This is true, it was a fantastic console and such a shame it didn't last the race. I remember playing Phantasy Star Online over the 56k modem before the term MMO even existed.
I'm pretty sure I heard that term used in the leadup to UO, which came out two years before the DC.
This is being held up by some as proof that warrant less wiretapping is important and works. That, of course, ignores the fact that all of the surveillance done in this case happened legally through FISA court requests.
It doesn't really make sense to claim "sample size is small" for an 1,100-person sample. If the sampling was done in a random, unbiased manner, that size sample gives a margin of error of +/- 3%. If there are flaws in the sampling method, that's another thing, but the sample size alone doesn't seem problematic, unless you need accuracy better than +/- 3%.
If the sampling was done in a random, unbiased matter? That's one of the main problems. Another is rounding up by 50% to account for under-reporting. Preposterous.
Also, as a rule of thumb, never trust root N statistics on survey data. Systematic error is always huge and there's no reason to be confident that a normal distribution really applies. Notice how election polls with 10000 participants will show their root N error (+/- 1%) and disagree with similar polls with the same number of participants done by a different source by 8%. All the time.
If you get your cloud information from enterprise IT vendors and not Web 2.0 hustlers, then the picture gets a lot clearer.
So they want you to use Amazon instead of Google.
Doctorow would probably agree. His real problem is with privacy - the cost stuff is secondary. He usually brings it up in order to draw attention from people who don't know or care about privacy.
I read another report (maybe at Anandtech) of the same thing earlier this week. It was a sidenote in a motherboard preview claiming that Intel removed it after it showed no meaningful performance advantage in real use, unlike an SSD.
I got frustrated with FF 3.5.2's occasional pauses while i was trying to smoothly and rapidly scroll through a long page of images and links (ve3d) to embedded videos yesterday. The main Slashdot page showed some of the same behavior. I'd grab the scroll bar, pull down, and the framerate of the scroll would stutter and occasionally lag to the extent that it skipped a whole screen in catching up. I decided that I'd do a qualitative benchmark on those two pages on all the major browsers, then find a way to get good adblocking on whichever I picked. This was in Windows 7 with a c2d at 2.6 ghz, 4 gigs of ram, and a 4870.
First I tried IE8, since it was already installed. Surprisingly, it wasn't worse than FF. It wasn't noticeably faster either. A tie goes to the status quo, so I waved goodbye to Trident and moved on. Then I tried Chrome, expecting to encounter my winner. Instead, the problems were vastly worse. Javescript benchmarks showed me much higher scores with Webkit, as expected, but in terms of HTML rendering it was much, much slower. The scroll bar itself noticeably lagged behind my cursor, sometimes to the extent that my cursor exited the bar until I slowed down to let it catch up. The pauses and hickups on the screen during scrolling went from being annoying to agonizing. I probably saw 2-5 fewer frames while scrolling than in FF or IE. Amazing, but true. I hoped that Google simply had a bad Webkit implementation, but sadly, Safari showed the same performance. I removed Chrome (easily) and Safari (less easily, since it installed two or three other Apple things that didn't go away during my Safari uninstall) and moved to my last option.
I installed Opera and ran the same test. I was blown away by how smooth the scrolling was. Loading those pages from cache also matched FF and went a little faster than Chrome/Safari (I didn't check IE). I hadn't expected much from Opera, but the new version (10) is, for me, the fastest browser in Windows. In the grand scheme of things, FF and IE are pretty fast, too, but even when I turned adblocking back on in FF it was still slower than Opera. I never really liked Opera in the past, but I'm going to use it as my main browser for awhile to see how it goes.
Speaking of which, is there an auto-updating adblocker plugin for Opera?
I've got no academic background in linguistics (though I do know a bit about French and Latin evolution), but I've long assumed that change in a language isn't as necessary as the increase in entropy in a closed system. My contention is that linguistic changes beyond additions to vocabulary are a bad thing. I also think that the disconnect between written and spoken language likely came about in many cases because the majority of the population didn't use written language to communicate. I think that today we are actually anchored to the language of the past more than at any previous point in history.
