I think the different curves are variants of the graphite material. It really doesn't look that impressive to me. It's very brittle with an elongation less than 0.3% and the tensile strength is low ~12k lb/in^2 (ksi). There are many steels that have tensile strengths above 120ksi and elongation in the 20-40% range. It may still be useful since the reduced density allows more of it to be used with less weight. I could see aerospace applications (really large light weight kites?) using something like this, but it isn't going to replace steel anytime soon.
That article brings up a good point, but I don't think it really applies here. It indicates that any personal belongings (including phones, laptops, etc.) would be searched after an arrest. For civil traffic violations I would think that it would be treated the same as a glove box, trunk, laptop or any other closed container or device. Unless there's blatantly obvious evidence that it played a significant role in the traffic violation, it would only be subject to plain sight inspection.
I'm an American aerospace/mechanical engineer and I deal with many different types of calculations every day and use both unit systems. I really don't see the problem with having both. Neither system is great for all applications so I just use whichever I find most convenient for the calculations at hand. When I am required to produce documents in one system or the other, I just do my work in the unit system I'm most comfortable with and convert at the end.
Here are a few examples of when I use each system and why:
Statics/stress analysis - This field is really only force, length, area and pressure which gives the edge to US Pascals and Newtons are more cumbersome than lbs and psi.
Cooking - well, lets just say that in US units, you don't always need a scale
Heat transfer/Thermodynamics - no contest, metric wins by default. BTUs, seriously?
Dynamics - Metric is made for this, very versatile with basically no drawbacks (with CGS and MKS there are two good choices). US has some serious problems here due to the confusion between mass and force. In fact, my nickname here is from the worst unit ever (IMHO), the "slinch" or slug-inch.
That's only true if they have a reason to suspect that you are in violation of a law specifically prohibiting the use of cell phones (which Michigan doesn't have*) or violated another traffic law with the use of a cell phone (i.e. distracted driving). Most of the time they don't have enough evidence to support a distracted driving charge and you'll receive a ticket for a specific violation like speeding or drifting across lane lines. This type of device, if used appropriately, could provide evidence in these cases. The problem is what qualifies as sufficient cause to warrant a search of a phone (and what the data security practices are)? I would think it would be the same as any other personal item like a laptop or briefcase. If it's in your hand with a half completed text on the screen, then sure. If it's in a pocket or even just sitting idle on the seat, then I would think it would be inadmissible as evidence.
*From the michigan.gov traffic laws FAQ:
Question: Is it against the law to talk on a cell phone while driving in Michigan?
Answer: Michigan does not have a law specifically prohibiting cell phone use in a vehicle. A driver who becomes distracted by using a cell phone, and commits a traffic violation could be charged with careless driving, or with the specific violation, such as improper lane use, if they are drifting in and out of their lane.
Some municipalities have recently enacted local ordinances that prohibit using a cellular phone while driving within their respective jurisdiction. Any municipality that establishes such an ordinance should post notification at their jurisdictional boundaries to alert motorists.
Another possibility are symbiotic relationships between plant species. The higher ones absorbing certain wavelengths and being transparent to those that plants below absorb. This would allow for many color variations instead of just black or gray.
I wasn't expecting some fairy tale ending where OtherOS is restored, the Sony Executives are all vanquished, and hacking your own hardware is recognized by the Supreme Court as a protected activity.
I wasn't expecting it either, but the hope was some of that might happen if I donated and it would be guaranteed that it none of it would if he didn't receive any donations. As long as he keeps his promise to donate the remaining funds to the EFF, I have no problem with the outcome. I think George Hotz and his legal team did whatever they could without causing undue risk to him personally. He and his lawyers aren't dumb. He settled because he found the offer to be better than the available alternatives. With the documents that are currently public, it seems like he got nothing out of the deal at all, but he also seemed to be in a good position legally. I think Sony must have given up something for him to agree to a settlement. I have no idea what that is, but my hope is that it's something along the lines of what he said he'd want in a settlement a while back.
Create a formula for a 3D lofted surface that produces the maximum lift with the least drag for an object 10 meters long and 5 meters wide. Due to material fragility, max strain cannot exceed 30ka/cm^2, and wind sheer restricts max airspeed to 120kph.
