I think that, given the context you would be aware, I mean I think its kind of obvious that if you want to use something that chews up whitespace, Python is not the tool. The question is, does this make Python a bad tool? And the answer is most assuredly no. I think its rare and unambiguous when you are dealing with a situation where whitespace will be messed up, but otherwise, like when your file is just sitting on your OS and maybe being run from time to time, I think you are safe. Given this context, Python is an exceptional tool for what it does, and a complaint about its semantics isn't really a complaint about the merits of the language.
Thats it? You are that inflexible that you balk at your *style* changing?
How about this: I HATE that C enforces style on my code by forcing me to wrap code blocks in curly braces. Why should I have to use curly braces in my code??
I use Eclipse with Pydev and Visual Stuio with IronPython, both of these have auto-indent working perfectly with Python, as does Idle and probably every other text editor/ide. This is just simply incorrect.
Firstly, vertical white space carries no meaning, so thats a red herring. Secondly, Python defines the block delimiter as the first bit of whitespace it encounters in your script, all following indents must adhere to the first one you used. So there is consistency, provided you can do something so simple as remember how many times you pressed the spacebar, or set your auto-indent to use the standard 4 single spaces.
Python is a C wrapper with the absolutely moronic idea that white space is an appropriate closing curly brace.
Why is it a moronic idea? Space is a valid character, as is a curly. Curlies add line noise, whitespace is much more readable. Its a plus in that code becomes more readable, I guess it adds some ambiguity so thats a minus, a net nothing then. But only if you actually make the effort to not care about how you write your code. Seriously, use four standard spaces instead of a tab and you will be sweet, if your IDE can't do this, then maybe you should try a better one.
The 'programming' in dynamic programming does not refer to writing computer programs, it is a branch of mathematics that grew out of the original convex optimization problems. Dantzig was a military 'programmer' in the 40s, the simplex algorithm was developed as a solution to problems that could be posed as a linear objective function with linear constraints. Programming in this sense was a word used by the military to describe how operations would be organised. Dynamic programming is an extension of linear programming and refers to mathematics, not computer code.
What did Palm do that is not in windows? Please elaborate? Is it not WIMP-based?
Exactly! You finally get it!
I have always got it you fucking idiot. I've said right from the start that tablets make sense when handwriting makes sense to you. For these people, there is nothing diminished in the user experience to justify complete OS redesign, in fact my tablet would simply be worse for it.
That's not the reason. People buy Macs, which cost more than the average PC. They do so because they want a Mac. If they wanted a pen, they'd buy that.
Bad comparison, firstly, tablet pc's cost a lot more than macs do, secondly, macs are a fashion item, and obey different laws of supply and demand.
This current Windows kludge is not enough
Have you ever, for an appreciable time, used windows 7 with a tablet pc in tablet mode? Exploring the features and really trying them out? If not, can you please refrain from crapping on about shit you haven't used.
You keep saying how great the stylus works for you. NO SHIT! That's because you live in that niche. Hooray for you! But you're delusional if you think a major factor in keeping people from joining you is price. The factor is that people don't want pens, not the way they exist now.
No, people just don't want pens, there never will be much demand for them. I've never claimed otherwise, I am simply claiming that for people who might consider buying one of these devices, the user interface is not a barrier to their purchase so much as the prohibitive price is.
Now, again you haven't given me a single example as to what is diminished about the user interface experience of a tablet, on windows. I've given several examples of optimizations employed, which work well. All you did was say "newton" and "palm"... those are not examples of UI features, they are clumsy little palmtops from a bygone era.
Put up or shut up, or at least admit you really have no experience using a tablet pc, and thus really don't know what the fuck you are talking about.
Dude I get your point, and I disagree, why are you ignoring every point I've made? An OS designed exclusively for pen input is going to suck balls, as a fairly experienced tablet user, I can tell you this with confidence. Ever tried to surf the web with pen input only? Or just an on-screen keyboard and your finger? It sucks balls and no optimization is going to change that fact. Web is just something you need to type on a keyboard for. What do you suggest? A bloody great list of words to select from? Sounds even more stupid. All we really need is better handwriting recognition (7 is more than impressive already, but not good enough) and for humans to evolve the ability to write by hand at over 60wpm (unlikely). iPhone/iPod Touch and iPad on screen keyboards are so much worse than handwriting input, and these are supposedly 'optimized' platforms.
