What's so bad about monochrome for an eBook reader? All of the books I read are certainly printed as black text on white paper. Why on Earth would I want to display different paragraphs in multiple colours?
If you want to create a commercially successful product, you have to choose what features are included and which are left out. For instance, if I compare two cell phones, and one has a colour screen for $100 more, then I'll likely choose the monochrome one if all the other features are identical. The colour screen gives you zero added value, so why bother? Perhaps elitist techies will pay the extra money for the cool factor, but I imagine that this device is trying to target more practical consumers.
Perhaps if you were interested in picture books... then maybe I could see it.
Next year, the Ontario government will be posting a list of approved automobiles for travel on the Highway 407 Electronic Toll Route. Only Chevrolet, Buick, and a couple Pontiac vehicles will be compatible with the new concrete technology.;-)
If this is something that they can "create" in a lab, then perhaps it's small enough to be the oh-so-difficult-to-detect dark matter that has eluded science so much recently? It seems a little more plausible that "micro black holes", or whatever the theory of the week is.
Does this mean that it's legal to download copyrighted mp3's in Canada because the artist's are getting paid? And if it's not legal, why the tax?
Here's an interesting analogy... if it makes any sense at all: 1) Speeding is illegal. 2) Speeders consume more gasoline. 3) Speeders pay more tax because gasoline is taxed.
Now, just because speeders pay more taxes, doesn't mean they are somehow not breaking the law. However, the people who use the roads more recklessly end up paying a higher portion of the road repair bill. At least, that's how it's supposed to work.
Of course, in the case of the Levy on recordable media, the money isn't going to help those who need it the most. Instead, it's supporting the overdue-for-extinction record companies who are too incompetent to adapt to changes in media technologies.
I've noticed something disturbing - that any time a story mentions Canada, everyone jumps in to make fun of it. I understand that most readers of/. are Americans, but does that mean we have to ignore the posted story and focus on unimportant details like nationality?
We are living in a global society now, or at least that's what the internet is supposed to be creating, so why are we still concerned with these arbitrary meat world boundaries? Can't we get on with a meaningful discussion here?
The fact that there are companies competing for the X-Prize is reason enough to link this story. Perhaps it should not have featured Canada so prominently in the title - it's not surprising that Canada is taking part in cutting edge research and development, because it always has. So, can we drop the nationalism at the homepage, and address the topic at hand?
The obvious danger with this technology is the ability to make someone appear to have said something they didn't, like in a perjury case. However, if I'm not mistaken, audio recordings are looked upon with skepticism in court, are they not?
Here's another cool use though... say you can't sign Sean Connery for your movie because he wants too much money. Well, just use some _Final_Fantasy_ technology to make a model of him, and use this voice technology to do his lines. Presto! You don't need actors at all (not even to do their own voices).
Naive Bayes is a damn good text classifier that has already proven to be a good spam identifier. The problem is that no such automated classifier system will ever be able to get rid of most spam without throwing away a few non-spam messages too.
I'm not familiar with Naive Bayes... is that a neural network program? I was specifically talking about the ability of Neural Nets to *learn* based on previous cases. A neural net is basically a way to find a non-linear mapping between one set of variables, and another.
The link you gave is for using iFile, which is nothing like a neural net.
When trying to solve the issue of Spam mail, you invariably have to define Spam. Perhaps that's the real problem, or the first we have to solve... Most of us have an idea of Spam, and we can all agree that a certain e-mail IS, or IS NOT Spam. However, making a machine do something that we consider so trivial is nearly impossible.
However, there is a technology that is capable of performing this task: a neural network. Granted that setting up the input channels would be a little tricky, but once you did that, there is no end to the examples you could use to train this neural net. The net would even be able to categorize e-mails into "almost certainly Spam", "probably Spam", "probably not spam" and "almost certainly not Spam".
The prohibitive cost of such a system would actually be the hardware, since simulated neural nets require lots of FLOPS. On the other hand, you can mass produce a pre-trained neural net for relatively little. Therefore, if someone could train a net to do the job, you could sell the solution as a plug-in PCI card for a computer. Just filter all the emails through the card at the MTA level.
