Yes, cherry-picking some rubes off the street, and getting them to play to the camera and act enthusiastic for a celebrity waving a gadget in their face, demonstrates incredible generalizations about the entire Apple userbase. Parrotting such rubbish actually says a lot more about YOUR mindset.
Do you seriously believe the same trick couldn't be pulled off with other devices?
Not one of them realized it was the old iPhone 4S.
ERH MER GERD! NOT ONE!?
The people who DID realize, were simply edited out. For all you know, it took 20 attempts for each "mark". (Although I doubt it, it's probably pretty easy for a celebrity to get random people on the street to accept what they're saying is true, and act excited for a chance to be on TV)
Opus is a very low-latency codec [...] to allow interactive speech and music over the Web.
Very good post, but I think you have your terms backwards? The web is a HIGH latency medium. Local storage on an MP3 player would be LOW (damn near zero) latency.
Milo: I understand that my opponent supports the 55 M.P.H. speed limit. Opus: Saves 500 lives a year! I fully support saving lives. Milo: Then he'd support the saving of another 10,000 lives by lowering the limit to 40 M.P.H. Opus: 40? Milo: Or to 20... Saving 30,000 lives a year. Opus: Gee... 20 is pretty slow. Milo: Apparently my opponent would send 30,000 men, women, and children to fiery, mangled deaths just so he can zoom along to his manicurist at 55. Opus: I DON'T HAVE A MANICURIST! Milo: He probably doesn't. Most mass murderers don't. Hitler didn't.
I just thought it was a cool quote that echoed the "dying is what makes us real" sentiment in the post I was replying to. Certainly not trying to "prove" some universal truth with a fictional story, good grief!;)
And besides which, obviously, if you were immortal, you'd occupy yourself by individually insulting every sentient being in the galaxy in alphabetical order. This has been clearly established. (Adams, Douglas. c1982)
I can understand the potential concern with transmission capabilities.
But many airlines will tell you that even if you can shut that off (ie, "Airplane Mode"), it's still not enough and the device must be completely shut off. Which makes no sense whatsoever.
We've lived too long, seen too much. To live on, as we have, is to leave behind joy, love, and companionship because we know it to be transitory; of the moment. We know it will turn to ash.
Only those whose lives are brief can believe that love is eternal. You should embrace that remarkable illusion. It may be the greatest gift your race has ever received.
There should be a "-1 Bitching That This Doesn't Meet My Personal Criteria For News" mod. Every. Damn. Article. Somebody has to come write an essay on how completely not interesting or impressive this is to them.
Now if you'd bothered to RTFA, you'd have noted it already directly discusses this:
Of course, factoring 15 isn't something that is going to threaten the PKI and cryptography in general, but factoring larger numbers is just a matter of increasing the number of qubits and this approach does seem to be a scalable solid state approach.
So they can instantly factor numbers (well, with ~50% success), with an approach that *seems scalable*. That's news to me.
Maybe in a few months, there will be another story about how they failed to scale this approach up. That will be an additional piece of news. Failure can be news.
Some of us are interested in the journey, not just the destination.
Any site that is UNUSABLE without Flash will either adapt, or die. And thank goodness for that.
Flash was (still is?) a great way to provide an enhanced experience for desktop users. Any web developer worth the title would provide fallbacks for critical path functionality.
People that built nav menus, or unskippable intros, or (heaven forbid) entire sites out of Flash without proper fallbacks should be rounded up and shot in the head.
Progressive enhancement. Graceful degradation. These are not buzzwords, they're the cornerstone of any sane rich-media web development strategy.
It's not "clear" at all. Just because they didn't provide such details doesn't mean they don't exist. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Valve is an exceptionally competent developer of high performance, low-level graphics software. The article says "The data is generated from an internal test case". It's reasonable to assume this internal test case is specifically designed for, oh I dunno, TESTING. Which means it's designed to put the different rendering pipelines through the exact same gauntlet (or as close as can be managed).
Why would you think that them running the test at inconsistent resolution/detail settings is even a remote possibility? Do such obvious test practices REALLY need to be spelled out for you?
Yes, they reduced the test data to a simple number (I thought it was pretty obvious this represented "average" FPS). It's an easier discussion point. What of it? It's a blog post, not a scientific paper.
First of all, get off your high horse, I play real instruments too. GarageBand is a great tool for quickly throwing together some drum/bass/rhythm backing.
