I still believe that Jobs has made one hell of a positive impact on society.
No he didn't. In retrospect to the whole of the 7 billion, he's made an implant on maybe 10%. He's made a minor impact on western culture.
Who the hell even implied that the man made a positive impact on every soul in the world? I said 'society,' implying 'western culture,' and specifically, the geek technophile part of that culture.
Sorry to offend you by complimenting someone you hold in low regard.
But unfortunately, this thread will turn into yet again another opportunity for anyone who even implies indirectly anything positive about Apple or their products to be accused of Trolling and met with mind-bogglingly uncivil replies by people who can find insult where none exists merely by reading a comment which can be interpreted as a slight against the brand of computer they're typing on or the operating system upon which it runs.
I've been a happy Mac owner since 1988 and while there are times I am unhappy with AAPL, now included, I still believe that Jobs has made one hell of a positive impact on society. We wouldn't be where we are without him, and he continues to trailblaze. Go. Steve!
That's an interesting point, and I believe it came up in prior threads on this topic.
Jeopardy's 'answers' generally include a clue to help the player intuitively confirm that his/her response is accurate. Does Watson algorithm use these, or does it just 'brute force' the lookup in its vast memory?
TFA sez that Watson must trigger a mechanical switch to buzz in. But yea, this is a trivial engineering problem, and Watson still has an advantage in reaction time.
I know this is/., but read TFA, it will answer most of those questions.
In the article, they mention that the computer gets the question as text. Does anyone know exactly when the computer receives the question?
Well, remember this is Jeopardy, so the contestants receive the 'answer,' and must supply the 'question.'
And in the interest of even-handedness, I suspect that Watson is provided the text version of the 'answer' at the same time that the text of the 'answer' is revealed to the human contestants.
When I watch Jeopardy, I seldom wait to hear Trebek read the 'answer' aloud before I start figuring out the 'question.' It's available on the screen as text, and I can read much faster than Trebek speaks. (And I assume this is a key players' strategy in the live game, too.)
I just wonder how this all works for those "video answers" provided by the blonde cutie or the academic-looking bro...
No, the point is don't lower the hammer on something just because it could have infringing uses... or even because, in practice, some uses are infringing.
If that were the case, cars would be banned because they're used to break laws. Knives would be forbidden because they are used to commit assault. Hell, words would be outlawed because they can be formed into libel.
Because I own two pairs of reading glasses *and* wear contacts. As I age, my extreme myopia is combining with presbyopia to require me to keep around several pairs of glasses for different applications: A pair of +1.50 glasses for desk work, reading and computer use, a pair of +2.50 glasses for electronics work, and I sometimes wear both for reading those tiny letters on SMD resistors, etc.
The days are over when I could wear spectacles for my myopia and just remove them for very close work. My eyes just don't focus close anymore at all.
I'd love a practical pair of variable magnification glasses for work.
400W x 24H x 18 [days] + 400W x 12H x 12 [days] = 230400 Watt-hours = 230.4 kWh
At an average rate of 12.78 cents per kWh, that works out to about $29.44 -- not a whole lot, really.
Now, change that to the GP's "more typical setup," using 4000 Watts of lighting, and your cost of electricity becomes $294.40 - still cheap really considering the value of the product.
This analysis completely ignores tiering, where you may pay more for kWh above the baseline allotment, which is the practice of my gas company. This may very well raise the price to the $800 figure the GP asserts.
Considering a typical terrestrial noise floor is about -90dBm, your talking in a jet wash analogy is not inaccurate for either scenario.
Because SNR is SNR (assuming we're not getting into the realm of ECM or correlated noise).
SNR and channel bandwidth (and a few other things we can hold constant in this example) give you your BER. If your BER is too high, then you either need to talk louder, narrow your bandwidth, or use an error correcting code. Usually some combination of all three. There are solutions, and plenty of engineers ready to take on the challenge.
The point is, they've gone from concluding it's impossible to showing us how it's possible. If you want to continue believing it's impossible, go ahead. Someone else will solve the problem.
From the test videos of the RQ-16 that I've seen, the thing is almost as loud as a police helicopter, too.
Its nickname is Thunder Bunny: it formerly had two omni antennae on the turbofan pods, not one, thus the name. (They look like 6 dB wifi Omni antennae, but a little longer.) And it's gasoline-powered, with two turbofans.