Tablet mode on a tablet convertible is perfectly fine for tablet use, there is no way you will optimize an OS for pen/touch input without taking away the greatness of a keyboard. There is nothing wrong with tapping away at small icons and menus with a stylus, this would suck with your finger, I agree (the irony here is that the supposedly optimized iPhone OS has even smaller icons to tap at than windows menus/icons, and I find it one of the most frustrating and clumsy interfaces I've used to date), but a stylus is plenty accurate enough, and windows has features to make sure you hand doesn't get in the way of the menus. You also have pen gestures, which make certain tasks even easier than using a keyboard/mouse, and plugins like grab n drag for firefox which make web browsing far superior imo than even using a mouse. Search, without a keyboard, is balls, no doubting it. But there are no optimizations for that, like I said, the iPhone is demonstrably *worse* in this respect.
The issue here is not that an optimized os is needed, or even could be made (I disagree it could), the reason pen computing has not taken off is simple: 1. People prefer the keyboard to handwriting and 2. Tablets are not cost competitive. If you could buy a tablet pc for the same money as a non tablet pc, sales figures would surge overnight. It has nothing to do with OS design.
Now one more time: I challenge you to come up with one single example of how the user experience is diminished and how it could be optimized with different UI design? I'm still waiting.
What is worse about it, seriously dude how many times do I need to ask? *What* about it is worse? A tablet is worse than a screen? How? It does more things.
I agree that modern OSes are not good touch interfaces, but I don't agree that they need much more than a few tweaks to be optimized for stylus input, tweaks which windows has.
So my tablet is faster and more accurate as primary input than my trackpad. It displays information like a normal screen, yet it receives input too. What is diminished about the user experience here?
For those that can make sufficient use of it to justify the decreased usability
And here:
They do one thing most every does pretty damned good (take notes) and do everything else quite poorly.
And its this latter comment in particular I take issue with: They do everything else exactly the same as every other laptop out there, except that I can use the stylus as input, and get my handwritten notes onto my laptop. A lot of tablet users I know don't swivel the screen often, they just tip it down and write on it right there, so theres a nuisance taken care of. I don't understand either how someone using a tablet convertible would find the hinge to be a problem, as you stated, since it does exactly what other laptop hinges do: allows the lid to open and close. There is no real evidence out there to suggest tablet swivels are weaker than standard laptop hinges, even if your intuition tells you they should be.
In any case, I maintain that there is nothing worse about using the WIMP based OS with a stylus, sure its not optimised for it, although I have no idea why such a thing should require optimisation. The only complaint I have is that I wish I could move scrollbars to the correct side for my handedness. Menus can be set to open to the left or right in Vista and 7, meaning your hand never obscures them if you have windows set up correctly. So what else is the problem? I am more than accurate enough with my stylus for it to be usable on small menu items, as I expect anyone with even the slightest amount of dexterity to be.
Where, exactly is this decreased user experience coming from? You haven't listed one single example.
My position is that more people would use tablet pc's if the price were competitive with regular laptops (an argument which seems to escape detractors such as yourself). They are typically $1000 more than their equivalent non-tablet laptop, a significant cost in this day of laptops being available for less than that alone. For every person I meet who would like to buy a tablet (that is: most people who see mine in action), very few of them are willing to pay the extra price. Its got nothing to do with user experience (which is overall very good in 7 with stylus gestures and other nice little additions), and everything to do with simple economics.
That's the problem. Loads of people think the idea is cool but in fact do NOT like the device really, in that they are pretty sure it would not work for them.
Wrong conclusion, most people want one until they find they can have the same laptop with more features for around $1000 cheaper. They are overpriced, thanks to Wacom, and thats about all there is to it.
Firstly, I agree with the GP, I own a tablet pc and it absolutely kicks ass for what I do (mathematics). Secondly, I rarely meet anyone who dislikes the device, other than nerds on their high horses who usually can't even write without a keyboard anyway. I have a few lecturers who use them, and I know several students who use them a lot. They are the perfect educational device for teachers (like a whiteboard but you can save as pdf, never have to wipe anything off it, and its also a fully functioning laptop), and they are the perfect device for students studying mathematics and engineering, and professional mathematicians and engineers for that matter.
Personally I believe the one reason these devices have failed* is nothing more than the price factor, they typically add about $1000 to the cost of a laptop, dude the the heavily patent encumbered and dramatically overvalued Wacom tablet that exists inside most of them (the ones which deviate from wacom tech, while being cheaper, are widely regarded as inferior). I really fail to understand how a device which adds functionality to a regular laptop, without taking anything away, could be regarded as somehow inferior.