Perhaps I'm getting a little too carried away; does anyone know of someone who's tried applying neural nets like this?
Heck, I'm wearing a Midnight Sun VI T-shirt right now!
You wouldn't be Dan Tshin from East-A first year, would ya?;)
Back on topic though, I graduated from UW last year, and I always remember how dissappointed the Midnight Sun team was each year... they always seemed to have a great car, and a great team, but many times came home with the "hard luck" or "persistence" type awards. Congrats to the UW team, hard work will always pay off in the end!
Also a congrats to Michigan and UMR for their first and second place finishes, respectively. These are the kind of competitions that drive the future of technology! Congrats to everyone who took part!
If the market is pushing towards optional filtering, what would make for a better solution?
IMHO, a small child should not be left unattended for long periods of time on the internet. The best filtering is for you to watch your kids and see what they're viewing. This goes for television too.
When your kids are older (i.e. teenagers) just make sure they understand what you approve of them looking at on the internet. At some point you have to trust their judgement of what's right/wrong. You still need to monitor, but don't put automated filtering there, because that just shows that you don't trust them. There are lots of ways to check what they're viewing without having a screen pop up saying that your parents have blocked this site because it contains objectionable content, when all they were reading were some/. postings.
...some folks can decend so deep into their own athiestic egos, like you, and lump biblical faith...
Not everyone who uses the term "bible-thumping" is an atheist. Nor does every atheist have an ego... nor did my prior post suggest that I did. If you are under the impression that every atheist has an ego, it's probably because whenever there are two sides to an opinion, you generally hear from the most narrow sighted, and egoistic people from each side. Those who inhabit the middle ground can usually be found on/.
Not every hardworking, honest person on the planet can afford a real house.
True, and not every person who lives in a mobile home is "trailer-trash" either. (oh, I guess you already said that) We're talking in stereotypes and generalities here, not in absolutes. Do you think that television ratings care about individual people? They only care about statistics, and stereotypes.
Anyway, accusations aside, let's get back to the topic, which is something to do with violence and trash on television. It's no secret that television is more and more trying to align itself with the lowest common denominator of viewer. Whether you believe these viewers to be "atheistic apartment trash", or "bible-thumping trailer trash", the fact is that this demographic group controls what we get to see on television, simply because they watch the most TV.
Perhaps the real issue is that most of us consider watching television to be a waste of time. That means the only time we bother watching TV is when we want to waste time - meaning television only gives us more time-wasting choices.
Sorry if you're upset, and I apologize if you feel I've offended you. Hopefully we can put personal issues aside and get back to the original topic.
You know who to blame this on? Liberals. Everything has to be dummed down to the lowest common denominator of society, that the principal of Darwanism may as well be eliminated completely.
This should be rated up as very funny! First of all, you're saying that Liberals want to dumb things down... but in the same breath you manage to spell "dumbed" as "dummed", and use "principal" where you should be using "principle". Finally, I'm pretty sure that his name was "Darwin", and hence the correct term would be "Darwinism".
Let's face it, if television has to be "dummed" down for anyone, that would be the stereotypical midwest bible-thumping trailer-trash Americans who spend more time in front of the TV than anyone else. These people have a higher representation in the ratings than anyone else, because everyone else has more important things to do all day, rather than watch stupid "dummed" down TV shows.
I'm pretty sure that if you read carefully, the Canadian company in question is just one part of a consortium of companies that are selling the services. This company only has rights to sell the service in Canada. The consortium is actually Iridium Satellite LLC, I think.
We should all add this snippet of code to our.sigs and use it everyday for every form of electronic communication: Slashdot postings, Usenet, email, you name it!!
Something less prohibiting would be better, telling the cellphone not to use its ringer.
