IIRC from the lastest issue of, erm, Automobile, i think (we get all the major car mags), the 04 Prius does 0-60 in 10.1, only about a second slower than the (pretty snappy imho) Focus ZX3 i drive.
I get between 20 and 26 mpg (though i drive agressively, which lowers what i *could* be getting), wheras the Prius does 50-60 mpg. If i was in the market for a new ride, i think it'd worth the one second to more than double fuel efficiency.
The review i read was pretty much glowing, with only a minor complaint about the suspension tuning i believe. Every other statement indicated an appreciation for the fit and polish and strong engineering chops Toyota put into this car.
I think there's a fine line here which we should probably give at least some attention too. Is the scientist who's working under a DoD contract to develop a system to see through smoke really rationalizing his work by saying "Well, it won't ONLY be used to kill people."
Isn't it more likely that they're saying something more like "Yes, this technology will be used to increase the effectiveness of our military to kill other soldiers, but if i do a good job and it's useful, maybe it'll save more people than it helps kill."
I'd like to think at least some of them feel that way, and i wouldn't hold it against someone for taking the funding they can get to work on a technology with broad non-military use, in addition to the specific ideas the DoD has in mind. As the article says, there are vast areas of gray, in fact, it's mostly gray, so it comes down to people making ethical decisions on the specific details at hand. Sometimes that'll lead you to not develop a technology, if you sway towards non-militarism, and so, great, one less way to kill, but sometimes you'll develop something that kills sometimes, but saves in other contexts, or pushes our comprehension of basic science, the universe, etc.
as slicky said, slimp3 is the cleanest, most easily integrated component for this purpose. the server is perl, iirc, so it should run on your mac, and it's not impossible that it includes, or will soon include, the ability to transcode from AAC to MP3 on the fly. I know it can do this with OGG.
The slimp3 has an ethernet jack, so if you need it wireless, you may be up a creek, unless you can find an ethernet-to-wifi bridge that's reasonably priced.
well, i can't speak for all of them, but neither Emory (18) nor Vandy (20) have "tens of thousands". I think Vandy had about 7k undergrads when i was there 3 years ago and Emory's about the same or smaller. Neither Harvard nor Yale are preposterously large in terms of numbers.
No, it's money more than population that motivates these numbers. These USnews rankings are fairly misleading because people really should look for schools that are strong in the fields they want to study, not that they're in the top 20. That's just so you can feel a little better about the tens of thousands of dollars in debt you've racked up going to, well, in my case, Vanderbilt (32 - 35k / yr when i was there), but most of these top places apply, though the privates obviously fuck you the hardest. Get to meet and network with a lot of rich people though, not that it'll necessarily do you any good.
Crimony people, they're using the same tactics as RIAA. They're not expecting to make money off of this maneuver, but they're hoping to scare the shit out of some of the lower tier resellers/companies who can't afford to defend themselves like RH and IBM can. Those companies will either pay or, possibly, funnel that money into some microsoft products. At 700 bucks per linux server, you could almost transfer to a MS infrastructure for that and tell SCO to fuck off, you don't use linux anymore. The conspiracy theorists here have already belabored the possibility that this whole thing is designed to discredit all unix and unix-like OS's to microsoft's benefit. Same as RIAA, first they went after the corporates and scared them into rethinking linux, and now they're making noise about suing everyone, knowing that at least some people will decide to cut their losses and bail out rather than risk legal proceedings. Not to mention it makes a good news story and i'd bet their stock is up as of this evening.
well, actually, they can sue anyone they want without showing anything. it's winning that they can't do without proof.
semantic issues out of the way, the reason I care, and i imagine many other folks here do, is that linux is being damaged right now. SCO winning has nothing to do with it. As this very moment lots of businesses are putting on hold or cancelling linux initiatives, which is bad for linux. This shit won't get to court until April 2005, by which time a great deal of damage will have already been done. additionally, this whole situation is offensive on a philosophical level in a few different ways - absurd legal arguments, shady stock dealings, lying... These are all offensive in and of themselves. These jerks are going to turn SCO into Enron and in the meantime all the non-executive employees and shareholders are going to get completely fucked. people are infurated because SCO is making them out to be criminals, all the while getting away with some pretty heinous actions.
