Artificial intelligence (AI) has a long history, with roots dating back to the 1950s. It was at this time Alan Turing introduced the idea of a thinking machine, and the idea that it is possible to create machines that can mimic human intelligence and perform tasks that normally require human cognition, such as learning, problem solving, and decision making.
A key development in technology was the invention of the digital computer in the 1940/50s. Back then computers took up rooms of space because vacuum tubes just took up lots of space. Computers had the ability to perform complex calculations quickly and accurately, and they laid the foundation for the development of more advanced AI systems. A key component of computers is memory. They too took up lots of space (check out the history of memory). The invention of the transistor in 1947 paved the way to smaller and more compact computers decades later.
In the 1950s, researchers began to consider the possibility of using computers to simulate human intelligence. One of the first researchers to propose this idea was Alan Turing, who is considered to be the father of modern computer science. Turing’s work laid the foundation for the development of the first AI programs, using computers which were designed to perform specific tasks such as playing chess or solving mathematical problems.
In the 1960s and 1970s, AI research focused on developing programs that could understand and process natural language, as well as on creating expert systems that could make decisions based on rules and data. In the 1980s and 1990s, AI research expanded to include machine learning, which involves developing algorithms that allow computers to learn from data without being explicitly programmed.
AI Today
Today, it is common to have Siri, Cortana, Alexa, and Google on our phones or home appliances. Through language recognition, you can ask them anything and they can help you answer things you can normally search on the web. But we know they aren’t quite like what Alan Turing has described.
Nevertheless, there is technology out there now in their infancy where the Turing’s conditions have been exceeded, and where people on the receiving end of the chat session can no longer tell if the other side is actually an artificial intelligence. The system sounds and reasons like a human being. Check out openai.com. and you will see what I mean. Below you will see how the AI responded to my question about “why people celebrate Christmas.”
source: chat.openai.com
There are other AI technologies out there that aid humans in various ways. Check these out:
Novel AI – this technology is based on the same technology at chat.openai.com. However they have monetized the technology to help content creators build stories of certain genres. The assistance comes in the form of content and images.
DALL-E 2 – this technology is the image side of openai.com. You can describe the image you have in mind using text and the AI will create the image you describe.
Below is an image I had the AI create using this description: “an oil painting by Dally of a Japanese garden during the spring just at the first light of the morning“
In my opinion, three things converged to make today’s AI possible”:
Cheap memory: In the 1970s computers ran with as little as 8K of RAM. Today 8K is several orders of magnitude smaller than even the built-in memory cache of common CPUs (Central Processing Units). CPUs come with level 1 to 3 cache, which can go from around 384K to 32MB respectively!
Fast CPUs/GPUs: Today’s CPUs are leaps and bounds better than the original CPUs; CPUs today come with multiple cores (internal CPUs) running at multi-GHz clocks. In the late 1970s CPU only had one core and were running around 4.77Mhz.
Massive access to cloud compute/storage: Thanks to Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft’s Azure Cloud, and Google’s Cloud Services Platform, companies have the ability to develop and research AI technology without having to buy their own hardware.
AI in the Future
Things are changing rapidly in the field of AI. The next major leap in computing technology is in quantum computing. Quantum computing can perform certain computations faster than classical computers. With quantum computing, AI technology may continue to level up!
by admin·Comments Off on Phishing & Other Email Scams
beware of email scams
Several years ago, the most common email scam was the lure of the Nigerian Prince who needed help in moving millions of dollars from his account to a safer account outside his country. And all he needed was a kind-hearted soul who was willing to provide him their bank information to make the transfer. In return, the good samaritan would get a percentage of that money.
What is the aim of these email scams? Money. It is always about money. For the Nigerian prince, once your bank account is compromised, the hacker behind the facade, can siphon off whatever balance you may have in your bank account.
Email Trends
I heard in a conference I attended several months ago, that a white hat hacker put an end to the Nigerian email scam years ago, and that’s why you and everyone else isn’t hearing much from the prince. However, there are a new breed for email scams out there, and they fall into these general categories:
phishing
impersonation
extortion
Like the Nigerian prince scam, these email scam trends are all about money–stealing your money or money you have access to.