Vibrate mode is a good thing, but for some reason most people don't use it. Normally, I figure it's some kind of attention grabbing, but there are other reasons... For instance, women, in general, carry their cell phones in a purse rather than on their person, so they don't notice if the phone starts to vibrate.
Personally, I hate cell phones, but I'm required to have one for work. Even so, I usually turn the phone *off* (yes, they do have off switches, you know) when I'm in a restaurant. It's courteous to others. Besides, if someone calls me and it goes to voicemail, they just assume that I was somewhere out of the service area.
I think jammers are a great idea... can I get one mounted to the front of my car?
That's very generous of you...:-) But which language are you going to write it in? You could write it in assembly, but there is no assembler to assemble it.
Since real programmers write in machine code, I guess I'll volunteer to write the first assembler, entirely in hexadecimal. Now all we need is someone willing to re-instate a computer that uses vaccuum tubes or relays.
This may be a bit simplified, or a bit tongue in cheek, but I took computer engineering in university, and one of my professors tried to explain the difference between CS and CE as:
A computer scientist assumes that when you write a value onto a bus, that all the bits reach the other end of the bus at the same time. A computer engineer knows about bus skew - that due to the varying capacitance of individual wires on the bus, that some signals arrive sooner than others.
I admit that this is an overly simplified view, but it does illustrate that there are two levels of knowledge. As an engineer, I didn't study the algorithms and data structures as much as a CS major would, even though we did take courses on real time OS's, compilers, and algorithms/data structures, but we had to study *more* of the physics (and even chemistry) side of things. One of our courses was all about the electrical properties of silicon, for example.
Another good differentiation is this - a computer engineer would design a new CPU, whereas a computer scientist would write an optimized compiler for it.
Re:WOW! An even bigger moron than Jon Katz
on
Making Small Change
·
· Score: 1
I think you are doing some two bit (NZ$) economics course and wanted to show off a little... Prolly from New York too...
I guess the fact that I'm Canadian didn't come across in all that. Besides, some of us realize that life is a bit more complicated than "a box of chocolates".
I think you are angry that you don't understand why things are the way they are, and you're looking for someone to blame. Probably from Kansas too...
Slashdot Mirror
What's so bad about monochrome for an eBook reader? All of the books I read are certainly printed as black text on white paper. Why on Earth would I want to display different paragraphs in multiple colours?
If you want to create a commercially successful product, you have to choose what features are included and which are left out. For instance, if I compare two cell phones, and one has a colour screen for $100 more, then I'll likely choose the monochrome one if all the other features are identical. The colour screen gives you zero added value, so why bother? Perhaps elitist techies will pay the extra money for the cool factor, but I imagine that this device is trying to target more practical consumers.
Perhaps if you were interested in picture books... then maybe I could see it.
Next year, the Ontario government will be posting a list of approved automobiles for travel on the Highway 407 Electronic Toll Route. Only Chevrolet, Buick, and a couple Pontiac vehicles will be compatible with the new concrete technology. ;-)
Check out the GNCTR:
o ggan&hl=en&safe=off
Great
Northern
Concrete
Toboggan
Race
at http://www.google.com/search?q=gnctr+concrete+tob
If this is something that they can "create" in a lab, then perhaps it's small enough to be the oh-so-difficult-to-detect dark matter that has eluded science so much recently? It seems a little more plausible that "micro black holes", or whatever the theory of the week is.
Perhaps the U.S. should concentrate more on improving the election system before tackling the job of making the census more complicated!
Does this mean that it's legal to download copyrighted mp3's in Canada because the artist's are getting paid?
And if it's not legal, why the tax?
Here's an interesting analogy... if it makes any sense at all:
1) Speeding is illegal.
2) Speeders consume more gasoline.
3) Speeders pay more tax because gasoline is taxed.
Now, just because speeders pay more taxes, doesn't mean they are somehow not breaking the law. However, the people who use the roads more recklessly end up paying a higher portion of the road repair bill. At least, that's how it's supposed to work.
Of course, in the case of the Levy on recordable media, the money isn't going to help those who need it the most. Instead, it's supporting the overdue-for-extinction record companies who are too incompetent to adapt to changes in media technologies.