And of course I run Windows. Because my neighbours do.. although at the rate I'm being asked to fix peoples computers, its probably worth the extra 1000$ for me to *not* have Windows and be able to feign ignorance when begged for help.
That's the best part... once you stop using windows for a while, you won't have *feign* ignorance because you really won't know shit about whatever current thing is fucking everything up, or want to. and your brain will start to purge all the painful stuff, leaving room to store useful knowledge. and then you can smile smugly and say, "Yeah, bob, i dunno. I haven't used windows for a year now, so i haven't the faintest idea what's wrong with your laptop."
There's nothing wrong with elitism when you're right.
unfortunately, the retards watching CNBC may decide these cases.
The RedHat case is the only one in which i read the entire filing, and in it they explicitly request a jury trial. It's not unlikely that the others will work the same way, especially where monetary damages are involved. Judges may be the ones deciding on injunctions (i.e. the ones IBM and RedHat filed to force SCO to stop making possibly untrue statements), but the major decisions will likeley be made by a jury of our 'peers'. This is one of our system's most powerful and dangerous mechanisms, primariliy because law is hard, and normal people have trouble maintaining a strict distinction between what the law says and what the lawyers say in court. These are almost always distinct from each other and lawyers are VERY good at confusing the issues to their benefit.
That's the system, and there's always the danger that some of the jurors won't be able to extricate the crap they've read on MSN or seen on CNBC (or, to be fair,/. and k5) from their decision making process.
I'm beyond wanting to fiddle with my desktop PC, which is why, after 5 years of using Linux on the desktop, I'm switching from Linux to Mac OS X once the next powerbook update occurs.
hear hear!
i'm in the same boat exactly. there are plenty of things i love about linux, but spending an eternity fucking around with fonts, printing, samba, drivers and video codecs just to do the basic, normal things a computer should do exceeds my patience these days.
i'll always have a linux box or 2 around as servers (like my current file server, gateway/firewall) or some pet development work, but the day Apple releases an updated 15" powerbook with Panther, that's the end of my use of linux as a primary desktop OS. I'm ready for an OS where the majority of stuff works out of the box *and* looks and feels good to boot.
the crowd with the real money, as you say, doesn't spend money on CD's. besides, most adults with real jobs don't have all that much disposable income, whereas many younger folks have nothing but disposable income (albeit not a great deal of it) and will spend all of it on music, movies and video games.
if you want proof, do the research, adults are not the driving force behind music revenues except insofar as their money buys stuff for their kids.
not to mention, highly marketed hacks have ALWAYS been the backbone of popular music, which is why so many music aficinado's refer to pop with such derision. the quality of the production (what you call DSP, but which involves far more) is almost directly proportional to the marketing a release can expect. the state of the art in production, and thus, to a great extent, sound quality, has always belonged to the pop stars who draw in that lucrative 12-18 year old demographic with no bills to pay, a penchant for shiny things, and lots of environmental pressure to espouse popular memes, like the lamentable tripe of ms. spears.
i don't think your post was flame bait at all. it brings up a good point, but i think the real question is:
are there any real objective and impartial 3rd parties that review or report on anything, ever?
it's a fact of life that most people competent to review items in a product class are going to be experts of some sort with products of that class, with all the built up preferences and biases that come with being an expert.
i've come to the point where i no longer look for objectivity, because it doesn't exist -- just add new information into a corpus of prior knowledge, along with whatever inherent slant it has, and base personal reasoning on that. objectivity and impartiality are best simulated with aggregation. i don't fell i can assume someone else is even capable of impartiality.
it's like the news media. i could watch cnn, or fox news, or local news, and adjust whatever they say to normalize what whichever one says based on what i know of their inherent proclivities. I could watch all of them, but that's not feasible from a time standpoint, so i take the digest form : news.google.com. Not because it's new and flashy, but because it provides aggregation. I can scan the headlines and merge them into a global sense of the prevailing attitude towards a story. I can see which outlets are sensationalizing (or alternatively, downplaying) a story, or who's not covering it at all, with a quick scan. I can then choose to read the stories from any perspective i choose (which is often not necessarily my own) because i can trivially determine which sources have what perspectives.
