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Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

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Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#191

Post by reitanqild »

odammit wrote: post #104
blueside wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds no different than my experience with some Oracle and SAP products that we had the unfortunate pleasure of supporting.

Oracle's Responsys is definetly dog shit wrapped in cat shit. I hope you'll never had to deal with that dumpster fire.

Even just trying to install Oracle 11g correctly was hard.

I think it expected to be installed in /usr/local and company procedures demanded that it was installed in /opt (or the other way around).

For this it would consequently misplace some permissions on some of the files causing a later stage in the installer to fail and bork the installation.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#192

Post by jimmaswell »

Spooky23 wrote: post #58
jimmaswell wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of reminds me of these frustrating anti-nuclear advocates that set up a table with some posters at my old college one day. They couldn't give me any real answers why I should support solar wind and hydro over nuclear besides nuclear being "old technology". They had no response to the fact that this state isn't ideal for large scale use of any of the green alternatives or that much more deaths directly result fro…

It sounds like you trolled some kids passionate about a subject to argue for a technology and industry that you don't really understand. Were you prepared to compare the plight of the solar installers who fall off of roofs and get injured to the construction workers injured on the job during various nuclear plant construction projects? Did you count the various victims at Chernobyl? (Epidemiologists project at least…

If they were so passionate then they should've known more. It was likely just something done as part of a class assignment.

Sure, I don't understand nuclear perfectly - it's their job to convince me of their platform and that involves educating.

Yes, I'd say solar was still more dangerous if it resulted in more deaths per kWh.

The context was the US so I was talking about statistics in the realm of US safety standards. Even worldwide nuclear gets a better score than worldwide everything else: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents

I said in my post that the economics of the operation was a valid point. It was also the only point the students at the table didn't give. My overall point was that it was disappointing how they wouldn't just use the real argument and instead relied on faulty reasoning like "it's old."

Being nice how? If you're putting up a table to convince people of some position, swaying people on the fence is what you signed up for.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#193

Post by jimmaswell »

jancsika wrote: post #161
jimmaswell wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of reminds me of these frustrating anti-nuclear advocates that set up a table with some posters at my old college one day. They couldn't give me any real answers why I should support solar wind and hydro over nuclear besides nuclear being "old technology". They had no response to the fact that this state isn't ideal for large scale use of any of the green alternatives or that much more deaths directly result fro…

> They had no response to the fact that this state isn't ideal for large scale use of any of the green alternatives or that much more deaths directly result from solar panel installation accidents alone than nuclear as a whole. Given an uninformed student and a misinformed didact, I admit to having a strong bias toward criticizing the latter. From the Wikipedia page on the human toll of the Chernobyl disaster[1]: > T…

Chernobyl was a plant design that was already outdated at the time and known to be dangerous, ran in the Soviet Union. It's not representative of anything modernly relevant.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#194

Post by semi-extrinsic »

dotancohen wrote: post #126
blazespin wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be more honest if they said "IBM Data AI Division."

How about: With All The Shit On Nails Hmm, I'm having a hard time figuring out the N. Ideas?

"With All The Shit One Needs"?

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#196

Post by staofbur »

reitanqild wrote: post #191
odammit wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oracle's Responsys is definetly dog shit wrapped in cat shit. I hope you'll never had to deal with that dumpster fire.

Even just trying to install Oracle 11g correctly was hard. I think it expected to be installed in /usr/local and company procedures demanded that it was installed in /opt (or the other way around). For this it would consequently misplace some permissions on some of the files causing a later stage in the installer to fail and bork the installation.

Back in about 1999, I was working for a big corporate and one of our Oracle admins lost her shit and had a meltdown, think it was around 8i era. She just got up and walked out shouting "fuck this fucking shit, I quit". This was on a freshly delivered HP N-Class HPUX box and they just couldn't get it to run after a month of going back and forth between HP and Oracle.

I bumped into her last year at Ansible Fest London and she was still angry about it 17 years later!

And that's what Oracle does to your soul :)

Edit: that N class and Oracle NEVER got deployed in the end. It just sat there unused, licenses weren't renewed, it got sheepishly powered down after a few months to save electricity and it got chucked in a skip after 5 years. About £200k of expenditure down the pan.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#197

Post by skgoa »

deepGem wrote: post #113
zoeysaurusrex wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm happy to be harsh because I've had years and years of experience dealing with IBM. Their tools are trash for the cost they want. The majority of their offerings are overengineered and prone to failure in a production setting. They are pros at selling to non-technical management, all the while IT employees get stuck dealing with the aftermath. We ended up getting stuck with the IBM version of work item management,…

What perplexes me is that none of these seem to affect their services business. 39 billion in services revenues is nothing to scoff at. I mean how can a company build shitty products like this and be a world leader in services ? Do these units operate like two separate entities.

A lot of that is consulting on and reselling of SAP products. There are many companies in the world that want to move to SAP and haven't been burned by IBM yet.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#198

Post by semi-extrinsic »

pgodzin wrote: post #112
UnquietTinkerer wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the 60 Minutes segment was just marketing copy handed to them by IBM (how else could they talk for 20 minutes about cutting-edge ML without mentioning Google or Amazon at all?). Watson is introduced as "an AI" - singular - designed to play Jeopardy and then, after he wins, nobly re-purposed to medicine. Charlie Rose even says at one point that "they taught Watson to diagnose cancer", implying that it was the…

Google and Amazon were presumably left out because the segment was in the context of the healthcare field. I don't think DeepMind's healthcare initiatives were very mature at that point. I agree the language is problematic for non-technical viewers, but at the same time these are difficult concepts to explain to non-technical people, and explain the details of what it can't do is obviously much less compelling than f…

> these are difficult concepts to explain to non-technical people

But that's not the problem, is it? It's not that IBM is trying to explain something difficult. Rather, if IBM was trying to be honest, the box that won Jeopardy would be called Watson, and the box they're now trying to sell everyone and their dog would be called "Whitney, Watson's big sister" or whatever. At the very least, "Watson the third".

By calling it the exact same name, you are trying to convince us it's the exact same thing just with more training. Which it's not.

Others mentioned poisoning the well; round here the expression is "pissing in the well", which I think fits much better.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#199

Post by throwaway7645 »

maxxxxx wrote: post #54
throwaway9980 wrote: post #3

IBM vastly over promises with their marketing. It is so frustrating to have to answer questions from the CEO about why we don't solve all our problems with magic beans from IBM's Watson. I understand that this is what they want. They want to drive executives' interest in the product, but I believe they do so at the expense of their goodwill with the tech community. Am I the only one who cringes when these ads air? Ed…

This certainly works with the IT department and top executives in my company. I have seen Watson mentioned in a ton of presentations and they are all super excited about it. In the last 12 months I have been trying to find out about anything concrete they are doing but so far nothing. It seems all talk.

I recommend you read Dilbert more often.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#200

Post by heisenbit »

dangero wrote: post #177

Anything that IBM puts out remember they are a consulting company, so they want to generate a huge brand name. That allows them to charge the consulting prices they need to charge to make this business work for them. IBM Watson is a collection of sort-of-working AI related APIs, but it gets A LOT of press. If they can create an AI brain, then people will believe they can do anything for them in the tech arena and tha…

This is true. However they are also accounting towards AI services. The way it works is that at the beginning a few existing projects are re-classified under the new heading. But over time the revenue is expected to grow. It did not. And other revenue is also not growing - that was why they started this new initiative in the first place. Unless one switches in time to a new growth story in a credible manner one has to make it work at some point in time. Eventually even Wall St. gets a clue and then real problems start.
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