Check out this song: "Every OS Sucks" by Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie
It's probably more insightful than whatever drivel Katz is spewing today.
I've noticed something disturbing - that any time a story mentions Canada, everyone jumps in to make fun of it. I understand that most readers of /. are Americans, but does that mean we have to ignore the posted story and focus on unimportant details like nationality?
We are living in a global society now, or at least that's what the internet is supposed to be creating, so why are we still concerned with these arbitrary meat world boundaries? Can't we get on with a meaningful discussion here?
The fact that there are companies competing for the X-Prize is reason enough to link this story. Perhaps it should not have featured Canada so prominently in the title - it's not surprising that Canada is taking part in cutting edge research and development, because it always has. So, can we drop the nationalism at the homepage, and address the topic at hand?
The obvious danger with this technology is the ability to make someone appear to have said something they didn't, like in a perjury case. However, if I'm not mistaken, audio recordings are looked upon with skepticism in court, are they not?
Here's another cool use though... say you can't sign Sean Connery for your movie because he wants too much money. Well, just use some _Final_Fantasy_ technology to make a model of him, and use this voice technology to do his lines. Presto! You don't need actors at all (not even to do their own voices).
I'm not familiar with Naive Bayes... is that a neural network program? I was specifically talking about the ability of Neural Nets to *learn* based on previous cases. A neural net is basically a way to find a non-linear mapping between one set of variables, and another.
The link you gave is for using iFile, which is nothing like a neural net.
When trying to solve the issue of Spam mail, you invariably have to define Spam. Perhaps that's the real problem, or the first we have to solve... Most of us have an idea of Spam, and we can all agree that a certain e-mail IS, or IS NOT Spam. However, making a machine do something that we consider so trivial is nearly impossible.
However, there is a technology that is capable of performing this task: a neural network. Granted that setting up the input channels would be a little tricky, but once you did that, there is no end to the examples you could use to train this neural net. The net would even be able to categorize e-mails into "almost certainly Spam", "probably Spam", "probably not spam" and "almost certainly not Spam".
The prohibitive cost of such a system would actually be the hardware, since simulated neural nets require lots of FLOPS. On the other hand, you can mass produce a pre-trained neural net for relatively little. Therefore, if someone could train a net to do the job, you could sell the solution as a plug-in PCI card for a computer. Just filter all the emails through the card at the MTA level.
Perhaps I'm getting a little too carried away; does anyone know of someone who's tried applying neural nets like this?
Sorry, I didn't mean EVERY year; just many years. After all, Midnight Sun IV was pretty successful, wasn't it?
You wouldn't be Dan Tshin from East-A first year, would ya? ;)
Back on topic though, I graduated from UW last year, and I always remember how dissappointed the Midnight Sun team was each year... they always seemed to have a great car, and a great team, but many times came home with the "hard luck" or "persistence" type awards. Congrats to the UW team, hard work will always pay off in the end!
Also a congrats to Michigan and UMR for their first and second place finishes, respectively. These are the kind of competitions that drive the future of technology! Congrats to everyone who took part!
- Scott W.
Why would someone bother to bring it over by hand, when you can FedEx it overnight delivery from anywhere in the world?
Why bother with this when every car has an alternator, charging system, and battery? Just plug into the cigarette lighter!
IMHO, a small child should not be left unattended for long periods of time on the internet. The best filtering is for you to watch your kids and see what they're viewing. This goes for television too.
When your kids are older (i.e. teenagers) just make sure they understand what you approve of them looking at on the internet. At some point you have to trust their judgement of what's right/wrong. You still need to monitor, but don't put automated filtering there, because that just shows that you don't trust them. There are lots of ways to check what they're viewing without having a screen pop up saying that your parents have blocked this site because it contains objectionable content, when all they were reading were some /. postings.
