Some (many?) programs will let you start doing rotations and projects the summer before you start your program. There are a whole heap of reasons for getting there early. Once school starts you'll be expected to be taking classes, doing research, selecting a lab/PI, and getting familiar with a new area (going from a small liberal arts college to a research university may involve a change of city in your case).
In your early years there is a lot pressure to do well in classes, and f you are coming out of undergrad there will be momentum to focus on your coursework, particularly as you get ready for quals. It is hard to get settled into a new lab and be productive, so your research suffers and it is hard to do well and impress potential advisors and be happy about your research work. If you start during the summer, you'll have some research momentum that will carry you through your classwork time. It also gives you time to learn the new area and all the little details you need for your life. Finally, many programs don't already have a PI picked out for you, so you can spend time going to any summer seminars are going on, sit in on different lab meetings (to learn about the culture of how the lab works), and generally start to learn about what is actually going on. Anything you are reading in papers or even on the lab website is about what the lab used to be doing, sometimes wildly out of date, and sometimes the projects that are already well established are precisely the ones you won't be able to work on or won't want to, because there is already an army of postdocs and grad students already working on them. You can scope out the landscape and find the interesting new research areas that are just emerging.
I wouldn't worry about starting a hobby right now. Once school starts, you can meet your no cohort of students. There will usually be some people who are into something new that you aren't into (rock climbing, wine tasting, soccer, skiing, distance biking, juggling, whatever). That's a good way to discover new hobbies and interests, and a good way to bond with your colleagues. Science is good about bringing together people from eclectic backgrounds, particularly globally/internationally, and it is good way to be exposed to different cultures, foods, ways of thinking, etc. One big transition from undergrad to grad school in science is that usually there is a big jump in the internationalized character of the grad students and postdocs you interact with. They will definitely be introducing you to new things. At the very least, your new university will have student groups, and usually there will be an activity fair (yeah, even for grad students), so you can have a chance to learn about new groups. You can even put together an intramural team (choose your sport) in your department.
A few years into school, you will have time and options to try something new. There is a big lull after you finish quals and classes (and hopefully finished TAing) while you are just doing your dissertation research, that is a sort of the long dark stretch. That's a good time that you will want to be getting out of the lab now and again so you don't go bonkers. Don't think about it being "my last out of the lab for a long time". Grad school is a long, indeterminate stretch of time. It's a marathon or endurance run not a sprint, so you will need to take breaks and vacations as you go. Once you are in the long research stretch, you will actually have some flexibility to take vacations and so forth. Most advisors are fine with you taking some away breaks now and again, as long as you are being really productive most of the time.
Good luck in grad school! It is can be really trying at times, but it is fun and worth it. The upcoming sequester is going to have big effects on how biological science is funded, good luck!
Papers are still quite common in medicine. I'm not entirely sure if that is an institutional resistance to change, capital expense put into setting up the system, because it works better, or just because it is a 'sufficient' system. It is the case that pagers seem to work well in an environment where you often can't immediately respond to the page (like answering the phone), but will respond shortly.
Does anyone know more?
Unfortunately, invariably at big meetings (like Grand Rounds), someone forgets to put their pager on vibrate...
I was curious how this compared to various national populations, and this data may be a bit old, but...
Countries by Sorted by Population
This means that WoW has more players than 112 countries have people. Ten million is of course much larger than the populations of Vatican City, Tuvalu, Monaco, Luxembourg, etc. But also bigger than Uruguay, Costa Rica, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Israel, Austria, Laos, and many more.
I was told by an-submarine officer that the quality of submarine officers is going down because of LASIK surgery. The best recruits used to be divided by eye exam, with those who didn't needed glasses going into aviation and those who needed glasses into subs. With eye surgery, that isn't a factor.
...this looked a bit like Braveheart with elves and orcs?
However, I have no doubt this will be the best of the three. It was certainly the best book and full of lots of exciting battles and special effects opportunities.
I have a friend who worked for a major cable premium network that produces some very popular series. He worked in product placement, and it was his job to negotiate deals with companies for all sorts of placement of products.
Nowadays they generally try to be a little bit more subtle than back in the day when people would describe the virtues of their products directly. It can be as simple as what brand of soda is out on the kitchen island, what watch comapny is featured in the closeup, or what type of car the cool lead character drives. However, rarely are these uses of brands unitentional or for artistic purposes.