*Despite endless claims that tablets failed in the market, there are more models available today than ever before, and more people using them than ever before. Not we are not all using them, but they have grown as a market, and that is not typically how you define failure. Honestly by this definition of failure, hasn't Apple failed over and over again?
I s'pose you didn't read all of what I said, or you chose to simply ignore it, so I'll repeat myself:
A stylus, in my experience, is a vastly more accurate and speedy primary input device than a trackpad. I'm talking about generic OS interaction. It is easily comparable to a mouse for a small screen, oftentimes superior, but sometimes not.
I'm not trying to pretend that stylus input is naturally and fully replacing the mouse, I am explicitly stating it as truth for my experience. Yours may differ, but listen to me, I consider it truth. You can't write hard rules for UI deisgn and I'm telling you I prefer my stylus to my trackpad, and I prefer it to dragging a bluetooth mouse around with me. Expand beyond the box you are limiting yourself to, I'm specifically not talking about a large desktop display out in front of you, I'm talking about a small 12" laptop display which sits comfortably close for pen input. In this case, the pen is easily superior to the trackpad for everything.
Using the OS without a keyboard is a clumsy experience, tablets which include the keyboard are vastly more popular in my experience, because converting pen to typing is hit and miss. Everyone I know who owns a tablet (a few people, but significant in my small sample), owns a convertible, not a slate. So anecdotally your claim that convertibles sell worse is completely false. I still see plenty of convertibles out on display for sale, haven't seen a slate for a long time, until now that is.
A convertible tablet pc is just a laptop that can take pen input through the screen. How this translates to doing thing worse than other laptops I don't understand, it has everything a normal laptop has, plus a stylus. What has been taken away?
Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. None of these are well suited for even stylus based interaction, let alone multitouch.
I disagree, strongly. Windows Vista has numerous enhancements for stylus input, 7 has even more and they both work well for certain tasks on a stylus machine. I have a convertible hp tablet pc, it has been my primary machine for university for two years now, and for mathematics/engineering, could not be better. The stylus is a marked improvement over the stupid trackpad, vastly more accurate and faster, I pull out the stylus frequently in favour of the trackpad. I could not however, imagine using full blown windows without the keyboard.
I agree that touch is another story, but the stylus on a small laptop screen is faster/more accurate than the trackpad, and even arguably better than a mouse. The only problem I have is that as a lefty, I can't change the whole OS to display scroll bars on the left hand side of the screen, but at least onenote can do this, and thats my primary pen app anyway.
IT guys tend not to 'get it' when it comes to tablets, you need to have a real need for handwriting before it makes sense. For me I have that need, and I carry around with me the equivalent of a whole bookcase worth of my notes which I can flick through at my leisure when they are needed. To me a tablet sans stylus makes absolutely no sense, and I'll take my eeepc (5 hrs battery life) over this kind of device anyday.
Unfortunately, there is absolutely no way to describe this stuff in "human" terms, you really just have to get your head around the concepts and even then you are likely to have no idea what this stuff is on about. Mathematicians could spend their whole career not understanding this stuff, easily.
I'll try as best I can, but I can barely get my head around the most basic concepts here, so here I go: In topology we don't care so much about what you normally think of as mathematics, topology I guess you could say is a study of bulk mathematical structure in some sense, highly abstracted notions of geometric structure in this case, but topology goes beyond geometry and it is wrong to think of it as simply the study of manifolds and such. A manifold, the kind they are talking about, is a 'locally smooth surface', that means if you have the surface of a 3d object and zoom into a point anywhere, the region around the point will eventually begin to look 'flat', this means if you move around on the 3d surface, you can move in 2 dimensions only and encounter nothing discontinuous about the surface. Of course this extends to higher dimensions too. If you think of a map of the earth as a flat 2d grid, then the sphere that is the earth is a 2-manifold. Here we have embedded a 2-dimensional plane into a 3-dimensional space. If you then think about the general plane and how it stretches out infinitely, we can actually 'compactify' that infinite plane into a finite manifold by 'mapping' each point on the plane onto a point on the surface of a sphere, we and add one single point we can call 'infinity' and the once infinite plane is now 'compact'. The infinite plane has now become finite (sort of) by embedding it into higher dimensions.
In topology a homeomorphism between topological spaces (a manifold is a topological space) just means we can find a perfectly reversible function which maps every point from one to every point in the other exactly one way, it means the two spaces will have the same structure and all theorems proven for one are true for the other. This is where the famous saying "the coffee cup is no different to the donut" comes from. If two topological spaces are homeomorphic, we can find some function which morphs one into the other, and hence they are simply the same thing. In terms of manifolds this is like saying we can warp, bend, twist and pass the manifold through itself, but never fold or cut, until one matches the shape of the other. So a donut can be made into a coffee cup, but never a sphere.
