Speaker wire is so low impedance and the signal so strong that even something from monoprice is plenty fine.
Forget "fancy" speaker wire--it boggles my mind that people (even non-audiophiles) pay extra for something labeled "speaker wire" when stock zip cord works just as well and is invariably cheaper. Of course, I use coathangers (see the mouseover text in the linked cartoon).
Not sortable means you have to see more titles before you select one. For the person looking for a title that's bad.
The person looking for a specific title will simply use search, which still works fine. The only purpose of the scrolling interface is to browse what's available. Not sortable only means that you have no easy way to skip the stuff you already looked at yesterday. On top of that, the slower scrolling means that people are likely to get tired of browsing after seeing a lot fewer movies, since it takes so much longer to see each one.
How much do you want to bet they just log the mouse overs, seeing what people wanted to get detail on?
The old interface used mouseovers to provide details. The only thing you got with no mouseover was the title and #stars. If you wanted to see the plot summary, actors, director, genre, rating, etc., you had to mouseover. Netflix is not going to get a whole lot more info from this interface, except that they'll probably learn which movies have covers that are hard to read.
To discover new, interesting stuff, or stumble across stuff you'd forgotten about. Yeah, if you always know exactly what you want to watch or add to your queue in advance, then the new interface is no problem, but I like exploring, and they've seriously messed that up. Probably 80% of my Netflix use comes from stuff I randomly stumbled across; the stuff I really really care about, I probably already saw in the theater or own.
Just tried it out; the scrolling is awkward and annoying, but aside from that I don't see much to complain about. At least, not compared to the disimprovements they just added to the game console player (at least on the PS3), which is just horrible!
On the console, they used to have a hierarchy--you could go to a genre (e.g. Horror), then drill down to see various subcategories (New Releases, Zombie movies, B-Horror, Slashers and Serial Killers, etc.). That's all been replaced with a flat grid, where each row represents a single genre. This is particularly annoying with the psuedo-genres, "Independent" and "Foreign", each of which was subdivided into actual genres (Independent Comedy, Foreign Science Fiction), which were sometimes subdivided further (Independent Romantic Comedies, Japanese Science Fiction). Now all the indie and foreign films are in one big shapeless, useless pile. And it's a much smaller pile, which brings me to complaint two:
With the old, tree-structured interface, each sub-category (or sub-sub-category) could have up to a couple of hundred films to browse. There was a fair amount of overlap between sub-categories, but even so, this meant you could have well over a thousand films available in each category. Now, each main category seems to be limited to 75 movies max!
One slightly more minor disimprovement: they changed the layout so that slightly less room is available for descriptions. Most of their descriptions are still short enough to fit anyway, and some were too long even with the older layout, but there's definitely more that don't fit now.
Compared to all that, what they did to the web page is nuttin'!
Comparing it to a polygraph is definitely misleading. A polygraph has at least some science behind it. According to Professor Mark Liberman, who has been studying these sorts of voice analyzer systems for years, there is absolutely no research to show that there is anything to measure, so the claim that they collected a bunch of data from police voice files is meaningless. They might as well claim that they studied the eye colors of people who were found to by lying in past polygraph tests, for all the scientific validity it adds to their claims.
And seven years later, things haven't really changed. Of course, not all such systems claim to work on the basis of laryngeal micro-tremors — some explicitly say proudly that they *don't* use that method, which has gotten a bit of a reputation as snake oil. But neither do they cite a different method that's well enough specified for someone else to implement it and test it.
Real polygraphs measure several different phenomenon related to stress, and have to be carefully calibrated to each individual when used, and even so, they're not a lot better than a coin flip. The idea that this machine, which measures a single phenomenon (voice), and compares it to some sort of mythical average, rather than the current speaker's norms, when there's no evidence that the phenomenon it's measuring is even affected by lying, let alone how, let alone whether the effect is consistent between individuals, is simply preposterous. This doesn't deserve "a little more merit" than a polygraph; it deserves far less!
First you have to build something that can actually be called a "lie detector" without the mandatory use of scare quotes. Personally, I suspect that if you installed one near Capital Hill, it would simply prove to be even less reliable than your normal, completely-unreliable "lie detector" since politicians are such expert liars!
