Casino City, a flagship website of the Casino City Network, has announced the addition of a directory of 142 online gambling payment methods to its popular Online.CasinoCity.com website, which provides comprehensive profiles and popularity rankings of 2,100 online gambling sites plus the latest news and information on where online gambling enthusiasts can play in today's tumultuous legal environment.
The new directory describes each payment method available at online gambling sites and ranks them in popularity order based on the amount of web traffic received by the gaming sites that use the method. The list is automatically personalized for each visitor, showing only the payment methods used by sites accepting play from the visitor's geographic location and available in the visitor's language. Visitors may change their location and language preferences at any time. They can also order the list of payment methods by number of sites accepting the payment method or alphabetically by payment method name.
When visitors click on a payment method in the directory, they are given some background information on the payment method and also a list of all online gambling sites using that method, ranked by popularity and personalized for the visitor's location and language preferences.
By Staff Writer
http://www.cbronline.com/article_news.asp?guid=9E82D07A-7CE8-41CF-8405-C3D37C9CA3D2
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Computer researchers on the prowl for human "common sense"
Computers might seem smart, but they have no common sense.
Two Carnegie Mellon University researchers using a Web site called the ESP Game are among a growing number nationwide tapping into human brains for common knowledge that can be programmed into computers to improve artificial intelligence.
Grad student Luis von Ahn and his mentor, computer science professor Manuel Blum, hope that search engines such as Google and Alta Vista someday will adopt word labels generated by their ESP Game to help computers see images more like the way humans do.
"People talk about all this unused CPU (computer) power on the planet, but the greatest amount of untapped CPU power on the planet is the human brain," Matthew Burke, an industry analyst with New York City-based Jupiter Research said. "It's just a question of how you loop them into (computer networks) and connect them to it."
Search engines use algorithms _ mathematical recipes designed to solve problems _ to sort, rank and filter pages, text and images on the Internet.
But they can't "see" an image the way a human being does. Instead, the engines rely on the surrounding text to make an educated guess about what the picture shows.
While that works most of the time, it's not foolproof _ and it offers no help to blind Internet users who use special equipment to read the text aloud. When such devices come upon a picture, they simply say "image" without offering any description, von Ahn said.
The ESP game (www.espgame.org) works by pairing a player with an anonymous Internet partner who are both asked to type in words that describe a series of images. The players win points when they match words _ and von Ahn and Blum have another label they can affix to the image in question.
It would take too long for researchers to label every one of the hundreds of millions of images that can be accessed by Google or other search engines and assign five or six word labels to each. But by getting a few thousand people to play the ESP game each day, von Ahn hopes that might be accomplished in a few months.
Spokesmen for Google and Alta Vista were mum on that prospect because they jealously guard the computer secrets their programmers have developed to search the Web.
Some industry analysts don't agree that efforts like von Ahn's will change the search engine landscape all that much.
Sophisticated algorithms can eliminate some of those semantic problems simply by tracking which sites help the most users with specific questions _ and that's generally faster and cheaper than using a phalanx of human editors, said Danny Sullivan who edits a Web site called SearchEngineWatch.com, a branch of Connecticut-based Jupitermedia.com.
"They figure, maybe we can't be 100 percent perfect every time, but we can be fairly good. Maybe we can be really good 90 to 95 percent of the time and that's good enough," Sullivan said. Google boasts that it searches more than 3.3 billion Web pages and that includes an estimated 1 billion images, Sullivan said.
Still, Sullivan said some sites use human editors so that their search engines make some semantic distinctions. For example, if you type the word "Saturn" into MSN.com it suggests three broad categories: the planet, the Sega game system and the automaker.
"That's in part because they had human editors go through those Web pages and say, 'We have three different meanings for the word Saturn,'" Sullivan said.
Other artificial intelligence, or AI, researchers agree that computers need more human, common-sense input.
"Computers don't know very much about the world _ like that clouds are fluffy, and the sky is blue, and people sleep at night. It's called common-sense knowledge; that's actually a technical term," said Push Singh, a graduate student researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "If you buy a copy of Microsoft Windows it can do all sorts of applications, but it doesn't have any common sense in it."
The Open Mind project, begun three years ago (openmind.media.mit.edu) by Singh and others at MIT, solicits common-sense information from visitors by asking them to supply underlying "common-sense" facts that fit a given scenario.
Users are asked to list five things that someone would need to know beforehand to understand a statement like "Bob bought some milk." Three examples are, "Bob probably used money to buy the milk;" "Milk is a kind of food;" and "Bob probably bought the milk at a store."
It's not rocket science, but such common sense is beyond even the most sophisticated computers. For now.