To me, it's the best possible feature of the www -- true impartiality of reporting because the web crawler doesn't give a shit what the inherent slant is, just what words are in the document.
as for benchmarks, they're often only marginally above statistics on the scale of truth (i.e. somewhere south of 'damn lies'), so they're *really* only useful taken as a broad average of many, many different testers and conditions.
seems like all but 10% of/.ers forget that patents like this are *methods*. In this case a *method* for *enabling* translation of IM's, not the translation itself.
From what i can discern the patent essentially covers a system wherein the user can set a local language preference in his client and rely on an abstracted translation service to handle conversion. The client resends all incoming messages to some translation service (presumably local _or_ remote) which does the translation (maybe a good job, maybe not) and sends back the translated text. For the purposes of showing this technology is workable, the "translator" could just convert all words into md5 sums of the words... it's the architecture that's being patented, not the concept of translating im's.
MS or not, sounds like a decent idea to me. The downside being, since it's microsoft, the protocol isn't likely to be open, meaning only translator services licencing MS technology will be able to put a translator onto the web.
On the other hand that may be a good thing, if the protocol was open, all the OSS kiddies would do is make 10000 english->l337 servers, because translation is hard, and good translation software costs a lot of money.
That's missing the point. In actual fact, i don't have to know who's selling me something. All i need to know is that the information is available in the event of fraud/errors/etc. Privacy isn't an all or nothing thing. Ebay, as the facilitator should make reasonable efforts to know and verify the identity of all sellers in the event that they need to resolve a dispute. But, there's a big defference between eBay knowing who the seller is and eBay making that information effectively public.
It's not dissimilar from the discussions surrounding future uses of smart cards for everyday transactions. It involves trust models that are based on knowing that something is true or verifiable without having to know all the details.
The bottom line is that ebay should know who the sellers and buyers using its service are, to a reasonable extent. They should also release that information only to the extent that the requestor can be verified as someone with a legitimate right to it. This includes the seller (who has a right to contact non-payers), buyer (who has a right to contact fraudulent sellers) and law enforcement. In every case, however, there should be a reasonable guarantee that the requestor has legitmate uses for all the information sought (i.e. as a buyer, i have no legitimate reason to obtain the sellers bank account or credit card numbers, whereas a LEO *may* have such reasons, but he should have to prove it by acquiring a court order).
nice to see such a clear, concise and complete dismissal of SCO's FUD. They kept it professional and straightforward, and with any luck, this'll defuse some of the tension surronding the entire situation.
Kudos FSF and Eben Moglen
convergence is overratted...
on
Is 3G Irrelevant?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
the next phone i buy will be purchased for one of the following two reasons, and they're the only ones: 1. it's smaller and more comfortable to carry in my pocket, without being microscopic.
2. lets me plug in my laptop and use the cellular network for data transmission at a reasonable speed for as long as i want, up to my alotment of minutes. a friend of mine has a phone that he can connect and use this way, but it's mercilessly slow and substantially limited in terms of how much use he can make of it.
i suppose it's possibel that public WiFi access will become common in the city, so i guess that'd reduce the need, but i'm not holding my breath.
who wants a damn video phone is my question? i don't quite see how this adds value to my life. then again, i only just bought my first cell phone 9 months ago, so maybe 6 years from now i'll think 2.5G/3G is pretty cool, when everyone else is picking up their holoCell-9000's or something.
i have about 60 gigs of (legal) MP3s so it's something i've put some thought into.
I agree with you that the best way to categorize music is probably not to start with an ontology of fixed genres but to try and just group music with similar stylistic elements with each other, and let the user infer what the genre is from there. I.e., i don't care what the grouping is called, as long as it helps identify the style. Still pretty hard i imagine...