Movies are incredibly bad offenders. MIB is a prime example. It is basically a sci-fi music video add for a variety of products. Probably worse than that though are children's cartoons. They are basically half hour long advertisements for all the tie in merchandise: collectible cards, action figures, video games, t-shirts, bedroom sets, lunch boxes, etc. I'm just surprised no one has started to geographically target local advertisers in television programs and movies using the technology news and sports broadcasters have used to 'edit' billboards and the like digitally so local affiliates can get the right adds. Maybe they have.
I thought the movie was amazing when I watched it last night, but I did dislike a few things and have some comments about the post..
When action and dialog was added it seemed uniformly worse than the rest of the movie. I understand stuff had to be left out, but I would cite the example of the fight between Saruman (very nicely cast!) and Gandalf as very disapointing. Since this battle was only mentioned in the books and not described, they filled it up with some crap. Contrast this with the action and dialog that Gandalf uses when fighting the Balrog, much more stirring and exciting.
Pippin almost
seems a whipping-boy for Gandalf throughout the movie, but it's all because of his
foolishness.
Pippin is something of a whipping boy in the books for Gandalf. His comment in the Mines of Moria was straight out of the books. Gandalf is sort of encouraging him to mature, which he and Merry begin to do when they are with the Ents. Pippin really comes into his own and does some maturing and gets respect in Gandalf's eyes when he travels alone with Gandalf to Minas Tirith...
Galadriel was too mystical.
Again, Galadriel was supposed to be very mystical and bewitching. I just think it is bad that they left the stuff about Gimli really changing his mind about her out. It is also too bad that they didn't talk about the lembas and cloaks (since the lembas is basically what keeps Frodo and Sam alive in Mordor) or that Legolas is a wood elf (and somewhat more primitive).
Aragorn. Aragorn was probably my second favorite character in the book (next to
Faramir), and I didn't like the way he was portrayed as bearing a family "weakness".
BTW, Faramir is my fave too. Aragorn is certainly portrayed as an amazing fighter. He defeats a whole bunch of Nazgul all by himself (not Frodo using the Barrow-wight knife). Arwen and Boromir's respect sort of makes one feel that he deserves that respect. This is just a matter of personal opinion though...
The voice acting is the main element. It is very reminiscent of Diamond Age (Neal Stephenson) in which the computer industry could create very accurate visual simulations, but had a much harder time with generating voices. People used to adore various radio celebrities without any CG visuals at all.
I'm sure all these CG celebs have 1-2 voice actors associated with them at most, and they can certainly demand large salaries, get into scandals and so forth. They might even be able to move into regular acting roles (cf Hank Azaria from the Simpsons). You can see that Kermit has no longer been the same since the death of his creator and voice. Good voice actors/singers are not interchangeable.
Automatic speech generation is very primitive. The fall of Lernout and Hauspie has certainly impacted the whole speech community. A look at Victor Zue's work at MIT helps to illustrate how the field is just getting to the point where they can create a realistic sounding voice. The best techniques use concatenated phonemes from real speakers. They are nowhere near the point of being able to convey emotion or being able to sing...although research continues.
The following is a response to a query about the codewarrior kit:
Hi,
Thanks for your e-mail and for your interest in CodeWarrior for
PlayStation2. The first step in beginning to develop games for the
PlayStation2 is to become licensed by Sony. The use of our tools
requires that you have the hardware and software that Sony provides to
its licensed PS 2 developers. Have you already begun the licensing
process with Sony and if so what stage are you currently in?
Once the licensing process is complete you will be able to use our tools
to develop for the PlayStation2. Prices for the software range from
$4800-$7200 per seat.
If you have any additional questions please don't hesitate to contact me
directly. Look forward to hearing from you soon!
Regards,
Becky
So start saving your pennies, because the licensing from Sony is very expensive.
I'll try to leave all the arguing about AI and Cyc's place in it, and just say that it has great potential to be helpful for projects in expert system research and things like natural language processing. It was always really annoying to me that Cyc was closed, the little link on the end to OpenCyc seems very important to me! A big part of the knowledge source is supposed to be released soon, and that is what I am looking forward to!
Supposedly they are not releasing the source to the inference engine, but that is not that big of a deal. Plenty of research has been done on logical systems, stochastic logic, robust logics, etc. It is the data that is always hard to come by. Also according to the website, WordNet is to be included. This is when it gets interesting... using the basic knowledge base and WordNet, pour in text and work on automatic ontology building. Let sufficient amounts of text (Guttenberg project anyone?) inform the system enough to generate its own relationships and extend its knoweledge base.
Even games could use this low level knowledge base for helping to determine the actions of the game AI.
