From their website: "We define Risk Intelligence as the ability to estimate probabilities accurately."
Are they not aware of the pioneering and Nobel prize awarded studies of Tversky and Kahnemann in the 70's which demonstrated beyond any doubt that humans are terrible at estimating any kind of probability (especially risk-related ones)?
What about the 10-step percentage scale they used? Seriously, is any person able to differentiate between being "70% sure" and "80% sure" regarding any statement?
What about latent variables like the OS used? How can one possibly compare any feature of a Windows user with features of Mac or Linux user?
I can't locate any samples of the questionnaire used and I don't need to see any, because I'm 89.345943% sure they don't know what they're talking about.
Not so fast, please... In most countries downloading is still legal, but torrenting is not, because technically it involves uploading too. Would you really want Mozilla to take the blame for billions of potential law offenses?
If you hate waiting, why don't you use the SkipScreen FF plugin or use a dedicated downloader app like JDownloader instead to queue your requests?
I really can't grasp the scope of such "marketing studies". Who are they and what is their supposed customer base and usage scenario? Are they comparing browsers with no plugins in the same way OS wars love to compare the "native security" of operating systems with no antivirus/firewall installed, because this is what the "average Joe" will do?
Or are they the kind of reductionist scientists that kill plants in order to study their roots? Finally, are they the kind of purist "security experts" who, when (and if) Microsoft releases its next OS with Microsoft Security Essentials preinstalled they'll remove it, in order to assess the security of the plain vanilla OS?
As for myself, in 2011 I cannot conceive setting up a computer for a friend or client without having him BUY my preferred non-free internet security suite and insisting on using Firefox with full plugin defensive and privacy armor. Initially they may protest at the extra clicks required to burn in the safety engines, but eventually they will be convinced that the Internet is a Dangerous Place and they need as hell be fully protected. By the way, I install Firefox Portable, so he can duplicate the full setup in his other boxes without fuss.
My ethics golden rule is what I configure for my friends and clients is what I consider optimal for myself, irrespectively of what their experience level, because "he who knows has the obligation to teach". Would the Accuvant gurus kindly please come forward and tell us what is the browser they use at work and at home and whether they use plugins or not?
Supposing that by "basic foods" you meant "natural foods", IMHO the tax plans are meant to promote at all costs "plastic foods" which have much higher profit margins. Even in schools. Even when plastic food reduces your and your children's life expectancy by 10 or more years. I'm starting to get sympathetic to those conspiracy theorists that say this is a part of the great plan to effectively and proactively reduce the population of the Earth.
Fruits and vegetables need a lot of care and affection to come to your grocery store in that great shape and look, while all "plastic" food needs is a colourful and shiny packaging. Not to mention that producing natural products requires human labour too
Does any sane person actually believe those studies arguing that ketchup is "equivalent" to fresh tomatoes or that canned orange juice is offers the same health benefits as fresh oranges?
Amen. It's the 2nd/. post in two weeks where people forget that the first post regarding a death should always be sending condolences. Is netiquette immune to death?
In that other post somebody said that his father just died and asked for best practices on how to securely disclose passwords for posterity. IIRC there were about 150 technical threads and I felt the urge in that 151st post to offer him my condolences.
I don't know whether I'm too old school or just too sensitive, but to me the primary definition of being human still remains to have empathy and be compassionate (especially in matters of life and death).
Therefore, RIP Ilya. Somehow I have the feeling that you never managed to convince your parents that computers were a good thing for you.
Imagine an ideal product (e.g. a phone) that is advertised as having virtually no bugs. Suddenly a bug emerges and the company's share value drops 1%. What do you think the company should do in the future?
a. Do extensive and intensive beta testing and bug hunting for at least a year before the release of a new model, in order to avoid a future 1% drop (or more) in share value and possible firm reputation damages, or
b. Let the occasional bug leak in a controlled way every few months so that clients and the market get used to it ("oh, it's just a bug, it will be fixed in two-three weeks") and void the risk of share value drop?
Bear in mind that (a) is much more risky than (b), because when the next bug appears (the damned things tend to do that) the drop might be 2%. With (b) shareholders and clients get used to it, just say "oh well, shit happens" and get on with their lives.
+5 from me too. One of the most eloquent and informative proofs that the we are the merchandise. Capitalism has acquired a whole new meaning, based on the capitalization of capita which is Latin for "head", including whatever it's left of the brain in it. Social companies are truly the 21st century headhunters.
As the Journal is evolving, you'll find that simple applications like Libre Office simply are not flexible enough. Please consider (the sooner the better) migrating the workflow towards Scribus (http://www.scribus.net) - it's Desktop Publishing - oriented, open source and the best FOSS tool for the job.