Marginal shifts in vernacular are gradually accepted into writing and then accepted as part of the language. Over time, language creeps into new forms. I like the idea of building a fence around it. I may be idealistic, but I'm surprised that all of the responses to my comment told me that I was wrong because Shakespeare is hard for us to read. I was saying that I know languages change, and I want that to slow down. You, Mr. AC, actually had something educational to say, so thanks.
Well that's just 'natural evolution' of the language. Language is not something that is fixed in stone for all etermity, rather, it is a continuously changing entity.
That's traditionally due to poor literacy rates and it's not a good thing. Linguistic drift is the reason much of the written works of the English language are opaque to most current English speakers. I want people in 300 years to be able to easily and intuitively understand my papers. I don't want them having to do a running translation of "too" to "2" and so forth.
Google doesn't want to have to deal with subpoenas for information any more than libraries do. That's why they anonymize the data after nine months.
Google makes no claims about anonymizing or deleting all of the data they cull and attach to any Google (or Youtube, Chrome, etc.) account you have, and once they have it attached to your identity, not just an IP that could lead to a subpoena that leads to your identity, why should they even care about keeping search IP logs?
Just a couple weeks ago I saw a report stating that despite Google's search supremacy, Yahoo was still the biggest "portal" on the web, followed oddly enough by AOL, I believe. I think that Italy's questionable complaint is barking up the wrong tree. I suppose they know that Google's got the big bucks, and remember that Italy is run by a megalomaniacal media tycoon.
Unless there are nuclear bomb plans on the desktop, why would we be holding these devices for any days? Why are searching people's data anyways, when any serious criminal could simply upload their data to a server, drop it in a Dropbox account, or just encrypt it before crossing the border?
We need to be encouraging tourism and business travelers, not pulling this crap.
DHS isn't about criminals, it's about gaining more control over normal people.
Sorry to reply to myself, but here's the most important reason for the lack of substrate heterogeneity in the image:
"The AFM images (Fig. 1, C and D) were recorded in constant-height mode; that is, the tip was scanned without z feedback parallel to the surface while the frequency shift {Delta}f was being recorded (16). In this and all of the following measurements, the tip height z is always given with respect to the STM set point over the substrate."
In school, when I ran AFM I allow feedback from the tip to adjust the height of the probe so that it maintains contact with the thing I'm imaging, regardless of topography. Here, they had a very smooth substrate and then set the height of their probe to a fixed position above it.
So if the Pantacene is made of Benzene and the Benzene is C6H6, what is that gray flat smooth material that the molecules are sitting on top of in the second picture? Is this simply due to a focus so incredibly tuned that you can't see past the Pentacene molecules? I would expect that to be a field of bumps and crazy random shapes because it has to be made of some molecule or atom, right? How would they finish the slide/table/surface of that so accurately? I'm used to seeing that when you see bacteria or viruses with an electron microscope, what is in effect here that we don't see an alien landscape back-dropping these molecules? I'm not calling into question the authenticity of the image, just curious if anyone knows.
From the paper: "In this work, we present atomically resolved AFM measurements of pentacene both on a Cu(111) substrate and on a NaCl insulating film. For atomic resolution with the AFM, it is necessary to operate in the short-range regime of forces, where chemical interactions give substantial contributions."
This was a scanning probe microscope, and the tip of the probe was a single carbon monoxide atom. Apparently the CO didn't interact with the Cu or NaCl in such a way that it saw contrast from atom to atom, but it had a finer interaction with the atoms in the pentacene.
Single strands of synthetic polymers and DNA have been imageable for many years. I imagine many of us on slashdot have personally acquired images of these single molecules before.