...so I can see what the problem is. There have been conflicting rulings in the past on about linking to deeply located content, but that seems to be what the Buxley's site is doing. When you click on their map, it brings you to the geocaching.com site with that relevant information. If had gathered the info with web spiders for example, he would be in a much better position. He is providing a portal giving direct links to content (kind of like Slashdot with news articles).
...is such a cool idea. I had never heard of it (perhaps there are old/. posts). Now I finally have a reason to get a GPS unit. This is a fun way to get to see cool locations.
However, I wonder how long until this sort of thing just degenerates into a bunch of teenagers just taking everything from the cache. I think the only way for this to continue is to make it something involving many landmarks like orienteering exercises. Perhaps more riddles as well. The Geocaching FAQ reccommends offsets too, something involving needing to visit the spot..ie go west as many seconds of longitude as there are stripes on the building, etc.
So as a matter of taste, I don't think that Metamath presents a very appealing view of maths,
and I suspect that some people will be actively put off maths by this. If not then fine, but this is my personal feeling.
I think that as lofty as the goals of its creators, this will act as more in the vein of mathematical recreations for people who already like to play with math rather than getting people interested in mathematics. However, it also has a lot of potential as an aid to assisting in homework. This can be both good and bad. It can be good if it helps one locate references for a particular proof (you know that a relationship is true, and remember proving it, but don't have time to do it again whilst doing another proof), but also can just turn into a generator for answering assigned proofs which would be a Bad Thing TM.
It is always hard to prepare for future technological needs, but things certainly look like they are moving toward wireless solutions.
Re:Ha! Metric unit of mass is still a chunk of met
on
Uncle Sam's Funhouse
·
· Score: 2
Although the original metric system was based on pure water(the calorie was defined in terms of heating water), it really has nothing today with today's system which relies on much more precisely measureable quanitities. And actually, the real basis of the measurement system was some very bad measurements of the earth which they attempted to divide up evenly into the meter. This was then combined with the second (which is a very arbitrary division of time). This distance and length measure were then used with water to get standards of length, energy, and temperature. Now, for example they used fixed wavelengths from a band in the Cesium spectrum to measure length, and atomic decay times to measure time (they should use a pulsar instead). One of the points of the article is that we are using an actual kilogram and comparing things to it (which is very primitive). One can also imagine that the real international standard is not very similar to the US one, at least at the precision we can now measure things at (considering it is over a hundred years old). There wasn't any information about this in the article.
I visited NIST in the fall as part of a conference, and I didn't see anything wasteful at all. Consumer advocacy is very important. We are lucky to have things like the FDA.
Their efforts in computer science have been very good. One of the main things that they do is provide evaluation metrics and facilitate competitions/evaluations for different tasks. Often times it is hard to really define metrics for software evaluation (cf all the benchmarkings for speed). This is something that should not be left to the manufacturer's (which is why all these non-independent evaluators tell us how slow Linux is compared to Windoze). By defining a task and then performing the evaluation on the software, NIST acts a real independent evaluation. This is the type of role they play in many industries. I'd rather have NIST doing this than relying on the marketing people.
I'd hate to sound mean so early in the morning....
But maybe "ask slashdot" should be renamed to "ask slashdot users to type something in www.google.com/linux for me".
Well, part of the point of Ask Slashdot is not to just ask for pointers (although people who include them are often moderated up), but for actual reccomendations from people who have worked with whatever the questions is about. If you just give pointers that you find with a search engine, you have no idea if the stuff pointed to is of any value.
My friend from the Georgian Republic (former Soviet republic) used Dragon's speech recognition system when learning English. He practiced English sentences until the engine was able to recognize them. This might be a good way to practice pronounciation because it helps unbias your accent. You speak a clear and in some sense 'pure' form of the language. There was quite a bit of mention on Slashdot about open source speech recognition engines.
I know that I learned a lot about Portuguese grammar when I was trying to learn by talking to people from Brazil who were learning English. They would directly translate into English, so I would get a good idea of how to construct Portuguese sentences (eg: For to go there. The Maurio is arrived.) by observing interesting constructions in English. Maybe using Babelfish or something on the language of your choice would help you in this respect.
I know this is basically off-topic, but I was just curious what online comics people here like? What sort of comics are/.ers into?
By way of starting things off, my favorites are: PvP, Penny Arcade, Dilbert, When I Grow Up, General Protection Fault, and Sinfest. I have a morning ritual where I make some tea, and read my morning paper (ie Slashdot) and funny pages (the above) before going to work.