Also, as a former DTP pro, I'd recommend producing two versions of the journal - one that's meant to be read on paper, and (at least) one meant to be read on-screen. The present form of the Journal is a hybrid and does not suit everybody. Having a low and high quality download doesn't solve the problem.
Finally, before making decisions for the screen-only version, you could administer a poll to see what screen size is the majority of readers using. Formatting the Journal for 15" is very different from formatting it for 9". Perhaps a HTML version (where users can adjust the font size at will) is a better solution than the fixed-font-size PDF format. Probably the commenter above that suggested a blog format had this problem in the back of his mind.
Excuse me for saying so, but you are to blame too - not testing a (critical) presentation you have to give on the target platform (and if possible, on the target PC) is generally a bad idea.
The desktop "Windows 7 nano" that you refer to exists, and is called "Signature Edition". I've read about it a bit after the launch time of Win 7, but it seems it's not commercially available yet. Also since February 2011 there is a thin client called Thin PC, available for testing.
However, I'm sure that for education they'll just give away the stuff for free.
I'd give you +1 insightful if you could provide some reasons why it's the wrong people doing the jobs. Somehow I get the feeling that you are not merely implying that all this wrongness is just the result of bureaucratic blunders or cutting the costs.
I can't help but make comparisons with another industry: "I've worked in the big pharma for 10 years. The right people are designing new drugs for people. The right people are buying them in hospital and private practices. The right people are designing the ads and optimal choices for the health system serving the feeling of public well-being. And, a lot of right doctors are making sure the dosages are maintained".
After so many decades of commercial software engineering, one might have have expected that the ideal "smart education software" to teach spelling, multiplication or indefinite integrals surely would already have been designed and now used in schools. However, somehow we seem to not be there yet. One has to wonder why.
Lack of proof i.e. measuring the effectiveness of computed-aided instruction is still the biggest problem. The other (bigger) problem is that like any commercial product, software is never finished. Ideal razor blades are not here yet, this is why you see new models every few months. The same applies to toothbrushes, chewing gum, netbooks, cars, even weapons. No one is willing to challenge our carefully programmed by the industry (any industry, including education) habit of planned obsolescence (except perhaps the big players who can claim version 8.0 is two times as good as version 7.0 just because we can and will swallow it).
Finally, a school using this presumably ideal software (if it ever existed) will have to compete with the neighboring school that uses the latest bling. In the same way, Waldorf schools have to compete with computer intensive schools. The debate will never end. However, the variety of existing options is the only way to achieve the much needed variability to survive and evolve in the feature.
It never ceases to amaze me that the intensive "teaching to the test" as realized in the US somehow has not led to a monopoly "operating system" in education and armies of graduate clones. Somehow, and in the tradition of good ole science fiction, seeing some of the parents still not trusting machines (TVs, game consoles and computers including smartphones) messing with their children's brains always fills me with hope for a better future.
by signing the Budapest Open Access Initiative, supported by Soros' Open Society Institute. You can read about it here http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read
Everybody nowadays uses the terms Science and Engineering (and sometimes their marketing) interchangeably, and it's not only plain folk or children. Academic institutions also do, because all Departments want a piece of the the cake.
In my country there is historically a big battle between Schools and their Departments: In the mainframe computer beginnings (the 80's) it was the Mathematicians that claimed to be the foremost experts in CS. Almost immediately the Physicists came along, claiming that they are the only ones that knew how to apply CS in real life problems. Soon, the Engineering Schools got their CS Depts. and 20 years ago the first CS Depts. within Science Schools were founded.
All these graduates still fight for computer-related jobs in the public and private sector, all claiming to have a "CS" degree and related post-graduate studies.
In real life: A CS Dept. Professor once told me, when asked about the specs of a new PC they were ordering: "Don't ask me about what 'video card' I'd prefer, I don't really know what's inside a PC - I'm a networks expert". On the other end of the spectrum, computer shop owners and sales stuff have no CS background at all - they're just salesmen who might have been hobbyists in their teens.
In conclusion, there's just one thing one could safely advise about "CS" and it's the same piece of advice pertaining to life itself: Beware, it's a bitch.
Everybody taking pictures with cheap cameras, in low light conditions or in shaky environments has at some stage researched for deblur solutions. Personally, about once every year I survey the status of deblurring software to see if there is any progress. There are about a dozen (mostly shareware) alternatives out there, some of them pretty expensive too, but I don't find them very spectacular. Most rely on trial-and-error tweaking some cryptic parameters (point spread function radius etc) and eyeballing the results.