No one here ever mentions resolution as a feature on phone screens, and they should. I have eyesight just good enough to pass the DMV tests without corrective lenses and that's sufficient for my old iPhone's 320x480 screen to be painful for me in comparison to the 640x480 screen on my new phone. I can read significantly smaller text, meaning I can see much larger chunks of real web pages, on the higher resolution screen.
The N900 described in TFA has an 800x480 resolution. That should get people very excited!
How presumptuous is it for these physicists to make claims about exoplanets, when no one has been able to visit them to confirm anything that our measurements are telling us *might* be out there? How confident is astrophysics in what they're seeing and interpreting?
The error bars are published along with the data, you know. There's no presumption here. These astronomers are presenting data and then interpreting the results in order to suggest probably implications.
Why is it that every "scientists find something new and try to understand it" article on Slashdot prompts comments that get modded up (why is the parent +4 insightful?!) for complaining that arrogant scientists are making stuff up and leaping to conclusions?
"which they've always denied until now" That's the BBC spin. "We have a government admittedly selling human organs for profit" Is misrepresenting the article.
ChromeOS will just be another way of controlling you really; Google is, in a very MS-like move, intending to use their operating system to leverage people onto their cloud services. How free or not their OS will be irrelevant because its goal is to have you shove all your data off to Google.
To be blunt, you want a free OS you download and install Linux. Yes, Linux can be an absolute pain in the arse, you sometimes need to faff around to get the simplest things to work whereas a whole bunch of features you don't need work out of the box, but no matter how much of a mess it gets, it is always YOUR mess.
As G. B. Shaw said, "Liberty means responsibility, that is why most men dread it"
If you want to be free, be prepared to spend Saturday screwing around on the command line. If its too much hassle, go ahead and place your data in the hands of Google or MS.
One thing MS has never been guilty of is "leveraging people onto their cloud services." This isn't a very MS-like move. This is next-level. With MS, you use the platform but it will always be trivial for a private user to take his data and move it to OSX, Linux, or anything else if he decides to switch operating systems. His data is always on his own machine, under his control. If Windows 9 is released and changes that, he can choose not upgrade and walk away with his data if he wants to move elsewhere.
On Google's servers, if "the cloud" gets a change for the worse regarding data privacy, security, access, or control, there's no chance to see the change, decide it's a problem, and easily remove the data. The data is in Google's control, not the user's. If they want to change the privacy policy they just do it. If there's anything we've learned about Google it's that they believe in "opt-out." If you want to save your data before the cloud undergoes some objectionable change, you'll need to hear about it in advance and take action. When the data is on your local machine and Apple or MS decides to make the next OS scan it for advertising information, you can avoid it by doing nothing.
I have to agree with the underwhelming nature of only 13MPH faster.
We now have a much better handle on material science and metallurgy. We actually have the capability to model the predicted performance and make design tweaks. We have the ability to machine to tolerances only dreamed about back then. And we have composites and alloys that weren't available.
I realize that it's not a linear scale from a drag standpoint, but our victory could be due only to 1906 measurement error.
Sheldon
"Our" victory? We as the people of 2009 banded together to defeat those godawful sons of bitches from 1906?
I think it's impressive to even make a steam powered car now. Sure, the 1906 record is more impressive, but this one is cool too. It's like getting back to the Moon would be pretty impressive after we basically abandoned the related technology.
Slashdot Mirror
This is true, it was a fantastic console and such a shame it didn't last the race. I remember playing Phantasy Star Online over the 56k modem before the term MMO even existed.
I'm pretty sure I heard that term used in the leadup to UO, which came out two years before the DC.
This is being held up by some as proof that warrant less wiretapping is important and works. That, of course, ignores the fact that all of the surveillance done in this case happened legally through FISA court requests.
1176 people compared to 10 comes a lot closer to real truth. Close enough to have just a few % error margin, so in statistics it works good.
You assume a normal distribution, which is debatable, and no systematic error.
