot;Jeopardy&quot; players. These sparring matches have provided a lot of insight into Watson's performance.How confident are you that Watson can beat the champs And how surprised would you be if one of the champs came out on topBrown: We are very confident that Watson will be competitive. However, the exhibition match is just two games, and anything can happen. Watson (or any player, for that matter) could get [unlucky] with the categories or the Daily Doubles. This is another reason why we played the sparring matches--to create a record over a much larger set of games.After these large tests you've done, what kind of questions give Watson the hardest timeBrown: Since we haven't played the final exhibition match yet, I can't give you any specifics. I will say that we're often surprised by some of the clues Watson can get right.In one of the videos  about Watson, I noticed a moment where, when asked to identify two of the men in the R.E.M. song, &quot;It's the end of the world as we know it&quot; with the initials &quot;L.B.,&quot; Watson totally misunderstands and responds, &quot;I feel fine.&quot; What had to change for it to get past those kinds of basic language misunderstandingsBrown: The interesting point here is that humans might perceive that as a &quot;basic language misunderstanding,&quot; but let's look at what's really going on. That kind of clue is challenging because of the many layers. You have to know the lyrics of the song, know what a &quot;person&quot; is, find the people in the lyrics, know what &quot;initials&quot; are, and match the initials to come up with the answer. This requires complex decomposition and nested processing.Tell me what's surprised you most about working on this projectBrown: I think the biggest surprise is how quickly we've been able to push the technology. When we started this project, our state-of-the-art question answering system at the time was nowhere near being competitive at &quot;Jeopardy.&quot; Over the last four years, this team has made incredible progress and solved innumerable challenges, from natural language processing algorithms to scale out and latency. Seeing it all come together has really been amazing.Brown: Another surprising element is the way this challenge has resonated within IBM, with our customers, and with the academic community. People are really drawn to &quot;Jeopardy&quot; as a demonstration of this technology. It has been very rewarding for the entire team.How can what your team has learned on the Watson project be applied to other real-world projects/problemsBrown: Watson is an application of underlying technology that supports better decision making by evaluating candidate answers (or &quot;hypotheses&quot;) with lots of different evidence and algorithms. We see a number of exciting applications of this approach in areas such as the medical domain, business intelligence, help desks, etc.Finally (and this is the standard last question in this interview series), I like to do IM interviews for several reasons: it allows my guest to be more thoughtful and articulate than they might be in a phone or in-person interview' I get a perfect transcript' and instant messaging allows for multi-tasking. So, if you don't mind, can you tell me what else you were doing during the interviewBrown: I had a few IMs from colleagues, and I've talked to a few people that were in and out of the meeting room I'm sitting in. But for the most part I've been focused on this interview.Excellent. Well, thank you very much for your time. I'm very excited by this project, and I really look forward to seeing how it turns out.Brown: Great, thanks very much for the opportunity to share this with you and your readers.<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[preGame 34: Epic Mickey]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=pregame-34-epic-mickey</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=pregame-34-epic-mickey</comments>
<pubDate>Tue, 30 Nov 2010 08:10:23 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>batteryfast</dc:creator>
<category>Technology</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=pregame-34-epic-mickey</guid>
<description><![CDATA[<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Is MyLife the biggest social site youa4a4ve never heard of]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=is-mylife-the-biggest-social-site-youâÂ€Â™ve-never-heard-of</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=is-mylife-the-biggest-social-site-youâÂ€Â™ve-never-heard-of</comments>
<pubDate>Mon, 30 Nov -001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>batteryfast</dc:creator>
<category>Latest News</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=is-mylife-the-biggest-social-site-youâÂ€Â™ve-never-heard-of</guid>
<description><![CDATA[When you think of hot social networking companies, MyLife probably isna4a4t the first one that comes to mind. Or the second. But chief executive Jeff Tinsley said Los Angeles, Calif.-based website is quickly building an audience that can challenge its more famous rivals.Specifically, Tinsley said MyLife had 29.3 million unique visitors in November, a 91 percent increase over the past year, and also up from 26.1 million in October. That might be attributable to heavy TV ad spending, estimated this summer at $1 million a month.Internet research company Compete even shows MyLife overtaking LinkedIn in unique visitors for the past few months. External measurements by companies like Compete are often incorrect, so that isna4a4t definitive proof that MyLife is bigger, but it certainly suggests that the company is becoming a major player.The site also added 2.5 million registered users in November, bringing the total to more than 41 million, Tinsley said.He argued that users come to MyLife for a very different reason than whata4a4s driving visits to Facebook or Twitter. Since the service pulls user listings from other social networks, public data, and proprietary sources (there are more than 750 million profiles in all), people visit MyLife when theya4a4re looking for someone and dona4a4t want to worry about which social network they might be on. MyLife also offers the ability to see whoa4a4s been searching for you, and has been adding features like dating search.So why isna4a4t the company getting more attention in the startup world For one thing, a people search site probably doesna4a4t inspire the high level of activity that you see on services like Facebook and Twitter. But Tinsley said hea4a4s okay with that, even proud that users only come to MyLife when ita4a4s useful for them. In fact, he argued that rather than trying to create more activity, professional networking site LinkedIn should be a4Aprouda4 of the fact that many users only visit when they have a specific purpose.a4AWe&amp;'re not expecting people to come back every single day and just share every single piece of nonsense,a4 Tinsley said.That approach is also reflected in MyLifea4a4s business model, which is built around paid subscriptions for extra features, rather than advertising. The company is approaching 800,000 subscriptions, and in November, its revenue increased 69 percent compared to the same period last year, putting it on an $80 million annual revenue run rate. That may be orders of magnitude less than Facebook, but it means MyLife is profitable, TInsley said.The company was born from the merger of Reunion.com and Wink, and it has raised $25 million from Oak Investment Partners.Next Story: Zynga launches Mafia Wars Atlantic City for mobile phones Previous Story: Nasuni nets $15M to smooth sailing into cloud storagePrintEmailTwitterFacebookGoogle BuzzLinkedIn      DiggStumbleUponRedditDeliciousGoogleMore&amp;8230'          Tags: people search, social networkingCompanies: linkedin, MyLifePeople: Jeff Tinsley          Tags: people search, social networkingCompanies: linkedin, MyLifePeople: Jeff TinsleyAnthony is a senior editor at VentureBeat, as well as its reporter on media, advertising, and social networks. Before joining the site in 2008, Anthony worked at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. He attended Stanford University and now lives in San Francisco. Reach him at anthony@venturebeat.com. (All story pitches should also be sent to tips@venturebeat.com) You can also follow Anthony on Twitter.VentureBeat has new weekly email newsletters.  Stay on top of the news, and don't miss a beat.<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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