Antialiasing is not just eye candy. Studies have shown that anti-aliased text is easier to read (or at least can be read faster) than non-anti-aliased text. Supposedly, the "cost" to the economy due to the use of aliased text (since this fact was determined years ago) is in the billions of dollars.
Now, that all depends on which fonts you use. I suspect bad anti-aliasing would be worse than a good non-anti-aliased font, but it would all depend on the specific details of the study. If only there was a simple way to enable it. sigh.
You gotta be kidding. Pointing someone to Robert Asprin as a step-up from Piers Anthony? He burned out in the early 90s, and after having his future earnings garnished by the IRS, only writes with other people. One of his last books (which I read, of course--I wanted to relive junior high), "A Phule's something-or-other", got about halfway through and was completely unravelling. I think Asprin got blocked, so he handed it off to some kid, who resolved all the threads in about a page and a half and wrote another story that was completely unrelated for the second half. The later books in the 'Myth' series (yep, read them all too) were apparently therapy where Asprin worked through a mid-life crises by writing boring drivel. Sure, the books were clever and usually entertaining, but please don't mistake them for being anything but pulp sci-fi fantasy.
I encourage anyone who is tired of Piers Anthony and the rest of the crap shoved between the Mystery and Romance sections at Waldenbooks to grow up and try something different, even if isn't that 'good'. Read some Louis L'Amour, or Sherlock Holmes--they are highly entertaining although not really 'Literature'. Or try out W. S. Maugham, Jane Austen, James Joyce, Hemingway, or Steinbeck for a historical kick. Trust me, these will all speak to you, you only need the courage to dare to read a book without a picture of a dragon on the cover!
India is one of the regions where microloans were pioneered. These are small loans of $5-$10 at a time, mostly to women in small villages, to create small businesses. It sounds crazy, but it really works. Among the businesses you would expect this to foster in such places (like farming, weaving, pottery, etc.), one of the more successful sectors is cellular phones. A family will take out these microloans to help finance their purchase of a cell phone, and then sell phone-time to everyone in the neighboring villages. This not only brings money to the family that owns the phone, but by being able to communicate with their friends/relatives in the city, the local residents are better able to operate their own businesses.
It appears to me that this is the model the Simputer people are looking toward. They sell these gadgets (probably with financing) to one family per village, and it lets your whole village communicate with the village 100 miles up the road, probably more cheaply than the cell phone (you don't have to wait for the guy who owns the phone to ride his goat over out to the farm you are calling to talk to your business partner).
So, the price isn't that different from the costs associated with a citizen of the US starting his/her own business. It could cost $30,000-100,000 to start up a bar or restaurant, or car repair shop, a small farm, or many other retail businesses.
Of course, I've never been to India, so maybe someone from there can fill in the details.
What if blender didn't require hours of torturials just to make a simple teapot? It has become one of those examples of potentially market-changing technology that sunk because nobody could figure out how to use it--right up there with voice recognition software and Freenet. If blender was even as easy to use as, say, photoshop or soundforge (which are not as easy as AOL but simple enough to pick up on your own), do you really think Blender AG would have gone broke?
Would you rather buy an intentionally crippled product, or an 'open' competing product?
Well, when one of them will run my operating system of choice, and the other one won't, it is an easy decision.
Luckily, my operating system of choice runs on the open product. Unluckily, the silent hand is wielded by the 95% of people whose OS of choice will probably only run on the closed hardware.
Actually, I didn't know that it came from South Park, or that it originally wasn't about Linux. I only knew that you were supposed to respond with a post that said:
"Underpants?"
And was step 2 "Sell them on Ebay", or are you just making that up to fool those of us with basic cable?
That doesn't work, because whenever someone gives a good one out for everybody to use (like username slashdot, password slashdot), someone comes along and says "Cool, I can get the "slashdot" account for my own personal use, alls I gotta do is change the password!"
Actually, the reason it was not a haiku is because it is the truth. Help! My desktop exploded. I was running gnome. I don't have a panel and nautilus doesn't work. I got shoved into blackbox. Ugh.
Imagine a world where 'organized' crime was occuring on-line. For instance, casinos would be on-line, skimming off the top, not paying off what they claim to be, and bilking senior citizen's out of their children's inheritance. Or, large billion-dollar corporations would extort protection money by requiring 'licensing' of internet middleware on all your computers, even those that don't use their software. And, to make sure you are honest, they would install a artificially-intelligent mole on your computer that would snitch on you if you didn't pay up. Or imagine a multi-national syndicate that artificially creates a scarcity of urls, and then makes people pay through the nose for the privilege to own such scarce property?
