Tech Giants Trade Punishing Verbal Hooks
July 19, 2010
The addled goose and the goslings enjoy watching humanoids who make lots of money tussle. It is even more enjoyable when the squabble involves technical giants. Here’s the latest Silicon Valley death match. In the aptly titled Larry Page Calls Steve Jobs a ‘Little Bit’ of a Liar, the acrimony is more frightening than Muhammad Ali’s remarks in the run up news conference for the Thrilla in Manila dust up with Smokin’ Joe Frazier. Personally I think Mr. Page and Mr. Jobs are more intimidating to an addled goose. (One of Mr. Ali’s relatives works with the addled goose, and I think she would be terrified of these tech titans’ blows too.)
Image source: http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/sportatorium/DWTS%20-%20AliFrazier.jpg
Mr. Page, a math black belt, says that he doesn’t believe the tech terminator’s assertion that Google created the Android after the iPhone became a success of the iPhone. In fact the math black belt suggests Mr. Jobs is engaging in an activity that is a ‘little bit like rewriting history.’ I had a teacher who later became an Illinois Congressman. Dr. Phil Crane asserted that Joseph Stalin did the same thing with certain textbooks as part of much-needed revisionism.
And those Illinois elected officials. Paragons.
According to the aforementioned Gizmodo.com article, one could see the Android as somewhat similar to the iPhone. Coincidence? The addled goose is frightened and cannot think clearly. The whole thing has an air of
Excellent wretch! Perdition catch my soul
But I do love thee! and when I love thee not,
Chaos is come again.
Fascinating.
Stephen E Arnold, July 19, 2010
Freebie
Oracle and Its Silence May Dissolve OpenSolaris Board
July 19, 2010
Oracle and open source might have more difficulty than Mel Gibson and his significant other.
There’s a report of trouble brewing over Oracle keeping things close to the hip about the future of OpenSolaris. The project, which is an open-source version of Sun’s Solaris distribution of Unix, has run into snags since Oracle bought Sun in February.
Frustrated by the lack of open discourse from Oracle, The OpenSolaris Governing Board (OGB) has issued an ultimatum. The accompanying article OpenSolaris Board May Quit Over Oracle’s Silence even goes on to say that Oracle needs to appoint a liaison by August 16. The significance lies in the fact that under those circumstances, the control in OpenSolaris would be returned to Oracle.
Oracle might not worry too much about these things. They are a commercial outfit and all in all, walkouts do attract attention. Still at least one board member understands how damaging these things can be to a firm’s reputation according to comments made by John Plocher.
Will there be a reconciliation? In Hollywood, the publicists decide. The addled goose is happy with the Lucid Imagination approach.
Rob Starr, July 19, 2010
Freebie
Sky Falls, Web Changes or Is It Sky Changes, Web Falls?
July 19, 2010
“It’s Time to Prepare for the End of the Web as We Know It” telling us we should all ready for a change in the Web is true, at least according to Morgan Stanley, a company that should know. It’s no big surprise global internet surfing will be bigger on mobile devices than on PCs in the near future, but to suggest the entire Web will change might be a little premature. It was working this morning, right?
Apps will rule and fun will take over from grandiose design, according to the piece in adage.com. and it wont be enough to repurpose content like newspapers did for the Web in the 1990s. The idea that applications will become search is a popular one. The problem is that no one defines search. In fact, few marketers define anything except their billable hours and even those reports can require a team of linguists to interpret. How many billable hours fit into a 40 hour work week?
A new way of thinking will be necessary..new designs for the apps age, according to Steve Rubel, senior VP-director of insights at Edelman Digital. He makes some good arguments but wasn’t the Web going to be the end of mass media in general way back when? The addled goose never gets it right. Is it the sky falls and the Web changes or is it the sky changes and the Web falls. Well, one or the other.
Stephen E Arnold, July 19, 2010
Silverchair Tagmaster 4
July 19, 2010
There’s a new tagging solution from the Semedica Division of Silverchair that includes automated tagging for a variety of content including medical and scientific text. According to a press release from the company, the Tagmaster has already been used for the semantic enrichment of hundreds of thousands of pages of STM content.