My friend is a doctor in large hospital in NYC, and she uses her Palm all the time. It has replaced a least a half dozen heavy manuals she used to keep in her pockets. Many companies now sell e-text versions of their reference works. She got it to reduce the number of reference works she had to use, but I think it is better in that it facilitates better searching and indexing. She is young, and young doctors liker her use them all the time, it is the older ones in power that are technologically resistant.
I think that it is unfortunate the medical field has been so slow to adopt technology like this. If anyone knows the history of MYCIN, it is amazing to me that the medical field has ignored such powerful diagonostic tools. In the end I think it is the public that suffers.
There is a company, Bilbo Innvoations that makes foot controllers similar to those used for an organ or sewing machine. They mainly are used as meta keys (shift, alt, control), but I am sure they could be mapped to other things inside of a game. Links and pictures here . If you are looking for a directional syste, then Infogrips No-Hands Mouse may be a better choice. Info and pics here . I am not sure how this would work in a game though. I know that the Hacker's Dictionary mentions that the original 'space cadet' keyboard at MIT was supposed to have foot pedals, but in the end it was opted out. I think that was a bad decision, made prior to the GUI revolution, and that the mouse was a poor choice. Picking your hand up from the keyboard is a waste of time. Future interface devices need to include a mixture of hand, feet, maybe some sort of head mounted directional stuff (like the things in airplanes that monitor where your are looking for targetting) and perhaps a little bit of voice recognition.
As a side note, I was complaining to my aunt who worked for the post office about all the junk snail mail, and she laughed and told me how important it was. Junk snail mail pays for the US Post Office. Bulk mailings are what keep it afloat. When I thought about it, I realized that only a tiny percentage of my mail was anything I had intentionally wanted. I have three magazine subscriptions, and get 4-5 different bills per month, , and occassional cards at Christmas and my birthday (so not that much) yet I get lots of mail almost everyday. In the end it is an inefficient system, but it is worthwhile noting that it does keep this system in existence, and it is far more preferable to me than telemarketers!
All the spamming and privacy issues just make it apparent to me that the US Postal service should take some sort of active role involved with email. It would be nice if it your email privacy was protected by federal law, and so forth.
For anyone who hates telemarketers, and I think that includes everyone, including telemarketers, but most especially people who work at home, I would direct your attento to the Tom Mabe site which features the very funny Tom Mabe, who deals with telemarketers in a unique and hilarious way. You can even buy CD recordings of his interactions.
Sony is a large and strange company. When you get to the size Sony is, the $2B is not even that much money. It will be very difficult to predict their actions. However, although you are right about arcade machines being Sega's strong place in the market, nowadays these machines are just extensions of the console game market. There aren't any titles in the arcade that aren't marketed on consoles. I know there is sometimes a delay before they go on sale, but it is cerrtainly not a speciality market in the sense that I am sure those enclosures just hold essentially Dreamquests. Part of the problem (and this came up quite a bit with PS2 discussions) is that console systems are hard to code for, and there are no standards. That makes porting games very difficult I imagine (and it certainly seems to not work out too well). It is really impractical for Sega to compete independently when it can't hope to match sales of Play Station games. They were already planning to market some of their titles for the PS2, so maybe it would just be better for them to become part of Sony. In any events, I imagine Sega will become a pure software company before too long. Another thing is that it is probably weird for people here to realize how huge Nintendo really is. My little brothers and all their friends love it. Right now they dominate the kids market. And those kids are growing up. If they can lock these kids into platforms and titles, they have them for years. They already completely dominate the portable game market (Gameboys), and if they can integrate them with cellphones, they will have the future of speciality gaming machines locke up I imagine.
I just can't wait until Crazy Taxi Driver comes out for the Playstation 2 though!:o)
One point that hasn't been mentioned is that corporations might love this. They can use this technology to make sure that their software is all approriately licensed and so forth. And the home user market is getting very saturated. Tons of people have computers, and either find them to be not the useful or use them for chat rooms, pr0n, and mp3's.
Speaking of that, it amazes me that people replied to this post with comments about how the average computer user would be oblivious to the differences in hard drives. Have they been living in a hole? Do they know how huge Napster is? All these people will be _very_ away of something that will prevent them from exchanging free music.
Even if there is big money backing this idea, it won't work without some sort of legislation or something. Too many people are dealing with pirated software and mp3's for this to make any input. Maybe we'll all be ordering our hard drives from some shady place in Singapore, but that will be the case...
Slashdot Mirror
Some (many?) programs will let you start doing rotations and projects the summer before you start your program. There are a whole heap of reasons for getting there early. Once school starts you'll be expected to be taking classes, doing research, selecting a lab/PI, and getting familiar with a new area (going from a small liberal arts college to a research university may involve a change of city in your case).