Please send your error messages to audacity's help list, along with a list of what versions of gcc, wxwindows, and what./configure options you used. They can help, and won't make any progress if you don't at least tell them the problems you are having.
FWIW, Looks to me like a problem with the id3tag library--try doing./configure --without-id3tag
Don't fear, audacity is a gtk app as well. It is written to the wxWindows api, which is a cross-platform 'wrapper' that will allow you to compile to native applications on gtk, windows, or mac. Glame seems to me to be more concerned with creating effect networks for real-time processing, whereas audacity is more about recording, editing, and playing sound files. Furthermore, the linux version of audacity is probably the most stable, because almost all of the developers are using linux. It accomodates an unlimited number of channels, and the "unstable" branch release has the ability to use high-quality 32-bit float audio. But don't take my word for it, the download is small--try it out. You can even use both of them on your system, and neither will get jealous.
If music is such an important part of being human (which I agree with), then the demise of an industry that has become successful at distributing music on physical media will not harm "music" in general. And the author says this, stating how their downfalle will be in a culture awash with music. Music has flourished for thousands of years without the Recording Industry. When the economies this industry exploited no longer exists, music will continue to flourish without them.
I hate to break it to you, but GB is dead. It seems that mono sorta killed it. They are planning to announce its demise when mono gets a little better. For that matter, the KDE KBasic appears just as dead, but it too was probably doomed from the start.
If the source code is available, then why do the developers need binaries? Aren't these the people most likely to recompile the system from scratch?
Yes, grasshopper, but how will a developer know if his software works on the binary distribution his customers use if his system was compiled from scratch?
When they say "unmaintainability", this is code-word for "Programmed in Lisp", rather than "Programmed in a sloppy messy spaghetti-like fashion", or "The primary developer is no longer working on it". Most likely, the Wipro programmers don't have much experience with lisp/scheme/rep, and a decision was made to dump it for Metacity, which happens to be written in a language they speak (c, that is).
If you read the metacity source code, at least on earlier releases, Havoc had written things like "I won't implement idea X, because it is crackrock. Tough luck." Things like making metacity play nicely with XMMS. Of course, this was when it was his pet project and not being considered by Sun/Wipro. One wonders if there will be a Sun fork of the project, or if Havoc will turn over development or make compromises that Sun will inevitably require.
While I think metacity is a pretty cool project, Sun's decision is probably one of these management mistakes that have been talked about in all the sociology of software development books. Think of all the little bugs that have been sorted out over the years in Sawfish that will have to be solved again. Things like maintaining focus of window when changing desktops using keybindings; or dual-head setups that have different monitor resolutions while using multiple workspaces and desktops. These things will all have to be sorted out again.
All this box-office gamesmanship is kinda silly. If you want to assess the human value or impact of a film (or a movie), I can assure you that the just about the worst way to do it is to count how much money it reportedly took in in ticket sales. Ever wonder why nobody records the number of ticket sales (which are already adjusted for inflation), but rather calculates raw sales $$? It is mainly to build hype for a film, because even a moderate success this year is bound to beat the blockbuster from two years ago. "Box Office Records" are laughable, because they are guaranteed to fall.
By making these arguments about total gross/per theater gross/screens/etc., we are just playing into the Hollywood money machine's hand. But, myself a victim to this game, I believe the 3615/3161 number indicates venues or physical locations where the film is played, whereas the number of actual "Prints" is something like 7500 vs. 6000, which is what the parent was apparently quoting. I don't know if anyone has actually recorded the number of screenings anywhere. Given that AOTC was a little longer than Spidey, this translates into fewer screenings per venue, as well as fewer per print: The difference between 2 hours and 2 hours 20 minutes is enough to reduce the number of screenings at some little theaters from 2 to 1 or from 3 to 2 per day; at multiplexes, it may reduce the number of showings from 15 to 12.
Its a shame, considering that game playing is thought to be one of the easiest problem domains for AI.
It isn't just search. The best chess programs also have a huge database of end-games and start-games. And this at least is similar to how actual chess experts play: many spend a large proportion of their training reading and 'memorizing' these same game patterns.