I am amazed that the headline and article use the ridiculous term "lie detector". There is no such thing. The polygraph, which is one of the most sophisticated devices thus labeled, requires an expert operator and careful calibration for each subject, and even so, has failed in independent studies to show more than about 61% reliability (compared to 50% for a coin flip). Voice analyzers which aren't carefully calibrated for each subject don't even begin to approach that level of "reliability". Personally, I think there's better evidence for the existence of "gaydar" than for the existence of anything that could reasonably be called a "lie detector" (although I can't seem to find any published statistics on the reliability of gaydar).:)
I know, I know, Slashdot doesn't actually have editors; what, am I new here? Still, this is supposed to be News for Nerds, and any nerd who uses the term "lie detector" unironically should turn in his/her nerd card. (Unless he or she is writing a science fiction novel, I suppose.)
Her work has often been said to represent sexual images, a critique O'Keeffe denied, stating she only painted what she saw in the flower, nothing more, nothing less. Still, it is easy to see how the label of "sexual images" was attached to some paintings (for example, Black Iris, Jack-in-the-Pulpit VI).
Of course, a lot of people simply think she was forced to deny it given the political climate of the time. Heck, the first I ever heard of her, it was as "that woman who paints vulvas disguised as flowers."
If you're still not convinced, just do an image search for "grey line with black blue and yellow". I know several people who have a print of that, and I assure you that none of them think it's anything but a va-jay-jay. no matter what the artist may have intended!:)
Law takes intent into account—something that is often difficult for literal-minded techies to grasp. If it is your intent that the image be transmitted to someone it's intended to offend, then you might be liable even though you may not have literally transmitted the image. The opposite reasoning would tend to make the person merely hosting the image less likely to be liable.
Warning: IANAL, and anyone who makes important legal decisions based on my random slashdot posts is hereby declared to be a complete idiot.
Given that the "Land of the Free" was heavily influenced by the Dutch Republic (1581-1795), maybe it's not so surprising. Note that this was the period when, despite the lack of rule by royalty or church, the Dutch became a major world power, confounding all expectations at the time. Since the Republic was still a going concern at the time of the American Revolution, I think that there's little doubt that it was a major influence on the Founding Fathers' decision to try something similar. Of course, there's some irony in the fact that the freedom of religion guaranteed by the Dutch Republic was probably a factor in the Pilgrims' decision to leave Holland (where they'd fled from England) and colonize America, where they would be free to hate both royalty and Catholics.
Anyway, given Holland's long (if interrupted) history of freedom, perhaps it isn't so surprising that they'd be first here. We can only hope that the US doesn't take 195 years to follow the Dutch lead this time!:)
Wait, they're down to only one GL version? I thought there were at least two!
Falcon's Eye and Vulture's Eye? The former is a dead project, and the latter is simply the name given to the new project that picked up the pieces of older one. I consider them more-or-less the same thing. Depends on how you look at it, I guess.
The imagination needed, or rather, willingness to put up with the lack of the great anchor that is known as graphics
If only there were a version of Nethack that used graphics--oh wait! Nethack has had graphics (optional, but usually on by default) for well over a decade; there's even a 3D isometric version based on GL.
most OEMs pay MS per unit shipped, no per unit with windows installed.
That practice was, as I understand it, supposed to have ended in 1994. There have been allegations that it continues, but no whistleblowers have come forward with a smoking gun, which is pretty impressive, given the number of people that would have had to be privy to such agreements over the years.
These days, I believe, they rely on financial incentives tied to adware and trial-versions of software to be bundled with OEM releases of Windows, to offset the cost of Windows itself and remove the incentive OEMs might have to offer cheaper (e.g. free) OSes as an alternative. The result is: Microsoft is happy because they're still getting paid, even if it's by ISVs instead of directly by the OEMs, and because they get to promote their other products; the OEMs are happy because they're paying less for the OS; and ISVs are happy because they're getting a very cost-effective form of advertising. The only losers are the customers who now get machines clogged with adware and free-trialware that they may have no interest in, and other OS vendors who can no longer compete on price, even if that price is zero.
This is where it gets interesting: if Ubuntu can start making enough money off of their partnership deals with companies like Amazon and Google, they may be able to start paying OEMs for including Ubuntu instead of Windows. Hence, I suspect, Ubuntu's recent controversial moves regarding Banshee.