The Poincarre conjecture is a way of characterizing a 3-manifold as homeomorphic to the 3-sphere. So we have stepped up a dimension from the flat earth/spherical earth example above. Now our basic manifold is locally flat in 3 dimensions, so locally it might look like 3-dimensional space while it globally exists in 4-dimensional space. If you walked around on the surface of a 3-sphere, you could move in 3 directions. In the case of the 2-sphere, we can characterize homeomorphic manifolds by the fact that if you take any circle on the surface of a sphere, you can contract it down to a point on the surface. This is not true for donuts, as some circles cannot contract down to a point, hence the sphere is not homeomorphic to the donut. So we then have a simple way of describing which manifolds are homeomorphic to the 2-sphere. Poincarre conjectured that this was possible for the 3-sphere.
The proof, I can give no insight on, and I imagine most of the worlds best mathematicians would struggle to follow it. It took years to verify this proof, years of work and teams of mathematicians.
As for usefulness, you need to step out of the structured world of classical applied mathematics and think in abstract ways. At face value there is very little of anything useful about this proof, other than gaining deeper insight into the geometry of 4 dimensional space. Topology is used in spatial databasing, image processing, protein folding/knot theory, lots and lots of physics (string theory especially) and ma
Physics (yes, Physics, THE hardest of hard sciences) is full of terrible mathematics, absolutely terrible, shockingly bad stuff. The good ones know it, some will say it doesn't matter because their butchery comes up with "accurate" results. If they can't even get their analysis right, what can we expect of the softer sciences? That said physics is not so much concerned with statistics as it is probability, none the less, they have some serious problems, for example they often simply decide highly non-convergent things should converge because the experiment says it should...
The greatest tragedy in modern science (in my eyes) is the loss of physics as a hard science, currently these guys are way off with the fairies and producing nothing of worth, string theorists are the worst. We'll see what the CERN guys manage to come up with, but right now the mathematicians have taken the ball and run with it. It has been said that physics has become too hard for the Physicists...
I am not trolling, I am quite serious about Physicists playing dodgey games with mathematics.
I'm really not so sure about that, from a standstill, perhaps, running at highway speeds? Thats another story. You run into brake fade issues very quickly unless you are running highly exotic ceramic brakes (which they are not). Some Aurions have really got obscene amounts of power too. Whilst it is probably true that you *can* apply enough force to stop a car at WOT, the question is can most average drivers actually pull this off before their brakes overheat and become quite useless? I personally remain unconvinced.
I agree that the privacy controls on Facebook are sufficient (hence I use it), but Zuckerberg has publicly stated that he does not think this is good enough, and that he does not think people should expect privacy at all anymore. He essentially stated his wish to simply take what data he wishes from your interactions with facebook and claim it as his own. Now fair enough if thats his stated goal, but to lure people in by saying it is NOT your stated goal, then attempt to change the rules mid course is disingenuous at best, downright criminal at worst. (See facebook IP fiasco for more details)
The point is to honour what the user wishes to be private. Facebook lured people in by saying everything you post is private if you wish it to be, or only available for your friends to view. But then it became obvious how much money could be made by targeted advertising if this were not the case, and suddenly the rules changed mid game.
Absolutely you will not get data back that was lost in the jpeg compression, and CS WILL treat jpeg artifacts as structure.
What I mean when I say you do not have to sample at the Nyquist rate is that you do not have to take the required number of samples specified to get the higher frequencies (n > 2f where f is your highest freq), however you do have to capture these frequencies in your random sample. This is a guarantee if you sample randomly. The point of compressed sensing is that the Nyquist rate *does not apply* to sparse signals. CS specifies sampling rates significantly lower than the Nyquist rate, and can recover data accurately in this setting. This is very new mathematics, and challenges very old and very strong paradigms, but it is true.
I honestly don't know. Tao gave a talk at my university on the topic and made mention of it, so thats all I know.
What is even more interesting is Candes happened across this by sheer accident. Apparently he was trying to clean up some MRI images using l1 minimisation or something and instead of a slightly de-noised picture (what he expected) he ended up with a pixel for pixel reconstruction.
The algorithm does not work at all in the way that the wired article describes. In CS you make the assumption that your unknown data set is sparse, it is now known that a random sample of a sparse data set contains all the information about the sparsity of that data set. From here you seek the most sparse data set which agrees with your sample, and it will be the exact solution provided all your assumptions are true and your sampled data is perfect. If your assumptions are nearly true and your sampled data is nearly perfect, then you will recreate very nearly the exact data set.