The thing is a gas-powered ducted fan, and weighs about 20 lb, so it's hard to get both a decent payload fraction and mission endurance out of something that heavy and power hungry. You could add bigger gas tanks, but you quickly reach a point where your useful payload capacity gets too small. (In other words, you can trade radios and cameras for more gas, but it would only add a few more minutes of flight time and then what's the point without getting video back?)
Also, it's ugly as sin and makes quite a racket. Soldiers refer to it as the 'flying trash can' and 'Thunder Hawk' or sometimes 'Thunder Bunny' -- lovingly, of course.
There are much better VTOL UAV implementations coming down the pike (AV's SP2S, for instance) but right now the T-Hawk is the only one with an FAA Certificate of Airworthiness for UAVs, allowing domestic operations by nonmilitary entities, so Miami-Dade has no other options for a UAV that can hover.
Korotkevich and co say the weakness of the transmission signal doesn't matter because ground-based receivers can be made hugely sensitive, certainly much more so than mobile ones.
Considering we can communicate with interplanetary (and now some technically interstellar) probes with received signal strengths on the order of -200 dBm, and we can build arbitrarily large transmitters/receivers on the ground, and health and status telemetry doesn't require huge bandwidths (on the order of 10^2 bps), I'd say he's right.
Well, I hesitated to even use the word 'quality' to avoid this kind of semantic argument.
Simply put, the Macintosh delivered what a lot of people wanted. In the ISO9000 sense of the word quality, it met their requirements. It met mine: As a heavy Windows user, I was delighted to be able to use a GUI that made sense to me. I found the Mac environment a lot easier to maintain and with the transition to OSX, I was able to nearly abandon Windows entirely.
Other people have different requirements. I advise a lot of people, including my wife, to choose Windows computers because Windows and/or the hardware it runs on better meets their requirements. (The ones whom I would advise to use *nix don't solicit my advice, nor do I think they need it.)
Regardless of how you define it, Apple has sold a LOT of Macs. Somebody likes them, so Apple did something right. Call it quality, bullshit, or whatever... from a business standpoint it was a success. My original point was that this iPhone strategy doesn't seem consistent with the successful model that AAPL has employed in the past. (But yes, I forgot about the Shuffle, which others have since brought up.)
Troll? LOL! Which part of my post is a troll to you?
- Claiming there's a valid reason to pay more for Macs? - Claiming that there are cheaper, "rickety pieces of crap?" - Claiming that AAPL proved there's a reliable market share for people willing to pay more? - Claiming that Macs offer "quality and real, practical utility?"
None of those are trolls, my friend. You are just far, far too easily trolled.
I never claimed or even implied that Macintosh or any other AAPL product is "better over everything else." You just inferred that from my claim that Macs are better than some strawman POS.
The point was that the people who prefer the more expensive option enough to save their money and delay gratification are NOT going to be blindly loyal to some fruity logo or a corporate identity. And we certainly aren't the type to come onto/. and start a platform war.
But we do forget sometimes how any mention of the platform in a positive manner is an incitement to those looking for a platform war. Sorry - my bad.
I own an iPod shuffle, though it was a gift. I wish it had a lot more memory, but it's a nice thing to have in my beach bag. I'm happy with it, because it does its job and cost me nothing. But I see your point.
(I believe I spent more money on its earphones than the giftgiver did on the iPod, though.)
This was the rebuttal I was expecting. +1: Insightful for seeing the Other Side.
Yes, it's true that many of the iPhone purchasers are new Apple customers, and it's also true that Apple has nearly saturated the market of Apple faithful with deep pockets. Therefore, introducing a low-end model to appeal to an even wider market of phone users may very well be a valid short term strategy.
In the long run, though, half of the Macintosh owners I know IRL aren't happy with the iPad/iPod/iPhone lockdown strategy and are clamoring for Android devices. They are the high end market that Apple will lose with the strategy described in the OP.
The other half are the ones who have no desire to tinker or customize and are quite happy with the iPhone app market as it is, so I guess AAPL will always have a small guaranteed market and are looking to expand this to include people who can't/won't pay $300 and up for an iPhone.
Slashdot Mirror
I still believe that Jobs has made one hell of a positive impact on society.
No he didn't. In retrospect to the whole of the 7 billion, he's made an implant on maybe 10%. He's made a minor impact on western culture.
Who the hell even implied that the man made a positive impact on every soul in the world? I said 'society,' implying 'western culture,' and specifically, the geek technophile part of that culture.
Sorry to offend you by complimenting someone you hold in low regard.
Thank you. I knew someone would come along and demonstrate my points about hypersensitivity and incivility.
I agree. Thank you.