Phishing
Phishing’s goal is to steal your account information. It is done through a simple but official looking email from a trusted organization–except it is really bogus. The email might say something to the effect that you need to verify your account at your bank in order to ensure security. To do this, all you need to do is click on a link which takes you to a nice looking web page that looks like the bank’s web page. But it isn’t. It asks you for your account name and password, and after you submit it, it may say something like page can’t be found, something went wrong, redirect you to the actual bank web site, or something else. Regardless, once you click submit, they got your account. That is pure phishing.
If it was your email account that was compromised, then the result of this phishing hack could result in more phishing hacks on your contacts or other folks in your organization if the email account if for work.
Phishing is really the entry point for a hacker’s ability to monetize their efforts.
Impersonation
Anyone can impersonate anybody else on the Internet through email. How? Because anyone can create an email account with almost anyone’s name–provided the account isn’t already taken. And even then, anyone can use anyone’s name as their email display name; that is, if my email address is xyz123@gmail.com, I can use, for example “Prince Charles” as the display name. And if I was in anyway associated with or related to the actual Prince Charles, I may think that the email actually came the the prince.
Impersonation can be monetized in many ways. Two of the most common ways are:
asking for a favor by requesting gift cards
asking for a list of employee information
For the case of the gift cards, the way the perpetrator gets money is by pretending to be a person’s manager or some high ranking official in an organization. The hacker scouts out an organization’s web site and figures out the organizational structure and finds names of managers and direct reports. Once they find this, they are all set.
They simply create an email account on gmail, yahoo, or many other email sources, and sets the display name to the name of the manager whom an employee reports to. The email is sent in a very simple form–asking if the employee is in the office. If the employee responds, the ploy begins with the hacker posing as the manager and that the manager is in a meeting and needs some gift cards. And so the impersonator asks the employee for a favor to purchase one or more gift cards with a promise to get paid immediately after the manager gets out of the meeting.
If the employee agrees to help out, the impersonator asks the employee to simply take pictures of the gift cards and email the pictures back. Once the employee does this, the money is gone and the employee is out a few dollars.
This scenario is playing out everyday across the country. And it is happening non-stop because it works!
Extortion
This one is a little different, and it plays into people’s fears of the ability of hackers to capture people’s activities online. A typical extortion email in this class of scam comes in with the FROM address of the email matching the target’s email address. The claim is that the hacker hacked the target’s email account, and that on top of that, the hacker has videos and pictures of the target’s Internet activities. The hacker claims that they will expose these potentially reputation-killing information to the Internet should the target not pay up. All they need to begin this is your email address.
To pay up, the target would need to buy bitcoin click a link in the email and paste a real long string key into that web page. Once the target pays up, they are safe.
Believe it or not, some people fall for this. And it doesn’t take much success rate for the hacker to make money. They make money, and that is why they do this.
A more destructive type of extortion is the type that infects and encrypts files on your computer. These ones preys on people without any computer anti-virus or anti-malware solutions.
These can come in as an email that looks official claiming that there is an invoice you must pay or your credit will be ruined, or some other threatening reason. In the email is an attachment that looks like an invoice, but when you open it, it installs and runs malware on your computer which encrypts all your pictures, videos, and other documents. You won’t know about it until after a few days when it pops open a page saying that you must pay up to decrypt your files.
In this situation, they too ask that you buy bitcoin to pay for this. After you pay, they will give you a string key to decrypt your files.
Now, I don’t know if this is true, but the hackers seem to keep their word. People’s files are restored after they pay up, but I woudn’t really bet on it. Anyway, if you don’t want to fall prey to this, don’t open any attachments you receive via email unless you know what it is.
Conclusion
If you don’t get anything from this article, get at least this:
You cannot trust anything you get via email. If in doubt don’t open attachments or click links. If the email looks like it is coming from someone you know, call them to verify.
The existing drive was still functional and served as the root drive (drive C).
It had a capacity of 500GB but was short on space due to the massive amount of photos my wife was saving on her existing desktop.
These photos are priceless. I can’t imagine losing these pictures as they are irreplaceable.