If you want to know the 'algorithm' used in CS is probably some variant of the simplex algorithm, or some interior point method for solving convex optimisation problems.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that, given the context you would be aware, I mean I think its kind of obvious that if you want to use something that chews up whitespace, Python is not the tool. The question is, does this make Python a bad tool? And the answer is most assuredly no. I think its rare and unambiguous when you are dealing with a situation where whitespace will be messed up, but otherwise, like when your file is just sitting on your OS and maybe being run from time to time, I think you are safe. Given this context, Python is an exceptional tool for what it does, and a complaint about its semantics isn't really a complaint about the merits of the language.
Thats it? You are that inflexible that you balk at your *style* changing?
How about this: I HATE that C enforces style on my code by forcing me to wrap code blocks in curly braces. Why should I have to use curly braces in my code??
See how stupid that argument is?
I use Eclipse with Pydev and Visual Stuio with IronPython, both of these have auto-indent working perfectly with Python, as does Idle and probably every other text editor/ide. This is just simply incorrect.
Firstly, vertical white space carries no meaning, so thats a red herring. Secondly, Python defines the block delimiter as the first bit of whitespace it encounters in your script, all following indents must adhere to the first one you used. So there is consistency, provided you can do something so simple as remember how many times you pressed the spacebar, or set your auto-indent to use the standard 4 single spaces.
You mean we should be able to parse our code through arbitrary html forms? Why?
Why is it a moronic idea? Space is a valid character, as is a curly. Curlies add line noise, whitespace is much more readable. Its a plus in that code becomes more readable, I guess it adds some ambiguity so thats a minus, a net nothing then. But only if you actually make the effort to not care about how you write your code. Seriously, use four standard spaces instead of a tab and you will be sweet, if your IDE can't do this, then maybe you should try a better one.
So why is it a moronic idea?
Cos you know, its way cooler to just berate him for his obvious inferiority....
The 'programming' in dynamic programming does not refer to writing computer programs, it is a branch of mathematics that grew out of the original convex optimization problems. Dantzig was a military 'programmer' in the 40s, the simplex algorithm was developed as a solution to problems that could be posed as a linear objective function with linear constraints. Programming in this sense was a word used by the military to describe how operations would be organised. Dynamic programming is an extension of linear programming and refers to mathematics, not computer code.
What did Palm do that is not in windows? Please elaborate? Is it not WIMP-based?
I have always got it you fucking idiot. I've said right from the start that tablets make sense when handwriting makes sense to you. For these people, there is nothing diminished in the user experience to justify complete OS redesign, in fact my tablet would simply be worse for it.
Bad comparison, firstly, tablet pc's cost a lot more than macs do, secondly, macs are a fashion item, and obey different laws of supply and demand.
Have you ever, for an appreciable time, used windows 7 with a tablet pc in tablet mode? Exploring the features and really trying them out? If not, can you please refrain from crapping on about shit you haven't used.
No, people just don't want pens, there never will be much demand for them. I've never claimed otherwise, I am simply claiming that for people who might consider buying one of these devices, the user interface is not a barrier to their purchase so much as the prohibitive price is.
Now, again you haven't given me a single example as to what is diminished about the user interface experience of a tablet, on windows. I've given several examples of optimizations employed, which work well. All you did was say "newton" and "palm"... those are not examples of UI features, they are clumsy little palmtops from a bygone era.
Put up or shut up, or at least admit you really have no experience using a tablet pc, and thus really don't know what the fuck you are talking about.
Dude I get your point, and I disagree, why are you ignoring every point I've made? An OS designed exclusively for pen input is going to suck balls, as a fairly experienced tablet user, I can tell you this with confidence. Ever tried to surf the web with pen input only? Or just an on-screen keyboard and your finger? It sucks balls and no optimization is going to change that fact. Web is just something you need to type on a keyboard for. What do you suggest? A bloody great list of words to select from? Sounds even more stupid. All we really need is better handwriting recognition (7 is more than impressive already, but not good enough) and for humans to evolve the ability to write by hand at over 60wpm (unlikely). iPhone/iPod Touch and iPad on screen keyboards are so much worse than handwriting input, and these are supposedly 'optimized' platforms.