You say "Group data by category, content, whatever" and then say "we don't need AI for that". Well, you're almost right, but you need some intelligence in order to make decisions about what the content of file X really is. You could say, "well, yeah, that's me..." but the point of this and other Knowledge Management systems is that it takes the responsbility of categorization off of the user, because we are often inconsistent, or, at least, incomplete. Let's say I have a document that pertains to two or more general topics, lets say, Pollution, Energy Use and Windmills. Let's also say that right now i'm using it for a school report on alternative energy, so i classify it, quite sensibly for now, by year, course number, and assignment. That's totally useless in a few years when i'm looking for the information. I *could* have been smarter and manually attached some meta data to the file describing the kinds of topics it relates to, but i may miss one, and plus, that's extra work for me. Projects like this use complicated statistical (usually) analysis to determine the content for you automatically, and maintain a persistent database of all files realted to particular topics/content items, etc. Haystack and many others do this categorization with an ontologie which predefines the topic groups or elements they care about. Some systems derive the content groups dynamically, and include fuzzy searching to allow you to find documents and files related to some keywords (or if they're real good, natural language query) you enter.
What you mentioned is not that different from what they're doing, except they're not making it transparent -- they're making into a workspace.
I'll note also that categorization of text into topics or genres, while difficult, is easier than doing the same with music. The kinds of statistical analysis you can do on text doesn't lend itself to fourier decompisitions. To properly categorize music (in my opinion at least, which admittedly counts for little) the best technique would be to separate and identify the individual instruments (voices) in the song. This makes categorization a bit easier because now you can get data for tempo, rhythm, sohpistication of note progression, etc. on a per instrument basis. I'm not sure it's possible tho.
you're correct on that -- i made an error in my initial post.
battery life is approximately equal from all the reviews i've seen, but the Pentium M is clock for clock somewhat more efficient than the TMTA, and thus faster. The Acer has better performance while maintaining approximately identical battery life, and similar cost, which is the main advantage it has over the compaq.
lucky you for having had the chance to play with one -- i'd love to have personal experience to apply to the discussion...
unfortunately, i've yet to see one in a store. others have mentioned this too, but i'm pretty reluctant to shell out 2 grand for a product i've never even seen in person.
Taking notes on a laptop was totally out of the question for me in college, because i was a physics student, which means i was drawing lots of pictures (force diagrams, particle interactions, coordinates, etc.) and doing lots of formulae, which are too time consuming to input via keyboard when the prof is still proceeding with explanations. The kinds of notes you take as a physics student are very difficult to translate to keyboard based note taking. I'd have KILLED for a tablet back then, because it combines the best parts of paper (free form notes, sketches) and computers (typing when appropriate, simpler to keep organized). In this case, unless you can spring for a tablet, i'd still suggest paper... apply your computer budget to a cheaper, faster desktop machine and a *reliable* printer.
OTOH, If you're gonna be majoring in something which requires notes in pure text and which will involve lots of papers, and such, i say go for the laptop. It'll be easier than translating notes and such to the pc later, if you are that kind of person.
One caveat : some profs don't like to hear the clickety clack of keyboards in class, so despite your choice, buy some paper and have a plan for dealing with this contingency.
these do exist. Acer makes one called the C110 and there's an HP/COMPAQ model named the TC1000.
The Acer is a bit pricer but uses a more powerful *and* more energy efficient Pentium M whereas the compaq uses a ULV Pentium III. They're called convertables and appear to be fairly resilient from the reviews i've read.
The biggest beef with tablet pc's i've seen are that their screens (with the exception of one very expensive toshiba slate) are not too viewable outside. i'd buy one of those acers right now if it had any kind of decent outdoor performance. i may anyway -- i haven't decided how much direct sunlight it's likely to get.
Incidentally, the reason it seems like a gimmick to you is that you only deal in text. For text, a keyboard is likely to be far quicker than a tablet. In my case, i'm drawn to tablets (no pun intended, i swear) because i would like to be able to make sketches and draw out diagrams naturally. I also hate to have to carry sheafs of paper that deal with the text notes i've got on my laptop... this is convergence of the best kind in my situation. There are a lot of things that are simpler and clearer to work on in a free form way and don't lend themselves to expression in pure text. and don't mention "drawing" with the trackpad... that's apples to elephants.
Slashdot Mirror
almost forgot -- it's also pretty reasonably priced at 20k. That's cheaper than the honda hyprids i believe.
IIRC from the lastest issue of, erm, Automobile, i think (we get all the major car mags), the 04 Prius does 0-60 in 10.1, only about a second slower than the (pretty snappy imho) Focus ZX3 i drive.