Here’s what I planned in order to get the new drive to take over without having to redo everything (from re-installing the operating system and re-installing all her existing applications):
Do a backup of her profile, along with all her files, create a recovery image of the system, and create a system repair disk
Remove the old disk drive, then install the new larger disk drive
Boot of the recovery/repair disk and restore the system image
Done
Backing Up User Profile/Create System Image/Create System Repair disk
Using Windows 7’s built-in backup and restore utility, I proceeded to do three things:
Backup my wife’s user files
Create a System Image
Create a System Repair Disk
Backup My Wife’s User Files
Of utmost importance is to first ensure my wife’s priceless photographs are safe. To do this, I purchased a Seagate Expansion 5TB Desktop External Hard Drive USB 3.0 (STEB5000100) (FYI: This is an Amazon.com affiliate link). This should serve me well for storing file backups as well as the system image I will be creating in the next section.
To launch Windows 7 Backup and Restore utility, click START, then in the search field enter “backup and restore” and this will show the Backup and Restore utility. Select it to open. You should see this simple utility interface pop up:
Backup and Restore Utility
Now click Set up backup and follow the prompts. You should see a screen just like below. In the image, you see arrows pointing to potential backup destinations. In this particular example, my 5TB USB drive isn’t connected, but if it was, it would show up as another disk drive with over 4.5 TB of free space. That was the drive I actually selected for my backup destination.
Target Backup Destination Drive
In general, you will want to select the target drive with sufficient space to take on large backups. After you select the destination drive, click Next and follow the prompts. At a certain point, you will have the opportunity to change any default settings, but in general, unless you really know what you are doing, you can leave default settings as they are. Then invoke the backup now. Depending how much data you have, it could take anywhere from several minutes to a few hours. Mine took a few hours (around 3 hours I think).
Create a System Image
During the backup process, you will have the option to select to have a system image made. Make sure to set that. I did this to save myself a lot of time doing software and driver re-installs. Believe me, it is worth it.
Note that I had problems creating a system image. I figured that this was due to not having enough disk space left on the root drive (drive C) as my wife’s photos used up most of the disk drive space. Having backed up the photos, I proceeded to delete all her photo folders. This was a scary thing because at this point, I am putting my trust in Microsoft’s backup utility to save me should something go south with this process. After doing this, I was able to build a system image.
Create a System Repair Disk
When the system finishes creating both the user file backups and the system image, it will prompt you about creating a system repair disk. I opted to do this. I readied my DVD-R disc; it takes one.
Remove Old Disk Drive and Install New One
At this point in time, I turned off the computer and removed the old disk drive and placed the new one.
Use System Repair Disk to Restore the Saved System Image
This is where the actual recovery process begins. Before I using the system repair disk, I configured the system BIOS to seek the DVD drive first as the boot device, then pressed F10 to save and exit the BIOS setup. I placed my system repair disk in the DVD drive my Gateway NV79, then restarted the computer by simply turning it OFF then turning it ON.
The laptop began to boot from the DVD and determined that I will be doing an image restore. At this point, I still had my 5TB external USB drive connected to the laptop. After the utility gets started, you will opt to restore from an image.
It was at this point that I encountered the error that the system could not restore the image because the system repair disk says “No disk that can be used for recovering the system disk can be found.” After seeing this, I thought perhaps I needed to match the partition configuration of the original drive, so I ran diskpart.exe and tried this. It didn’t work. After trying a few things that didn’t work, I finally gave in by doing a search on google. I found the answer at answers.microsoft.com. It turns out, all I needed to do on the disk drive was to run diskpart.exe, select the drive, and invoke CLEAR on it.
After I did this, the image restore process worked as it should have in the first place.
Everything that was on the original disk drive was restored, less the photos.
To fix this, I simply invoked the file/folder restore within the backup and restore utility and selected the photo folders to be restored.