Tablet mode on a tablet convertible is perfectly fine for tablet use, there is no way you will optimize an OS for pen/touch input without taking away the greatness of a keyboard. There is nothing wrong with tapping away at small icons and menus with a stylus, this would suck with your finger, I agree (the irony here is that the supposedly optimized iPhone OS has even smaller icons to tap at than windows menus/icons, and I find it one of the most frustrating and clumsy interfaces I've used to date), but a stylus is plenty accurate enough, and windows has features to make sure you hand doesn't get in the way of the menus. You also have pen gestures, which make certain tasks even easier than using a keyboard/mouse, and plugins like grab n drag for firefox which make web browsing far superior imo than even using a mouse. Search, without a keyboard, is balls, no doubting it. But there are no optimizations for that, like I said, the iPhone is demonstrably *worse* in this respect.
The issue here is not that an optimized os is needed, or even could be made (I disagree it could), the reason pen computing has not taken off is simple: 1. People prefer the keyboard to handwriting and 2. Tablets are not cost competitive. If you could buy a tablet pc for the same money as a non tablet pc, sales figures would surge overnight. It has nothing to do with OS design.
Now one more time: I challenge you to come up with one single example of how the user experience is diminished and how it could be optimized with different UI design? I'm still waiting.
What is worse about it, seriously dude how many times do I need to ask? *What* about it is worse? A tablet is worse than a screen? How? It does more things.
I agree that modern OSes are not good touch interfaces, but I don't agree that they need much more than a few tweaks to be optimized for stylus input, tweaks which windows has.
So my tablet is faster and more accurate as primary input than my trackpad. It displays information like a normal screen, yet it receives input too. What is diminished about the user experience here?
Yes, yes you did, repeatedly. Like here:
And here:
And its this latter comment in particular I take issue with: They do everything else exactly the same as every other laptop out there, except that I can use the stylus as input, and get my handwritten notes onto my laptop. A lot of tablet users I know don't swivel the screen often, they just tip it down and write on it right there, so theres a nuisance taken care of. I don't understand either how someone using a tablet convertible would find the hinge to be a problem, as you stated, since it does exactly what other laptop hinges do: allows the lid to open and close. There is no real evidence out there to suggest tablet swivels are weaker than standard laptop hinges, even if your intuition tells you they should be.
In any case, I maintain that there is nothing worse about using the WIMP based OS with a stylus, sure its not optimised for it, although I have no idea why such a thing should require optimisation. The only complaint I have is that I wish I could move scrollbars to the correct side for my handedness. Menus can be set to open to the left or right in Vista and 7, meaning your hand never obscures them if you have windows set up correctly. So what else is the problem? I am more than accurate enough with my stylus for it to be usable on small menu items, as I expect anyone with even the slightest amount of dexterity to be.
Where, exactly is this decreased user experience coming from? You haven't listed one single example.
My position is that more people would use tablet pc's if the price were competitive with regular laptops (an argument which seems to escape detractors such as yourself). They are typically $1000 more than their equivalent non-tablet laptop, a significant cost in this day of laptops being available for less than that alone. For every person I meet who would like to buy a tablet (that is: most people who see mine in action), very few of them are willing to pay the extra price. Its got nothing to do with user experience (which is overall very good in 7 with stylus gestures and other nice little additions), and everything to do with simple economics.
Wrong conclusion, most people want one until they find they can have the same laptop with more features for around $1000 cheaper. They are overpriced, thanks to Wacom, and thats about all there is to it.
My brain just output: "due to" as "dude"... maybe I need more coffee...
Firstly, I agree with the GP, I own a tablet pc and it absolutely kicks ass for what I do (mathematics). Secondly, I rarely meet anyone who dislikes the device, other than nerds on their high horses who usually can't even write without a keyboard anyway. I have a few lecturers who use them, and I know several students who use them a lot. They are the perfect educational device for teachers (like a whiteboard but you can save as pdf, never have to wipe anything off it, and its also a fully functioning laptop), and they are the perfect device for students studying mathematics and engineering, and professional mathematicians and engineers for that matter.
Personally I believe the one reason these devices have failed* is nothing more than the price factor, they typically add about $1000 to the cost of a laptop, dude the the heavily patent encumbered and dramatically overvalued Wacom tablet that exists inside most of them (the ones which deviate from wacom tech, while being cheaper, are widely regarded as inferior). I really fail to understand how a device which adds functionality to a regular laptop, without taking anything away, could be regarded as somehow inferior.
*Despite endless claims that tablets failed in the market, there are more models available today than ever before, and more people using them than ever before. Not we are not all using them, but they have grown as a market, and that is not typically how you define failure. Honestly by this definition of failure, hasn't Apple failed over and over again?