But unfortunately, this thread will turn into yet again another opportunity for anyone who even implies indirectly anything positive about Apple or their products to be accused of Trolling and met with mind-bogglingly uncivil replies by people who can find insult where none exists merely by reading a comment which can be interpreted as a slight against the brand of computer they're typing on or the operating system upon which it runs.
I've been a happy Mac owner since 1988 and while there are times I am unhappy with AAPL, now included, I still believe that Jobs has made one hell of a positive impact on society. We wouldn't be where we are without him, and he continues to trailblaze. Go. Steve!
I hate you - now I have that stuck in my head!
Baby! OOOOOOooOOoooooh!
That's an interesting point, and I believe it came up in prior threads on this topic.
Jeopardy's 'answers' generally include a clue to help the player intuitively confirm that his/her response is accurate. Does Watson algorithm use these, or does it just 'brute force' the lookup in its vast memory?
TFA sez that Watson must trigger a mechanical switch to buzz in. But yea, this is a trivial engineering problem, and Watson still has an advantage in reaction time.
I know this is /., but read TFA, it will answer most of those questions.
In the article, they mention that the computer gets the question as text. Does anyone know exactly when the computer receives the question?
Well, remember this is Jeopardy, so the contestants receive the 'answer,' and must supply the 'question.'
And in the interest of even-handedness, I suspect that Watson is provided the text version of the 'answer' at the same time that the text of the 'answer' is revealed to the human contestants.
When I watch Jeopardy, I seldom wait to hear Trebek read the 'answer' aloud before I start figuring out the 'question.' It's available on the screen as text, and I can read much faster than Trebek speaks. (And I assume this is a key players' strategy in the live game, too.)
I just wonder how this all works for those "video answers" provided by the blonde cutie or the academic-looking bro...
Best quote from the article:
Truly. Although it sounds threatening to some, the practical applications of the natural language parsing technology will ultimately benefit everyone.
Until, that is, you dial your bank's customer service number from a noisy restaurant, and try to talk to Watson to ask him why your Visa was denied.
(Rutter's quote was a nifty Skynet allusion, but its syntax was mangled by the reporter/editor, so it comes in second best.)
No, the point is don't lower the hammer on something just because it could have infringing uses... or even because, in practice, some uses are infringing.
If that were the case, cars would be banned because they're used to break laws. Knives would be forbidden because they are used to commit assault. Hell, words would be outlawed because they can be formed into libel.
Because I own two pairs of reading glasses *and* wear contacts. As I age, my extreme myopia is combining with presbyopia to require me to keep around several pairs of glasses for different applications: A pair of +1.50 glasses for desk work, reading and computer use, a pair of +2.50 glasses for electronics work, and I sometimes wear both for reading those tiny letters on SMD resistors, etc.
The days are over when I could wear spectacles for my myopia and just remove them for very close work. My eyes just don't focus close anymore at all.
I'd love a practical pair of variable magnification glasses for work.
No, in the first month (30 days) it would use:
400W x 24H x 18 [days] + 400W x 12H x 12 [days] = 230400 Watt-hours = 230.4 kWh
At an average rate of 12.78 cents per kWh, that works out to about $29.44 -- not a whole lot, really.
Now, change that to the GP's "more typical setup," using 4000 Watts of lighting, and your cost of electricity becomes $294.40 - still cheap really considering the value of the product.
This analysis completely ignores tiering, where you may pay more for kWh above the baseline allotment, which is the practice of my gas company. This may very well raise the price to the $800 figure the GP asserts.
Considering a typical terrestrial noise floor is about -90dBm, your talking in a jet wash analogy is not inaccurate for either scenario.
Because SNR is SNR (assuming we're not getting into the realm of ECM or correlated noise).
SNR and channel bandwidth (and a few other things we can hold constant in this example) give you your BER. If your BER is too high, then you either need to talk louder, narrow your bandwidth, or use an error correcting code. Usually some combination of all three. There are solutions, and plenty of engineers ready to take on the challenge.
The point is, they've gone from concluding it's impossible to showing us how it's possible. If you want to continue believing it's impossible, go ahead. Someone else will solve the problem.
From the test videos of the RQ-16 that I've seen, the thing is almost as loud as a police helicopter, too.
Its nickname is Thunder Bunny: it formerly had two omni antennae on the turbofan pods, not one, thus the name. (They look like 6 dB wifi Omni antennae, but a little longer.) And it's gasoline-powered, with two turbofans.
Thunder Bunny will not be sneaking up on you.