I'm an aerospace engineer and these are the types of questions asked in undergrad work. Most focus only on a single subject since they can't assume knowledge from anything that isn't a prerequisite. Yours is a good question for a junior year engineering principles type of class where you take a lot of what you've learned and apply it things like this. Since it's so open ended, you could even make it a team project.
The math classes I took all the way from elementary school to differential equations was simple rote memorisation and any theory or principles gleaned from it were purely incidental. Calculators were sometimes allowed and sometimes not. It didn't really matter much. Everyone was in the same boat "learning" the equations and sometimes when to use them. It wasn't until physics that I began to understand calculus and I learned the usefulness of algebra and geometry through engineering courses. I took a vibrations class and ended up doing linear algebra and differential equations (some of which on my calculator) without recognising what they were until I stumbled across some of my old notes. Either way, the calculator is irrelevant. I didn't learn the underlying principles in my diff eq. class and that is why I missed the connection in vibration.
I wish they would have taught mathematics like an engineering course or as a history class or a pure theory class or anything but what the current curriculum is. I'd much rather have a decent education on the principles of mathematics and not get past basic algebra and simple geometry before college than be able to differentiate and integrate without any understanding of what that means.
I don't know that they'll completely disappear outside of testing. I use my TI-89 almost daily. Yes most of what it does could be duplicated by calculator programs, matlab/octave, maple, etc., but having all of that capability at hand in a form that gives easy access to most math functions is very convenient. The graphing capability may not be used that much, but for simple things like finding local minima and maxima it can be as fast as anything and is portable.
Besides, there is at least one thing that it does better than anything else I've tried, symbolic manipulation with mixed units. I usually end up with my input units in a mix of SI, cgs, US customary and misc. engineering unit systems. I can just punch all of these in and it spits out the answer in the correct units (which I verify, of course). Also, it's relatively quick for simple numerical and symbolic integration and differentiation, but I don't use that quite as often. Over all, I have made many investments in my education that paid off better (especially with all of the free software that's available), but by a huge margin paying $120 for that calculator was not the worst. I'd say it's well above many of my textbooks in that regard.
tl;dr version: Yes, there are tools/software that are about as capable for the same price or less, but that doesn't mean that a good calculator can't be worth a price tag in the $100-150 range.
I do find it odd how it could end that suddenly and with those terms. I think one of two things happened.
Sony decided they couldn't win and were planning to drop the case, but settled on these terms so that geohot doesn't have to worry about being sued again at a later date and so Sony could save some face.
or
There are terms that aren't in the stipulation. The only way we'll know that is if Other OS suddenly appears in a firmware update (or something similar).
That's only true if you turned your head sideways. if you are facing down, your face will be at the stagnation pressure which is marginally above ambient due to your velocity as you fall. Either way, it wouldn't be a large enough pressure differential to do much of anything. You'd still be able to breathe, it may just take a bit more effort.
I agree. One version later and they drop support for all of the old cartridges and accessories. If I upgrade, my dot matrix printer, 5.25" floppy, joystick and sega genesis controllers will be useless.
When you use amazon's cloud to stream your music, it's your music, and you've done nothing wrong. But amazon has. Because every time you stream it, they are effectively selling it to you again. They either charge you per usage, or advertise to you, or promote additional services. That means amazon is redistributing and reselling the music. you don't have the right to grant that permission to them. and they don't have it in the first place.
So what you're saying is that it is copyright infringement on the part of a cloud service provider to allow the storage of files that the end user does not own the copyright to? I agree that Amazon would be infringing copyright if they allowed access to someone other than the proper owner of that copy, but that's not what this service does. It allows the owner of a copy to store said copy and retrieve it. Nothing else. Amazon is taking a risk here in that if the service isn't secured well enough and the files are somehow made publicly accessible, they could end up unintentionally committing copyright infringement on a huge scale.
Actually, I'm not sure why the music industry would be against a service like this. It would allow a very easy means to track and catch copyright infringers. All they'd have to do is request that the cloud service provider give them info on users that upload a large number of files matching naming/hashes/watermarks of music on known illegal file sharing sites.