"If we can crack the common sense problem, then we've solved AI," Singh said. "Figuring out the common sense problem is almost the same as being able to build a person."
The Associated Press
http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=10324308&BRD=2212&PAG=461&dept_id=465812&rfi=6
Two Carnegie Mellon University researchers using a Web site called the ESP Game are among a growing number nationwide tapping into human brains for common knowledge that can be programmed into computers to improve artificial intelligence.
Grad student Luis von Ahn and his mentor, computer science professor Manuel Blum, hope that search engines such as Google and Alta Vista someday will adopt word labels generated by their ESP Game to help computers see images more like the way humans do.
"People talk about all this unused CPU (computer) power on the planet, but the greatest amount of untapped CPU power on the planet is the human brain," Matthew Burke, an industry analyst with New York City-based Jupiter Research said. "It's just a question of how you loop them into (computer networks) and connect them to it."
Search engines use algorithms _ mathematical recipes designed to solve problems _ to sort, rank and filter pages, text and images on the Internet.
But they can't "see" an image the way a human being does. Instead, the engines rely on the surrounding text to make an educated guess about what the picture shows.
While that works most of the time, it's not foolproof _ and it offers no help to blind Internet users who use special equipment to read the text aloud. When such devices come upon a picture, they simply say "image" without offering any description, von Ahn said.
The ESP game (www.espgame.org) works by pairing a player with an anonymous Internet partner who are both asked to type in words that describe a series of images. The players win points when they match words _ and von Ahn and Blum have another label they can affix to the image in question.
It would take too long for researchers to label every one of the hundreds of millions of images that can be accessed by Google or other search engines and assign five or six word labels to each. But by getting a few thousand people to play the ESP game each day, von Ahn hopes that might be accomplished in a few months.
Spokesmen for Google and Alta Vista were mum on that prospect because they jealously guard the computer secrets their programmers have developed to search the Web.
Some industry analysts don't agree that efforts like von Ahn's will change the search engine landscape all that much.
Sophisticated algorithms can eliminate some of those semantic problems simply by tracking which sites help the most users with specific questions _ and that's generally faster and cheaper than using a phalanx of human editors, said Danny Sullivan who edits a Web site called SearchEngineWatch.com, a branch of Connecticut-based Jupitermedia.com.
"They figure, maybe we can't be 100 percent perfect every time, but we can be fairly good. Maybe we can be really good 90 to 95 percent of the time and that's good enough," Sullivan said. Google boasts that it searches more than 3.3 billion Web pages and that includes an estimated 1 billion images, Sullivan said.
Still, Sullivan said some sites use human editors so that their search engines make some semantic distinctions. For example, if you type the word "Saturn" into MSN.com it suggests three broad categories: the planet, the Sega game system and the automaker.
"That's in part because they had human editors go through those Web pages and say, 'We have three different meanings for the word Saturn,'" Sullivan said.
Other artificial intelligence, or AI, researchers agree that computers need more human, common-sense input.
"Computers don't know very much about the world _ like that clouds are fluffy, and the sky is blue, and people sleep at night. It's called common-sense knowledge; that's actually a technical term," said Push Singh, a graduate student researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "If you buy a copy of Microsoft Windows it can do all sorts of applications, but it doesn't have any common sense in it."
The Open Mind project, begun three years ago (openmind.media.mit.edu) by Singh and others at MIT, solicits common-sense information from visitors by asking them to supply underlying "common-sense" facts that fit a given scenario.
Users are asked to list five things that someone would need to know beforehand to understand a statement like "Bob bought some milk." Three examples are, "Bob probably used money to buy the milk;" "Milk is a kind of food;" and "Bob probably bought the milk at a store."
It's not rocket science, but such common sense is beyond even the most sophisticated computers. For now.
"If we can crack the common sense problem, then we've solved AI," Singh said. "Figuring out the common sense problem is almost the same as being able to build a person."
The Associated Press
http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=10324308&BRD=2212&PAG=461&dept_id=465812&rfi=6
Saturday, October 20, 2007
Firefox updates for Leopard
The Mozilla Foundation has released Firefox 2.0.0.8, introducing support for Mac OS X 10.5 'Leopard' in the release.
The company recommends all users install the update, which also implements security and stability improvements across all its supported operating systems -- Mac, Linux and Windows.
Firefox 2.x users will receive an automated update notification. The update can also be applied manually by selecting 'Check for Updates' from the Help menu.
The organization notes some issues remain when running Firefox on Mac OS X 10.5, principally affecting media players such as Flash and Java.