Conclusion
What I thought was going to be a routine process turned out to be one heck of an effort. What really screwed me up was Windows 7 image restore now working the way it should in the first place without having to execute the DISKPART utility’s CLEAR command on the new drive.
by admin·Comments Off on Windows 10 and PC version of Minecraft
On July 29, 2015, Microsoft released the long awaited Windows 10. Anyone who has Windows 7 or higher gets the upgrade for free. This is a great move for Microsoft in order to quickly get the masses to move over to their supposedly last main Windows version. From here on, Windows 10 users will get updates much like apps get updates.
Anyway, overall the update from Windows 7 to 10 on my computer went pretty smooth. The main hiccup during the update was mainly to the process of switching to an online Microsoft account as the computer login. I followed the steps as prompted, yet the process would just take me around in circles, always coming back to asking me for the my Microsoft account, my password and looking like it was going to work.
I got tired of trying to make it work, so I just cancelled out of it and restarted my computer. Then it happened. It prompted me to login using my online Microsoft account. I typed my password and was able to get into my desktop.
S0 far all the programs I use on it are working except for the PC version of Minecraft. After the upgrade launching Minecraft causes the error “The application was unable to start correctly (0xc0000018).”
At first I thought that I needed to update my version of JAVA. I did that but the error continued. Then I did a search on the web for that error message and I found my answer at http://goo.gl/0iUKo2. I asked that you delete the Windows registry entry APPINIT_DLLS located at:
After I deleted that entry and restarted Windows, I was again able to run the PC version of Minecraft on my computer. Note that I’m not 100% sure if this issue was caused by the update to Windows 10 because I installed the BETA version of Minecraft for Windows 10 before trying to run the PC version. Regardless, if you happen to run into this issue, the solution requires the deletion of the APPINIT_DLLS parameter located at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Windows.
Thanks for reading. Let me know by commenting below when you started experiencing this issue when launching the PC version of Minecraft.
by admin·Comments Off on Online Account Management
Managing Online Accounts
Before 1996, people kept a log of their acquaintances’ or friends’ home addresses and phone numbers using an address book. Soon after 1996, people began to create many accounts. As the use of the web became more accessible to everyone, businesses such as banks and online stores began to make their services available through the web as well. After 2004, a whole slew of other online services came one line: Facebook, Google, MySpace, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and many others.
Today, everything we do on the web requires one form of an account or another. Even the games people play on the Internet require some form of login. So it isn’t too farfetched to say that anyone who is connected to the Web has at least 20 accounts!
That said, unless you make all your accounts exactly the same or you have a super photographic memory, you’ll need someplace to log or record all your account information.
The solution is a log book. One such solution is available online at createspace.com.
by admin·Comments Off on Need a Free Email Marketing Tool?
If you only have less than 2000 subscribers, you can get a free email marketing tool through mailchimp.com. It is easy to set up, and did I say it’s free if you have less than 2000 subscribers?
Note that the free version even allows for 12,000 emails per month. It’s free forever!
by admin·Comments Off on Free Cloud Storage Everywhere!
Cloud Storage (photo credit: Forlanda)
I’ve meant to write about this for some time. Now is as good a time ever, especially with the recent release of Google Drive.
As of this writing, you can get several Gigabytes of cloud storage for free. Yes “FREE”. Everyone likes free, and this article will list several places where you can get anywhere from 2GB to 7GB of free space.
There is another cloud storage solution called the Adrive which provides 50GB free. This is not a typo, it is 50GB of free storage, web interface only though with ads. There is an app for it on Android OS, but it’s not free.
Each solution below supports the following platforms:
Dropbox: Microsoft Windows, Windows Phone, Apple iOS (e.g. iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch), Apple Mac, Android OS
Skydrive: Microsoft Windows, Windows Phone, Apple iOS (e.g. iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch), Apple Mac
Google drive: Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac, Android OS
Amazon cloud drive: Microsoft Windows, Apple iOS (e.g. iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch), Apple Mac, Android OS
Apple’s iCloud: Microsoft Windows, Apple iOS (e.g. iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch), Apple Mac
Sign up for cloud storage now if you don’t have one.
Word of advice…only put files there that aren’t confidential in nature, or information you cannot afford to lose. Also backup your cloud files to a separate external USB drive. It will help ensure you aren’t caught unprepared if your cloud storage provider all of a sudden dissolves.