Second, claiming the keyboard is just as good an input device for playing a range of (simulated) instruments is just obstinate. With a touchscreen, it can draw a fretboard that you can strum (of COURSE it doesn't sound as good as a real instrument, but that's a different subject entirely). It can draw violin strings that you can either stroke or pluck. It can redraw the instrument interface using only notes from a certain key. On a somewhat giving surface, it can even use the accelerometer to measure how hard you hit the note. None of this is possible with a keyboard. You can't "redraw" a keyboard to seamlessly change the interface on the fly. You can't have a keyboard react differently depending on how they touch the key.
This applies to (some types of) gaming as well. Take a game like Multi-Ponk (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.fingerlab.multiponk&hl=en), it's basically fancy 4-player Pong. Four players controlling their paddles via direct manipulation (ie, 1:1 match between finger position and paddle) right on the screen. This is VASTLY superior to any version you'd manage to do on say, a standalone laptop.
Or how about Marble Mixer? (http://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/marble-mixer-for-ipad/id363999775?mt=8) It features 4 players who can flick marbles towards the centre from each corner. Each flick requires measuring 2 analog components; the actual aiming angle, and the force of the flick. With 4 simultaneous players. Again, vastly superior to any version you'd be able to make with keyboard/mouse.
A simple way of summarizing the above advantages: a multi-touch screen can provide any number of direct-manipulation analog controls, as needed.
Sorry, but people who think there are no good applications for that kind of flexibility whatsoever, simply aren't using their imaginations.
I think the big advantage is MULTI-touch. Take Garage Band on the iPad for example; a brilliant application of multi-touch (ie, real time instrument playing) that simply wouldn't be possible with any sort of conventional single-pointer interface. Shared-screen multiplayer games (ie, Fruit Ninja, Fieldrunners, Flight Control, Marble Mixer, etc) are another good example.
I'm not saying that makes it "better" (in the general sense, it's certainly not, for the reasons you outlined above), but calling it "not even remotely a good solution" is a bit harsh IMHO. It's just a very different toolset, that is great for some scenarios, but sub-optimal for others.
OMG I just installed this yesterday, cannot believe something this amazing is free.
I mean, virtually all other options with turn-by-turn voice navigation have either a $50 price tag (TomTom, Navigon, Magellan), or a recurring subscription price (TeleNav Scout, MotionX, GoKivo, etc).
Add to that the awesomeness of crowd-sourced realtime updates, and solidly implemented features like automatic route recalculation, and Waze is a real winner. And it's FREE! TomTom and Garmin must be shitting bricks right about now.
I'm not saying your opinion is "wrong", I'm giving MY opinion that you're being incredibly presumptuous about speaking for how well Dick's ideas were translated.
Are you seriously suggesting that Blade Runner (the movie) has nothing to say about "globalized culture and the introduction of advanced technology to culture"? The visualization of the city alone is an incredible (and increasingly prescient) commentary on these subjects.
Are you aware that Philip K Dick, while sadly dying before the final film was complete, saw some early footage and LOVED it? A letter he wrote:
I happened to see the Channel 7 TV program "Hooray For Hollywood" tonight with the segment on BLADE RUNNER. (Well, to be honest, I didn't happen to see it; someone tipped me off that BLADE RUNNER was going to be a part of the show, and to be sure to watch.) Jeff, after looking --and especially after listening to Harrison Ford discuss the film-- I came to the conclusion that this indeed is not science fiction; it is not fantasy; it is exactly what Harrison said: futurism. The impact of BLADE RUNNER is simply going to be overwhelming, both on the public and on creative people -- and, I believe, on science fiction as a field. Since I have been writing and selling science fiction works for thirty years, this is a matter of some importance to me. In all candor I must say that our field has gradually and steadily been deteriorating for the last few years.Nothing that we have done, individually or collectively, matches BLADE RUNNER. This is not escapism; it is super realism, so gritty and detailed and authentic and goddam convincing that, well, after the segment I found my normal present-day "reality" pallid by comparison. What I am saying is that all of you collectively may have created a unique new form of graphic, artistic expression, never before seen. And, I think, BLADE RUNNER is going to revolutionize our conceptions of what science fiction is and, more, can be.
Let me sum it up this way. Science fiction has slowly and ineluctably settled into a monotonous death: it has become inbred, derivative, stale. Suddenly you people have come in, some of the greatest talents currently in existence, and now we have a new life, a new start. As for my own role in the BLADE RUNNER project, I can only say that I did not know that a work of mine or a set of ideas of mine could be escalated into such stunning dimensions. My life and creative work are justified and completed by BLADE RUNNER. Thank you..and it is going to be one hell of a commercial success. It will prove invincible.