The Tagmaster system works by using an aggressive taxonomy with text analytics to provide an automated tagging process that has a useful domain aware dimension. The advantage here is the fact that the system can be easily integrated into live application and other production workflows.
Tagmaster 4.0 also features a Configuration Dashboard that allows users without technical expertise the ability to adjust the autotagging settings. Silverchair’s Semedica Releases Tagmaster 4.0 Integrated Semantic Tagging Solution is another way the firm enables providers in science technology and medicine to connect through dynamic knowledge applications.
Rob Starr, July 19, 2010
Freebie
Google Metaweb Deal Points to Possible Engineering Issue
July 19, 2010
Years ago, I wrote a BearStearns’ white paper “Google’s Semantic Web: the Radical Change Coming to Search and the Profound Implications to Yahoo & Microsoft,” May 16, 2007, about the work of Epinions’ founder, Dr. Ramanathan Guha. Dr. Guha bounced from big outfit to big outfit, landing at Google after a stint at IBM Almaden. My BearStearns’ report focused on an interesting series of patent applications filed in February 2007. The five patent applications were published on the same day. These are now popping out of the ever efficient USPTO as granted patents.
A close reading of the Guha February 2007 patent applications and other Google technical papers make clear that Google had a keen interest in semantic methods. The company’s acquisition of Transformics at about the same time as Dr. Guha’s jump to the Google was another out-of-spectrum signal for most Google watchers.
With Dr. Guha’s Programmable Search Engine inventions and Dr. Alon Halevy’s dataspace methods, Google seemed poised to take over the floundering semantic Web movement. I recall seeing Google classification methods applied in a recipe demo, a headache demo, and a real estate demo. Some of these demos made use of entities; for example, “skin cancer” and “chicken soup”.
Has Google become a one trick pony? The buy-technology trick? Can the Google pony learn the diversify and grow new revenue tricks before it’s time for the glue factory?
In 2006, signals I saw flashed green, and it sure looked as if Google could speed down the Information Highway 101 in its semantic supercar.
Is Metaweb a Turning Point for Google Technology?
What happened?
We know from the cartwheels Web wizards are turning, Google purchased computer Zen master Danny Hillis’ Metaweb business. Metaweb, known mostly to the information retrieval and semantic Web crowd, produced a giant controlled term list of people, places, and things. The Freebase knowledgebase is a next generation open source term list. You can get some useful technical details from the 2007 “On Danny Hillis, eLearning, Freebase, Metaweb, Semantic Web and Web 3.0” and from the Wikipedia Metaweb entry here.
What has been missing in the extensive commentary available to me in my Overflight service is some thinking about what went right or wrong with Google’s investments and research in closely adjacent technologies. Please, keep in mind that the addled goose is offering his observations based on his research for this three Google monographs, The Google Legacy, Google Version 2.0, and Google: the Digital Gutenberg. If you want to honk back, use the comments section of this Web log.
First, Google should be in a position to tap its existing metadata and classification systems such as the Guha context server and the Halevy dataspace method for entities. Failing these methods, Google has its user input methods like Knol and its hugely informative search query usage logs to generate a list of entities. Heck, there is even the disambiguation system to make sense of misspellings of people like Britney Spears. I heard a Googler give a talk in which the factoid about hundreds of variants of Ms. Spears’s name were “known” to the Google system and properly substituted automagically when the user goofed. The fact that Google bought Metaweb makes clear that something is still missing.
Partner News from BA-Insight
July 18, 2010
I received a link to a news story about BA-Insight, Microsoft SharePoint, and the Fast search system. You can read the material at this link. What interested me is not the endorsement of BA Insight by Microsoft. BA Insight, like other vendors, is a “partner” of Microsoft. Love is expected in this tie ups. What surprised me was that the page on which the story about BA Insight as a partner ran a video featuring a pirate flag, a trip to the commode, and a tour of ESA’s Mars500 and a video about turtle hatchings. I was confused because of the welter of distracting audio and video messages running live and via a link to a webinar. Interesting content-based marketing approach.
Stephen E Arnold, July 18, 2010
Freebie
Barcode Scan Coming to iPhone
July 18, 2010
From the search without search department:
Things keep moving forward where technology is concerned and that’s most apparent when it comes to everyone clamoring over themselves and each other to be the ones to come out with something new in that technology.