Not really. It is cold on the dark side of the moon, but since there's no atmosphere to conduct heat away, you'd need a relatively complicated cooling system to keep it from overheating.
what's your workload that works if you can write at 315 MB/s, but fails if you're limited to a measly 250?
While it may not fail at the ~150MB/s that the striped HDD array I'm using gets, but doubling the read/write speed will cut the solution time nearly in half for much of what I do. I run FEA that is limited by continuous writes and reads in the 50-60 GB range. One of these SSDs would allow me to get almost twice as much done. Even better would be a PCI-e SSD that has write speeds approaching 1GB/s, but those would be tough to justify since they still cost more than the rest of the Workstation.
In a desktop, the read/write speed is less important than the random access times. I have a SSD as a boot drive on my home desktop and it makes freshly opened programs feel like they were already loaded in RAM.
Who said anything about RAID? If you're concerned about TRIM support, don't use SSDs in an array. Individual drives are fast enough for most purposes and if you want redundancy, then just drop periodic images on a spare.
There's a reason ATCs use very outdated tech... It Works. These systems have already been certified by the appropriate regulatory agencies and there is a lot of experience built up using them over the years. There is plenty of room for improvement (using GPS for example), but extensive testing and oversight is needed to ensure that any new system that is put in place will actually improve cost or efficiency without adversely impacting safety.
The way I understand it, the models predict that at a given collision energy level, there will be a certain probability that a Higgs boson can be detected. If a particle accelerator is run at this energy for a certain number of collisions (at lower energies this could take years due to the extremely low probabilities involved) and there is no indication of the Higgs, it means that the model is very unlikely to be valid. Supposedly at the levels the LHC has been operating without finding evidence of the Higgs, a subset of the hypotheses that predict measurable effects at lower energies are less likely now. Apparently, the upcoming two year run will cover a large portion of the current models' predictions and could invalidate them if it's not found. Since the most popular versions of the standard model rely on a measurable Higgs boson, not finding it could mean that we don't understand the universe as well as we think and would need new models that explain how particles have mass without it.
This may be a dumb question (IANAWD), but does this also block javascript from the same site? If so, it seems like MS is making the basic features of NoScript available to IE users. Seems like a good idea to me. With this I might not hate IE9 that much as long as they move the home, stop and refresh buttons back to a sane location.
I agree, in general, that a properly mastered 16 bit file would sound close enough to 24 bit. Although, for music that has very high dynamic range (mostly classical) it could have an audible, but not terribly significant difference.
I think a bit higher sampling rate might be worthwhile though. 44.1kHz only gives a 2kHz band for the low pass filter to roll off which is difficult to make without significantly affecting audible frequencies (This PDF, gives a good explanation). Back when the CD format was chosen space and sampling rate were at a premium, but now it would be much cheaper to use a 96kHz sampling rate throughout and just let the extra inaudible data add headroom so that the DACs filter can slowly roll off past the range of human hearing.
I'm really not sure what the advantage of a 192kHz sample rate would be, unless you're analyzing impacts or other highly dynamic events.
While it's true that Watson had to ring the buzzer in the same way as the other contestants, as others have already pointed out, Watson had a head start since it received the question electronically. It takes a good amount of time (on the order of seconds) for a human to either hear or read the clue before they get a chance begin parsing the language. The clue was delivered to Watson as a text file, so it received the entire clue in a few milliseconds and had a at least a couple of seconds after that to parse, and begin understanding it before the human contestants had the full clue. For many of the easier questions, it had probably already decided that it intended to answer before Alex finished reading the first couple of words. The only advantage Ken and Brad could have had was that they could decide to ring in when they had confidence that they would be able to find the correct question instead of waiting until they were confident in a specific question. I think the additional time Watson had made that slight tactical advantage meaningless.
Additionally, I don't remember seeing very many clues where Watson had a high confidence and didn't buzz in first. I'd like to see some plots of the buzzer timing data.
Nokia Meego, the phone for people who don't want to mess about with shady app sellers. Try the N900. Anyone who has KNOWS why it was such a good idea. It blows everything else out of the water.