That being said, the true high-performance chess computers are not really serious scientific AI; they are mostly advertisements for how good the hardware and software wizardry at IBM are. Probably, more knowledge about how people play chess is found in Bill Chase's 25-year-old paper "The Mind's Eye in Chess", than in all of the subsequent IBM chess programs. Most serious AI is focused on real-world problems, like getting robots to play soccer and stacking blocks in a virtual world.:=>
The ACLU has a good point, but their coin flip analogy is a little misleading. If they were really using a coin flip to 'guess' who each person was (i.e., guessing randomly), accuracy would have been much lower, with expected normalized discriminibility score (d') of 0. For example, their target set was of 250 people. So, a dumb guessing system would have less than a.4% hit rate: compared to that, 50% is pretty good. Furthermore, this wasn't a simple categorization task: there were 5000 passengers a day that were tested. Over 4 weeks there were around 1000 false alarms, which is a false alarm rate of.007 (and a d' of 2.5). Note that they could have increased the hit rate to above 50% if they wanted to allow for more false alarms, but they tuned the algorithms to err on the side of letting people through if there was any question. To me, this sounds like something the ACLU should be happy about, and they should perhaps recognize the difficulty of setting these thresholds and attempt to provide guidelines about how to do it and what to do after you register a hit. Face it, automated detection devices are going to exist, and they won't be perfect. But, in order to optimize the detection criteria, costs must be assigned to false alarms relative to misses. This is something that we shouldn't let the engineers and businessmen and law enforcement do alone--it is something that the humanists and the civil libertarians and the policy-makers and you and I need a voice in too.
Re:Pretty cool, but there's always a but
on
Hacking the Highways
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
but just imagine if we allowed your average person on the street to dictate how a tcp/ip stack should be implemented, or what have you.
You have just described open-source software development.
You are probably thinking of LSA: (Latent Semantic Analysis), which was 'Invented' by former Bell labs researcher (and current U of Colorado psych. prof) Tom Landauer. He uses it to grade his papers, and others probably do as well. It uses the same principle that some search engines (e.g., excite) are based on, and essentially amounts to factor analysis on text. It maps every word in a text into about a 100-dimensional space, based on how often they co-occur in similar contexts. If you feed those factors into a clustering algorithm or and multi-dimensional scaler in order to present it graphically, you probably get something very close to this trick.
Slashdot Mirror
Antialiasing is not just eye candy. Studies have shown that anti-aliased text is easier to read (or at least can be read faster) than non-anti-aliased text. Supposedly, the "cost" to the economy due to the use of aliased text (since this fact was determined years ago) is in the billions of dollars.
Now, that all depends on which fonts you use. I suspect bad anti-aliasing would be worse than a good non-anti-aliased font, but it would all depend on the specific details of the study. If only there was a simple way to enable it. sigh.
Here's one you can find on slashdot: If your comment consists entirely of "First Post", you get modded down to -1.
You gotta be kidding. Pointing someone to Robert Asprin as a step-up from Piers Anthony? He burned out in the early 90s, and after having his future earnings garnished by the IRS, only writes with other people. One of his last books (which I read, of course--I wanted to relive junior high), "A Phule's something-or-other", got about halfway through and was completely unravelling. I think Asprin got blocked, so he handed it off to some kid, who resolved all the threads in about a page and a half and wrote another story that was completely unrelated for the second half. The later books in the 'Myth' series (yep, read them all too) were apparently therapy where Asprin worked through a mid-life crises by writing boring drivel. Sure, the books were clever and usually entertaining, but please don't mistake them for being anything but pulp sci-fi fantasy.
I encourage anyone who is tired of Piers Anthony and the rest of the crap shoved between the Mystery and Romance sections at Waldenbooks to grow up and try something different, even if isn't that 'good'. Read some Louis L'Amour, or Sherlock Holmes--they are highly entertaining although not really 'Literature'. Or try out W. S. Maugham, Jane Austen, James Joyce, Hemingway, or Steinbeck for a historical kick. Trust me, these will all speak to you, you only need the courage to dare to read a book without a picture of a dragon on the cover!
The worst is playing nethack on a dvorak keyboard laptop (no arrow keys for moving around). Ugh.
India is one of the regions where microloans were pioneered. These are small loans of $5-$10 at a time, mostly to women in small villages, to create small businesses. It sounds crazy, but it really works. Among the businesses you would expect this to foster in such places (like farming, weaving, pottery, etc.), one of the more successful sectors is cellular phones. A family will take out these microloans to help finance their purchase of a cell phone, and then sell phone-time to everyone in the neighboring villages. This not only brings money to the family that owns the phone, but by being able to communicate with their friends/relatives in the city, the local residents are better able to operate their own businesses.
It appears to me that this is the model the Simputer people are looking toward. They sell these gadgets (probably with financing) to one family per village, and it lets your whole village communicate with the village 100 miles up the road, probably more cheaply than the cell phone (you don't have to wait for the guy who owns the phone to ride his goat over out to the farm you are calling to talk to your business partner).