So Apple needs to stay on top and that’s why they are looking at NFC-enhanced apps that will let users, among other things, scan a barcode on an item to get the product reviews or check nutritional information on a menu before you order from a restaurant.
Here’s a new approach to findability that plays right into the health consciousness and new consumer awareness.
With this new kind of barcode scanning coming to iPhone, we’ll all be able to make the best choices and keep bad firms and industries on their toes. One of the goslings recalls reading that this idea has surfaced elsewhere. The legal eagles will sleuth out this potential intellectual overlap.
Rob Starr, July 18, 2010
Freebie
What Our Uncle Microsoft Knows
July 18, 2010
They all do it , so it’s unfair to single out Microsoft because pretty much every software vendor or Internet service collects information about you. Even while the experts tell us WAT, Bing and Hotmail do collect data when you use them, they also say they are not as concerned with what Big Brother ( Microsoft) knows as compared to other what other high profile companies collect. Still, they do collect data and here’s a few ways they do it. WAT, the validation process you go through when you first start your computer, doesn’t get too personal in an Orwellian sense but they do get the make and model of your computer and the region and language that applies. Bing and Hotmail get a little closer with IP addresses and unique identifiers contained in cookies. Perhaps you don’t need to worry through. Microsoft asserts that it deletes the IP addresses after six months.
Stephen E Arnold, July 18, 2010
Search and Fax from Oracle Purchasing: Easy as Pie
July 17, 2010
Every once in a while I realize why Oracle database administrators are thrilled with their jobs. I don’t use facsimiles too often any more. I still have a fax machine, and I use it to communicate with one of my three legal eagles. None of these folks is into electronic mail, SMS, or taking telephone calls. A post on the San Francisco Blogger Community reminded me of the hula hoops that Oracle administrators must keep swinging to accomplish simple tasks.
Assume you have run a query on the Oracle table and you have the information required in one of those plain Jane Oracle text reports. You have to fax that report to 20 field offices. Do you code the fax numbers into the Brother MFC 8820D or do you write a custom script, pass the Oracle output to the Omtool Genifax system and sit back thinking about your next vacation?
Oracle certified professionals may go with the vacation method because of the complexity of the process required to perform a quite simple task. Navigate to “How Would I transfer the Info from a PO in Oracle to a Text File That Genifax Can Pick Up and Fax Out?”
The key is an “indispensable report to a content record.” Any questions about why a CFO’s effort to replace an Oracle database centric system with a lower cost, more programmer friendly system? Thought not.
The Oracle administrator when it comes to retrieving a record and faxing it has more power than the top bean counter. That’s why NoSQL vendors face significant push back when pitching alternatives to the decades old Codd database in my opinion. From my vantage point in the goose pond, the cost of using certain traditional enterprise information systems may force abrupt, non linear change.
For some organizations, the shift will come too late in the game to have a material impact I fear.
Stephen E Arnold, July 17, 2010
Search the Old Fashioned Way. Bing, Google, Not Needed
July 17, 2010
Sorry. Could not resist. Navigate to “Oldest Written Document Ever Found in Jerusalem Discovered by Hebrew University.” Quite a story of traditional search and retrieval. A 14th century BCE document surfaced in Jerusalem.
Here’s the passage I noted:
The words the symbols form are not significant in themselves, but what is significant is that the script is of a very high level, testifying to the fact that it was written by a highly skilled scribe that in all likelihood prepared tablets for the royal household of the time, said Prof. Wayne Horowitz , a scholar of Assyriology at the Hebrew University Institute of Archaeology. Horowitz deciphered the script along with his former graduate student Dr. Takayoshi Oshima, now of the University of Leipzig, Germany.
The conclusion I drew is that writing systems may have been older and more sophisticated than I was taught at university. This type of search and retrieval returns a zero on Bing and Google. Useful reminder that not all information resides in these systems. Nothing against Bing and Google, of course. I just like the idea of old fashioned, down and dirty research and human-centric translation.
Stephen E Arnold, July 15, 2010
Freebie
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