Considering Google and Facebook are in the advertising market
Bingo! And all those Facebook/social networking buttons and whatnot that are appearing on sites all over the Internet? Facebook is tracking you through those, and, while I don't trust either company, when it comes to tracking my every move I distrust Google a whole lot less than I distrust Facebook!
I'm really torn. I'd love to see some decent competition in the Internet advertising game, but Facebook are just about the last people I'd like to see become successful at it. Google may made a number of very public gaffes when it comes to respecting privacy, but FB seems to be just-plain anti-privacy, and makes the news only when they reluctantly do something to improve people's privacy. Plus, they seem to be on the cutting edge when it comes to using advanced technology to track and annoy (e.g., mouseover-triggered popups that Firefox doesn't even try to block).
I saw Marc Andreessen give a talk shortly after the initial public release of the Netscape Navigator code. One of the things he mentioned was that the very first patch they received from outside Netscape was one to make the blink tag work with images!
The little remaining faith I had in humanity died that day.:)
Your point three may be more than merely "possible"--intelligence may be much less useful/likely than our biased opinions might suggest. From a biological perspective, big brains are expensive to produce and maintain. A lot of people seem to assume that once life arises, intelligent life will necessarily follow, but, in fact, it may well be that the right set of circumstances to allow the (expensive and therefore evolutionarily counter-productive) development of larger brains to evolve to the point of developing even the most primitive technology (which is where brains start to become a significant evolutionary advantage) is very rare indeed.
For that matter, the development of multicellular life (or equivalent) may be a rare fluke.
Finally, your points two and three are not independent. If intelligent life is incredibly rare, and a high-enough percentage of intelligent life self-destructs (or is destroyed by outside forces before it reaches the point of being able to deal with such threats), then we don't have to be the first in our neighborhood in order to be the only one present right now, even if life itself is very common.
Why do you only mention 2.8? What about 2.7 and 2.9? (For that matter, what about 2.10 and 2.11?) Since odd minor no longer indicates a development branch, 2.7 would have been just as reasonable a choice for the next notable increment as 2.8. Which, BTW, I think may be your answer--by skipping 2.{7,8,9,...}, he carefully avoids any confusion over the meaning of the second digit, and allows all that to be relegated to pre-3.0 history.
I love it how these companies and even our own government can't keep people from talking about secrets
Sure they can! It's just that they're only good at it when it concerns UFOs and JFK's assassination and Bigfoots and the faked moon landing and the Illuminati and the herds of Invisible Pink Unicorns thundering across the Great Plains, and things like that.
The G1 had the best keyboard on any device I've ever used.
I really hope you mean "on any handheld device I've used", because otherwise, I've got some serious reservations about your opinions on pretty much anything!:)
I agree that the G1 had (has) one of the nicest keyboards of any phone I've seen.
For embracing what Android is supposed to be about.
I suspect (though I wouldn't bet money on it) that you really mean what you wish Android was supposed to be about.
Android is not targeted at "freedom-loving geeks"; it is targeted at consumers who want a powerful smartphone with lots of apps. It distinguishes itself from the iPhone not so much by being "open" (although there is a subset of users for whom that's a concern), but by being cross-vendor, so you're not tied to a single provider, and by being associated with the very popular "Google" brand. Openness may be the issue most discussed here at Slashdot, but if it were what Android was "supposed to be about", then Android would probably be about as popular as the N900.
As an iPhone user, I'm sure you're aware that most people don't care how open their phone is. Well, guess what? "Most people" is the target audience for Android, so it would have been foolish to have made openness "what it's supposed to be about".
Aside from that quibble, though, I basically agree with your post. While openness may never have been what Android was supposed to be about, it was at least suggested to be a feature available to those who did care about such things, and to that extent, you're dead on the money.
Slashdot Mirror
Speaker wire is so low impedance and the signal so strong that even something from monoprice is plenty fine.
Forget "fancy" speaker wire--it boggles my mind that people (even non-audiophiles) pay extra for something labeled "speaker wire" when stock zip cord works just as well and is invariably cheaper. Of course, I use coathangers (see the mouseover text in the linked cartoon).
Not sortable means you have to see more titles before you select one. For the person looking for a title that's bad.
