blueplastic

Agreed. I don't think the point of the article to is to say that this is a never-before-seen type of event, but rather that the landscape is shifting again in the hardware space, as it does maybe once every couple of decades... and that software (compilers specifically) are going to be needed to enable and accelerate the shift of many workloads to ML Accelerators.

SPAM!

Looks like the server is overloaded... images in middle of the article aren't loading for me.

I'm pretty sure you can throw IBM Watson's AI at any of these business problems and you can solve it very quickly.

lol, that PDF is referencing Spark 1.3 from March 2015 and to say that you need 12 modern Spark machines to break-even with one machine running a non-distributed ML framework is ridiculously wrong. And he wan Spark on EMR, which was pretty unoptimized back then.

I've been using Thinkpads and Macbooks on and off for the last 15 years, and this gen-5 Thinkpad is easily the best laptop I've ever owned.

Some subtle features of this gen-5 laptop that may not be apparent:

- The audio jack creates no hiss. If you used Thinkpads in the past with sensitive headphones, you'd hear a buzzing noise. The Macbooks never did that and this is the first Thinkpad that is a silent audio jack.

- You can spill water on the keyboard and it'll just flow though.

- Seriously best keyboard in class compared to all other ultrabooks. I really don't like the Macbook keyboard design... the depth on keypress is too shallow and it doesn't have the nice bounceback effect of the Thinkpads.

- Battery life is around 6-7 hours, which is long lasting ThinkPad finally.

I think the build quality of Thinkpads is way more functional and utlitarian than Macbooks. I like the matt screen of Thinkpads more. The touchpoint to use your index finger to move the mouse lets you keep your hand in the typing position. Fingerprint sensor is fast and works well.

Horrible stance.

Yahoo!'s new spinoff, HortonWorks, can become a billion dollar Hadoop company down the line if they carefully navigate around Cloudera and MapR. Not sure how/if that affects Yahoo shareholders.

wtf

Thanks, Jon. That's exactly what I meant.

E-mail is so broken fundamentally, that it's not even funny. I'm surprised more people aren't trying to replace it.

E-mail's based on the idea that it is free to message me and bother me and take a few precious seconds of my stream of consciousness.

If it's free to email people, then of course spammers will flood email channels with their deals and scams.

Ideally, I want a communications platform where only my 200 or so friends, co-workers and friends of friends can message me for free. Anybody else who wants to contact me has to send the message with a $1 bitcoin (interrupting my stream of conciousness price would be custom set by me, so lil' wayne would probably set his price at $75).

If the message from a stranger I got was in fact a cool dude I met at a party last weekend following up on that cat picture, then I'd click "reply and return" to give him back that bitcoin. If I see that the message is from a prince, I'd just ignore it and go buy some gum or something with his precious $1.

The current horrible e-mail architecture feeds giants like gmail, microsoft, yahoo b/c everyone is going to get tons of junkmail and people around 1999 had to start moving to cloud based providers who did free spam detection to parse through people's emails (Outlook Express sucked at spam cleaning). Problem is the web giants are snorting in everyone's private communications. It's as if the US Postal Service offered to deliver all mail for free, but in exchange opened everything and read it and if they thought this is something you shouldn't read or if this is marketing propaganda, so they won't deliver it to the recipient. I think pretty much everyone would think that's a crappyly architected postal service, but I guess with email we shouldn't be thinking about those kinds of things. Let's just figure out some new technical protocol instead, after IMAP and POP and SMTP will be replaced by SPDY or RESTful HTTP right? Yeah, let's build that instead.

True, e-mail is a universal platform, but it sucks.

I do appreciate the reply. The only way I'd feel safe is if you never got or saw my emails. Instead of me sending 5 years of my emails to you, I'd rather you send me 2,000 lines of code to analyze my email locally and locally tell me who I need to follow up with. If your analyzation code came to me, I wouldn't even mind if it did NLP and deeply datamined the emails to tell me who I may have missed following up with.

Ideally, I'd like to see unsecure e-mail replaced by crypto communication systems based on OTR and people locally storing their emails on Raspberry Pis, but that's dangerous stuff and I probably shouldn't have even said that.

Thing is, I'm sure you're nice guys and gals right now, but when you're billionaires and have 500 million people's digital data, evil you will turn.

By the way, good presentation at SVNewTech last night.

Did you totally miss Facebook's existence? Teenagers these days don't even use email. Facebook's sucking in the next generation's messages. Email's too slow and asynchronous they cry. Douglas Rushkoff would bet to differ, but anyway. Facebook's unified messaging was kind of interesting, but I might as well be CCing all my email to Kim Jong-un.

So, why would I trust you with 5 years of all my sent and received emails? Should I take your word for it that you'll just save the email addresses and the sent/received timestamp for each?

at least they're not peeping into your mind

Oh, here's our group's website: accenture.com/techlabs

I work for Accenture R&D in San Jose, CA. Everything I've read here is very different than my typical work day. We're hiring analysts (entry level) and consultants (experienced hires) to work in our research lab. Both on the Research (typically PhD) and Development (typically BA/MA) sides. Click on my username and you'll find my email if you'd like to apply.

The people I work with are doing things like studying NoSQL databases (Cassandra, Riak, HBASE), MapReduce (Hadoop, Cloud MapReduce), cryptography, biometrics, language/sentiment analysis, data visualizations, cloud computing (Amazon, Rackspace, VMWare) etc. We're not like the typical consulting arm of Accenture. We're also not like a typical theory focused research lab.

We're a fun bunch. Recent company sponsored trips have included sailing the bay, indoor skydiving at iFly, snowboarding in Tahoe, white water rafting, wine tasting, hiking, a vegas trip and behind the scenes tour of the SF Giants stadium. We're also known to throw some pretty wicked happy hours.