I have a N900 and I can definitely see the potential of MeeGo. Maemo is great, but it lacks that last bit of polish that takes something from being good to being the best. If Meego can improve the interface and allow even easier development across a wider set of devices, then I could see it becoming a dominant platform very quickly. iOS is limited by only being supplied by one vendor and Android can't take advantage of the existing Linux code base as easily or scale to a full desktop like MeeGo can.
Actually, if Intel et. al. can get MeeGo to be a serious competitor on netbooks and tablets, smart phone handsets will follow whether Nokia produces them or not. If Nokia did stay on board, there's a good chance that MeeGo could become not just a leading competitor, but the dominant platform on mobile computing devices. What they would need to do is collaborate with Intel and another hardware manufacturer on a simultaneous release of netbook, tablet and handset hardware accompanied by a marketing program that highlights MeeGo as a unified platform with seamless integration to the desktop and between these mobile devices.
It may not push Android out of the market immediately, but why buy an Android phone or tablet when MeeGo can run all Android apps and integrates better with your other devices? The only stumbling block I can see is that, in the US at least, the mobile service providers may not accept such an open platform since they seem to like having control over their customer's devices.
Good point. I wonder if there will be any video or picture categories? It seems like there's usually at least one category per game that requires interpretation of images. Unless IBM made some huge breakthroughs in machine vision, Watson wouldn't have a chance even against an average human on these clues.
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I think the different curves are variants of the graphite material. It really doesn't look that impressive to me. It's very brittle with an elongation less than 0.3% and the tensile strength is low ~12k lb/in^2 (ksi). There are many steels that have tensile strengths above 120ksi and elongation in the 20-40% range. It may still be useful since the reduced density allows more of it to be used with less weight. I could see aerospace applications (really large light weight kites?) using something like this, but it isn't going to replace steel anytime soon.
That article brings up a good point, but I don't think it really applies here. It indicates that any personal belongings (including phones, laptops, etc.) would be searched after an arrest. For civil traffic violations I would think that it would be treated the same as a glove box, trunk, laptop or any other closed container or device. Unless there's blatantly obvious evidence that it played a significant role in the traffic violation, it would only be subject to plain sight inspection.
I'm an American aerospace/mechanical engineer and I deal with many different types of calculations every day and use both unit systems. I really don't see the problem with having both. Neither system is great for all applications so I just use whichever I find most convenient for the calculations at hand. When I am required to produce documents in one system or the other, I just do my work in the unit system I'm most comfortable with and convert at the end.
Here are a few examples of when I use each system and why:
Statics/stress analysis - This field is really only force, length, area and pressure which gives the edge to US Pascals and Newtons are more cumbersome than lbs and psi.
Cooking - well, lets just say that in US units, you don't always need a scale
Heat transfer/Thermodynamics - no contest, metric wins by default. BTUs, seriously?
Dynamics - Metric is made for this, very versatile with basically no drawbacks (with CGS and MKS there are two good choices). US has some serious problems here due to the confusion between mass and force. In fact, my nickname here is from the worst unit ever (IMHO), the "slinch" or slug-inch.
That's only true if they have a reason to suspect that you are in violation of a law specifically prohibiting the use of cell phones (which Michigan doesn't have*) or violated another traffic law with the use of a cell phone (i.e. distracted driving). Most of the time they don't have enough evidence to support a distracted driving charge and you'll receive a ticket for a specific violation like speeding or drifting across lane lines. This type of device, if used appropriately, could provide evidence in these cases. The problem is what qualifies as sufficient cause to warrant a search of a phone (and what the data security practices are)? I would think it would be the same as any other personal item like a laptop or briefcase. If it's in your hand with a half completed text on the screen, then sure. If it's in a pocket or even just sitting idle on the seat, then I would think it would be inadmissible as evidence.
*From the michigan.gov traffic laws FAQ:
Question: Is it against the law to talk on a cell phone while driving in Michigan?
Answer: Michigan does not have a law specifically prohibiting cell phone use in a vehicle. A driver who becomes distracted by using a cell phone, and commits a traffic violation could be charged with careless driving, or with the specific violation, such as improper lane use, if they are drifting in and out of their lane.