In your early years there is a lot pressure to do well in classes, and f you are coming out of undergrad there will be momentum to focus on your coursework, particularly as you get ready for quals. It is hard to get settled into a new lab and be productive, so your research suffers and it is hard to do well and impress potential advisors and be happy about your research work. If you start during the summer, you'll have some research momentum that will carry you through your classwork time. It also gives you time to learn the new area and all the little details you need for your life. Finally, many programs don't already have a PI picked out for you, so you can spend time going to any summer seminars are going on, sit in on different lab meetings (to learn about the culture of how the lab works), and generally start to learn about what is actually going on. Anything you are reading in papers or even on the lab website is about what the lab used to be doing, sometimes wildly out of date, and sometimes the projects that are already well established are precisely the ones you won't be able to work on or won't want to, because there is already an army of postdocs and grad students already working on them. You can scope out the landscape and find the interesting new research areas that are just emerging.
I wouldn't worry about starting a hobby right now. Once school starts, you can meet your no cohort of students. There will usually be some people who are into something new that you aren't into (rock climbing, wine tasting, soccer, skiing, distance biking, juggling, whatever). That's a good way to discover new hobbies and interests, and a good way to bond with your colleagues. Science is good about bringing together people from eclectic backgrounds, particularly globally/internationally, and it is good way to be exposed to different cultures, foods, ways of thinking, etc. One big transition from undergrad to grad school in science is that usually there is a big jump in the internationalized character of the grad students and postdocs you interact with. They will definitely be introducing you to new things. At the very least, your new university will have student groups, and usually there will be an activity fair (yeah, even for grad students), so you can have a chance to learn about new groups. You can even put together an intramural team (choose your sport) in your department.
A few years into school, you will have time and options to try something new. There is a big lull after you finish quals and classes (and hopefully finished TAing) while you are just doing your dissertation research, that is a sort of the long dark stretch. That's a good time that you will want to be getting out of the lab now and again so you don't go bonkers. Don't think about it being "my last out of the lab for a long time". Grad school is a long, indeterminate stretch of time. It's a marathon or endurance run not a sprint, so you will need to take breaks and vacations as you go. Once you are in the long research stretch, you will actually have some flexibility to take vacations and so forth. Most advisors are fine with you taking some away breaks now and again, as long as you are being really productive most of the time.
Good luck in grad school! It is can be really trying at times, but it is fun and worth it. The upcoming sequester is going to have big effects on how biological science is funded, good luck!
Papers are still quite common in medicine. I'm not entirely sure if that is an institutional resistance to change, capital expense put into setting up the system, because it works better, or just because it is a 'sufficient' system. It is the case that pagers seem to work well in an environment where you often can't immediately respond to the page (like answering the phone), but will respond shortly.
Does anyone know more?
Unfortunately, invariably at big meetings (like Grand Rounds), someone forgets to put their pager on vibrate...
I was curious how this compared to various national populations, and this data may be a bit old, but... Countries by Sorted by Population This means that WoW has more players than 112 countries have people. Ten million is of course much larger than the populations of Vatican City, Tuvalu, Monaco, Luxembourg, etc. But also bigger than Uruguay, Costa Rica, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Israel, Austria, Laos, and many more.
I was told by an-submarine officer that the quality of submarine officers is going down because of LASIK surgery. The best recruits used to be divided by eye exam, with those who didn't needed glasses going into aviation and those who needed glasses into subs. With eye surgery, that isn't a factor.
...this looked a bit like Braveheart with elves and orcs?
However, I have no doubt this will be the best of the three. It was certainly the best book and full of lots of exciting battles and special effects opportunities.
I have a friend who worked for a major cable premium network that produces some very popular series. He worked in product placement, and it was his job to negotiate deals with companies for all sorts of placement of products.
Nowadays they generally try to be a little bit more subtle than back in the day when people would describe the virtues of their products directly. It can be as simple as what brand of soda is out on the kitchen island, what watch comapny is featured in the closeup, or what type of car the cool lead character drives. However, rarely are these uses of brands unitentional or for artistic purposes.
Movies are incredibly bad offenders. MIB is a prime example. It is basically a sci-fi music video add for a variety of products. Probably worse than that though are children's cartoons. They are basically half hour long advertisements for all the tie in merchandise: collectible cards, action figures, video games, t-shirts, bedroom sets, lunch boxes, etc. I'm just surprised no one has started to geographically target local advertisers in television programs and movies using the technology news and sports broadcasters have used to 'edit' billboards and the like digitally so local affiliates can get the right adds. Maybe they have.