I get between 20 and 26 mpg (though i drive agressively, which lowers what i *could* be getting), wheras the Prius does 50-60 mpg. If i was in the market for a new ride, i think it'd worth the one second to more than double fuel efficiency.
The review i read was pretty much glowing, with only a minor complaint about the suspension tuning i believe. Every other statement indicated an appreciation for the fit and polish and strong engineering chops Toyota put into this car.
I think there's a fine line here which we should probably give at least some attention too. Is the scientist who's working under a DoD contract to develop a system to see through smoke really rationalizing his work by saying "Well, it won't ONLY be used to kill people."
Isn't it more likely that they're saying something more like "Yes, this technology will be used to increase the effectiveness of our military to kill other soldiers, but if i do a good job and it's useful, maybe it'll save more people than it helps kill."
I'd like to think at least some of them feel that way, and i wouldn't hold it against someone for taking the funding they can get to work on a technology with broad non-military use, in addition to the specific ideas the DoD has in mind. As the article says, there are vast areas of gray, in fact, it's mostly gray, so it comes down to people making ethical decisions on the specific details at hand. Sometimes that'll lead you to not develop a technology, if you sway towards non-militarism, and so, great, one less way to kill, but sometimes you'll develop something that kills sometimes, but saves in other contexts, or pushes our comprehension of basic science, the universe, etc.
here -- this should help :
http://www.magnetbox.com/riaa/bookmark.asp
the bookmarklets available here will scan an Amazon product page and tell you if the record listed there is a RIAA product or not.
as slicky said, slimp3 is the cleanest, most easily integrated component for this purpose. the server is perl, iirc, so it should run on your mac, and it's not impossible that it includes, or will soon include, the ability to transcode from AAC to MP3 on the fly. I know it can do this with OGG.
The slimp3 has an ethernet jack, so if you need it wireless, you may be up a creek, unless you can find an ethernet-to-wifi bridge that's reasonably priced.
well, i can't speak for all of them, but neither Emory (18) nor Vandy (20) have "tens of thousands". I think Vandy had about 7k undergrads when i was there 3 years ago and Emory's about the same or smaller. Neither Harvard nor Yale are preposterously large in terms of numbers.
No, it's money more than population that motivates these numbers. These USnews rankings are fairly misleading because people really should look for schools that are strong in the fields they want to study, not that they're in the top 20. That's just so you can feel a little better about the tens of thousands of dollars in debt you've racked up going to, well, in my case, Vanderbilt (32 - 35k / yr when i was there), but most of these top places apply, though the privates obviously fuck you the hardest. Get to meet and network with a lot of rich people though, not that it'll necessarily do you any good.
Crimony people, they're using the same tactics as RIAA. They're not expecting to make money off of this maneuver, but they're hoping to scare the shit out of some of the lower tier resellers/companies who can't afford to defend themselves like RH and IBM can. Those companies will either pay or, possibly, funnel that money into some microsoft products. At 700 bucks per linux server, you could almost transfer to a MS infrastructure for that and tell SCO to fuck off, you don't use linux anymore. The conspiracy theorists here have already belabored the possibility that this whole thing is designed to discredit all unix and unix-like OS's to microsoft's benefit.
Same as RIAA, first they went after the corporates and scared them into rethinking linux, and now they're making noise about suing everyone, knowing that at least some people will decide to cut their losses and bail out rather than risk legal proceedings. Not to mention it makes a good news story and i'd bet their stock is up as of this evening.
well, actually, they can sue anyone they want without showing anything. it's winning that they can't do without proof.
semantic issues out of the way, the reason I care, and i imagine many other folks here do, is that linux is being damaged right now. SCO winning has nothing to do with it. As this very moment lots of businesses are putting on hold or cancelling linux initiatives, which is bad for linux. This shit won't get to court until April 2005, by which time a great deal of damage will have already been done.
additionally, this whole situation is offensive on a philosophical level in a few different ways - absurd legal arguments, shady stock dealings, lying... These are all offensive in and of themselves. These jerks are going to turn SCO into Enron and in the meantime all the non-executive employees and shareholders are going to get completely fucked.
people are infurated because SCO is making them out to be criminals, all the while getting away with some pretty heinous actions.