It doesn't really make sense to claim "sample size is small" for an 1,100-person sample. If the sampling was done in a random, unbiased manner, that size sample gives a margin of error of +/- 3%. If there are flaws in the sampling method, that's another thing, but the sample size alone doesn't seem problematic, unless you need accuracy better than +/- 3%.
If the sampling was done in a random, unbiased matter? That's one of the main problems. Another is rounding up by 50% to account for under-reporting. Preposterous.
Also, as a rule of thumb, never trust root N statistics on survey data. Systematic error is always huge and there's no reason to be confident that a normal distribution really applies. Notice how election polls with 10000 participants will show their root N error (+/- 1%) and disagree with similar polls with the same number of participants done by a different source by 8%. All the time.
If you get your cloud information from enterprise IT vendors and not Web 2.0 hustlers, then the picture gets a lot clearer.
So they want you to use Amazon instead of Google.
Doctorow would probably agree. His real problem is with privacy - the cost stuff is secondary. He usually brings it up in order to draw attention from people who don't know or care about privacy.
There have also been rumors, however, that Braidwood has been canceled, at least in the near term:
http://www.dvhardware.net/article37368.html
I read another report (maybe at Anandtech) of the same thing earlier this week. It was a sidenote in a motherboard preview claiming that Intel removed it after it showed no meaningful performance advantage in real use, unlike an SSD.
I got frustrated with FF 3.5.2's occasional pauses while i was trying to smoothly and rapidly scroll through a long page of images and links (ve3d) to embedded videos yesterday. The main Slashdot page showed some of the same behavior. I'd grab the scroll bar, pull down, and the framerate of the scroll would stutter and occasionally lag to the extent that it skipped a whole screen in catching up. I decided that I'd do a qualitative benchmark on those two pages on all the major browsers, then find a way to get good adblocking on whichever I picked. This was in Windows 7 with a c2d at 2.6 ghz, 4 gigs of ram, and a 4870.
First I tried IE8, since it was already installed. Surprisingly, it wasn't worse than FF. It wasn't noticeably faster either. A tie goes to the status quo, so I waved goodbye to Trident and moved on. Then I tried Chrome, expecting to encounter my winner. Instead, the problems were vastly worse. Javescript benchmarks showed me much higher scores with Webkit, as expected, but in terms of HTML rendering it was much, much slower. The scroll bar itself noticeably lagged behind my cursor, sometimes to the extent that my cursor exited the bar until I slowed down to let it catch up. The pauses and hickups on the screen during scrolling went from being annoying to agonizing. I probably saw 2-5 fewer frames while scrolling than in FF or IE. Amazing, but true. I hoped that Google simply had a bad Webkit implementation, but sadly, Safari showed the same performance. I removed Chrome (easily) and Safari (less easily, since it installed two or three other Apple things that didn't go away during my Safari uninstall) and moved to my last option.
I installed Opera and ran the same test. I was blown away by how smooth the scrolling was. Loading those pages from cache also matched FF and went a little faster than Chrome/Safari (I didn't check IE). I hadn't expected much from Opera, but the new version (10) is, for me, the fastest browser in Windows. In the grand scheme of things, FF and IE are pretty fast, too, but even when I turned adblocking back on in FF it was still slower than Opera. I never really liked Opera in the past, but I'm going to use it as my main browser for awhile to see how it goes.
Speaking of which, is there an auto-updating adblocker plugin for Opera?
What a wonderful response - thanks.
I've got no academic background in linguistics (though I do know a bit about French and Latin evolution), but I've long assumed that change in a language isn't as necessary as the increase in entropy in a closed system. My contention is that linguistic changes beyond additions to vocabulary are a bad thing. I also think that the disconnect between written and spoken language likely came about in many cases because the majority of the population didn't use written language to communicate. I think that today we are actually anchored to the language of the past more than at any previous point in history.
