Kaspersky chooses to live in a nation that has gone from a corrupt police state to an even more corrupt anarchy, and now he recommends Russian-style policies for the rest of the world. Sorry, I don't think I want to take advice from him about communication in a democracy.
In the US, the ability to communicate anonymously is a fundamental right, and for good reason.
It's unclear that this buys you much over OpenMP 3.0. GCD gives you a little bit more flexibility, but that's not needed in many applications, and GCD is quite inconvenient without closures.
I'm happy for you that you like the TouchStream and that it works for you. But people can train themselves to use almost anything. Biomechanically, it it worse than a keyboard with springs on any metric that matters.
The taxpayer will pay for it, it will look great on paper but be overly complicated ($31m buys a lot of unnecessary engineering), Microsoft and Lockheed will patent it, they'll market the hell out of it, and they'll create a slow and buggy Windows implementation with Microsoft-proprietary "enhancements" that make it non-interoperable.
Then industry is going to settle on something different because the standard is patent-encumbered, too complicated, and doesn't work right anyway.
CSIRO exists because it's publicly funded. It's publicly funded because it's supposed to benefit the public and create research results usable by everybody.
Wireless networking was developed by amateur radio operators, not by CSIRO. By the time CSIRO filed its patent (1996), you already could buy WLAN hardware commercially. CSIRO patented some specific techniques that happened to be present in several standards, but it's not even clear whether what they patented is an engineering solution (not patentable) or a true invention (patentable). That's why companies decided to challenge their patent in court.
I'm not so sure. It's not my area, but this patent sounds like it might be an engineering solution, a simple application of known techniques, instead of an invention. The fact that a standards body decided to use this technology (either not knowing about the patent or deliberately ignoring it) also suggests that this is not actually a new technology.
Can you explain what you think is novel and unobvious about this technology?
Even if you typed completely in air, it would still not be "zero force". Try threading a needle: there is no force from the needle to the thread, but there are a lot of opposing forces in your fingers.
The TouchStream requires less force to register a keystroke. But the amount of force needed to register a keystroke differs from the forces that your fingers, tendons, muscles, and joints actually experience while typing at normal speeds.
Why do you think regular keyboards use the kinds of springs and switches they do? People could have built keyboards with the kind of response that the TouchStream has for decades; switches for that have been available. They didn't because it's biomechanically bad. It's the same with piano keyboards and running surfaces.
No need for a new input device, since many mice already support adjusting four analog values simultaneously: x-y position and two-directional scrolling. If that's not enough, there are 6 DOF analog input devices as well. You can also use two mice or two 6 DOF devices if you like, for a total of 8-12 DOF analog inputs. That's all with cheap, existing, off-the-shelf technology.
There is no such thing as "zero force typing"; it's physically impossible. And hitting a hard surface while typing is subjecting you to more strain and requires you to use more muscles than a regular keyboard.
Moving your hands between they keyboard and mouse is generally a good thing. However, if it really bothers you, there are many existing keyboard designs that use regular keys and have a built-in trackball or trackpoint. You can also use footmice.
If the Fingerworks product works for you, you should probably stick with it. But it's probably not a good choice for most people, and it's probably not even the most ergonomic choice for you.
Apple got its multitouch technology by buying a company called FingerWorks. FingerWorks' primary product was just like what 10/GUI describes: a multitouch surface that could either replace they keyboard or the mouse(pad). It largely failed in the market.
People use the keyboard and mouse because they really work well. If people did want more DOF, it would be easy to add more sensors to a standard mouse, for example to record twisting, pushing, and other pressures, but even that isn't catching on.
Another idea that keeps bubbling up is the idea of pressure sensitive keyboards; they also keep failing because the resulting interactions just become too complex and add little benefit.
The real flaw in all these devices is the assumption that the limiting factor in communicating with machines is they "bandwidth" of they keyboard and mouse. It really isn't. Generally, people can think no faster than they can type and mouse, and speeding up the keyboard or mouse any further is pointless.
I think this sort of disaster shows that one simply can't trust desktop computing. You should put your data in the cloud instead, where knowledgeable and careful companies like Microsoft take care of the backups for you!