And of course I run Windows. Because my neighbours do .. although at the rate I'm being asked to fix peoples computers, its probably worth the extra 1000$ for me to *not* have Windows and be able to feign ignorance when begged for help.
That's the best part... once you stop using windows for a while, you won't have *feign* ignorance because you really won't know shit about whatever current thing is fucking everything up, or want to. and your brain will start to purge all the painful stuff, leaving room to store useful knowledge. and then you can smile smugly and say, "Yeah, bob, i dunno. I haven't used windows for a year now, so i haven't the faintest idea what's wrong with your laptop."
There's nothing wrong with elitism when you're right.
Hear hear!
unfortunately, the retards watching CNBC may decide these cases.
/. and k5) from their decision making process.
The RedHat case is the only one in which i read the entire filing, and in it they explicitly request a jury trial. It's not unlikely that the others will work the same way, especially where monetary damages are involved. Judges may be the ones deciding on injunctions (i.e. the ones IBM and RedHat filed to force SCO to stop making possibly untrue statements), but the major decisions will likeley be made by a jury of our 'peers'. This is one of our system's most powerful and dangerous mechanisms, primariliy because law is hard, and normal people have trouble maintaining a strict distinction between what the law says and what the lawyers say in court. These are almost always distinct from each other and lawyers are VERY good at confusing the issues to their benefit.
That's the system, and there's always the danger that some of the jurors won't be able to extricate the crap they've read on MSN or seen on CNBC (or, to be fair,
-k
I'm beyond wanting to fiddle with my desktop PC, which is why, after 5 years of using Linux on the desktop, I'm switching from Linux to Mac OS X once the next powerbook update occurs.
hear hear!
i'm in the same boat exactly. there are plenty of things i love about linux, but spending an eternity fucking around with fonts, printing, samba, drivers and video codecs just to do the basic, normal things a computer should do exceeds my patience these days.
i'll always have a linux box or 2 around as servers (like my current file server, gateway/firewall) or some pet development work, but the day Apple releases an updated 15" powerbook with Panther, that's the end of my use of linux as a primary desktop OS. I'm ready for an OS where the majority of stuff works out of the box *and* looks and feels good to boot.
the crowd with the real money, as you say, doesn't spend money on CD's. besides, most adults with real jobs don't have all that much disposable income, whereas many younger folks have nothing but disposable income (albeit not a great deal of it) and will spend all of it on music, movies and video games.
if you want proof, do the research, adults are not the driving force behind music revenues except insofar as their money buys stuff for their kids.
not to mention, highly marketed hacks have ALWAYS been the backbone of popular music, which is why so many music aficinado's refer to pop with such derision. the quality of the production (what you call DSP, but which involves far more) is almost directly proportional to the marketing a release can expect. the state of the art in production, and thus, to a great extent, sound quality, has always belonged to the pop stars who draw in that lucrative 12-18 year old demographic with no bills to pay, a penchant for shiny things, and lots of environmental pressure to espouse popular memes, like the lamentable tripe of ms. spears.
i don't think your post was flame bait at all. it brings up a good point, but i think the real question is :
are there any real objective and impartial 3rd parties that review or report on anything, ever?
it's a fact of life that most people competent to review items in a product class are going to be experts of some sort with products of that class, with all the built up preferences and biases that come with being an expert.
i've come to the point where i no longer look for objectivity, because it doesn't exist -- just add new information into a corpus of prior knowledge, along with whatever inherent slant it has, and base personal reasoning on that. objectivity and impartiality are best simulated with aggregation. i don't fell i can assume someone else is even capable of impartiality.
it's like the news media. i could watch cnn, or fox news, or local news, and adjust whatever they say to normalize what whichever one says based on what i know of their inherent proclivities. I could watch all of them, but that's not feasible from a time standpoint, so i take the digest form : news.google.com. Not because it's new and flashy, but because it provides aggregation. I can scan the headlines and merge them into a global sense of the prevailing attitude towards a story. I can see which outlets are sensationalizing (or alternatively, downplaying) a story, or who's not covering it at all, with a quick scan. I can then choose to read the stories from any perspective i choose (which is often not necessarily my own) because i can trivially determine which sources have what perspectives.