I s'pose you didn't read all of what I said, or you chose to simply ignore it, so I'll repeat myself:
A stylus, in my experience, is a vastly more accurate and speedy primary input device than a trackpad. I'm talking about generic OS interaction. It is easily comparable to a mouse for a small screen, oftentimes superior, but sometimes not.
I'm not trying to pretend that stylus input is naturally and fully replacing the mouse, I am explicitly stating it as truth for my experience. Yours may differ, but listen to me, I consider it truth. You can't write hard rules for UI deisgn and I'm telling you I prefer my stylus to my trackpad, and I prefer it to dragging a bluetooth mouse around with me. Expand beyond the box you are limiting yourself to, I'm specifically not talking about a large desktop display out in front of you, I'm talking about a small 12" laptop display which sits comfortably close for pen input. In this case, the pen is easily superior to the trackpad for everything.
Using the OS without a keyboard is a clumsy experience, tablets which include the keyboard are vastly more popular in my experience, because converting pen to typing is hit and miss. Everyone I know who owns a tablet (a few people, but significant in my small sample), owns a convertible, not a slate. So anecdotally your claim that convertibles sell worse is completely false. I still see plenty of convertibles out on display for sale, haven't seen a slate for a long time, until now that is.
A convertible tablet pc is just a laptop that can take pen input through the screen. How this translates to doing thing worse than other laptops I don't understand, it has everything a normal laptop has, plus a stylus. What has been taken away?
I disagree, strongly. Windows Vista has numerous enhancements for stylus input, 7 has even more and they both work well for certain tasks on a stylus machine. I have a convertible hp tablet pc, it has been my primary machine for university for two years now, and for mathematics/engineering, could not be better. The stylus is a marked improvement over the stupid trackpad, vastly more accurate and faster, I pull out the stylus frequently in favour of the trackpad. I could not however, imagine using full blown windows without the keyboard.
I agree that touch is another story, but the stylus on a small laptop screen is faster/more accurate than the trackpad, and even arguably better than a mouse. The only problem I have is that as a lefty, I can't change the whole OS to display scroll bars on the left hand side of the screen, but at least onenote can do this, and thats my primary pen app anyway.
IT guys tend not to 'get it' when it comes to tablets, you need to have a real need for handwriting before it makes sense. For me I have that need, and I carry around with me the equivalent of a whole bookcase worth of my notes which I can flick through at my leisure when they are needed. To me a tablet sans stylus makes absolutely no sense, and I'll take my eeepc (5 hrs battery life) over this kind of device anyday.
Unfortunately, there is absolutely no way to describe this stuff in "human" terms, you really just have to get your head around the concepts and even then you are likely to have no idea what this stuff is on about. Mathematicians could spend their whole career not understanding this stuff, easily.
I'll try as best I can, but I can barely get my head around the most basic concepts here, so here I go: In topology we don't care so much about what you normally think of as mathematics, topology I guess you could say is a study of bulk mathematical structure in some sense, highly abstracted notions of geometric structure in this case, but topology goes beyond geometry and it is wrong to think of it as simply the study of manifolds and such. A manifold, the kind they are talking about, is a 'locally smooth surface', that means if you have the surface of a 3d object and zoom into a point anywhere, the region around the point will eventually begin to look 'flat', this means if you move around on the 3d surface, you can move in 2 dimensions only and encounter nothing discontinuous about the surface. Of course this extends to higher dimensions too. If you think of a map of the earth as a flat 2d grid, then the sphere that is the earth is a 2-manifold. Here we have embedded a 2-dimensional plane into a 3-dimensional space. If you then think about the general plane and how it stretches out infinitely, we can actually 'compactify' that infinite plane into a finite manifold by 'mapping' each point on the plane onto a point on the surface of a sphere, we and add one single point we can call 'infinity' and the once infinite plane is now 'compact'. The infinite plane has now become finite (sort of) by embedding it into higher dimensions.
In topology a homeomorphism between topological spaces (a manifold is a topological space) just means we can find a perfectly reversible function which maps every point from one to every point in the other exactly one way, it means the two spaces will have the same structure and all theorems proven for one are true for the other. This is where the famous saying "the coffee cup is no different to the donut" comes from. If two topological spaces are homeomorphic, we can find some function which morphs one into the other, and hence they are simply the same thing. In terms of manifolds this is like saying we can warp, bend, twist and pass the manifold through itself, but never fold or cut, until one matches the shape of the other. So a donut can be made into a coffee cup, but never a sphere.