The thing is a gas-powered ducted fan, and weighs about 20 lb, so it's hard to get both a decent payload fraction and mission endurance out of something that heavy and power hungry. You could add bigger gas tanks, but you quickly reach a point where your useful payload capacity gets too small. (In other words, you can trade radios and cameras for more gas, but it would only add a few more minutes of flight time and then what's the point without getting video back?)
Also, it's ugly as sin and makes quite a racket. Soldiers refer to it as the 'flying trash can' and 'Thunder Hawk' or sometimes 'Thunder Bunny' -- lovingly, of course.
There are much better VTOL UAV implementations coming down the pike (AV's SP2S, for instance) but right now the T-Hawk is the only one with an FAA Certificate of Airworthiness for UAVs, allowing domestic operations by nonmilitary entities, so Miami-Dade has no other options for a UAV that can hover.
Try http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purgatorio#Seventh_terrace_.28the_lustful.29.
FTFA:
Considering we can communicate with interplanetary (and now some technically interstellar) probes with received signal strengths on the order of -200 dBm, and we can build arbitrarily large transmitters/receivers on the ground, and health and status telemetry doesn't require huge bandwidths (on the order of 10^2 bps), I'd say he's right.
Yifftown just got better!
Fixed to optimize likelihood.
Well, I hesitated to even use the word 'quality' to avoid this kind of semantic argument.
Simply put, the Macintosh delivered what a lot of people wanted. In the ISO9000 sense of the word quality, it met their requirements. It met mine: As a heavy Windows user, I was delighted to be able to use a GUI that made sense to me. I found the Mac environment a lot easier to maintain and with the transition to OSX, I was able to nearly abandon Windows entirely.
Other people have different requirements. I advise a lot of people, including my wife, to choose Windows computers because Windows and/or the hardware it runs on better meets their requirements. (The ones whom I would advise to use *nix don't solicit my advice, nor do I think they need it.)
Regardless of how you define it, Apple has sold a LOT of Macs. Somebody likes them, so Apple did something right. Call it quality, bullshit, or whatever... from a business standpoint it was a success. My original point was that this iPhone strategy doesn't seem consistent with the successful model that AAPL has employed in the past. (But yes, I forgot about the Shuffle, which others have since brought up.)
Troll? LOL! Which part of my post is a troll to you?
- Claiming there's a valid reason to pay more for Macs?
- Claiming that there are cheaper, "rickety pieces of crap?"
- Claiming that AAPL proved there's a reliable market share for people willing to pay more?
- Claiming that Macs offer "quality and real, practical utility?"
None of those are trolls, my friend. You are just far, far too easily trolled.
I never claimed or even implied that Macintosh or any other AAPL product is "better over everything else." You just inferred that from my claim that Macs are better than some strawman POS.
The point was that the people who prefer the more expensive option enough to save their money and delay gratification are NOT going to be blindly loyal to some fruity logo or a corporate identity. And we certainly aren't the type to come onto /. and start a platform war.
But we do forget sometimes how any mention of the platform in a positive manner is an incitement to those looking for a platform war. Sorry - my bad.
Two words: iPod shuffle.
Touche.
I own an iPod shuffle, though it was a gift. I wish it had a lot more memory, but it's a nice thing to have in my beach bag. I'm happy with it, because it does its job and cost me nothing. But I see your point.
(I believe I spent more money on its earphones than the giftgiver did on the iPod, though.)
This was the rebuttal I was expecting. +1: Insightful for seeing the Other Side.
Yes, it's true that many of the iPhone purchasers are new Apple customers, and it's also true that Apple has nearly saturated the market of Apple faithful with deep pockets. Therefore, introducing a low-end model to appeal to an even wider market of phone users may very well be a valid short term strategy.
In the long run, though, half of the Macintosh owners I know IRL aren't happy with the iPad/iPod/iPhone lockdown strategy and are clamoring for Android devices. They are the high end market that Apple will lose with the strategy described in the OP.
The other half are the ones who have no desire to tinker or customize and are quite happy with the iPhone app market as it is, so I guess AAPL will always have a small guaranteed market and are looking to expand this to include people who can't/won't pay $300 and up for an iPhone.
Oh, and way to go with reinforcing the Apple fan stereotype of being insulting and condescending
Stop projecting. You're casting shadows.
Your statement evaluates logically to TRUE.
You clearly haven't met my wife.
My gaming buddies have nicknamed her 'The Paladin.'
I posted; can't moderate.
So here: +1 LOL