Wikipedia's anonymous editing is a huge headache. It takes the constant efforts of several hundred people just to deal with the vandalism and incoming junk. At least you now have to register to create an article.
Having 1.5 million articles is a bug, not a feature. There are several thousand articles on Star [Wars|Trek|Gate]. There's one for every Pokemon. There's one for every episode of South Park. There's one for every city alderman of Calgary since the city was founded.
One for every station on most subway lines of the world.
A sizable fraction of Wikipedia is dreck like that. It's so easy to add.
Then there's stuff for which Wikipedia is just the wrong tool for the job. There are articles for a huge number of CDs, but they're not organized into a useful database like Gracenote. There are articles for musicians, actors, and movies, but they're not in a database like IMDB with all the proper connections. There are articles for books, but they're not catalogued as a library would catalogue them. There are articles for most US state highways, but they're not organized into a map or atlas system. It's an "if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" problem.
In time, Wikipedia will either have to tighten up who can edit, or the thing will sink under all the dreck and vandalism. Actually, Wikipedia probably peaked in quality a while back. It's rare today that anyone adds an article that matters. Look at the last 50 new articles added; perhaps one or two actually belong in an encyclopedia.
you can get all the pro-Commie rubbish you can stomach.
After the USSR tanked, the Stanford Bookstore had a sale: "All Communism 40% off". I still have a copy of Gorbachev's last address to the Central Committee. I regret not buying a copy of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia in English; that's now a collector's item.
Although I just got my degree the other day and they "Confirmed" it on this shoddy carbon copy of a dot matrix printout...
That's what I got when I graduated from Stanford in 1985. I finished at the end of a quarter, but not at the end of the academic year. So I got a printout on a dot matrix printer. It was a real letdown. Eventually, many months later, the fancy diploma showed up in the mail.
Firefox goes to 100% CPU utilization, hangs, then crashes if you close the window. That's with the latest Firefox and the previous one. (Some really wierd stuff happened with the previous version of Firefox, including typing going into right-to-left mode for English.)
What those guys seem to make is a tuneable laser, one where the color can be changed dynamically. Last month, they announced it as a breakthrough for fibre optic data transmission. That's why they have "more colors" than old fashioned RGB systems. This will be useful in presenting pictures to species which have more than three-color vision. (Birds have at least four color vision, and see further into the UV than humans; some bird species have more than four color sensors.)
Other than that, having more than three display colors isn't that useful. It's useful for printers because of ink limitations, but that's a different problem.
It's unclear how this translates into a display, but I suspect it's something like a DLP display with field-sequential color.
One big pain with this idea is that it brings back scanning. We finally have displays that don't flicker at all, and they're so much more restful to watch. Going to a scanned technology is a step backwards.
We now know that's wrong. The increase in prices from $20/bbl to $60/bbl only produced a modest increment in supply, and very little of that increase is from new sources. It surprises economists how inelastic oil supply is is, but it doesn't surprise geologists. Read Deffeyes. There is no remaining "long tail" in oil. Once there was, but we're in the tail already. The easy fields were pumped out years ago. There's never been another Spindletop, at 80,000bbl/day from one well, back in 1900. The US average today is ten barrels a day per well.
Demand is also rather inelastic. The runup from $20 to $60 resulted in about a 1% decrease in consumption.
Organic food is mostly a scam. It's really a way to crank up the price. The farming cost differential for "organic" crops is small, but the retail price differential is large.
You've been had by Whole Foods.
Whole Foods is amusing. They have a huge booze section. Looks like a liquor store that also carries food.
The problem with restaurants seems to be pasta. There's been this huge move towards Italian restaurants, where, by running generic carbohydrates through an extruder, they can produce something for which they can charge serious money. French cuisine takes real work in the kitchen, and competent chefs. Italian restaurants can be run by minimum-wage labor.
Why not go back to the days of looking up phrases in the manual?
I still remember an engineering application for the Mac which used that approach. Just before shipping the product, they made some change to the manual which forced repagination of some of the later pages. So when the program asked for "the last word on page 20", it would work fine, but if it asked for "the last word on page 250", it would fail. Grrr. Took me weeks to figure out what was wrong, and even longer before the company finally corrected the problem.
Active winch support systems have been used for movie stunts for a few years now. For a good overview of how this works, rent "Underworld: Evolution" and watch the special features. It's really funny. First the stunt guys practice the stunt on a big padded mockup of the set until they get it right. The movements are recorded. Then, on the actual set, the actors are pulled through the same motions by servo-controlled winches. In post-production, the wires are removed from the images.
Yes, that's how Kate Beckinsale does all those high jumps and landings.