Marginal shifts in vernacular are gradually accepted into writing and then accepted as part of the language. Over time, language creeps into new forms. I like the idea of building a fence around it. I may be idealistic, but I'm surprised that all of the responses to my comment told me that I was wrong because Shakespeare is hard for us to read. I was saying that I know languages change, and I want that to slow down. You, Mr. AC, actually had something educational to say, so thanks.
Well that's just 'natural evolution' of the language. Language is not something that is fixed in stone for all etermity, rather, it is a continuously changing entity.
That's traditionally due to poor literacy rates and it's not a good thing. Linguistic drift is the reason much of the written works of the English language are opaque to most current English speakers. I want people in 300 years to be able to easily and intuitively understand my papers. I don't want them having to do a running translation of "too" to "2" and so forth.
To be fair, those batteries were made by Sony.
Apple doesn't make anything itself. What's the point?
And this differs from Silly Putty how?
Exactly - it's just another viscoelastic. The viscosity vs. flow rate curve is different, but the concept is the same as silly putty.
Google doesn't want to have to deal with subpoenas for information any more than libraries do. That's why they anonymize the data after nine months.
Google makes no claims about anonymizing or deleting all of the data they cull and attach to any Google (or Youtube, Chrome, etc.) account you have, and once they have it attached to your identity, not just an IP that could lead to a subpoena that leads to your identity, why should they even care about keeping search IP logs?
Just a couple weeks ago I saw a report stating that despite Google's search supremacy, Yahoo was still the biggest "portal" on the web, followed oddly enough by AOL, I believe. I think that Italy's questionable complaint is barking up the wrong tree. I suppose they know that Google's got the big bucks, and remember that Italy is run by a megalomaniacal media tycoon.
Unless there are nuclear bomb plans on the desktop, why would we be holding these devices for any days? Why are searching people's data anyways, when any serious criminal could simply upload their data to a server, drop it in a Dropbox account, or just encrypt it before crossing the border?
We need to be encouraging tourism and business travelers, not pulling this crap.
DHS isn't about criminals, it's about gaining more control over normal people.
the guy with the iInjury?
But you don't have to take my word for it!
"The show will cease airing on PBS on Friday, August 28, 2009 after 26 years on the air."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_Rainbow
duh duh DUH!
Sorry to reply to myself, but here's the most important reason for the lack of substrate heterogeneity in the image:
"The AFM images (Fig. 1, C and D) were recorded in constant-height mode; that is, the tip was scanned without z feedback parallel to the surface while the frequency shift {Delta}f was being recorded (16). In this and all of the following measurements, the tip height z is always given with respect to the STM set point over the substrate."
In school, when I ran AFM I allow feedback from the tip to adjust the height of the probe so that it maintains contact with the thing I'm imaging, regardless of topography. Here, they had a very smooth substrate and then set the height of their probe to a fixed position above it.
So if the Pantacene is made of Benzene and the Benzene is C6H6, what is that gray flat smooth material that the molecules are sitting on top of in the second picture? Is this simply due to a focus so incredibly tuned that you can't see past the Pentacene molecules? I would expect that to be a field of bumps and crazy random shapes because it has to be made of some molecule or atom, right? How would they finish the slide/table/surface of that so accurately? I'm used to seeing that when you see bacteria or viruses with an electron microscope, what is in effect here that we don't see an alien landscape back-dropping these molecules? I'm not calling into question the authenticity of the image, just curious if anyone knows.
From the paper: "In this work, we present atomically resolved AFM measurements of pentacene both on a Cu(111) substrate and on a NaCl insulating film. For atomic resolution with the AFM, it is necessary to operate in the short-range regime of forces, where chemical interactions give substantial contributions."
This was a scanning probe microscope, and the tip of the probe was a single carbon monoxide atom. Apparently the CO didn't interact with the Cu or NaCl in such a way that it saw contrast from atom to atom, but it had a finer interaction with the atoms in the pentacene.