I thought the movie was amazing when I watched it last night, but I did dislike a few things and have some comments about the post..
When action and dialog was added it seemed uniformly worse than the rest of the movie. I understand stuff had to be left out, but I would cite the example of the fight between Saruman (very nicely cast!) and Gandalf as very disapointing. Since this battle was only mentioned in the books and not described, they filled it up with some crap. Contrast this with the action and dialog that Gandalf uses when fighting the Balrog, much more stirring and exciting.
Pippin almost
seems a whipping-boy for Gandalf throughout the movie, but it's all because of his
foolishness.
Pippin is something of a whipping boy in the books for Gandalf. His comment in the Mines of Moria was straight out of the books. Gandalf is sort of encouraging him to mature, which he and Merry begin to do when they are with the Ents. Pippin really comes into his own and does some maturing and gets respect in Gandalf's eyes when he travels alone with Gandalf to Minas Tirith ...
Galadriel was too mystical.
Again, Galadriel was supposed to be very mystical and bewitching. I just think it is bad that they left the stuff about Gimli really changing his mind about her out. It is also too bad that they didn't talk about the lembas and cloaks (since the lembas is basically what keeps Frodo and Sam alive in Mordor) or that Legolas is a wood elf (and somewhat more primitive).
Aragorn. Aragorn was probably my second favorite character in the book (next to
Faramir), and I didn't like the way he was portrayed as bearing a family "weakness".
BTW, Faramir is my fave too. Aragorn is certainly portrayed as an amazing fighter. He defeats a whole bunch of Nazgul all by himself (not Frodo using the Barrow-wight knife). Arwen and Boromir's respect sort of makes one feel that he deserves that respect. This is just a matter of personal opinion though...
The voice acting is the main element. It is very reminiscent of Diamond Age (Neal Stephenson) in which the computer industry could create very accurate visual simulations, but had a much harder time with generating voices. People used to adore various radio celebrities without any CG visuals at all.
I'm sure all these CG celebs have 1-2 voice actors associated with them at most, and they can certainly demand large salaries, get into scandals and so forth. They might even be able to move into regular acting roles (cf Hank Azaria from the Simpsons). You can see that Kermit has no longer been the same since the death of his creator and voice. Good voice actors/singers are not interchangeable.
Automatic speech generation is very primitive. The fall of Lernout and Hauspie has certainly impacted the whole speech community. A look at Victor Zue's work at MIT helps to illustrate how the field is just getting to the point where they can create a realistic sounding voice. The best techniques use concatenated phonemes from real speakers. They are nowhere near the point of being able to convey emotion or being able to sing...although research continues.
The following is a response to a query about the codewarrior kit:
Hi,
Thanks for your e-mail and for your interest in CodeWarrior for
PlayStation2. The first step in beginning to develop games for the
PlayStation2 is to become licensed by Sony. The use of our tools
requires that you have the hardware and software that Sony provides to
its licensed PS 2 developers. Have you already begun the licensing
process with Sony and if so what stage are you currently in?
Once the licensing process is complete you will be able to use our tools
to develop for the PlayStation2. Prices for the software range from
$4800-$7200 per seat.
If you have any additional questions please don't hesitate to contact me
directly. Look forward to hearing from you soon!
Regards,
Becky
So start saving your pennies, because the licensing from Sony is very expensive.
I'll try to leave all the arguing about AI and Cyc's place in it, and just say that it has great potential to be helpful for projects in expert system research and things like natural language processing. It was always really annoying to me that Cyc was closed, the little link on the end to OpenCyc seems very important to me! A big part of the knowledge source is supposed to be released soon, and that is what I am looking forward to!
Supposedly they are not releasing the source to the inference engine, but that is not that big of a deal. Plenty of research has been done on logical systems, stochastic logic, robust logics, etc. It is the data that is always hard to come by. Also according to the website, WordNet is to be included. This is when it gets interesting ... using the basic knowledge base and WordNet, pour in text and work on automatic ontology building. Let sufficient amounts of text (Guttenberg project anyone?) inform the system enough to generate its own relationships and extend its knoweledge base.
Even games could use this low level knowledge base for helping to determine the actions of the game AI.
...so I can see what the problem is. There have been conflicting rulings in the past on about linking to deeply located content, but that seems to be what the Buxley's site is doing. When you click on their map, it brings you to the geocaching.com site with that relevant information. If had gathered the info with web spiders for example, he would be in a much better position. He is providing a portal giving direct links to content (kind of like Slashdot with news articles).