So, the price isn't that different from the costs associated with a citizen of the US starting his/her own business. It could cost $30,000-100,000 to start up a bar or restaurant, or car repair shop, a small farm, or many other retail businesses.
Of course, I've never been to India, so maybe someone from there can fill in the details.
What if blender didn't require hours of torturials just to make a simple teapot? It has become one of those examples of potentially market-changing technology that sunk because nobody could figure out how to use it--right up there with voice recognition software and Freenet. If blender was even as easy to use as, say, photoshop or soundforge (which are not as easy as AOL but simple enough to pick up on your own), do you really think Blender AG would have gone broke?
Would you rather buy an intentionally crippled product, or an 'open' competing product?
Well, when one of them will run my operating system of choice, and the other one won't, it is an easy decision.
Luckily, my operating system of choice runs on the open product. Unluckily, the silent hand is wielded by the 95% of people whose OS of choice will probably only run on the closed hardware.
I read that, and couldn't make any sense out of it. You mind sharing briefly what process you use to 'fix it yourself'?
Actually, I didn't know that it came from South Park, or that it originally wasn't about Linux. I only knew that you were supposed to respond with a post that said:
"Underpants?"
And was step 2 "Sell them on Ebay", or are you just making that up to fool those of us with basic cable?
That doesn't work, because whenever someone gives a good one out for everybody to use (like username slashdot, password slashdot), someone comes along and says "Cool, I can get the "slashdot" account for my own personal use, alls I gotta do is change the password!"
Actually, the reason it was not a haiku is because it is the truth. Help! My desktop exploded. I was running gnome. I don't have a panel and nautilus doesn't work. I got shoved into blackbox. Ugh.
Serves me right for being bleeding edge and all.
Imagine a world where 'organized' crime was occuring on-line. For instance, casinos would be on-line, skimming off the top, not paying off what they claim to be, and bilking senior citizen's out of their children's inheritance. Or, large billion-dollar corporations would extort protection money by requiring 'licensing' of internet middleware on all your computers, even those that don't use their software. And, to make sure you are honest, they would install a artificially-intelligent mole on your computer that would snitch on you if you didn't pay up. Or imagine a multi-national syndicate that artificially creates a scarcity of urls, and then makes people pay through the nose for the privilege to own such scarce property?
Sounds a lot like TuneBlock (TM)
Please send your error messages to audacity's help list, along with a list of what versions of gcc, wxwindows, and what ./configure options you used. They can help, and won't make any progress if you don't at least tell them the problems you are having.
./configure --without-id3tag
FWIW, Looks to me like a problem with the id3tag library--try doing
Don't fear, audacity is a gtk app as well. It is written to the wxWindows api, which is a cross-platform 'wrapper' that will allow you to compile to native applications on gtk, windows, or mac. Glame seems to me to be more concerned with creating effect networks for real-time processing, whereas audacity is more about recording, editing, and playing sound files. Furthermore, the linux version of audacity is probably the most stable, because almost all of the developers are using linux. It accomodates an unlimited number of channels, and the "unstable" branch release has the ability to use high-quality 32-bit float audio. But don't take my word for it, the download is small--try it out. You can even use both of them on your system, and neither will get jealous.
If music is such an important part of being human (which I agree with), then the demise of an industry that has become successful at distributing music on physical media will not harm "music" in general. And the author says this, stating how their downfalle will be in a culture awash with music. Music has flourished for thousands of years without the Recording Industry. When the economies this industry exploited no longer exists, music will continue to flourish without them.
I hate to break it to you, but GB is dead. It seems that mono sorta killed it. They are planning to announce its demise when mono gets a little better. For that matter, the KDE KBasic appears just as dead, but it too was probably doomed from the start.
If the source code is available, then why do the developers need binaries? Aren't these the people most likely to recompile the system from scratch?
Yes, grasshopper, but how will a developer know if his software works on the binary distribution his customers use if his system was compiled from scratch?
When they say "unmaintainability", this is code-word for "Programmed in Lisp", rather than "Programmed in a sloppy messy spaghetti-like fashion", or "The primary developer is no longer working on it". Most likely, the Wipro programmers don't have much experience with lisp/scheme/rep, and a decision was made to dump it for Metacity, which happens to be written in a language they speak (c, that is).
If you read the metacity source code, at least on earlier releases, Havoc had written things like "I won't implement idea X, because it is crackrock. Tough luck." Things like making metacity play nicely with XMMS. Of course, this was when it was his pet project and not being considered by Sun/Wipro. One wonders if there will be a Sun fork of the project, or if Havoc will turn over development or make compromises that Sun will inevitably require.