Are you using other cloud storage solution? If so, please share.
by admin·Comments Off on 101 Websites worth seeing before you die. Really? (part 4 of 4)
This is it. The last post that will complete the 101 websites that may be worth seeing before you die. Here you go:
http://savethewords.org/ – Yes. An interesting site which looks like a massive board with thousands of words posted on it. The idea is to save words that no longer are used by adopting a word and spreading the word.
http://www.asdfjklsemicolon.com/ – No. This is a totally useless site. It is as good as the previous site–twocansandstring.com (also made by the same person. I’m not sure how it even made it to the Maximum PC article. Go figure.
http://www.twocansandstring.com/ – No. Looks boring. It’s a way to chat anonymously. You can ask questions and answer people’s questions.
http://kevan.org/proce55ing/zombies/ – Yes. You need to see this one so that you know that if we actually had a zombie infection, how fast that infection would spread. Fortunately there is no such thing as “zombies.”
http://www.dontevenreply.com/ – No. If you are like me, you have enough emails to read. This site has email thread archives of some communication exchange. I suppose it is supposed to be humorous and entertaining, but not in this format. It feels too much like reading email for work.
http://marriedtothesea.com/ – No. It is somewhat entertaining, but you could probably live not even visiting this site. They seem to be focusing in selling you their merchandise.
http://theoatmeal.com/ – Yes. Very entertaining. Some pages are explicit, so it may not be good for kids to see.
http://www.wordle.net/ – Yes. You need this site to get the gist of the underlying message of any written communication. This site will create a world cloud from an input of text. Try doing this on President Obama’s job plan speech (last 9/8/2011) and you’ll see that what stands out are the following words: right, now, tax, jobs, Americans.
http://htwins.net/scale/ – Yes. Absolutely yes. This site gives you a good perspective on how insignificant we are in the universe, and how massive it is. If this doesn’t prove there is a god, nothing will. This site has a slider that allows you to zoom in or out to see various objects with their relative size and scale.
http://www.sealandgov.org/ – No. This is just a web site for Sea Land. If you are into royalty, this may be the site for you, but definitely not me.
http://bit.ly/eBk8rq – shows all of the above links. If you wish to save time trying to find all the links, this is definitely a site to see before you die.
I’m not sure about you, but I think there are other sites out there worth looking at before you die. If you have one to suggest, please comment below.
by admin·Comments Off on 101 Websites worth seeing before you die. Really? (part 3 of 4)
source: Salvatore Vuono, FreeDigitalPhotos.net
This is part 3 of a 4 part post regarding the February 2011 issue of Maximum PC which touts 101 websites you need to see before you die. In this article, I will continue to post my opinion regarding another 25 websites.
http://hatsproductions.com/organtrail.html – No. I would only recommend this site if you have time to kill, because this website page is basically a video game using graphics and technology based on 1970’s technology.
http://machinarium.net/demo – Yes. Even if you aren’t a computer game aficionado, you’ll at least appreciate the artwork and interesting puzzles here.
http://experiments.instrum3nt.com/markmahoney/ball/# – Yes (just once though). This is another Chrome experiment. It illustrates how multiple browser windows can inter operate through the use of a bouncing ball.
http://www.kokogiak.com– Yes. This guys has some interesting projects. I won’t mention what they are. Just go and check it out.
http://seaquence.org – Yes. This is an interesting way of composing and presenting music.
http://failblog.org – Yes. This is one of the most well known sites (especially on YouTube). It is very entertaining because it is so much like America’s Funniest Videos.