This may be a bad sign. Now they can turn off features by remote control, insist that you connect frequently to get updates, introduce new bugs remotely, and try to force you to sign up for new "revenue streams". Just like Microsoft and Tivo.
The SCO vs. IBM lawsuit has done quite a bit for open source.
SCO went up against the GPL, and had to back down.
Nobody laughs at the GPL any more.
If someone has to really defend the GPL, it's hard to beat the team of Cravath, Swayne and Moore, the world's leading commercial law firm, funded by IBM, the world's biggest computer company.
Companies are no longer afraid of legal FUD about open source. That stopped several years ago. Right after SCO threatened big companies, including Goldman Sacks and Damlier-Chrysler, and were laughed off.
The SCO lawsuit has validated open source and the GPL. We don't have to worry about that problem any more.
Note that on Slashdot, not everyone has moderation privileges. Moderators aren't selected entirely randomly, either. Only users somewhere near the median posting rate are selected. This filters out both new users and overly active users. It works surprisingly well.
The US Congress has no constitutional authority to compel testimony of any sort.
The Supreme Court disagrees:
"A legislative body cannot legislate wisely or effectively in the absence of information respecting the conditions which the legislation is intended to affect or change; and where the legislative body does not itself possess the requisite information-which not infrequently is true-recourse must be had to others who do possess it. Experience has taught that mere requests for such information often are unavailing, and also that information which is volunteered is not always accurate or complete; so some means of compulsion are essential to obtain what is needed." (McGrain v. Daugherty, 273 U.S. 135, 174 (1927))
"The power to investigate and to do so through compulsory process plainly falls within [the definition of Congress' legislative function]. This Court has often noted that the power to investigate is inherent in the power to make laws." (Eastland v. United States Servicemen's Fund, 421 U.S. 491, 505 (1975))
Sony doesn't need somebody to make the fanboys happy. Sony needed to (1) get their box into the stores in volume by Xmas (2) at a price comparable to the competition and (3) with some games that were visibly better than anything on the PS2. So far they've blown (1) and (2). We'll have to wait and see about (3).
Not a laser rangerfinder. Not even a sensor
on
Lego Mindstorms + Lasers
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
My first thought on reading that was "wow, somebody built a laser rangefinder for Lego Mindstorms". No such luck.
Biggest problem with amateur robotics is crappy sensors and lack of feedback. It's getting better, especially in Japan, but slowly.
This is OK. Because this is no longer an urgent issue for Congress, the bill to legalize
it probably won't make it through Congress before the election. Especially with the Republican leadership distracted by their pedophile problem.
By the time this gets to court, either or both houses of Congress will be controlled by Democrats. Which means that Congress can and will investigate this.
Remember, Congress has the real power in the United States. It doesn't look like that when both houses are controlled by the party that has the White House, and party discipline is strong, but that's an unusual situation, and one about to end. The United States Government works better with some tension between Congress and the President; it keeps both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue from going off the deep end.
Remember last year? Remember Microsoft botching the XBox 360 launch? Booking too much retail shelf space and not delivering product? Furious retailers? A product with heat dissipation problems? A weak selection of games at launch?
That's where Sony is this year.
2007 for the PS3 will probably look like 2006 for the Xbox 360.
The PS3 will slowly launch over the next year, and finally start to sell in volume for the Xmas 2007 season. Probably at a lower price. This will give developers another year to
get the Cell processor figured out, so the games will be better.
This is the price of increasing console complexity - the launch phase has more problems.
Regarding the PS3 price drop, the Wal-Mart buyer says
"We'd certainly like to see parity on pricing, but we have not had that conversation with them yet."
That should be read as "Sony will drop the price to Wal-Mart, or else."
Bear in mind that this is one of the very few people whose position on price really matters. The PS3 is crucial to Sony. Wal-Mart doesn't really need to carry it at all, let alone give it much shelf space. In fact, the PS3 is a rather high-priced product for Wal-Mart. They can move PS2s at $129 (and that's the new slim-line PS2) in volume. The PS3 will be a niche product to Wal-Mart until the price comes down.
That slim-line PS2 is worth watching. That's a mid-life kicker for the PS2, and the first time that's really happened in the videogame console market. That could be the killer product for this holiday season. The Xbox 360 and the PS3 get all the press attention, but the downsized PS2 will generate the profits this season.
Lucas is really a production designer who also writes and directs. He's a great production designer, but a terrible writer. If he makes a $20 million movie, someone else had better write it.
Sometimes, in acting classes, students are tortured by making them do a staged reading from a Lucas movie. Without all the special effects and an industrial-strength symphony orchestra, it falls flat.
Lucas is really the world's leading second unit director.
"Second Unit - To hell with dialogue, let's blow up something."
Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia's anonymous editing is a huge headache. It takes the constant efforts of several hundred people just to deal with the vandalism and incoming junk. At least you now have to register to create an article.
Having 1.5 million articles is a bug, not a feature. There are several thousand articles on Star [Wars|Trek|Gate]. There's one for every Pokemon. There's one for every episode of South Park. There's one for every city alderman of Calgary since the city was founded. One for every station on most subway lines of the world. A sizable fraction of Wikipedia is dreck like that. It's so easy to add.
Then there's stuff for which Wikipedia is just the wrong tool for the job. There are articles for a huge number of CDs, but they're not organized into a useful database like Gracenote. There are articles for musicians, actors, and movies, but they're not in a database like IMDB with all the proper connections. There are articles for books, but they're not catalogued as a library would catalogue them. There are articles for most US state highways, but they're not organized into a map or atlas system. It's an "if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" problem.
In time, Wikipedia will either have to tighten up who can edit, or the thing will sink under all the dreck and vandalism. Actually, Wikipedia probably peaked in quality a while back. It's rare today that anyone adds an article that matters. Look at the last 50 new articles added; perhaps one or two actually belong in an encyclopedia.
you can get all the pro-Commie rubbish you can stomach.
After the USSR tanked, the Stanford Bookstore had a sale: "All Communism 40% off". I still have a copy of Gorbachev's last address to the Central Committee. I regret not buying a copy of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia in English; that's now a collector's item.
Although I just got my degree the other day and they "Confirmed" it on this shoddy carbon copy of a dot matrix printout...
That's what I got when I graduated from Stanford in 1985. I finished at the end of a quarter, but not at the end of the academic year. So I got a printout on a dot matrix printer. It was a real letdown. Eventually, many months later, the fancy diploma showed up in the mail.
This business of calling surface chemistry of finely divided powders "nanotechnology" is a bit much.
(Apparently it's a Java bug. If you disable Java, the page loads, and complains you have Java disabled.)
Try this:
-
Go to Entrust.
-
Click on "Login".
Firefox goes to 100% CPU utilization, hangs, then crashes if you close the window. That's with the latest Firefox and the previous one. (Some really wierd stuff happened with the previous version of Firefox, including typing going into right-to-left mode for English.)What those guys seem to make is a tuneable laser, one where the color can be changed dynamically. Last month, they announced it as a breakthrough for fibre optic data transmission. That's why they have "more colors" than old fashioned RGB systems. This will be useful in presenting pictures to species which have more than three-color vision. (Birds have at least four color vision, and see further into the UV than humans; some bird species have more than four color sensors.)
Other than that, having more than three display colors isn't that useful. It's useful for printers because of ink limitations, but that's a different problem.
It's unclear how this translates into a display, but I suspect it's something like a DLP display with field-sequential color.
One big pain with this idea is that it brings back scanning. We finally have displays that don't flicker at all, and they're so much more restful to watch. Going to a scanned technology is a step backwards.
We now know that's wrong. The increase in prices from $20/bbl to $60/bbl only produced a modest increment in supply, and very little of that increase is from new sources. It surprises economists how inelastic oil supply is is, but it doesn't surprise geologists. Read Deffeyes. There is no remaining "long tail" in oil. Once there was, but we're in the tail already. The easy fields were pumped out years ago. There's never been another Spindletop, at 80,000bbl/day from one well, back in 1900. The US average today is ten barrels a day per well.
Demand is also rather inelastic. The runup from $20 to $60 resulted in about a 1% decrease in consumption.
Organic food is mostly a scam. It's really a way to crank up the price. The farming cost differential for "organic" crops is small, but the retail price differential is large.
You've been had by Whole Foods.
Whole Foods is amusing. They have a huge booze section. Looks like a liquor store that also carries food.
The problem with restaurants seems to be pasta. There's been this huge move towards Italian restaurants, where, by running generic carbohydrates through an extruder, they can produce something for which they can charge serious money. French cuisine takes real work in the kitchen, and competent chefs. Italian restaurants can be run by minimum-wage labor.
Use this link for the printable version on one page, instead of ten tiny pages full of banner ads.
Why not go back to the days of looking up phrases in the manual?
I still remember an engineering application for the Mac which used that approach. Just before shipping the product, they made some change to the manual which forced repagination of some of the later pages. So when the program asked for "the last word on page 20", it would work fine, but if it asked for "the last word on page 250", it would fail. Grrr. Took me weeks to figure out what was wrong, and even longer before the company finally corrected the problem.
Active winch support systems have been used for movie stunts for a few years now. For a good overview of how this works, rent "Underworld: Evolution" and watch the special features. It's really funny. First the stunt guys practice the stunt on a big padded mockup of the set until they get it right. The movements are recorded. Then, on the actual set, the actors are pulled through the same motions by servo-controlled winches. In post-production, the wires are removed from the images.