My favorite so far is a Danish freeware by Michael Vinther called "Image Analyzer". It is a standalone image processing toolbox with several features not meaningful to the average photographer (FFT etc), but allows several adjustments to be made, even adaptive noise reduction. Deblurring is implemented as a "Restoration by deconvolution" plugin and its distinguishing feature is that it automatically guesses the amount of motion blur (x and y axis), circular blur or Gaussian blur present in the image and allows previewing the result. One can iteratively apply deblurring steps and see the algorithm's convergence on a small graph, or scan a range of parameters and visually compare the individual corrected images. I have found that most problematic pictures suffer from both motion blur and poor focus, so correcting both often provides spectacular results. If you are really desperate about getting that unique image fixed, Image Analyzer is a very good and free start point.
However, after exploring the possibilities of Image Analyzer and other apps, I found that their weak point is that any significant image noise will distract the algorithms resulting in images worse than the original - noise itself gets focused and amplified. The Adobe demo worked well in the well-lit and therefore noise-free sample, but I doubt it would work with typical indoor photography using a weak flash or no flash at all (i.e. pics taken with mobile phones and of course tablets). In such cases, a workaround is to denoise the picture first (Absoft's Neat Image still is the king for the purpose) and then applying the deconvolution. Another trick, in case you are particularly interested in deblurring a part of an image, e.g. a face, is to crop the image to the part of interest, play with deblurring parameters and then apply them to the whole image.
Image blur is and will remain a big problem of digital photography, as long as the cameras are handheld, lightweight and used on the move or in low light conditions. Millions of unique shots worldwide are ruined by it and it's no wonder that a lot of effort and resources is spent by big companies and researchers (not to mention three letter agencies) to deal with it. If this new Adobe solution is a better one, I expect several lawsuits in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
From their website: "We define Risk Intelligence as the ability to estimate probabilities accurately."
Are they not aware of the pioneering and Nobel prize awarded studies of Tversky and Kahnemann in the 70's which demonstrated beyond any doubt that humans are terrible at estimating any kind of probability (especially risk-related ones)?
What about the 10-step percentage scale they used? Seriously, is any person able to differentiate between being "70% sure" and "80% sure" regarding any statement?
What about latent variables like the OS used? How can one possibly compare any feature of a Windows user with features of Mac or Linux user?
I can't locate any samples of the questionnaire used and I don't need to see any, because I'm 89.345943% sure they don't know what they're talking about.
Not so fast, please... In most countries downloading is still legal, but torrenting is not, because technically it involves uploading too. Would you really want Mozilla to take the blame for billions of potential law offenses?
If you hate waiting, why don't you use the SkipScreen FF plugin or use a dedicated downloader app like JDownloader instead to queue your requests?
In the last paragraph I meant to say "irrespectively of what their experience level is"
I really can't grasp the scope of such "marketing studies". Who are they and what is their supposed customer base and usage scenario? Are they comparing browsers with no plugins in the same way OS wars love to compare the "native security" of operating systems with no antivirus/firewall installed, because this is what the "average Joe" will do?
Or are they the kind of reductionist scientists that kill plants in order to study their roots? Finally, are they the kind of purist "security experts" who, when (and if) Microsoft releases its next OS with Microsoft Security Essentials preinstalled they'll remove it, in order to assess the security of the plain vanilla OS?
As for myself, in 2011 I cannot conceive setting up a computer for a friend or client without having him BUY my preferred non-free internet security suite and insisting on using Firefox with full plugin defensive and privacy armor. Initially they may protest at the extra clicks required to burn in the safety engines, but eventually they will be convinced that the Internet is a Dangerous Place and they need as hell be fully protected. By the way, I install Firefox Portable, so he can duplicate the full setup in his other boxes without fuss.
My ethics golden rule is what I configure for my friends and clients is what I consider optimal for myself, irrespectively of what their experience level, because "he who knows has the obligation to teach". Would the Accuvant gurus kindly please come forward and tell us what is the browser they use at work and at home and whether they use plugins or not?
Supposing that by "basic foods" you meant "natural foods", IMHO the tax plans are meant to promote at all costs "plastic foods" which have much higher profit margins. Even in schools. Even when plastic food reduces your and your children's life expectancy by 10 or more years. I'm starting to get sympathetic to those conspiracy theorists that say this is a part of the great plan to effectively and proactively reduce the population of the Earth.
