There's better solutions than this! (Score 1) on Monday July 19, @11:15PM Comments: 1 by Kanel on Monday July 19, @11:15PM (#32956500) Attached to: Wind power surges disrupting grid
This is a well known problem but the article dosn't even beginn to discuss the solutions. Which is very convenient for the windmill owners.
There's basically two solutions: Either you store the extra power for later in some kind of battery, or the grid has both windmills and some other kind of renewable power that can quickly step in or out with swings in windmill electricity. The textbook example is hydro power. The output from a hydro plant can be planned in advance since you have a reservoir you'r tapping from and how much electricity you produce can be changed by the flick of a switch. Unlike coal and nuclear powerplants, hydropower can in principle respond to an unanticipated demand in a matter of seconds.
Fascinatingly, a hydro power plant can also act as a battery. When windmills are producing excessive amounts of electricity at low prices, the electricity can be used to pump water back up into the reservoir, to be depleted later when the price is higher.
If you don't have a hydro power plant nearby, it's possible to store electricity in other ways, both in special batteries designed for windmills, pressurised air in underground caves, e.t.c. But this article only mention one solution: Build more grids. Why is that? So that grid owners will have to make the needed investments and the consumers will ultimately have to pay for it, while the windmill owners get all the benefits.
No. Encryption creates "noiselike" data already while the spread-spectrum method of radio transmissions spread the data in different frequencies. But it could still be detected as a source emitting electromagnetic radiation.
Actually, I think a lot of companies are collecting a lot of data because people _think_ that it will be useful in the future. If the data mining gurus says that a database of consumer behaviour is worth billions, then that's something a company can list as their assets. Drives up the perceived value of the company and the stock price.
To be precise, you can publish as much as you like once the patent application has been handed in at the patent office. You don't have to wait until the patent is granted, which could be years later
You can't patent something that has already been published or is out in the open. The Facebook news is well known so this means one of two things:
1) This is a patent that was filed years ago, before facebook launched the feed. In the years since the filing, facebook has probably developed their feed away from the original proposal in the patent
2) The patent contains something new that facebook has not implemented in today's facebook and which is not published elsewhere. In that case, what?
A system like this can work in two ways. Either the similarity measure computes a "distance" between the music by analyzing the sound and metadata, or it maps a band to a group of people that like it and then maps from this group back to other bands the group likes.
If the system is employing the latter, we have a problem. If we select only popular bands or pick bands randomly, there's no hidden wisdom of the crowd for the algorithm to extract. We can't blame the software, only ourselves
Most algorithms in machine learning and data mining are either very simple or complicated but very generic.
In your case the recommendations are based on a similarity metric not on the music itself but on those who like it. Really popular bands are useless for characterising a music lover since the group of people who like pink floyd will be so diverse. Because of that, it won't be able to map from pink floyd to users and back to bands similar to pink floyd:-(
We've been both promised personal recommendations and been threathened with personalized advertisement, yet I hardly ever see any of it.
Take Youtube I thought there was something fancy behind it but now that it displays _why_ it's recommending a clip, you can tell that it's extremely simple. Being a practictioner in machine learning and AI myself, I must confess that most industry implementations in our field is 10% very simple stuff, with 90% boring database and infrastructure code around it.
No news websites allow personalization, Google has (supposedly) only minor tweaks for the individual user. There's the recommendation system at Amazon, true, but it stands out only because it's the only one worth mentioning. (May I have overlooked some music streaming sites here?)
Compared to what we can do with search engines, the state of the art and the implementations are dismal. Is it a Really Hard Problem (TM) ? Consider the Netflix competition. Several groups worked feverishly to improve on the inhouse Netflix recommendation system and did so, by only 10%. Can we really hope for a breakthrough?
Sandwiches should have a "requires 1g gravity (not included)" sticker to avoid this.
Come to think of it, it's incredible what it takes to eat a sandwich. Not making it, just eating. You need a gigantic massive body to create the gravity needed to hold the sandwich together, an atmosphere to smell the sandwich in and plenty of oxygen made by faraway and totally unrelated plants to be able to digest it. Not to mention you and your ancestors need to have spent millions of years developing a jaw with which to chew it.