More information:
http://open.itworld.com/5037/071019firefoxleopard/page_1.html
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/user/174808
More special for firefox : firefox secrets
http://open.itworld.com/5037/050725_book_firefoxsecrets/index.html
The company recommends all users install the update, which also implements security and stability improvements across all its supported operating systems -- Mac, Linux and Windows.
Firefox 2.x users will receive an automated update notification. The update can also be applied manually by selecting 'Check for Updates' from the Help menu.
The organization notes some issues remain when running Firefox on Mac OS X 10.5, principally affecting media players such as Flash and Java.
More information:
http://open.itworld.com/5037/071019firefoxleopard/page_1.html
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/user/174808
More special for firefox : firefox secrets
http://open.itworld.com/5037/050725_book_firefoxsecrets/index.html
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Bill Gates Presents the One (Really Big) Ringy Dingy
For Cisco, Nortel, Avaya and the other companies that make telecommunications equipment, this Tuesday is a sort of D-Day.
That day, Bill Gates plans to introduce Microsoft’s invasion into their business, with a new line of software for what the company calls “unified communications.” That means it is meant to integrate all the ways that people talk to each other: voice, video, instant messaging and more elaborate forms of online collaboration.
If it is successful, this software will accelerate the shift of communications from specialized devices and networks onto Internet-based networks, desktop PCs and microprocessor-based servers. And that, in turn, could challenge the economics of the remarkably profitable telecommunications industry.
There is a great deal of brave talk from existing players about being both a partner and competitor to Microsoft, but in fact they should be about as glad to see Microsoft as the minicomputer industry was to see the upstart three decades ago.
In fact, Microsoft is opening a new front in its software strategy that mimics its Windows and Office approach to desktop and corporate computing.
On Tuesday Mr. Gates and his lieutenant Jeff Raikes will focus on marketing three software packages: Microsoft Communications Server 2007; a client software application dubbed Microsoft Office Communicator 2007; as well as a collaboration program, Microsoft Office Live Meeting.
Now, he argues, the economics of the microprocessor and the Internet will alter the way we communicate.
“As more and more of our communications and entertainment is transmitted over the Internet thanks to e-mail, instant messaging, video conferencing, and the emergence of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), Internet Protocol Television (IPTV), and other protocols, a new wave of software-driven innovations will eliminate the boundaries between the various modes of communications we use throughout the day,” he writes in a memo that will be distributed as part of his presentation to be given in San Francisco on Tuesday.
As he has done previously, Mr. Gates holds out the hope — possibly still a chimera — that in this new converged communications world software will protect us from constant interruption.
It’s an interesting concept, particularly because even Microsoft’s co-founder and chairman will have to admit that the PC and the Internet have done just the opposite so far — without any doubt it seems that the more technology, the more interruptions.
Just ask the Twitter generation.
By John Markoff
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/14/bill-gates-presents-the-one-really-big-ringy-dingy/
That day, Bill Gates plans to introduce Microsoft’s invasion into their business, with a new line of software for what the company calls “unified communications.” That means it is meant to integrate all the ways that people talk to each other: voice, video, instant messaging and more elaborate forms of online collaboration.
If it is successful, this software will accelerate the shift of communications from specialized devices and networks onto Internet-based networks, desktop PCs and microprocessor-based servers. And that, in turn, could challenge the economics of the remarkably profitable telecommunications industry.
There is a great deal of brave talk from existing players about being both a partner and competitor to Microsoft, but in fact they should be about as glad to see Microsoft as the minicomputer industry was to see the upstart three decades ago.
In fact, Microsoft is opening a new front in its software strategy that mimics its Windows and Office approach to desktop and corporate computing.
On Tuesday Mr. Gates and his lieutenant Jeff Raikes will focus on marketing three software packages: Microsoft Communications Server 2007; a client software application dubbed Microsoft Office Communicator 2007; as well as a collaboration program, Microsoft Office Live Meeting.
Now, he argues, the economics of the microprocessor and the Internet will alter the way we communicate.
“As more and more of our communications and entertainment is transmitted over the Internet thanks to e-mail, instant messaging, video conferencing, and the emergence of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), Internet Protocol Television (IPTV), and other protocols, a new wave of software-driven innovations will eliminate the boundaries between the various modes of communications we use throughout the day,” he writes in a memo that will be distributed as part of his presentation to be given in San Francisco on Tuesday.
As he has done previously, Mr. Gates holds out the hope — possibly still a chimera — that in this new converged communications world software will protect us from constant interruption.
It’s an interesting concept, particularly because even Microsoft’s co-founder and chairman will have to admit that the PC and the Internet have done just the opposite so far — without any doubt it seems that the more technology, the more interruptions.
Just ask the Twitter generation.
By John Markoff
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/14/bill-gates-presents-the-one-really-big-ringy-dingy/
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