Although I could appreciate neither its usefulness nor its performance this is an interesting news : Riya’s visual search took off today. I guess the similarity of name to live.com is purely a coincidental… but my stupided brain always manages to notice such things. Restricting to shopping items, speed are my initial complaints. But whats been more interesting to me is that M$ is managing to make news almost on a daily basis : zune release, 3D views of cities, making friends with one time bitter rival Novell (Eric Schmidt must be watching this development.. 
)… etc. etc. are some that caught my attention. I was really impressed by the billboards thing on maps.live. Perhaps M$ woke up a bit late but is definitely on the right course in safeguarding its traditional domains while using converting its research in visual information processing in to products at a faster rate. Btw, Y! too seems to be gearing up, their image ads being the latest news. What else? Following Paresh’s advice I am going to put in some vision and ML related tech stuff from now on.
Now another silly question. [This one really took some time for me ] : what is common for the digits 2 , 3, 7 and 8 ?
November 9, 2006 at 12:27 pm |
they can’t be at the last digit of perfect squares.
November 9, 2006 at 1:22 pm |
Right. The word ‘digits’ was missing in the orginal version of the question. So had to think hard. hehe. The next thing I was asked was to come with an elegant PROOF!! YUK.
November 10, 2006 at 7:35 pm |
Proof!!! Now that sounds really hard. Could you prove it?
November 11, 2006 at 1:23 am |
Not hard at all.
m = n^2 = (10p+q)^2 = 100 * p^2 + 10 * (2*p) + q^2.
So the last digit can only be (q^2)%10 for q in {0,…,9}.
This set is {0,1,4,5,6,9}… this last bit is by enumeration
.
November 11, 2006 at 12:19 pm |
oh… Well.. thanx