Now I like the subway chain just as much as the next guy, but considering that the whole universe has come together to make their sandwiches work, I think they'r hyping themselves. (I'm sure some of those oxygen-producing plants would be happy if we shared some of the monetary profits with them too:-)
I've met plenty of researchers and engineers in the oil industry and I've read and heard more oil industry upper management than what's healthy. I can assure you that their opinions on climate change are roughly the same as that of the general population. Most of them believe humans are playing a major role.
Some vocal US companies and persons excepted ofcourse. When viewed from a global vantage point, the US is the odd one out in many regards. Oil-people outside the US didn't even like George W. Bush!
Something has changed in the world, if our source for the latest internet phenomenas is the New York Times. It's as if I've become my parents, learning of hackers via a botched newspaper report or this here "Internet Chat" thingy from watching Ally McBeal.
I don't really buy that the carriers like Verizon are controlling the software on subsidized phones, this is more an issue with incompatible smartphones from different providers. I think we're painting with a cliché here.
You mention J2ME. I don't know what involvment from the mobile operators / carrier providers you refer to. J2ME was developed by Sun, now owned by Oracle, which has pledged continued support of J2ME. It depends heavily on those who make phones, like Nokia and Ericsson, but what has operators like Orange and Verizon had to do with it?
Anyway, seeing as Apple outlaw anything that itself download and run executable code on the IPhone, both Flash and Java is prohibited on IPhones. Steve Jobs even wants to rid the Apple computers of Flash and the next logical step would be to rein in Java. If things additionally are as bad as you say with the other phones, Java is in a really tight squeeze, much worse than we thought.
An Apple representative have openly admitted that their App store is not a cashcow. According to him, they break even but not much more. (Compared to Apple's other incomes I guess) The app store is useful because it adds value to the IPhones, which Apple then sell more of. It's the sale of phone itself which is the main income.
With this business-strategy in mind, we need to ask why phone companies such as AT&T and Telenor moves in. Why do they support a scheme which is most successfull as a way to sell more phones? Remember, these companies do not produce phones themselves. Is it because they'r uncomfortable with the power that Apple and Google now wield in the phone market and wish to support "nicer" businesspartners like Ericsson and Nokia?
Or are we seeing a hint that the network providers have come up with a new business plan, to compete against Apple and Google? What do they have up their sleeves?
Ok so they find that humans are genetically homogeneous compared to other species. But how do other species develop diversity? One way is to have isolated populations. If we imagine that humans were different from chimps and other primates in that humans travelled far and wide, there would be no isolated groups of humans, the whole of central africa would be effectively one gene pool. That alone could make humans less genetically diverse than other primates, without invoking any theory of a near-extinction.
You'r just making that up. The norwegian state has access to more economy-related information than for instance the US. The Nazi's usage of norwegian records receives scant mention in the daily debate here in Norway.
The european SMS "culture" appears more widespread and mature than the US one. It has been a killer app since the late 90's, when prices dropped. I recall being surprised around 2002 when talking with US friends and realizing that many of them had cellphones with no SMS capability. "surely your cellphone is broken or something?" I asked.
As for cheap, in parts of Africa there's almost a whole "language" based on the messages you can send just by calling and hanging up before it answears. the time of day or no. of missed calls forms a code that can be transmitted for free.
private text messages are being recorded in the US as well, by the government and possibly private enterprises too. Recall the text messages sent on 9/11, which was posted anonymously on wikileaks.org.
The only difference between the west and china is that they act upon the monitored data more extensively, the breach of privacy is the same.
If this works, it could have several implications that is not immediately visible:
When the data locally, between two nodes, look like gibberish, does it make it harder to charge traffic by the content in it? Like how a provider may in the future, with IPV6 charge you more per megabyte for say, downloading streaming video than for websurfing. Unlike IPV6 encryption, even the sender and receiver identities would be obfuscated.
If network coding ends at my ISP, it could still charge me. Websites could also charge the ISP if network coding is used merely to transmit data, not store it as the article also hints at. But network coding would end at my ISP simply because there's only one cable between it and me. With a wireless connection, network coding may offer a great advantage if the user is allowed to connect to several wlan transmitters simultaneously. Not only would this put a spanner in the works for charging-by-content, it may also make our habit of being subscribed to a single ISP seem archaic!