The Poincarre conjecture is a way of characterizing a 3-manifold as homeomorphic to the 3-sphere. So we have stepped up a dimension from the flat earth/spherical earth example above. Now our basic manifold is locally flat in 3 dimensions, so locally it might look like 3-dimensional space while it globally exists in 4-dimensional space. If you walked around on the surface of a 3-sphere, you could move in 3 directions. In the case of the 2-sphere, we can characterize homeomorphic manifolds by the fact that if you take any circle on the surface of a sphere, you can contract it down to a point on the surface. This is not true for donuts, as some circles cannot contract down to a point, hence the sphere is not homeomorphic to the donut. So we then have a simple way of describing which manifolds are homeomorphic to the 2-sphere. Poincarre conjectured that this was possible for the 3-sphere.
The proof, I can give no insight on, and I imagine most of the worlds best mathematicians would struggle to follow it. It took years to verify this proof, years of work and teams of mathematicians.
As for usefulness, you need to step out of the structured world of classical applied mathematics and think in abstract ways. At face value there is very little of anything useful about this proof, other than gaining deeper insight into the geometry of 4 dimensional space. Topology is used in spatial databasing, image processing, protein folding/knot theory, lots and lots of physics (string theory especially) and ma
Physics (yes, Physics, THE hardest of hard sciences) is full of terrible mathematics, absolutely terrible, shockingly bad stuff. The good ones know it, some will say it doesn't matter because their butchery comes up with "accurate" results. If they can't even get their analysis right, what can we expect of the softer sciences? That said physics is not so much concerned with statistics as it is probability, none the less, they have some serious problems, for example they often simply decide highly non-convergent things should converge because the experiment says it should...
The greatest tragedy in modern science (in my eyes) is the loss of physics as a hard science, currently these guys are way off with the fairies and producing nothing of worth, string theorists are the worst. We'll see what the CERN guys manage to come up with, but right now the mathematicians have taken the ball and run with it. It has been said that physics has become too hard for the Physicists...
I am not trolling, I am quite serious about Physicists playing dodgey games with mathematics.
I'm really not so sure about that, from a standstill, perhaps, running at highway speeds? Thats another story. You run into brake fade issues very quickly unless you are running highly exotic ceramic brakes (which they are not). Some Aurions have really got obscene amounts of power too. Whilst it is probably true that you *can* apply enough force to stop a car at WOT, the question is can most average drivers actually pull this off before their brakes overheat and become quite useless? I personally remain unconvinced.
I agree that the privacy controls on Facebook are sufficient (hence I use it), but Zuckerberg has publicly stated that he does not think this is good enough, and that he does not think people should expect privacy at all anymore. He essentially stated his wish to simply take what data he wishes from your interactions with facebook and claim it as his own. Now fair enough if thats his stated goal, but to lure people in by saying it is NOT your stated goal, then attempt to change the rules mid course is disingenuous at best, downright criminal at worst. (See facebook IP fiasco for more details)
The point is to honour what the user wishes to be private. Facebook lured people in by saying everything you post is private if you wish it to be, or only available for your friends to view. But then it became obvious how much money could be made by targeted advertising if this were not the case, and suddenly the rules changed mid game.
Absolutely you will not get data back that was lost in the jpeg compression, and CS WILL treat jpeg artifacts as structure.
What I mean when I say you do not have to sample at the Nyquist rate is that you do not have to take the required number of samples specified to get the higher frequencies (n > 2f where f is your highest freq), however you do have to capture these frequencies in your random sample. This is a guarantee if you sample randomly. The point of compressed sensing is that the Nyquist rate *does not apply* to sparse signals. CS specifies sampling rates significantly lower than the Nyquist rate, and can recover data accurately in this setting. This is very new mathematics, and challenges very old and very strong paradigms, but it is true.
I honestly don't know. Tao gave a talk at my university on the topic and made mention of it, so thats all I know.
What is even more interesting is Candes happened across this by sheer accident. Apparently he was trying to clean up some MRI images using l1 minimisation or something and instead of a slightly de-noised picture (what he expected) he ended up with a pixel for pixel reconstruction.
The algorithm does not work at all in the way that the wired article describes. In CS you make the assumption that your unknown data set is sparse, it is now known that a random sample of a sparse data set contains all the information about the sparsity of that data set. From here you seek the most sparse data set which agrees with your sample, and it will be the exact solution provided all your assumptions are true and your sampled data is perfect. If your assumptions are nearly true and your sampled data is nearly perfect, then you will recreate very nearly the exact data set.
If you want to know the 'algorithm' used in CS is probably some variant of the simplex algorithm, or some interior point method for solving convex optimisation problems.