Yes, that's how Kate Beckinsale does all those high jumps and landings.
Following the push of IE7 on Patch Tuesday, new IE7 exploits will be deployed on Exploit Wednesday. Coming soon to a computer near you.
This may be a bad sign. Now they can turn off features by remote control, insist that you connect frequently to get updates, introduce new bugs remotely, and try to force you to sign up for new "revenue streams". Just like Microsoft and Tivo.
Turned up to the biggest board size. It takes about 200 seconds to clear the board, and it's so mindless.
The SCO vs. IBM lawsuit has done quite a bit for open source.
The SCO lawsuit has validated open source and the GPL. We don't have to worry about that problem any more.
Note that on Slashdot, not everyone has moderation privileges. Moderators aren't selected entirely randomly, either. Only users somewhere near the median posting rate are selected. This filters out both new users and overly active users. It works surprisingly well.
Now if only we could use it on stories, too...
The US Congress has no constitutional authority to compel testimony of any sort.
The Supreme Court disagrees:
"A legislative body cannot legislate wisely or effectively in the absence of information respecting the conditions which the legislation is intended to affect or change; and where the legislative body does not itself possess the requisite information-which not infrequently is true-recourse must be had to others who do possess it. Experience has taught that mere requests for such information often are unavailing, and also that information which is volunteered is not always accurate or complete; so some means of compulsion are essential to obtain what is needed." (McGrain v. Daugherty, 273 U.S. 135, 174 (1927))
"The power to investigate and to do so through compulsory process plainly falls within [the definition of Congress' legislative function]. This Court has often noted that the power to investigate is inherent in the power to make laws." (Eastland v. United States Servicemen's Fund, 421 U.S. 491, 505 (1975))
Sony doesn't need somebody to make the fanboys happy. Sony needed to (1) get their box into the stores in volume by Xmas (2) at a price comparable to the competition and (3) with some games that were visibly better than anything on the PS2. So far they've blown (1) and (2). We'll have to wait and see about (3).
My first thought on reading that was "wow, somebody built a laser rangefinder for Lego Mindstorms". No such luck.
Biggest problem with amateur robotics is crappy sensors and lack of feedback. It's getting better, especially in Japan, but slowly.
This is OK. Because this is no longer an urgent issue for Congress, the bill to legalize it probably won't make it through Congress before the election. Especially with the Republican leadership distracted by their pedophile problem. By the time this gets to court, either or both houses of Congress will be controlled by Democrats. Which means that Congress can and will investigate this.
Remember, Congress has the real power in the United States. It doesn't look like that when both houses are controlled by the party that has the White House, and party discipline is strong, but that's an unusual situation, and one about to end. The United States Government works better with some tension between Congress and the President; it keeps both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue from going off the deep end.
Must be a slow day at Slashdot.
Remember last year? Remember Microsoft botching the XBox 360 launch? Booking too much retail shelf space and not delivering product? Furious retailers? A product with heat dissipation problems? A weak selection of games at launch?
That's where Sony is this year.
2007 for the PS3 will probably look like 2006 for the Xbox 360. The PS3 will slowly launch over the next year, and finally start to sell in volume for the Xmas 2007 season. Probably at a lower price. This will give developers another year to get the Cell processor figured out, so the games will be better.
This is the price of increasing console complexity - the launch phase has more problems.
Regarding the PS3 price drop, the Wal-Mart buyer says "We'd certainly like to see parity on pricing, but we have not had that conversation with them yet."
That should be read as "Sony will drop the price to Wal-Mart, or else."
Bear in mind that this is one of the very few people whose position on price really matters. The PS3 is crucial to Sony. Wal-Mart doesn't really need to carry it at all, let alone give it much shelf space. In fact, the PS3 is a rather high-priced product for Wal-Mart. They can move PS2s at $129 (and that's the new slim-line PS2) in volume. The PS3 will be a niche product to Wal-Mart until the price comes down.
That slim-line PS2 is worth watching. That's a mid-life kicker for the PS2, and the first time that's really happened in the videogame console market. That could be the killer product for this holiday season. The Xbox 360 and the PS3 get all the press attention, but the downsized PS2 will generate the profits this season.
Lucas is really a production designer who also writes and directs. He's a great production designer, but a terrible writer. If he makes a $20 million movie, someone else had better write it.
Sometimes, in acting classes, students are tortured by making them do a staged reading from a Lucas movie. Without all the special effects and an industrial-strength symphony orchestra, it falls flat.
Lucas is really the world's leading second unit director.
"Second Unit - To hell with dialogue, let's blow up something."