The person looking for a specific title will simply use search, which still works fine. The only purpose of the scrolling interface is to browse what's available. Not sortable only means that you have no easy way to skip the stuff you already looked at yesterday. On top of that, the slower scrolling means that people are likely to get tired of browsing after seeing a lot fewer movies, since it takes so much longer to see each one.
How much do you want to bet they just log the mouse overs, seeing what people wanted to get detail on?
The old interface used mouseovers to provide details. The only thing you got with no mouseover was the title and #stars. If you wanted to see the plot summary, actors, director, genre, rating, etc., you had to mouseover. Netflix is not going to get a whole lot more info from this interface, except that they'll probably learn which movies have covers that are hard to read.
Why scroll when you can search?
To discover new, interesting stuff, or stumble across stuff you'd forgotten about. Yeah, if you always know exactly what you want to watch or add to your queue in advance, then the new interface is no problem, but I like exploring, and they've seriously messed that up. Probably 80% of my Netflix use comes from stuff I randomly stumbled across; the stuff I really really care about, I probably already saw in the theater or own.
Just tried it out; the scrolling is awkward and annoying, but aside from that I don't see much to complain about. At least, not compared to the disimprovements they just added to the game console player (at least on the PS3), which is just horrible!
On the console, they used to have a hierarchy--you could go to a genre (e.g. Horror), then drill down to see various subcategories (New Releases, Zombie movies, B-Horror, Slashers and Serial Killers, etc.). That's all been replaced with a flat grid, where each row represents a single genre. This is particularly annoying with the psuedo-genres, "Independent" and "Foreign", each of which was subdivided into actual genres (Independent Comedy, Foreign Science Fiction), which were sometimes subdivided further (Independent Romantic Comedies, Japanese Science Fiction). Now all the indie and foreign films are in one big shapeless, useless pile. And it's a much smaller pile, which brings me to complaint two:
With the old, tree-structured interface, each sub-category (or sub-sub-category) could have up to a couple of hundred films to browse. There was a fair amount of overlap between sub-categories, but even so, this meant you could have well over a thousand films available in each category. Now, each main category seems to be limited to 75 movies max!
One slightly more minor disimprovement: they changed the layout so that slightly less room is available for descriptions. Most of their descriptions are still short enough to fit anyway, and some were too long even with the older layout, but there's definitely more that don't fit now.
Compared to all that, what they did to the web page is nuttin'!
Comparing it to a polygraph is definitely misleading. A polygraph has at least some science behind it. According to Professor Mark Liberman, who has been studying these sorts of voice analyzer systems for years, there is absolutely no research to show that there is anything to measure, so the claim that they collected a bunch of data from police voice files is meaningless. They might as well claim that they studied the eye colors of people who were found to by lying in past polygraph tests, for all the scientific validity it adds to their claims.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3185
And seven years later, things haven't really changed. Of course, not all such systems claim to work on the basis of laryngeal micro-tremors — some explicitly say proudly that they *don't* use that method, which has gotten a bit of a reputation as snake oil. But neither do they cite a different method that's well enough specified for someone else to implement it and test it.
Real polygraphs measure several different phenomenon related to stress, and have to be carefully calibrated to each individual when used, and even so, they're not a lot better than a coin flip. The idea that this machine, which measures a single phenomenon (voice), and compares it to some sort of mythical average, rather than the current speaker's norms, when there's no evidence that the phenomenon it's measuring is even affected by lying, let alone how, let alone whether the effect is consistent between individuals, is simply preposterous. This doesn't deserve "a little more merit" than a polygraph; it deserves far less!
In b4 grammar nazis: yes, I meant to type "Capitol Hill"; in my defense, I was only one letter off, just like the original poster. :)
First you have to build something that can actually be called a "lie detector" without the mandatory use of scare quotes. Personally, I suspect that if you installed one near Capital Hill, it would simply prove to be even less reliable than your normal, completely-unreliable "lie detector" since politicians are such expert liars!
