Artificial Artificial Intelligence: Amazon Mechanical Turk (beta) April 20, 2007
Posted by Kathy in Internet.add a comment
Computers perform many tasks much better than humans … but not all. Perhaps the world’s best computer is a human being. Perhaps you’ve heard of the SETI@Home project which harnesses the distributed computing power of individuals’ home machines in order to to search for space aliens. What if you replaced all the computers with people?
That’s the idea behind Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk. (What’s a mechanical turk?) Requesters submit HITs, or Human Intelligence Tasks, that they would like worked on by a human. Participants in the Turk find these tasks and complete them. What’s more, the workers get paid. (Not much, mind you — you couldn’t buy a soda with the reward most HITs provide.) If you’re a programmer, imagine that rather than writing a function to handle a certain job, you replace that function call with a person. Instead of distributed computing, would Amazon’s idea be called distributed humanity?
Check out Amazon Mechanical Turk
View an amusing HIT that pays $10
The Fishnet Radio Episode 8: Home Networking April 19, 2007
Posted by Kathy in Gadgets & Hardware, Internet Radio (Podcast).add a comment
You know that all those boxes with blinking lights have something to do with your Internet service, but you’re not sure what. Listen to this episode to learn a little bit about the key hardware components in a home network.
Desktop Wallpapers by Hamad Darwish April 17, 2007
Posted by Kathy in Internet.add a comment
Hamad Darwish is a Kuwaiti photographer who was commissioned by Microsoft to photograph wallpaper images for the new Vista operating system. Hamad has made his gallery of gorgeous images available for free at the following web page:
http://www.hamaddarwish.com/vista.html
Use one of the download links at the bottom of the web page to get the collection.
Windows XP: Disable auto-restart after automatic update April 11, 2007
Posted by Kathy in Internet, Software.1 comment so far
This web site just eliminated one of my biggest peeves about Windows. I hate when I leave my computer in a certain state overnight and return to it the next day to find that it has been automatically rebooted. Power failure? Nuh-uh. After I log in Windows nonchalantly informs me that an update was applied that required a reboot, so Windows took it upon itself to restart my computer. Never mind that I had several browser windows open that are now gone (thank you, Firefox session restore), or several documents open that I was viewing or editing. I have effectively lost my computing train of thought. Fortunately I found a web site that explains how to disable this vexing behavior. I’ll restart my computer when I’m good and ready, thank you very much.
(I applied this “fix” to Windows XP, Service Pack 2.)
HopStop.com – Subway Directions and Bus Directions April 6, 2007
Posted by Kathy in Internet.1 comment so far
Now even the most apprehensive travelers can navigate major American cities with ease. HopStop is like Mapquest for public transportation. If you want to get around New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, or Washington, D.C., type your starting and ending addresses into HopStop and it will calculate a subway or bus route, or a combination of the two. You can set your preference for a route that will require more or less walking or transfers. And you know the initial disorientation of coming above ground at an unfamiliar subway station? For some stops — get this — you get a 360-degree photographic view of the surrounding area, complete with an arrow indicating which way to walk.