Not everyone who uses the term "bible-thumping" is an atheist. Nor does every atheist have an ego... nor did my prior post suggest that I did. If you are under the impression that every atheist has an ego, it's probably because whenever there are two sides to an opinion, you generally hear from the most narrow sighted, and egoistic people from each side. Those who inhabit the middle ground can usually be found on /.
Not every hardworking, honest person on the planet can afford a real house.True, and not every person who lives in a mobile home is "trailer-trash" either. (oh, I guess you already said that) We're talking in stereotypes and generalities here, not in absolutes. Do you think that television ratings care about individual people? They only care about statistics, and stereotypes.
Anyway, accusations aside, let's get back to the topic, which is something to do with violence and trash on television. It's no secret that television is more and more trying to align itself with the lowest common denominator of viewer. Whether you believe these viewers to be "atheistic apartment trash", or "bible-thumping trailer trash", the fact is that this demographic group controls what we get to see on television, simply because they watch the most TV.
Perhaps the real issue is that most of us consider watching television to be a waste of time. That means the only time we bother watching TV is when we want to waste time - meaning television only gives us more time-wasting choices.
Sorry if you're upset, and I apologize if you feel I've offended you. Hopefully we can put personal issues aside and get back to the original topic.
This should be rated up as very funny! First of all, you're saying that Liberals want to dumb things down... but in the same breath you manage to spell "dumbed" as "dummed", and use "principal" where you should be using "principle". Finally, I'm pretty sure that his name was "Darwin", and hence the correct term would be "Darwinism".
Let's face it, if television has to be "dummed" down for anyone, that would be the stereotypical midwest bible-thumping trailer-trash Americans who spend more time in front of the TV than anyone else. These people have a higher representation in the ratings than anyone else, because everyone else has more important things to do all day, rather than watch stupid "dummed" down TV shows.
Or July 1st... it is, after all, a Canadian company that bought it. ;-)
I'm pretty sure that if you read carefully, the Canadian company in question is just one part of a consortium of companies that are selling the services. This company only has rights to sell the service in Canada. The consortium is actually Iridium Satellite LLC, I think.
Yeah! You go first... :-)
Vibrate mode is a good thing, but for some reason most people don't use it. Normally, I figure it's some kind of attention grabbing, but there are other reasons... For instance, women, in general, carry their cell phones in a purse rather than on their person, so they don't notice if the phone starts to vibrate.
Personally, I hate cell phones, but I'm required to have one for work. Even so, I usually turn the phone *off* (yes, they do have off switches, you know) when I'm in a restaurant. It's courteous to others. Besides, if someone calls me and it goes to voicemail, they just assume that I was somewhere out of the service area.
I think jammers are a great idea... can I get one mounted to the front of my car?
That's very generous of you... :-) But which language are you going to write it in? You could write it in assembly, but there is no assembler to assemble it.
Since real programmers write in machine code, I guess I'll volunteer to write the first assembler, entirely in hexadecimal. Now all we need is someone willing to re-instate a computer that uses vaccuum tubes or relays.
This may be a bit simplified, or a bit tongue in cheek, but I took computer engineering in university, and one of my professors tried to explain the difference between CS and CE as:
A computer scientist assumes that when you write a value onto a bus, that all the bits reach the other end of the bus at the same time. A computer engineer knows about bus skew - that due to the varying capacitance of individual wires on the bus, that some signals arrive sooner than others.I admit that this is an overly simplified view, but it does illustrate that there are two levels of knowledge. As an engineer, I didn't study the algorithms and data structures as much as a CS major would, even though we did take courses on real time OS's, compilers, and algorithms/data structures, but we had to study *more* of the physics (and even chemistry) side of things. One of our courses was all about the electrical properties of silicon, for example.
Another good differentiation is this - a computer engineer would design a new CPU, whereas a computer scientist would write an optimized compiler for it.
I guess the fact that I'm Canadian didn't come across in all that. Besides, some of us realize that life is a bit more complicated than "a box of chocolates".
I think you are angry that you don't understand why things are the way they are, and you're looking for someone to blame. Probably from Kansas too...