Single strands of synthetic polymers and DNA have been imageable for many years. I imagine many of us on slashdot have personally acquired images of these single molecules before.
No one here ever mentions resolution as a feature on phone screens, and they should. I have eyesight just good enough to pass the DMV tests without corrective lenses and that's sufficient for my old iPhone's 320x480 screen to be painful for me in comparison to the 640x480 screen on my new phone. I can read significantly smaller text, meaning I can see much larger chunks of real web pages, on the higher resolution screen.
The N900 described in TFA has an 800x480 resolution. That should get people very excited!
How presumptuous is it for these physicists to make claims about exoplanets, when no one has been able to visit them to confirm anything that our measurements are telling us *might* be out there? How confident is astrophysics in what they're seeing and interpreting?
The error bars are published along with the data, you know. There's no presumption here. These astronomers are presenting data and then interpreting the results in order to suggest probably implications.
Why is it that every "scientists find something new and try to understand it" article on Slashdot prompts comments that get modded up (why is the parent +4 insightful?!) for complaining that arrogant scientists are making stuff up and leaping to conclusions?
"which they've always denied until now" That's the BBC spin.
"We have a government admittedly selling human organs for profit" Is misrepresenting the article.
Please read the original article:
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2009-08/26/content_8616938.htm
Now go on bashing a culture because we fear they are overtaking our economic hegemony.
Chinese state-run newspapers will only publish exactly what the party wants them to publish. That's not remotely true with the BBC.
ChromeOS will just be another way of controlling you really; Google is, in a very MS-like move, intending to use their operating system to leverage people onto their cloud services. How free or not their OS will be irrelevant because its goal is to have you shove all your data off to Google.
To be blunt, you want a free OS you download and install Linux. Yes, Linux can be an absolute pain in the arse, you sometimes need to faff around to get the simplest things to work whereas a whole bunch of features you don't need work out of the box, but no matter how much of a mess it gets, it is always YOUR mess.
As G. B. Shaw said, "Liberty means responsibility, that is why most men dread it"
If you want to be free, be prepared to spend Saturday screwing around on the command line. If its too much hassle, go ahead and place your data in the hands of Google or MS.
One thing MS has never been guilty of is "leveraging people onto their cloud services." This isn't a very MS-like move. This is next-level. With MS, you use the platform but it will always be trivial for a private user to take his data and move it to OSX, Linux, or anything else if he decides to switch operating systems. His data is always on his own machine, under his control. If Windows 9 is released and changes that, he can choose not upgrade and walk away with his data if he wants to move elsewhere.
On Google's servers, if "the cloud" gets a change for the worse regarding data privacy, security, access, or control, there's no chance to see the change, decide it's a problem, and easily remove the data. The data is in Google's control, not the user's. If they want to change the privacy policy they just do it. If there's anything we've learned about Google it's that they believe in "opt-out." If you want to save your data before the cloud undergoes some objectionable change, you'll need to hear about it in advance and take action. When the data is on your local machine and Apple or MS decides to make the next OS scan it for advertising information, you can avoid it by doing nothing.
I have to agree with the underwhelming nature of only 13MPH faster.
We now have a much better handle on material science and metallurgy. We actually have the capability to model the predicted performance and make design tweaks. We have the ability to machine to tolerances only dreamed about back then. And we have composites and alloys that weren't available.
I realize that it's not a linear scale from a drag standpoint, but our victory could be due only to 1906 measurement error.
Sheldon
"Our" victory? We as the people of 2009 banded together to defeat those godawful sons of bitches from 1906?
I think it's impressive to even make a steam powered car now. Sure, the 1906 record is more impressive, but this one is cool too. It's like getting back to the Moon would be pretty impressive after we basically abandoned the related technology.
They are quite possibly the best and least biased foreign news reporters in the world, bar none. Excellent work they do.
CSM is very widely respected around the world. When I had a job analyzing foreign affairs, keeping up with CSM was my first duty.