So as another Philip K Dick fan (and yes I've read Androids), if you want to say the movie isn't as good as the book, fine (an incredibly boring & obvious statement, but fine). But calling it terrible? Something the author himself described in transcendant terms, as a new birth for the genre, and as justifying his life's work? Philip K Dick would punch you in the face, "fanboy".
It also means you can give full-width standard menu bars to really narrow applications (eg, IM), without every one of them having to invent their own custom menu widgets. You never, ever ask yourself "how the heck do I access the menu for this app?" on a Mac. The same cannot be said for many Windows apps.
And yeah, claiming a single menu takes up more space than EVERY window having it's own dedicated menu bar? Wonderful logic, that.
"100% pure form over function"? Uh, sure. No practical benefits whatsoever. This is a +5? But of course, poorly thought out, knee-jerk Apple-bashing for some cheap karma is a time honoured tradition around here.
(For the record, I've been a pure Windows user since 3.0, up until about 2 years ago, and used to mock Macs endlessly. Then I actually started using one regularly.)
It's confusing because it throws the "answers" right at you, a dollar and 10 cents, and then it's easy to confuse the concept of "a dollar more" vs "an order of magnitude (10x) more". $1.00 is exactly 10x more than $0.10, and your mind is looking for nice round numbers because the question is full of them, so it being 10x more "feels" like it satisfies the "dollar more" condition.
I certainly jumped to that as a first "intuitive" guess, but know enough to check my work, and realized it didn't actually satisfy the "dollar more" condition. Then my thought process went something like: Well the ball can't be free, then the bat is $1.00 and we're $0.10 short of the total. And the ball can't be $0.10, then the bat is $1.10 and we're $0.10 PAST the total. Aha! Symmetry! The answer is smack in the middle, the ball is $0.05.
One question they didn't answer in the study is whether time was a component of the test... ie were people told that the faster they did, the better? Or did they have as much time as they needed? One would think the former could lead to more of these "shortcuts".
(And yeah, the lilypad problem was obvious... but look at the audience here.;) It's like asking a programmer, "If it takes 10 steps to double something to 1024, at what step is it 512?")
I also hate earbuds, I find them uncomfortable and they never seem to stay put in my ears.
BUT, I also want something really portable... I picked up these Brookstone Earpods a couple years back and they're great... very good sound quality and very comfortable... I can even wear them lying down with my ear against a pillow, they're so flat. $59.99, hopefully close enough to your price range.
1) Download them and watch them as they come out. 2) ALSO purchase them on iTunes when they eventually come out ~8-10 months later (in the leadup to the next season IIRC), because I genuinely want to support the show financially.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, cherry-picking some rubes off the street, and getting them to play to the camera and act enthusiastic for a celebrity waving a gadget in their face, demonstrates incredible generalizations about the entire Apple userbase. Parrotting such rubbish actually says a lot more about YOUR mindset.
Do you seriously believe the same trick couldn't be pulled off with other devices?
ERH MER GERD! NOT ONE!?
The people who DID realize, were simply edited out. For all you know, it took 20 attempts for each "mark". (Although I doubt it, it's probably pretty easy for a celebrity to get random people on the street to accept what they're saying is true, and act excited for a chance to be on TV)
Very good post, but I think you have your terms backwards? The web is a HIGH latency medium. Local storage on an MP3 player would be LOW (damn near zero) latency.
Latency = delay, not speed.
Milo: I understand that my opponent supports the 55 M.P.H. speed limit. ... Saving 30,000 lives a year.
Opus: Saves 500 lives a year! I fully support saving lives.
Milo: Then he'd support the saving of another 10,000 lives by lowering the limit to 40 M.P.H.
Opus: 40?
Milo: Or to 20
Opus: Gee... 20 is pretty slow.
Milo: Apparently my opponent would send 30,000 men, women, and children to fiery, mangled deaths just so he can zoom along to his manicurist at 55.
Opus: I DON'T HAVE A MANICURIST!
Milo: He probably doesn't. Most mass murderers don't. Hitler didn't.
Are you seriously claiming you have better insight into how this specific approach will scale, compared to the actual scientists working on it?