...is such a cool idea. I had never heard of it (perhaps there are old /. posts). Now I finally have a reason to get a GPS unit. This is a fun way to get to see cool locations.
However, I wonder how long until this sort of thing just degenerates into a bunch of teenagers just taking everything from the cache. I think the only way for this to continue is to make it something involving many landmarks like orienteering exercises. Perhaps more riddles as well. The Geocaching FAQ reccommends offsets too, something involving needing to visit the spot..ie go west as many seconds of longitude as there are stripes on the building, etc.
So as a matter of taste, I don't think that Metamath presents a very appealing view of maths, and I suspect that some people will be actively put off maths by this. If not then fine, but this is my personal feeling.
I think that as lofty as the goals of its creators, this will act as more in the vein of mathematical recreations for people who already like to play with math rather than getting people interested in mathematics. However, it also has a lot of potential as an aid to assisting in homework. This can be both good and bad. It can be good if it helps one locate references for a particular proof (you know that a relationship is true, and remember proving it, but don't have time to do it again whilst doing another proof), but also can just turn into a generator for answering assigned proofs which would be a Bad Thing TM.
It is always hard to prepare for future technological needs, but things certainly look like they are moving toward wireless solutions.
Although the original metric system was based on pure water(the calorie was defined in terms of heating water), it really has nothing today with today's system which relies on much more precisely measureable quanitities. And actually, the real basis of the measurement system was some very bad measurements of the earth which they attempted to divide up evenly into the meter. This was then combined with the second (which is a very arbitrary division of time). This distance and length measure were then used with water to get standards of length, energy, and temperature. Now, for example they used fixed wavelengths from a band in the Cesium spectrum to measure length, and atomic decay times to measure time (they should use a pulsar instead). One of the points of the article is that we are using an actual kilogram and comparing things to it (which is very primitive). One can also imagine that the real international standard is not very similar to the US one, at least at the precision we can now measure things at (considering it is over a hundred years old). There wasn't any information about this in the article.
I visited NIST in the fall as part of a conference, and I didn't see anything wasteful at all. Consumer advocacy is very important. We are lucky to have things like the FDA.
Their efforts in computer science have been very good. One of the main things that they do is provide evaluation metrics and facilitate competitions/evaluations for different tasks. Often times it is hard to really define metrics for software evaluation (cf all the benchmarkings for speed). This is something that should not be left to the manufacturer's (which is why all these non-independent evaluators tell us how slow Linux is compared to Windoze). By defining a task and then performing the evaluation on the software, NIST acts a real independent evaluation. This is the type of role they play in many industries. I'd rather have NIST doing this than relying on the marketing people.
There is another obit (a little longer) that is in the NYTimes (<p>I am really sorry that I never go to meet him, he is certainly one my heros. His picture and Richard Feynman's are above my desk. I hope he makes it onto a postage stamp some day. I don't think a lot of CS people realize that without Shannon, they wouldn't know about Boolean algebra (well this is a bit of an exageration), but he was the first one to really make the link between boolean algebra and it's use in circuits and then computers. He was actually in the MIT electrical engineering department, I believe. Even though he was really a mathematician.</p>
I'd hate to sound mean so early in the morning.... But maybe "ask slashdot" should be renamed to "ask slashdot users to type something in www.google.com/linux for me".
Well, part of the point of Ask Slashdot is not to just ask for pointers (although people who include them are often moderated up), but for actual reccomendations from people who have worked with whatever the questions is about. If you just give pointers that you find with a search engine, you have no idea if the stuff pointed to is of any value.
My friend from the Georgian Republic (former Soviet republic) used Dragon's speech recognition system when learning English. He practiced English sentences until the engine was able to recognize them. This might be a good way to practice pronounciation because it helps unbias your accent. You speak a clear and in some sense 'pure' form of the language. There was quite a bit of mention on Slashdot about open source speech recognition engines.
I know that I learned a lot about Portuguese grammar when I was trying to learn by talking to people from Brazil who were learning English. They would directly translate into English, so I would get a good idea of how to construct Portuguese sentences (eg: For to go there. The Maurio is arrived.) by observing interesting constructions in English. Maybe using Babelfish or something on the language of your choice would help you in this respect.
I know this is basically off-topic, but I was just curious what online comics people here like? What sort of comics are /.ers into?
By way of starting things off, my favorites are: PvP, Penny Arcade, Dilbert, When I Grow Up, General Protection Fault, and Sinfest. I have a morning ritual where I make some tea, and read my morning paper (ie Slashdot) and funny pages (the above) before going to work.