Fruits and vegetables need a lot of care and affection to come to your grocery store in that great shape and look, while all "plastic" food needs is a colourful and shiny packaging. Not to mention that producing natural products requires human labour too
Does any sane person actually believe those studies arguing that ketchup is "equivalent" to fresh tomatoes or that canned orange juice is offers the same health benefits as fresh oranges?
Amen. It's the 2nd /. post in two weeks where people forget that the first post regarding a death should always be sending condolences. Is netiquette immune to death?
In that other post somebody said that his father just died and asked for best practices on how to securely disclose passwords for posterity. IIRC there were about 150 technical threads and I felt the urge in that 151st post to offer him my condolences.
I don't know whether I'm too old school or just too sensitive, but to me the primary definition of being human still remains to have empathy and be compassionate (especially in matters of life and death).
Therefore, RIP Ilya. Somehow I have the feeling that you never managed to convince your parents that computers were a good thing for you.
Imagine an ideal product (e.g. a phone) that is advertised as having virtually no bugs. Suddenly a bug emerges and the company's share value drops 1%. What do you think the company should do in the future?
a. Do extensive and intensive beta testing and bug hunting for at least a year before the release of a new model, in order to avoid a future 1% drop (or more) in share value and possible firm reputation damages, or
b. Let the occasional bug leak in a controlled way every few months so that clients and the market get used to it ("oh, it's just a bug, it will be fixed in two-three weeks") and void the risk of share value drop?
Bear in mind that (a) is much more risky than (b), because when the next bug appears (the damned things tend to do that) the drop might be 2%. With (b) shareholders and clients get used to it, just say "oh well, shit happens" and get on with their lives.
To me it's not a bug, it's a strategy.
Is Apple the only firm that faces the challenges the TFA describes?
In both the casino and the app store, the winner is The House with probability p = 1. Determinism/Chance has nothing to do with it.
+5 from me too. One of the most eloquent and informative proofs that the we are the merchandise. Capitalism has acquired a whole new meaning, based on the capitalization of capita which is Latin for "head", including whatever it's left of the brain in it. Social companies are truly the 21st century headhunters.
Since I didn't see any yet posted, I just wanted to express my warmest condolences for the loss of your father.
I lost mine three years ago and I am glad he took all his dark secrets with him.
As the Journal is evolving, you'll find that simple applications like Libre Office simply are not flexible enough. Please consider (the sooner the better) migrating the workflow towards Scribus (http://www.scribus.net) - it's Desktop Publishing - oriented, open source and the best FOSS tool for the job.
Also, as a former DTP pro, I'd recommend producing two versions of the journal - one that's meant to be read on paper, and (at least) one meant to be read on-screen. The present form of the Journal is a hybrid and does not suit everybody. Having a low and high quality download doesn't solve the problem.
Finally, before making decisions for the screen-only version, you could administer a poll to see what screen size is the majority of readers using. Formatting the Journal for 15" is very different from formatting it for 9". Perhaps a HTML version (where users can adjust the font size at will) is a better solution than the fixed-font-size PDF format. Probably the commenter above that suggested a blog format had this problem in the back of his mind.
I have tried Softmaker Office too some months ago, and I was really impressed by its abilities. I expect a lawsuit soon.
Excuse me for saying so, but you are to blame too - not testing a (critical) presentation you have to give on the target platform (and if possible, on the target PC) is generally a bad idea.
There may be laws restricting sales under cost, but there are no laws forbidding donations or "donations".
The desktop "Windows 7 nano" that you refer to exists, and is called "Signature Edition". I've read about it a bit after the launch time of Win 7, but it seems it's not commercially available yet. Also since February 2011 there is a thin client called Thin PC, available for testing.
However, I'm sure that for education they'll just give away the stuff for free.
I'd give you +1 insightful if you could provide some reasons why it's the wrong people doing the jobs. Somehow I get the feeling that you are not merely implying that all this wrongness is just the result of bureaucratic blunders or cutting the costs.
I can't help but make comparisons with another industry: "I've worked in the big pharma for 10 years. The right people are designing new drugs for people. The right people are buying them in hospital and private practices. The right people are designing the ads and optimal choices for the health system serving the feeling of public well-being. And, a lot of right doctors are making sure the dosages are maintained".
After so many decades of commercial software engineering, one might have have expected that the ideal "smart education software" to teach spelling, multiplication or indefinite integrals surely would already have been designed and now used in schools. However, somehow we seem to not be there yet. One has to wonder why.
Lack of proof i.e. measuring the effectiveness of computed-aided instruction is still the biggest problem. The other (bigger) problem is that like any commercial product, software is never finished. Ideal razor blades are not here yet, this is why you see new models every few months. The same applies to toothbrushes, chewing gum, netbooks, cars, even weapons. No one is willing to challenge our carefully programmed by the industry (any industry, including education) habit of planned obsolescence (except perhaps the big players who can claim version 8.0 is two times as good as version 7.0 just because we can and will swallow it).