While I think metacity is a pretty cool project, Sun's decision is probably one of these management mistakes that have been talked about in all the sociology of software development books. Think of all the little bugs that have been sorted out over the years in Sawfish that will have to be solved again. Things like maintaining focus of window when changing desktops using keybindings; or dual-head setups that have different monitor resolutions while using multiple workspaces and desktops. These things will all have to be sorted out again.
All this box-office gamesmanship is kinda silly. If you want to assess the human value or impact of a film (or a movie), I can assure you that the just about the worst way to do it is to count how much money it reportedly took in in ticket sales. Ever wonder why nobody records the number of ticket sales (which are already adjusted for inflation), but rather calculates raw sales $$? It is mainly to build hype for a film, because even a moderate success this year is bound to beat the blockbuster from two years ago. "Box Office Records" are laughable, because they are guaranteed to fall.
By making these arguments about total gross/per theater gross/screens/etc., we are just playing into the Hollywood money machine's hand. But, myself a victim to this game, I believe the 3615/3161 number indicates venues or physical locations where the film is played, whereas the number of actual "Prints" is something like 7500 vs. 6000, which is what the parent was apparently quoting. I don't know if anyone has actually recorded the number of screenings anywhere. Given that AOTC was a little longer than Spidey, this translates into fewer screenings per venue, as well as fewer per print: The difference between 2 hours and 2 hours 20 minutes is enough to reduce the number of screenings at some little theaters from 2 to 1 or from 3 to 2 per day; at multiplexes, it may reduce the number of showings from 15 to 12.
Its a shame, considering that game playing is thought to be one of the easiest problem domains for AI.
:=>
It isn't just search. The best chess programs also have a huge database of end-games and start-games. And this at least is similar to how actual chess experts play: many spend a large proportion of their training reading and 'memorizing' these same game patterns.
That being said, the true high-performance chess computers are not really serious scientific AI; they are mostly advertisements for how good the hardware and software wizardry at IBM are. Probably, more knowledge about how people play chess is found in Bill Chase's 25-year-old paper "The Mind's Eye in Chess", than in all of the subsequent IBM chess programs. Most serious AI is focused on real-world problems, like getting robots to play soccer and stacking blocks in a virtual world.
The ACLU has a good point, but their coin flip analogy is a little misleading. If they were really using a coin flip to 'guess' who each person was (i.e., guessing randomly), accuracy would have been much lower, with expected normalized discriminibility score (d') of 0. For example, their target set was of 250 people. So, a dumb guessing system would have less than a .4% hit rate: compared to that, 50% is pretty good. Furthermore, this wasn't a simple categorization task: there were 5000 passengers a day that were tested. Over 4 weeks there were around 1000 false alarms, which is a false alarm rate of .007 (and a d' of 2.5). Note that they could have increased the hit rate to above 50% if they wanted to allow for more false alarms, but they tuned the algorithms to err on the side of letting people through if there was any question. To me, this sounds like something the ACLU should be happy about, and they should perhaps recognize the difficulty of setting these thresholds and attempt to provide guidelines about how to do it and what to do after you register a hit. Face it, automated detection devices are going to exist, and they won't be perfect. But, in order to optimize the detection criteria, costs must be assigned to false alarms relative to misses. This is something that we shouldn't let the engineers and businessmen and law enforcement do alone--it is something that the humanists and the civil libertarians and the policy-makers and you and I need a voice in too.
but just imagine if we allowed your average person on the street to dictate how a tcp/ip stack should be implemented, or what have you.
You have just described open-source software development.
JPEG vs GIF is more like MP3 vs MIDI. (actually that's a reasonable analogy
:: mp3/ogg/etc. (lossy compression via removal of high frequencies)
:: flac/lpac/shorten/etc. (lossless compression via huffman coding compression)
:: midi (lossless symbolic description of media primitives)
Here's a more reasonable isomorphism between audio and image formats:
JPG
.gif/.png
.svg/.eps/etc.
You are probably thinking of LSA: (Latent Semantic Analysis), which was 'Invented' by former Bell labs researcher (and current U of Colorado psych. prof) Tom Landauer. He uses it to grade his papers, and others probably do as well. It uses the same principle that some search engines (e.g., excite) are based on, and essentially amounts to factor analysis on text. It maps every word in a text into about a 100-dimensional space, based on how often they co-occur in similar contexts. If you feed those factors into a clustering algorithm or and multi-dimensional scaler in order to present it graphically, you probably get something very close to this trick.