I just thought it was a cool quote that echoed the "dying is what makes us real" sentiment in the post I was replying to. Certainly not trying to "prove" some universal truth with a fictional story, good grief! ;)
And besides which, obviously, if you were immortal, you'd occupy yourself by individually insulting every sentient being in the galaxy in alphabetical order. This has been clearly established. (Adams, Douglas. c1982)
I can understand the potential concern with transmission capabilities.
But many airlines will tell you that even if you can shut that off (ie, "Airplane Mode"), it's still not enough and the device must be completely shut off. Which makes no sense whatsoever.
-Lorien (Babylon 5, "Into the Fire")
There should be a "-1 Bitching That This Doesn't Meet My Personal Criteria For News" mod. Every. Damn. Article. Somebody has to come write an essay on how completely not interesting or impressive this is to them.
Yes, factoring 15 isn't particularly impressive. Thank you, Captain Fucking Obvious.
Now if you'd bothered to RTFA, you'd have noted it already directly discusses this:
So they can instantly factor numbers (well, with ~50% success), with an approach that *seems scalable*. That's news to me.
Maybe in a few months, there will be another story about how they failed to scale this approach up. That will be an additional piece of news. Failure can be news.
Some of us are interested in the journey, not just the destination.
Any site that is UNUSABLE without Flash will either adapt, or die. And thank goodness for that.
Flash was (still is?) a great way to provide an enhanced experience for desktop users. Any web developer worth the title would provide fallbacks for critical path functionality.
People that built nav menus, or unskippable intros, or (heaven forbid) entire sites out of Flash without proper fallbacks should be rounded up and shot in the head.
Progressive enhancement. Graceful degradation. These are not buzzwords, they're the cornerstone of any sane rich-media web development strategy.
This is only true for the iPad1. iPad2 and later support full video mirroring.
It's not "clear" at all. Just because they didn't provide such details doesn't mean they don't exist. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Valve is an exceptionally competent developer of high performance, low-level graphics software. The article says "The data is generated from an internal test case". It's reasonable to assume this internal test case is specifically designed for, oh I dunno, TESTING. Which means it's designed to put the different rendering pipelines through the exact same gauntlet (or as close as can be managed).
Why would you think that them running the test at inconsistent resolution/detail settings is even a remote possibility? Do such obvious test practices REALLY need to be spelled out for you?
Yes, they reduced the test data to a simple number (I thought it was pretty obvious this represented "average" FPS). It's an easier discussion point. What of it? It's a blog post, not a scientific paper.
First of all, get off your high horse, I play real instruments too. GarageBand is a great tool for quickly throwing together some drum/bass/rhythm backing.
Second, claiming the keyboard is just as good an input device for playing a range of (simulated) instruments is just obstinate. With a touchscreen, it can draw a fretboard that you can strum (of COURSE it doesn't sound as good as a real instrument, but that's a different subject entirely). It can draw violin strings that you can either stroke or pluck. It can redraw the instrument interface using only notes from a certain key. On a somewhat giving surface, it can even use the accelerometer to measure how hard you hit the note. None of this is possible with a keyboard. You can't "redraw" a keyboard to seamlessly change the interface on the fly. You can't have a keyboard react differently depending on how they touch the key.
This applies to (some types of) gaming as well. Take a game like Multi-Ponk (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.fingerlab.multiponk&hl=en), it's basically fancy 4-player Pong. Four players controlling their paddles via direct manipulation (ie, 1:1 match between finger position and paddle) right on the screen. This is VASTLY superior to any version you'd manage to do on say, a standalone laptop.
Or how about Marble Mixer? (http://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/marble-mixer-for-ipad/id363999775?mt=8) It features 4 players who can flick marbles towards the centre from each corner. Each flick requires measuring 2 analog components; the actual aiming angle, and the force of the flick. With 4 simultaneous players. Again, vastly superior to any version you'd be able to make with keyboard/mouse.
A simple way of summarizing the above advantages: a multi-touch screen can provide any number of direct-manipulation analog controls, as needed.
Sorry, but people who think there are no good applications for that kind of flexibility whatsoever, simply aren't using their imaginations.
http://slashdot.org/faq/karma.shtml
Harmy's Despecialized Editions.
I think the big advantage is MULTI-touch. Take Garage Band on the iPad for example; a brilliant application of multi-touch (ie, real time instrument playing) that simply wouldn't be possible with any sort of conventional single-pointer interface. Shared-screen multiplayer games (ie, Fruit Ninja, Fieldrunners, Flight Control, Marble Mixer, etc) are another good example.