After all, it's only fair that the end-users should enjoy the same level of redundance the internet was originally built with:-)
Slashdot Mirror
There's better solutions than this! (Score 1) on Monday July 19, @11:15PM Comments: 1 by Kanel on Monday July 19, @11:15PM (#32956500)
Attached to: Wind power surges disrupting grid
This is a well known problem but the article dosn't even beginn to discuss the solutions. Which is very convenient for the windmill owners.
There's basically two solutions: Either you store the extra power for later in some kind of battery, or the grid has both windmills and some other kind of renewable power that can quickly step in or out with swings in windmill electricity. The textbook example is hydro power. The output from a hydro plant can be planned in advance since you have a reservoir you'r tapping from and how much electricity you produce can be changed by the flick of a switch. Unlike coal and nuclear powerplants, hydropower can in principle respond to an unanticipated demand in a matter of seconds.
Fascinatingly, a hydro power plant can also act as a battery. When windmills are producing excessive amounts of electricity at low prices, the electricity can be used to pump water back up into the reservoir, to be depleted later when the price is higher.
If you don't have a hydro power plant nearby, it's possible to store electricity in other ways, both in special batteries designed for windmills, pressurised air in underground caves, e.t.c. But this article only mention one solution: Build more grids. Why is that? So that grid owners will have to make the needed investments and the consumers will ultimately have to pay for it, while the windmill owners get all the benefits.
No. Encryption creates "noiselike" data already while the spread-spectrum method of radio transmissions spread the data in different frequencies. But it could still be detected as a source emitting electromagnetic radiation.
Actually, I think a lot of companies are collecting a lot of data because people _think_ that it will be useful in the future. If the data mining gurus says that a database of consumer behaviour is worth billions, then that's something a company can list as their assets. Drives up the perceived value of the company and the stock price.
To be precise, you can publish as much as you like once the patent application has been handed in at the patent office. You don't have to wait until the patent is granted, which could be years later
You can't patent something that has already been published or is out in the open. The Facebook news is well known so this means one of two things:
1) This is a patent that was filed years ago, before facebook launched the feed. In the years since the filing, facebook has probably developed their feed away from the original proposal in the patent
2) The patent contains something new that facebook has not implemented in today's facebook and which is not published elsewhere. In that case, what?
A system like this can work in two ways. Either the similarity measure computes a "distance" between the music by analyzing the sound and metadata, or it maps a band to a group of people that like it and then maps from this group back to other bands the group likes.
If the system is employing the latter, we have a problem. If we select only popular bands or pick bands randomly, there's no hidden wisdom of the crowd for the algorithm to extract. We can't blame the software, only ourselves
It's been a while since the viewpoints in Slashdot articles have challenged my opinions. A case of the chicken and egg question? :-o
Most algorithms in machine learning and data mining are either very simple or complicated but very generic.
In your case the recommendations are based on a similarity metric not on the music itself but on those who like it. Really popular bands are useless for characterising a music lover since the group of people who like pink floyd will be so diverse. Because of that, it won't be able to map from pink floyd to users and back to bands similar to pink floyd :-(
We've been both promised personal recommendations and been threathened with personalized advertisement, yet I hardly ever see any of it.
Take Youtube I thought there was something fancy behind it but now that it displays _why_ it's recommending a clip, you can tell that it's extremely simple. Being a practictioner in machine learning and AI myself, I must confess that most industry implementations in our field is 10% very simple stuff, with 90% boring database and infrastructure code around it.
No news websites allow personalization, Google has (supposedly) only minor tweaks for the individual user. There's the recommendation system at Amazon, true, but it stands out only because it's the only one worth mentioning. (May I have overlooked some music streaming sites here?)
Compared to what we can do with search engines, the state of the art and the implementations are dismal. Is it a Really Hard Problem (TM) ? Consider the Netflix competition. Several groups worked feverishly to improve on the inhouse Netflix recommendation system and did so, by only 10%. Can we really hope for a breakthrough?
Not all wars have a winner. Did we learn nothing from watching "Wargames" ?
Sandwiches should have a "requires 1g gravity (not included)" sticker to avoid this.
Come to think of it, it's incredible what it takes to eat a sandwich. Not making it, just eating. You need a gigantic massive body to create the gravity needed to hold the sandwich together, an atmosphere to smell the sandwich in and plenty of oxygen made by faraway and totally unrelated plants to be able to digest it. Not to mention you and your ancestors need to have spent millions of years developing a jaw with which to chew it.