The recipient might not think it's insulting, but you have to look at the intent of the person saying it.
No, I don't. What matters here is not what Bryce might have wanted to express, but the language he actually used to express it. Bryce said is that he was "abused" by being called a "homosexual". That kind of statement perpetuates the idea that a neutral description of someone's sexuality is in itself abusive or insulting. It is offensive and insensitive.
In other words, women's participation in FOSS development is over seventeen times lower than it is in proprietary software development.
Because women don't volunteer their time for FOSS development, men are sexist? Sorry, I just don't follow that logic.
Because I took a feminist stance in public, I have been abused in every way possible -- being called irrelevant, a saboteur, coward, homosexual, and even a betrayer of the community.
Being called a "homosexual" is "abuse"? Great going, Bruce: show off your feminist stance by insulting another minority group.
Danger held your data hostage from the start and didn't provide backup. Then, when Microsoft took them over, it was clear that they were going to mess with the service and servers. No backup + Microsoft mucking with the servers = kiss your data goodbye.
But that's no more an indictment of hosted services or "cloud computing" than a Windows BSOD is an indictment of desktop computing. Microsoft screwed up, and quite predictably, too.
Furthermore you need plenty of training data partitioned into training and test sets so you can evaluate the generalisation error.
Yes. What's the alternative?
Working with neural nets has a mostly experimental feel to them
Most of software development is "experimental" because most software works with real-world data and because you have an endless cycle of implementing new features, testing, bug reporting, and bug fixing. With neural networks (and similar methods), at least people quantify their error rates. With most other applications, people can't even quantify how often they fail or whether a bug fix actually improves things.
Slashdot Mirror
Kaspersky chooses to live in a nation that has gone from a corrupt police state to an even more corrupt anarchy, and now he recommends Russian-style policies for the rest of the world. Sorry, I don't think I want to take advice from him about communication in a democracy.
In the US, the ability to communicate anonymously is a fundamental right, and for good reason.
it seems like the ability to share work across machines, not just cores, would be a critical difference.
Neither GCD nor OpenMP allow you to "share work across machines".
It's unclear that this buys you much over OpenMP 3.0. GCD gives you a little bit more flexibility, but that's not needed in many applications, and GCD is quite inconvenient without closures.
I'm happy for you that you like the TouchStream and that it works for you. But people can train themselves to use almost anything. Biomechanically, it it worse than a keyboard with springs on any metric that matters.
The taxpayer will pay for it, it will look great on paper but be overly complicated ($31m buys a lot of unnecessary engineering), Microsoft and Lockheed will patent it, they'll market the hell out of it, and they'll create a slow and buggy Windows implementation with Microsoft-proprietary "enhancements" that make it non-interoperable.
Then industry is going to settle on something different because the standard is patent-encumbered, too complicated, and doesn't work right anyway.
The first location acts as a cache where all active genes are kept. The second location is a denser storage area where inactive genes are kept.
"Cache" suggests a rapidly accessible copy, but that's not what's happening.
It's simply that active genes are accessible while inactive genes are inaccessible. That's not a new insight; that's been known for many years.
The paper does make valuable contributions, in that it describes the statistics of how genes relate to each other in 3D better than previously known.
CSIRO exists because it's publicly funded. It's publicly funded because it's supposed to benefit the public and create research results usable by everybody.
Wireless networking was developed by amateur radio operators, not by CSIRO. By the time CSIRO filed its patent (1996), you already could buy WLAN hardware commercially. CSIRO patented some specific techniques that happened to be present in several standards, but it's not even clear whether what they patented is an engineering solution (not patentable) or a true invention (patentable). That's why companies decided to challenge their patent in court.
I'm not so sure. It's not my area, but this patent sounds like it might be an engineering solution, a simple application of known techniques, instead of an invention. The fact that a standards body decided to use this technology (either not knowing about the patent or deliberately ignoring it) also suggests that this is not actually a new technology.
Can you explain what you think is novel and unobvious about this technology?
They are nothing alike. PARC is a private, corporate research lab. CSIRO is a public, government funded organization.
Government-owned organizations are paid for by taxes. Why should I pay once for the invention by taxes and then again through licensing fees?