I'm not saying that makes it "better" (in the general sense, it's certainly not, for the reasons you outlined above), but calling it "not even remotely a good solution" is a bit harsh IMHO. It's just a very different toolset, that is great for some scenarios, but sub-optimal for others.
OMG I just installed this yesterday, cannot believe something this amazing is free.
I mean, virtually all other options with turn-by-turn voice navigation have either a $50 price tag (TomTom, Navigon, Magellan), or a recurring subscription price (TeleNav Scout, MotionX, GoKivo, etc).
Add to that the awesomeness of crowd-sourced realtime updates, and solidly implemented features like automatic route recalculation, and Waze is a real winner. And it's FREE! TomTom and Garmin must be shitting bricks right about now.
Haha no doubt. Saw "Radio Free Albemuth" a while back at a film fest (even got to meet the writer/director). Phil had.. an interesting mind. :)
Care to expand on that?
I'm not saying your opinion is "wrong", I'm giving MY opinion that you're being incredibly presumptuous about speaking for how well Dick's ideas were translated.
Are you seriously suggesting that Blade Runner (the movie) has nothing to say about "globalized culture and the introduction of advanced technology to culture"? The visualization of the city alone is an incredible (and increasingly prescient) commentary on these subjects.
Are you aware that Philip K Dick, while sadly dying before the final film was complete, saw some early footage and LOVED it? A letter he wrote:
(Source: http://www.philipkdick.com/new_letters-laddcompany.html)
So as another Philip K Dick fan (and yes I've read Androids), if you want to say the movie isn't as good as the book, fine (an incredibly boring & obvious statement, but fine). But calling it terrible? Something the author himself described in transcendant terms, as a new birth for the genre, and as justifying his life's work? Philip K Dick would punch you in the face, "fanboy".
It also means you can give full-width standard menu bars to really narrow applications (eg, IM), without every one of them having to invent their own custom menu widgets. You never, ever ask yourself "how the heck do I access the menu for this app?" on a Mac. The same cannot be said for many Windows apps.
And yeah, claiming a single menu takes up more space than EVERY window having it's own dedicated menu bar? Wonderful logic, that.
"100% pure form over function"? Uh, sure. No practical benefits whatsoever. This is a +5? But of course, poorly thought out, knee-jerk Apple-bashing for some cheap karma is a time honoured tradition around here.
(For the record, I've been a pure Windows user since 3.0, up until about 2 years ago, and used to mock Macs endlessly. Then I actually started using one regularly.)
sigh
Clearly, wider objects will NOT fall faster, due to increased air resistance.
Which of course is provided by the leprechauns blowing upwards.
It's confusing because it throws the "answers" right at you, a dollar and 10 cents, and then it's easy to confuse the concept of "a dollar more" vs "an order of magnitude (10x) more". $1.00 is exactly 10x more than $0.10, and your mind is looking for nice round numbers because the question is full of them, so it being 10x more "feels" like it satisfies the "dollar more" condition.
I certainly jumped to that as a first "intuitive" guess, but know enough to check my work, and realized it didn't actually satisfy the "dollar more" condition. Then my thought process went something like: Well the ball can't be free, then the bat is $1.00 and we're $0.10 short of the total. And the ball can't be $0.10, then the bat is $1.10 and we're $0.10 PAST the total. Aha! Symmetry! The answer is smack in the middle, the ball is $0.05.
One question they didn't answer in the study is whether time was a component of the test... ie were people told that the faster they did, the better? Or did they have as much time as they needed? One would think the former could lead to more of these "shortcuts".
(And yeah, the lilypad problem was obvious... but look at the audience here. ;) It's like asking a programmer, "If it takes 10 steps to double something to 1024, at what step is it 512?")
I also hate earbuds, I find them uncomfortable and they never seem to stay put in my ears.
BUT, I also want something really portable... I picked up these Brookstone Earpods a couple years back and they're great... very good sound quality and very comfortable... I can even wear them lying down with my ear against a pillow, they're so flat. $59.99, hopefully close enough to your price range.
A series of elves? Now that's just stupid. Obviously the elves are pulling in parallel.
Option 6:
1) Download them and watch them as they come out.
2) ALSO purchase them on iTunes when they eventually come out ~8-10 months later (in the leadup to the next season IIRC), because I genuinely want to support the show financially.