superxor 3 days ago | link

I once used Quickoffice on a Symbian S60 phone. I should say, it’s capabilities were pretty impressive. Especially with the meager resources available on those old so-called smart phones.

I hope this helps Google build better native Office apps. Obviously, will also be a big addition to their Docs back-end. But it has always puzzled me, with the infinite resources Google has, it still has not been able to develop a seamless import of MS Office files. Is it really that hard?

   
hesdeadjim 3 days ago | link

Having worked at Quickoffice years ago on the spreadsheet team, I can tell you that yes, it is really, really hard to do well.

People expect when they open their spreadsheet that the formulas they wrote on the desktop will provide the results they see on the desktop. Ok, well it’s just math right? Yes, and no. Excel actually has a lot of bugs with the execution of their formulas, so to be accurate you have to emulate all the mistakes they make. You also have to discover these bugs yourself, as they are not conveniently documented somewhere.

I ended up writing a unit test framework using generated Excel spreadsheets containing permutations of formulas with every possible input, just so I could identify where these bugs might be happening. Then you have to reverse engineer WHY they happen in the first place, and also find out if this was something the Excel team fixed in later releases, or left in because they themselves could not break backwards compatibility.

And this was what I would consider a small problem for us back then. The biggest problem was always round-tripping of unsupported data. The Office file format is large, complex, and full of crap you wouldn’t imagine supporting in a mobile product. However, your users expect that if they open a spreadsheet to change a number on their phone, when they save it and re-open it on the desktop all the fancy formatting and pivot tables still work and haven’t been lost.

Anyways, this is a great purchase for Google and I congratulate all the guys who have put in the hard work to make Quickoffice the amazing product it is today.

— Hacker News

2012.06.09 Saturday ACHK

Cyberpunk is a postmodern and science fiction genre noted for its focus on “high tech and low life.” The name was originally coined by Bruce Bethke as the title of his short story “Cyberpunk,” published in 1983. It features advanced science, such as information technology and cybernetics, coupled with a degree of breakdown or radical change in the social order. Cyberpunk works are well situated within postmodern literature.

Cyberpunk stories have also been seen as fictional forecasts of the evolution of the Internet. The earliest descriptions of a global communications network came long before the World Wide Web entered popular awareness, though not before traditional science-fiction writers such as Arthur C. Clarke and some social commentators such as James Burke began predicting that such networks would eventually form.

— Wikipedia on Cyberpunk

2012.06.07 Thursday ACHK

玩 = play = 角色扮演

— Me@2012-06-04 10:53:35 AM

2012.06.07 Thursday (c) All rights reserved by ACHK

General applications of Bayesian filtering

While Bayesian filtering is used widely to identify spam email, the technique can classify (or “cluster”) almost any sort of data. It has uses in science, medicine, and engineering. One example is a general purpose classification program called AutoClass which was originally used to classify stars according to spectral characteristics that were otherwise too subtle to notice. There is recent speculation that even the brain uses Bayesian methods to classify sensory stimuli and decide on behavioral responses.

— Wikipedia on Bayesian spam filtering

2012.06.06 Wednesday ACHK

The difference between devices which are possible to fail

and the devices which are impossible to fail

is that

when an impossible-to-fail device has failed,

you don’t know how to fix it.

—

2012.06.05 Tuesday ACHK

Bayesian spam filtering (after Rev. Thomas Bayes) is a statistical technique of e-mail filtering. It makes use of a naive Bayes classifier to identify spam e-mail.

Disadvantages

Depending on the implementation, Bayesian spam filtering may be susceptible to Bayesian poisoning, a technique used by spammers in an attempt to degrade the effectiveness of spam filters that rely on Bayesian filtering. A spammer practicing Bayesian poisoning will send out emails with large amounts of legitimate text (gathered from legitimate news or literary sources). Spammer tactics include insertion of random innocuous words that are not normally associated with spam, thereby decreasing the email’s spam score, making it more likely to slip past a Bayesian spam filter.

However with (for example) Paul Graham’s scheme only the most significant probabilities are used, so that padding the text out with non-spam-related words does not affect the detection probability significantly.

Words that normally appear in large quantities in spam may also be transformed by spammers. For example, ? Viagra ? would be replaced with ? Viaagra ? or ? V!agra ? in the spam message. The recipient of the message can still read the changed words, but each of these words is met more rarely by the bayesian filter, which hinders its learning process.

As a general rule, this spamming technique does not work very well, because the derived words end up recognized by the filter just like the normal ones.

Another technique used to try to defeat Bayesian spam filters is to replace text with pictures, either directly included or linked. The whole text of the message, or some part of it, is replaced with a picture where the same text is “drawn”. The spam filter is usually unable to analyze this picture, which would contain the sensitive words like “Viagra”.

However, since many mail clients disable the display of linked pictures for security reasons, the spammer sending links to distant pictures might reach fewer targets. Also, a picture’s size in bytes is bigger than the equivalent text’s size, so the spammer needs more bandwidth to send messages directly including pictures. Some filters are more inclined to decide that a message is spam if it has mostly graphical contents. Finally, a probably more efficient solution has been proposed by Google and is used by its Gmail email system, performing an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to every mid to large size image, analyzing the text inside.

— Wikipedia on Bayesian spam filtering

2012.06.03 Sunday ACHK

Wikipedia, which just recently celebrated its 10th birthday, is astonishing in its breadth and scope, but there’s only so much that any encyclopedia, limited to verifiable facts about discrete nouns, can capture within the entirety of human knowledge. On the other end of the spectrum, sites like Facebook and Twitter allow people to describe their lives and to make personal observations, but on such networks it’s hard to separate the informed opinion from the pure speculation.

The large expanse between the two approaches — the purely objective and the purely subjective — is the terrain that Quora hopes to occupy.

The early leader in social networking, Friendster, had terrible technology. The advertising-heavy MySpace, which dethroned Friendster, was a bit like Yahoo Answers: chaotic and low-rent, prone to spammers and scams. Yet both were immensely popular — until Facebook came along and figured out how to do social networking right.

— Does Quora Really Have All the Answers?

— Wired May 2011

— Gary Rivlin

2012.05.24 Thursday ACHK