20%? Measured how? Where's the publications and controlled trials to prove that?
Look in the literature; whenever anybody has studied them, mice and keyboards consistently win as input methods.
With that keyboard, you still hit a hard surface.
Even if you typed completely in air, it would still not be "zero force". Try threading a needle: there is no force from the needle to the thread, but there are a lot of opposing forces in your fingers.
The TouchStream requires less force to register a keystroke. But the amount of force needed to register a keystroke differs from the forces that your fingers, tendons, muscles, and joints actually experience while typing at normal speeds.
Why do you think regular keyboards use the kinds of springs and switches they do? People could have built keyboards with the kind of response that the TouchStream has for decades; switches for that have been available. They didn't because it's biomechanically bad. It's the same with piano keyboards and running surfaces.
No need for a new input device, since many mice already support adjusting four analog values simultaneously: x-y position and two-directional scrolling. If that's not enough, there are 6 DOF analog input devices as well. You can also use two mice or two 6 DOF devices if you like, for a total of 8-12 DOF analog inputs. That's all with cheap, existing, off-the-shelf technology.
There is no such thing as "zero force typing"; it's physically impossible. And hitting a hard surface while typing is subjecting you to more strain and requires you to use more muscles than a regular keyboard.
Moving your hands between they keyboard and mouse is generally a good thing. However, if it really bothers you, there are many existing keyboard designs that use regular keys and have a built-in trackball or trackpoint. You can also use footmice.
If the Fingerworks product works for you, you should probably stick with it. But it's probably not a good choice for most people, and it's probably not even the most ergonomic choice for you.
Apple got its multitouch technology by buying a company called FingerWorks. FingerWorks' primary product was just like what 10/GUI describes: a multitouch surface that could either replace they keyboard or the mouse(pad). It largely failed in the market.
People use the keyboard and mouse because they really work well. If people did want more DOF, it would be easy to add more sensors to a standard mouse, for example to record twisting, pushing, and other pressures, but even that isn't catching on.
Another idea that keeps bubbling up is the idea of pressure sensitive keyboards; they also keep failing because the resulting interactions just become too complex and add little benefit.
The real flaw in all these devices is the assumption that the limiting factor in communicating with machines is they "bandwidth" of they keyboard and mouse. It really isn't. Generally, people can think no faster than they can type and mouse, and speeding up the keyboard or mouse any further is pointless.
If they're so hard to produce and so "abhorrent to nature", maybe it would be good to stop trying?
I think this sort of disaster shows that one simply can't trust desktop computing. You should put your data in the cloud instead, where knowledgeable and careful companies like Microsoft take care of the backups for you!
The recipient might not think it's insulting, but you have to look at the intent of the person saying it.
No, I don't. What matters here is not what Bryce might have wanted to express, but the language he actually used to express it. Bryce said is that he was "abused" by being called a "homosexual". That kind of statement perpetuates the idea that a neutral description of someone's sexuality is in itself abusive or insulting. It is offensive and insensitive.
Because women don't volunteer their time for FOSS development, men are sexist? Sorry, I just don't follow that logic.
Being called a "homosexual" is "abuse"? Great going, Bruce: show off your feminist stance by insulting another minority group.
Danger held your data hostage from the start and didn't provide backup. Then, when Microsoft took them over, it was clear that they were going to mess with the service and servers. No backup + Microsoft mucking with the servers = kiss your data goodbye.
But that's no more an indictment of hosted services or "cloud computing" than a Windows BSOD is an indictment of desktop computing. Microsoft screwed up, and quite predictably, too.
Furthermore you need plenty of training data partitioned into training and test sets so you can evaluate the generalisation error.
Yes. What's the alternative?
Working with neural nets has a mostly experimental feel to them
Most of software development is "experimental" because most software works with real-world data and because you have an endless cycle of implementing new features, testing, bug reporting, and bug fixing. With neural networks (and similar methods), at least people quantify their error rates. With most other applications, people can't even quantify how often they fail or whether a bug fix actually improves things.
So, what do you suggest people should use instead?
I'm sure you would notice an apparently suspicious huge JVM process eating your CPU time. :]
How is that different from any other kind of JVM process?