Now I like the subway chain just as much as the next guy, but considering that the whole universe has come together to make their sandwiches work, I think they'r hyping themselves. :-)
(I'm sure some of those oxygen-producing plants would be happy if we shared some of the monetary profits with them too
I've met plenty of researchers and engineers in the oil industry and I've read and heard more oil industry upper management than what's healthy. I can assure you that their opinions on climate change are roughly the same as that of the general population. Most of them believe humans are playing a major role.
Some vocal US companies and persons excepted ofcourse. When viewed from a global vantage point, the US is the odd one out in many regards. Oil-people outside the US didn't even like George W. Bush!
Something has changed in the world, if our source for the latest internet phenomenas is the New York Times. It's as if I've become my parents, learning of hackers via a botched newspaper report or this here "Internet Chat" thingy from watching Ally McBeal.
I don't really buy that the carriers like Verizon are controlling the software on subsidized phones, this is more an issue with incompatible smartphones from different providers. I think we're painting with a cliché here.
You mention J2ME. I don't know what involvment from the mobile operators / carrier providers you refer to. J2ME was developed by Sun, now owned by Oracle, which has pledged continued support of J2ME. It depends heavily on those who make phones, like Nokia and Ericsson, but what has operators like Orange and Verizon had to do with it?
Anyway, seeing as Apple outlaw anything that itself download and run executable code on the IPhone, both Flash and Java is prohibited on IPhones. Steve Jobs even wants to rid the Apple computers of Flash and the next logical step would be to rein in Java. If things additionally are as bad as you say with the other phones, Java is in a really tight squeeze, much worse than we thought.
An Apple representative have openly admitted that their App store is not a cashcow. According to him, they break even but not much more. (Compared to Apple's other incomes I guess) The app store is useful because it adds value to the IPhones, which Apple then sell more of. It's the sale of phone itself which is the main income.
With this business-strategy in mind, we need to ask why phone companies such as AT&T and Telenor moves in. Why do they support a scheme which is most successfull as a way to sell more phones? Remember, these companies do not produce phones themselves. Is it because they'r uncomfortable with the power that Apple and Google now wield in the phone market and wish to support "nicer" businesspartners like Ericsson and Nokia?
Or are we seeing a hint that the network providers have come up with a new business plan, to compete against Apple and Google? What do they have up their sleeves?
Ok so they find that humans are genetically homogeneous compared to other species. But how do other species develop diversity? One way is to have isolated populations. If we imagine that humans were different from chimps and other primates in that humans travelled far and wide, there would be no isolated groups of humans, the whole of central africa would be effectively one gene pool. That alone could make humans less genetically diverse than other primates, without invoking any theory of a near-extinction.
You'r just making that up. The norwegian state has access to more economy-related information than for instance the US. The Nazi's usage of norwegian records receives scant mention in the daily debate here in Norway.
As for cheap, in parts of Africa there's almost a whole "language" based on the messages you can send just by calling and hanging up before it answears. the time of day or no. of missed calls forms a code that can be transmitted for free.
private text messages are being recorded in the US as well, by the government and possibly private enterprises too. Recall the text messages sent on 9/11, which was posted anonymously on wikileaks.org. The only difference between the west and china is that they act upon the monitored data more extensively, the breach of privacy is the same.
"Ants" in the network is an idea that has been around for a decade. For a short while it got a lot of interest as a network-routing tool
We don't really know how information is propagated in the brain. :-(
If this works, it could have several implications that is not immediately visible:
:-)
When the data locally, between two nodes, look like gibberish, does it make it harder to charge traffic by the content in it? Like how a provider may in the future, with IPV6 charge you more per megabyte for say, downloading streaming video than for websurfing. Unlike IPV6 encryption, even the sender and receiver identities would be obfuscated.
If network coding ends at my ISP, it could still charge me. Websites could also charge the ISP if network coding is used merely to transmit data, not store it as the article also hints at.
But network coding would end at my ISP simply because there's only one cable between it and me. With a wireless connection, network coding may offer a great advantage if the user is allowed to connect to several wlan transmitters simultaneously. Not only would this put a spanner in the works for charging-by-content, it may also make our habit of being subscribed to a single ISP seem archaic!
After all, it's only fair that the end-users should enjoy the same level of redundance the internet was originally built with