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/play/snake-oil-supplements – Yes. This ought to help you decide which vitamins to get at Costco. The visual data representation and the ability to filter on areas of concern make it easy to determine which one really is snake-oil.
http://www.kongregate.com/games/pastelgames/the-trader-of-stories – Yes. This is like reading an interactive comic book. The game is an adventure. There is no real time graphics, but between the sound and the awesome artwork, it makes for an entertaining play.
http://periodictable.com/ – Yes. I wish they had this when I was taking chemistry during college. It sure would have given me a better sense of what all these elements were.
http://firstpersontetris.com/ – No. This is just a tetris game where rotating the falling block isn’t what you do. Instead, you rotate everything else to make the block or shape land the way it needs to be. It makes you feel like you are in space doing tetris in zero gravity. This is very disorienting.
http://www.kongregate.com/games/icylime/multitask – No. This is a waste of time. If you like to torture yourself with useless multitasking activities, go for it. At the end of the day, it changes nothing, except maybe that you may think how uncoordinated you might be.
by admin·Comments Off on 101 Websites worth seeing before you die. Really? (part 2 of 4)
This is a continuation of a posting (101 Websites worth seeing before you die. Really? (part 1 of 4)) regarding an article I read on the February issue of Maximum PC. In the article, it listed 101 websites that they say you ought to see before you die. I beg to differ on some of the ones listed. What do you think?
http://demoscene.tv – No. For some reason the videos on this site would not play. I tried three different browsers. If it actually worked for me, I might have a different opinion.
http://www.pbfcomics.com – Yes. Good entertaining short comic strips. Look at a few and you’ll get a quick laugh. A little laugh here and there is always a good thing.
http://handdrawngames.com – Maybe. If you like tower-defense like video games, you’ll like this. WARNING! This game can get addicting; you can end up wasting precious time playing this game.
http://zombo.com – No, absolutely not. A waste of time. It seems just babble on and on about you being able to do anything at their site, when in fact, you can do nothing at their site.
http://lparchive.org – No. Seems to be an archive of old games, information about the, and some videos that show the look and feel of the game.
http://tvtropes.org – Maybe. If you are a fiction writer, this could be a good resource for you. This is a wiki site, and it definitely has tons of information to spark writing ideas.
http://autotopsy.ca – Yes. Gives one a very good idea of circumstances anyone of us can be in before an unexpected collision. The visuals and video are knit together to form a very cohesive presentation.
http://web.mit.edu/~jmcmicha/www/globegenie – Yes. You don’t have to physically travel to see the world. This Google map-based web application allows you to virtually teleport and view the world.
http://www.fasco-csc.com/works/crimson/crimson_e.php – Yes. If you aren’t from the generation that was fortunate enough to see the birth of the personal computer age, this site will give you an appreciation for how that generation of programmers created mysteries, puzzle, and adventure games.
http://www.tomscott.com/weather/starwars – Yes. If you are a Star Wars fan, this is definitely where you will want to tune in for weather. The site provides weather and temperature information that it tries to associate with the weather at a comparable location or planet.
http://maddox.xmission.com – Yes. This is an entertaining blog of someone who claims he’s got the best web page in the universe. If you are a sensitive or very politically correct, you can skip this site.
http://www.angelfire.com/trek/caver – Yes. This is an interesting blog by a caver. If you read the logs and look at the pictures and images, you will almost feel claustrophobic. If you don’t like tight places, I don’t recommend this. The bad this about this log was that it was never finished. Could it be that the caver perished?
http://www.ilovebees.com – NO. The site is supposedly about some person who loves bees. However, the site appears to be messed up. I hope it isn’t infected with some sort of mal-ware; and I hope my computer didn’t get infected.
http://www.photosynth.net/ – Yes. This is actually a Microsoft site. It allows you to get a 360 degree view of locations and objects. The content are actually a synthesis of multiple photos to give one a panoramic view of the subject matter. It is awesome, and it allows you the opportunity to contribute to the content.
http://recordtripping.com – No. This site is a game. I’m not quite sure what its objectives are, but the animation and audio sound pretty good. Nevertheless, it felt like a waste of time.
http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com – Yes. It is a good site to visit one time. After the novelty wears out, you’ll just get tired watching the firm it automatically generated for your using the address you provided.
http://balldroppings.com/js – Yes. This is an interesting play on physics and sound. Here you can control the rate at which the balls drop, the gravity, and the walls that the balls will encounter as they drop and bounce.
(FYI: this is an Amazon affiliate link) in hopes to provide my wife’s old Gateway NV79 laptop a new lease on life.
(FYI: This is an Amazon.com affiliate link). This should serve me well for storing file backups as well as the system image I will be creating in the next section.