I am amazed that the headline and article use the ridiculous term "lie detector". There is no such thing. The polygraph, which is one of the most sophisticated devices thus labeled, requires an expert operator and careful calibration for each subject, and even so, has failed in independent studies to show more than about 61% reliability (compared to 50% for a coin flip). Voice analyzers which aren't carefully calibrated for each subject don't even begin to approach that level of "reliability". Personally, I think there's better evidence for the existence of "gaydar" than for the existence of anything that could reasonably be called a "lie detector" (although I can't seem to find any published statistics on the reliability of gaydar). :)
I know, I know, Slashdot doesn't actually have editors; what, am I new here? Still, this is supposed to be News for Nerds, and any nerd who uses the term "lie detector" unironically should turn in his/her nerd card. (Unless he or she is writing a science fiction novel, I suppose.)
Citation from http://www.georgia-okeeffe.com/imagesgallery.html:
Her work has often been said to represent sexual images, a critique O'Keeffe denied, stating she only painted what she saw in the flower, nothing more, nothing less. Still, it is easy to see how the label of "sexual images" was attached to some paintings (for example, Black Iris, Jack-in-the-Pulpit VI).
Of course, a lot of people simply think she was forced to deny it given the political climate of the time. Heck, the first I ever heard of her, it was as "that woman who paints vulvas disguised as flowers."
If you're still not convinced, just do an image search for "grey line with black blue and yellow". I know several people who have a print of that, and I assure you that none of them think it's anything but a va-jay-jay. no matter what the artist may have intended! :)
Based on the condition of many private roads I've seen, and even lived on, I'll take the government "interference", thanks.
Law takes intent into account—something that is often difficult for literal-minded techies to grasp. If it is your intent that the image be transmitted to someone it's intended to offend, then you might be liable even though you may not have literally transmitted the image. The opposite reasoning would tend to make the person merely hosting the image less likely to be liable.
Warning: IANAL, and anyone who makes important legal decisions based on my random slashdot posts is hereby declared to be a complete idiot.
Why do painters always draw breasts and asses but they never, ever try to draw a vulva?
Apparently you're unfamiliar with the works of Georgia O'Keeffe. :)
Given that the "Land of the Free" was heavily influenced by the Dutch Republic (1581-1795), maybe it's not so surprising. Note that this was the period when, despite the lack of rule by royalty or church, the Dutch became a major world power, confounding all expectations at the time. Since the Republic was still a going concern at the time of the American Revolution, I think that there's little doubt that it was a major influence on the Founding Fathers' decision to try something similar. Of course, there's some irony in the fact that the freedom of religion guaranteed by the Dutch Republic was probably a factor in the Pilgrims' decision to leave Holland (where they'd fled from England) and colonize America, where they would be free to hate both royalty and Catholics.
Anyway, given Holland's long (if interrupted) history of freedom, perhaps it isn't so surprising that they'd be first here. We can only hope that the US doesn't take 195 years to follow the Dutch lead this time! :)
Wait, they're down to only one GL version? I thought there were at least two!
Falcon's Eye and Vulture's Eye? The former is a dead project, and the latter is simply the name given to the new project that picked up the pieces of older one. I consider them more-or-less the same thing. Depends on how you look at it, I guess.
Ha-ha, original poster was a FreeBSD fan!
Just kidding--actually, he's a Solaris fan.
Fooled ya! He actually uses The Hurd. Amiga? Plan9? Atari800?...
The imagination needed, or rather, willingness to put up with the lack of the great anchor that is known as graphics
If only there were a version of Nethack that used graphics--oh wait! Nethack has had graphics (optional, but usually on by default) for well over a decade; there's even a 3D isometric version based on GL.
most OEMs pay MS per unit shipped, no per unit with windows installed.
That practice was, as I understand it, supposed to have ended in 1994. There have been allegations that it continues, but no whistleblowers have come forward with a smoking gun, which is pretty impressive, given the number of people that would have had to be privy to such agreements over the years.
These days, I believe, they rely on financial incentives tied to adware and trial-versions of software to be bundled with OEM releases of Windows, to offset the cost of Windows itself and remove the incentive OEMs might have to offer cheaper (e.g. free) OSes as an alternative. The result is: Microsoft is happy because they're still getting paid, even if it's by ISVs instead of directly by the OEMs, and because they get to promote their other products; the OEMs are happy because they're paying less for the OS; and ISVs are happy because they're getting a very cost-effective form of advertising. The only losers are the customers who now get machines clogged with adware and free-trialware that they may have no interest in, and other OS vendors who can no longer compete on price, even if that price is zero.