My friend is a doctor in large hospital in NYC, and she uses her Palm all the time. It has replaced a least a half dozen heavy manuals she used to keep in her pockets. Many companies now sell e-text versions of their reference works. She got it to reduce the number of reference works she had to use, but I think it is better in that it facilitates better searching and indexing. She is young, and young doctors liker her use them all the time, it is the older ones in power that are technologically resistant.
I think that it is unfortunate the medical field has been so slow to adopt technology like this. If anyone knows the history of MYCIN, it is amazing to me that the medical field has ignored such powerful diagonostic tools. In the end I think it is the public that suffers.
There is a company, Bilbo Innvoations that makes foot controllers similar to those used for an organ or sewing machine. They mainly are used as meta keys (shift, alt, control), but I am sure they could be mapped to other things inside of a game. Links and pictures here . If you are looking for a directional syste, then Infogrips No-Hands Mouse may be a better choice. Info and pics here . I am not sure how this would work in a game though. I know that the Hacker's Dictionary mentions that the original 'space cadet' keyboard at MIT was supposed to have foot pedals, but in the end it was opted out. I think that was a bad decision, made prior to the GUI revolution, and that the mouse was a poor choice. Picking your hand up from the keyboard is a waste of time. Future interface devices need to include a mixture of hand, feet, maybe some sort of head mounted directional stuff (like the things in airplanes that monitor where your are looking for targetting) and perhaps a little bit of voice recognition.
As a side note, I was complaining to my aunt who worked for the post office about all the junk snail mail, and she laughed and told me how important it was. Junk snail mail pays for the US Post Office. Bulk mailings are what keep it afloat. When I thought about it, I realized that only a tiny percentage of my mail was anything I had intentionally wanted. I have three magazine subscriptions, and get 4-5 different bills per month, , and occassional cards at Christmas and my birthday (so not that much) yet I get lots of mail almost everyday. In the end it is an inefficient system, but it is worthwhile noting that it does keep this system in existence, and it is far more preferable to me than telemarketers!
All the spamming and privacy issues just make it apparent to me that the US Postal service should take some sort of active role involved with email. It would be nice if it your email privacy was protected by federal law, and so forth.
For anyone who hates telemarketers, and I think that includes everyone, including telemarketers, but most especially people who work at home, I would direct your attento to the Tom Mabe site which features the very funny Tom Mabe, who deals with telemarketers in a unique and hilarious way. You can even buy CD recordings of his interactions.
Sony is a large and strange company. When you get to the size Sony is, the $2B is not even that much money. It will be very difficult to predict their actions. However, although you are right about arcade machines being Sega's strong place in the market, nowadays these machines are just extensions of the console game market. There aren't any titles in the arcade that aren't marketed on consoles. I know there is sometimes a delay before they go on sale, but it is cerrtainly not a speciality market in the sense that I am sure those enclosures just hold essentially Dreamquests. Part of the problem (and this came up quite a bit with PS2 discussions) is that console systems are hard to code for, and there are no standards. That makes porting games very difficult I imagine (and it certainly seems to not work out too well). It is really impractical for Sega to compete independently when it can't hope to match sales of Play Station games. They were already planning to market some of their titles for the PS2, so maybe it would just be better for them to become part of Sony. In any events, I imagine Sega will become a pure software company before too long. Another thing is that it is probably weird for people here to realize how huge Nintendo really is. My little brothers and all their friends love it. Right now they dominate the kids market. And those kids are growing up. If they can lock these kids into platforms and titles, they have them for years. They already completely dominate the portable game market (Gameboys), and if they can integrate them with cellphones, they will have the future of speciality gaming machines locke up I imagine.
I just can't wait until Crazy Taxi Driver comes out for the Playstation 2 though! :o)
One point that hasn't been mentioned is that corporations might love this. They can use this technology to make sure that their software is all approriately licensed and so forth. And the home user market is getting very saturated. Tons of people have computers, and either find them to be not the useful or use them for chat rooms, pr0n, and mp3's.
Speaking of that, it amazes me that people replied to this post with comments about how the average computer user would be oblivious to the differences in hard drives. Have they been living in a hole? Do they know how huge Napster is? All these people will be _very_ away of something that will prevent them from exchanging free music.
Even if there is big money backing this idea, it won't work without some sort of legislation or something. Too many people are dealing with pirated software and mp3's for this to make any input. Maybe we'll all be ordering our hard drives from some shady place in Singapore, but that will be the case...