To me, it's the best possible feature of the www -- true impartiality of reporting because the web crawler doesn't give a shit what the inherent slant is, just what words are in the document.
as for benchmarks, they're often only marginally above statistics on the scale of truth (i.e. somewhere south of 'damn lies'), so they're *really* only useful taken as a broad average of many, many different testers and conditions.
Of course they can have it workable...
/.ers forget that patents like this are *methods*. In this case a *method* for *enabling* translation of IM's, not the translation itself.
seems like all but 10% of
From what i can discern the patent essentially covers a system wherein the user can set a local language preference in his client and rely on an abstracted translation service to handle conversion. The client resends all incoming messages to some translation service (presumably local _or_ remote) which does the translation (maybe a good job, maybe not) and sends back the translated text. For the purposes of showing this technology is workable, the "translator" could just convert all words into md5 sums of the words... it's the architecture that's being patented, not the concept of translating im's.
MS or not, sounds like a decent idea to me. The downside being, since it's microsoft, the protocol isn't likely to be open, meaning only translator services licencing MS technology will be able to put a translator onto the web.
On the other hand that may be a good thing, if the protocol was open, all the OSS kiddies would do is make 10000 english->l337 servers, because translation is hard, and good translation software costs a lot of money.
That's missing the point. In actual fact, i don't have to know who's selling me something. All i need to know is that the information is available in the event of fraud/errors/etc. Privacy isn't an all or nothing thing. Ebay, as the facilitator should make reasonable efforts to know and verify the identity of all sellers in the event that they need to resolve a dispute. But, there's a big defference between eBay knowing who the seller is and eBay making that information effectively public.
It's not dissimilar from the discussions surrounding future uses of smart cards for everyday transactions. It involves trust models that are based on knowing that something is true or verifiable without having to know all the details.
The bottom line is that ebay should know who the sellers and buyers using its service are, to a reasonable extent. They should also release that information only to the extent that the requestor can be verified as someone with a legitimate right to it. This includes the seller (who has a right to contact non-payers), buyer (who has a right to contact fraudulent sellers) and law enforcement. In every case, however, there should be a reasonable guarantee that the requestor has legitmate uses for all the information sought (i.e. as a buyer, i have no legitimate reason to obtain the sellers bank account or credit card numbers, whereas a LEO *may* have such reasons, but he should have to prove it by acquiring a court order).
nice to see such a clear, concise and complete dismissal of SCO's FUD. They kept it professional and straightforward, and with any luck, this'll defuse some of the tension surronding the entire situation.
Kudos FSF and Eben Moglen
the next phone i buy will be purchased for one of the following two reasons, and they're the only ones :
1. it's smaller and more comfortable to carry in my pocket, without being microscopic.
2. lets me plug in my laptop and use the cellular network for data transmission at a reasonable speed for as long as i want, up to my alotment of minutes. a friend of mine has a phone that he can connect and use this way, but it's mercilessly slow and substantially limited in terms of how much use he can make of it.
i suppose it's possibel that public WiFi access will become common in the city, so i guess that'd reduce the need, but i'm not holding my breath.
who wants a damn video phone is my question? i don't quite see how this adds value to my life. then again, i only just bought my first cell phone 9 months ago, so maybe 6 years from now i'll think 2.5G/3G is pretty cool, when everyone else is picking up their holoCell-9000's or something.
why thank you ;)
i have about 60 gigs of (legal) MP3s so it's something i've put some thought into.
I agree with you that the best way to categorize music is probably not to start with an ontology of fixed genres but to try and just group music with similar stylistic elements with each other, and let the user infer what the genre is from there. I.e., i don't care what the grouping is called, as long as it helps identify the style. Still pretty hard i imagine...