This is where it gets interesting: if Ubuntu can start making enough money off of their partnership deals with companies like Amazon and Google, they may be able to start paying OEMs for including Ubuntu instead of Windows. Hence, I suspect, Ubuntu's recent controversial moves regarding Banshee.
Switch to Iceweasel? :)
Considering Google and Facebook are in the advertising market
Bingo! And all those Facebook/social networking buttons and whatnot that are appearing on sites all over the Internet? Facebook is tracking you through those, and, while I don't trust either company, when it comes to tracking my every move I distrust Google a whole lot less than I distrust Facebook!
I'm really torn. I'd love to see some decent competition in the Internet advertising game, but Facebook are just about the last people I'd like to see become successful at it. Google may made a number of very public gaffes when it comes to respecting privacy, but FB seems to be just-plain anti-privacy, and makes the news only when they reluctantly do something to improve people's privacy. Plus, they seem to be on the cutting edge when it comes to using advanced technology to track and annoy (e.g., mouseover-triggered popups that Firefox doesn't even try to block).
Just avoid the blink tag and you should be fine.
I saw Marc Andreessen give a talk shortly after the initial public release of the Netscape Navigator code. One of the things he mentioned was that the very first patch they received from outside Netscape was one to make the blink tag work with images!
The little remaining faith I had in humanity died that day. :)
Your point three may be more than merely "possible"--intelligence may be much less useful/likely than our biased opinions might suggest. From a biological perspective, big brains are expensive to produce and maintain. A lot of people seem to assume that once life arises, intelligent life will necessarily follow, but, in fact, it may well be that the right set of circumstances to allow the (expensive and therefore evolutionarily counter-productive) development of larger brains to evolve to the point of developing even the most primitive technology (which is where brains start to become a significant evolutionary advantage) is very rare indeed.
For that matter, the development of multicellular life (or equivalent) may be a rare fluke.
Finally, your points two and three are not independent. If intelligent life is incredibly rare, and a high-enough percentage of intelligent life self-destructs (or is destroyed by outside forces before it reaches the point of being able to deal with such threats), then we don't have to be the first in our neighborhood in order to be the only one present right now, even if life itself is very common.
Is there a real reason for skipping 2.8 here
Why do you only mention 2.8? What about 2.7 and 2.9? (For that matter, what about 2.10 and 2.11?) Since odd minor no longer indicates a development branch, 2.7 would have been just as reasonable a choice for the next notable increment as 2.8. Which, BTW, I think may be your answer--by skipping 2.{7,8,9,...}, he carefully avoids any confusion over the meaning of the second digit, and allows all that to be relegated to pre-3.0 history.
I love it how these companies and even our own government can't keep people from talking about secrets
Sure they can! It's just that they're only good at it when it concerns UFOs and JFK's assassination and Bigfoots and the faked moon landing and the Illuminati and the herds of Invisible Pink Unicorns thundering across the Great Plains, and things like that.
The G1 had the best keyboard on any device I've ever used.
I really hope you mean "on any handheld device I've used", because otherwise, I've got some serious reservations about your opinions on pretty much anything! :)
I agree that the G1 had (has) one of the nicest keyboards of any phone I've seen.
For embracing what Android is supposed to be about.
I suspect (though I wouldn't bet money on it) that you really mean what you wish Android was supposed to be about.
Android is not targeted at "freedom-loving geeks"; it is targeted at consumers who want a powerful smartphone with lots of apps. It distinguishes itself from the iPhone not so much by being "open" (although there is a subset of users for whom that's a concern), but by being cross-vendor, so you're not tied to a single provider, and by being associated with the very popular "Google" brand. Openness may be the issue most discussed here at Slashdot, but if it were what Android was "supposed to be about", then Android would probably be about as popular as the N900.
As an iPhone user, I'm sure you're aware that most people don't care how open their phone is. Well, guess what? "Most people" is the target audience for Android, so it would have been foolish to have made openness "what it's supposed to be about".
Aside from that quibble, though, I basically agree with your post. While openness may never have been what Android was supposed to be about, it was at least suggested to be a feature available to those who did care about such things, and to that extent, you're dead on the money.