Finally, a school using this presumably ideal software (if it ever existed) will have to compete with the neighboring school that uses the latest bling. In the same way, Waldorf schools have to compete with computer intensive schools. The debate will never end. However, the variety of existing options is the only way to achieve the much needed variability to survive and evolve in the feature.
It never ceases to amaze me that the intensive "teaching to the test" as realized in the US somehow has not led to a monopoly "operating system" in education and armies of graduate clones. Somehow, and in the tradition of good ole science fiction, seeing some of the parents still not trusting machines (TVs, game consoles and computers including smartphones) messing with their children's brains always fills me with hope for a better future.
I get it now, Anonymous is just like Slashdot, because Slashdotters are slashdotters.
by signing the Budapest Open Access Initiative, supported by Soros' Open Society Institute. You can read about it here http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read
+1.
Everybody nowadays uses the terms Science and Engineering (and sometimes their marketing) interchangeably, and it's not only plain folk or children. Academic institutions also do, because all Departments want a piece of the the cake.
In my country there is historically a big battle between Schools and their Departments: In the mainframe computer beginnings (the 80's) it was the Mathematicians that claimed to be the foremost experts in CS. Almost immediately the Physicists came along, claiming that they are the only ones that knew how to apply CS in real life problems. Soon, the Engineering Schools got their CS Depts. and 20 years ago the first CS Depts. within Science Schools were founded.
All these graduates still fight for computer-related jobs in the public and private sector, all claiming to have a "CS" degree and related post-graduate studies.
In real life: A CS Dept. Professor once told me, when asked about the specs of a new PC they were ordering: "Don't ask me about what 'video card' I'd prefer, I don't really know what's inside a PC - I'm a networks expert". On the other end of the spectrum, computer shop owners and sales stuff have no CS background at all - they're just salesmen who might have been hobbyists in their teens.
In conclusion, there's just one thing one could safely advise about "CS" and it's the same piece of advice pertaining to life itself: Beware, it's a bitch.
Before you go, don't forget to advise them to always use NoScript in their browsers!
And discussion in a forum like /. is the most political act of all.
You got the Mac part right, because the next computing-related movie will surely be a Jobs biopic.
Everybody taking pictures with cheap cameras, in low light conditions or in shaky environments has at some stage researched for deblur solutions. Personally, about once every year I survey the status of deblurring software to see if there is any progress. There are about a dozen (mostly shareware) alternatives out there, some of them pretty expensive too, but I don't find them very spectacular. Most rely on trial-and-error tweaking some cryptic parameters (point spread function radius etc) and eyeballing the results.
My favorite so far is a Danish freeware by Michael Vinther called "Image Analyzer". It is a standalone image processing toolbox with several features not meaningful to the average photographer (FFT etc), but allows several adjustments to be made, even adaptive noise reduction. Deblurring is implemented as a "Restoration by deconvolution" plugin and its distinguishing feature is that it automatically guesses the amount of motion blur (x and y axis), circular blur or Gaussian blur present in the image and allows previewing the result. One can iteratively apply deblurring steps and see the algorithm's convergence on a small graph, or scan a range of parameters and visually compare the individual corrected images. I have found that most problematic pictures suffer from both motion blur and poor focus, so correcting both often provides spectacular results. If you are really desperate about getting that unique image fixed, Image Analyzer is a very good and free start point.
However, after exploring the possibilities of Image Analyzer and other apps, I found that their weak point is that any significant image noise will distract the algorithms resulting in images worse than the original - noise itself gets focused and amplified. The Adobe demo worked well in the well-lit and therefore noise-free sample, but I doubt it would work with typical indoor photography using a weak flash or no flash at all (i.e. pics taken with mobile phones and of course tablets). In such cases, a workaround is to denoise the picture first (Absoft's Neat Image still is the king for the purpose) and then applying the deconvolution. Another trick, in case you are particularly interested in deblurring a part of an image, e.g. a face, is to crop the image to the part of interest, play with deblurring parameters and then apply them to the whole image.
Image blur is and will remain a big problem of digital photography, as long as the cameras are handheld, lightweight and used on the move or in low light conditions. Millions of unique shots worldwide are ruined by it and it's no wonder that a lot of effort and resources is spent by big companies and researchers (not to mention three letter agencies) to deal with it. If this new Adobe solution is a better one, I expect several lawsuits in the future.