-kerry
apogee404@hotmail.com
You say "Group data by category, content, whatever" and then say "we don't need AI for that". Well, you're almost right, but you need some intelligence in order to make decisions about what the content of file X really is. You could say, "well, yeah, that's me..." but the point of this and other Knowledge Management systems is that it takes the responsbility of categorization off of the user, because we are often inconsistent, or, at least, incomplete. Let's say I have a document that pertains to two or more general topics, lets say, Pollution, Energy Use and Windmills. Let's also say that right now i'm using it for a school report on alternative energy, so i classify it, quite sensibly for now, by year, course number, and assignment. That's totally useless in a few years when i'm looking for the information. I *could* have been smarter and manually attached some meta data to the file describing the kinds of topics it relates to, but i may miss one, and plus, that's extra work for me. Projects like this use complicated statistical (usually) analysis to determine the content for you automatically, and maintain a persistent database of all files realted to particular topics/content items, etc. Haystack and many others do this categorization with an ontologie which predefines the topic groups or elements they care about. Some systems derive the content groups dynamically, and include fuzzy searching to allow you to find documents and files related to some keywords (or if they're real good, natural language query) you enter.
What you mentioned is not that different from what they're doing, except they're not making it transparent -- they're making into a workspace.
I'll note also that categorization of text into topics or genres, while difficult, is easier than doing the same with music. The kinds of statistical analysis you can do on text doesn't lend itself to fourier decompisitions. To properly categorize music (in my opinion at least, which admittedly counts for little) the best technique would be to separate and identify the individual instruments (voices) in the song. This makes categorization a bit easier because now you can get data for tempo, rhythm, sohpistication of note progression, etc. on a per instrument basis. I'm not sure it's possible tho.
My 57 yen.
I hope you're willing to pay that 10 dollars a month for the rest of your life...
i for one prefer not to lease my music, or to be dependent on the status of my internet connection to listen.
and i'll only passingly mention listening in the car, which would be tough, to say the least, with streaming only services...
you're correct on that -- i made an error in my initial post.
battery life is approximately equal from all the reviews i've seen, but the Pentium M is clock for clock somewhat more efficient than the TMTA, and thus faster. The Acer has better performance while maintaining approximately identical battery life, and similar cost, which is the main advantage it has over the compaq.
lucky you for having had the chance to play with one -- i'd love to have personal experience to apply to the discussion...
unfortunately, i've yet to see one in a store. others have mentioned this too, but i'm pretty reluctant to shell out 2 grand for a product i've never even seen in person.
Taking notes on a laptop was totally out of the question for me in college, because i was a physics student, which means i was drawing lots of pictures (force diagrams, particle interactions, coordinates, etc.) and doing lots of formulae, which are too time consuming to input via keyboard when the prof is still proceeding with explanations. The kinds of notes you take as a physics student are very difficult to translate to keyboard based note taking. I'd have KILLED for a tablet back then, because it combines the best parts of paper (free form notes, sketches) and computers (typing when appropriate, simpler to keep organized). In this case, unless you can spring for a tablet, i'd still suggest paper... apply your computer budget to a cheaper, faster desktop machine and a *reliable* printer.
OTOH, If you're gonna be majoring in something which requires notes in pure text and which will involve lots of papers, and such, i say go for the laptop. It'll be easier than translating notes and such to the pc later, if you are that kind of person.
One caveat : some profs don't like to hear the clickety clack of keyboards in class, so despite your choice, buy some paper and have a plan for dealing with this contingency.
my 57 yen.
these do exist. Acer makes one called the C110 and there's an HP/COMPAQ model named the TC1000.
The Acer is a bit pricer but uses a more powerful *and* more energy efficient Pentium M whereas the compaq uses a ULV Pentium III. They're called convertables and appear to be fairly resilient from the reviews i've read.
The biggest beef with tablet pc's i've seen are that their screens (with the exception of one very expensive toshiba slate) are not too viewable outside. i'd buy one of those acers right now if it had any kind of decent outdoor performance. i may anyway -- i haven't decided how much direct sunlight it's likely to get.
Incidentally, the reason it seems like a gimmick to you is that you only deal in text. For text, a keyboard is likely to be far quicker than a tablet. In my case, i'm drawn to tablets (no pun intended, i swear) because i would like to be able to make sketches and draw out diagrams naturally. I also hate to have to carry sheafs of paper that deal with the text notes i've got on my laptop... this is convergence of the best kind in my situation. There are a lot of things that are simpler and clearer to work on in a free form way and don't lend themselves to expression in pure text. and don't mention "drawing" with the trackpad... that's apples to elephants.