Some municipalities have recently enacted local ordinances that prohibit using a cellular phone while driving within their respective jurisdiction. Any municipality that establishes such an ordinance should post notification at their jurisdictional boundaries to alert motorists.
Another possibility are symbiotic relationships between plant species. The higher ones absorbing certain wavelengths and being transparent to those that plants below absorb. This would allow for many color variations instead of just black or gray.
Yes, like igniting a fuel pellet in a fusion reactor.
I wasn't expecting some fairy tale ending where OtherOS is restored, the Sony Executives are all vanquished, and hacking your own hardware is recognized by the Supreme Court as a protected activity.
I wasn't expecting it either, but the hope was some of that might happen if I donated and it would be guaranteed that it none of it would if he didn't receive any donations. As long as he keeps his promise to donate the remaining funds to the EFF, I have no problem with the outcome. I think George Hotz and his legal team did whatever they could without causing undue risk to him personally. He and his lawyers aren't dumb. He settled because he found the offer to be better than the available alternatives. With the documents that are currently public, it seems like he got nothing out of the deal at all, but he also seemed to be in a good position legally. I think Sony must have given up something for him to agree to a settlement. I have no idea what that is, but my hope is that it's something along the lines of what he said he'd want in a settlement a while back.
Create a formula for a 3D lofted surface that produces the maximum lift with the least drag for an object 10 meters long and 5 meters wide. Due to material fragility, max strain cannot exceed 30ka/cm^2, and wind sheer restricts max airspeed to 120kph.
I'm an aerospace engineer and these are the types of questions asked in undergrad work. Most focus only on a single subject since they can't assume knowledge from anything that isn't a prerequisite. Yours is a good question for a junior year engineering principles type of class where you take a lot of what you've learned and apply it things like this. Since it's so open ended, you could even make it a team project.
The math classes I took all the way from elementary school to differential equations was simple rote memorisation and any theory or principles gleaned from it were purely incidental. Calculators were sometimes allowed and sometimes not. It didn't really matter much. Everyone was in the same boat "learning" the equations and sometimes when to use them. It wasn't until physics that I began to understand calculus and I learned the usefulness of algebra and geometry through engineering courses. I took a vibrations class and ended up doing linear algebra and differential equations (some of which on my calculator) without recognising what they were until I stumbled across some of my old notes. Either way, the calculator is irrelevant. I didn't learn the underlying principles in my diff eq. class and that is why I missed the connection in vibration.
I wish they would have taught mathematics like an engineering course or as a history class or a pure theory class or anything but what the current curriculum is. I'd much rather have a decent education on the principles of mathematics and not get past basic algebra and simple geometry before college than be able to differentiate and integrate without any understanding of what that means.
I don't know that they'll completely disappear outside of testing. I use my TI-89 almost daily. Yes most of what it does could be duplicated by calculator programs, matlab/octave, maple, etc., but having all of that capability at hand in a form that gives easy access to most math functions is very convenient. The graphing capability may not be used that much, but for simple things like finding local minima and maxima it can be as fast as anything and is portable.
Besides, there is at least one thing that it does better than anything else I've tried, symbolic manipulation with mixed units. I usually end up with my input units in a mix of SI, cgs, US customary and misc. engineering unit systems. I can just punch all of these in and it spits out the answer in the correct units (which I verify, of course). Also, it's relatively quick for simple numerical and symbolic integration and differentiation, but I don't use that quite as often. Over all, I have made many investments in my education that paid off better (especially with all of the free software that's available), but by a huge margin paying $120 for that calculator was not the worst. I'd say it's well above many of my textbooks in that regard.
tl;dr version: Yes, there are tools/software that are about as capable for the same price or less, but that doesn't mean that a good calculator can't be worth a price tag in the $100-150 range.
I do find it odd how it could end that suddenly and with those terms. I think one of two things happened.
Sony decided they couldn't win and were planning to drop the case, but settled on these terms so that geohot doesn't have to worry about being sued again at a later date and so Sony could save some face.
or
There are terms that aren't in the stipulation. The only way we'll know that is if Other OS suddenly appears in a firmware update (or something similar).
That's only true if you turned your head sideways. if you are facing down, your face will be at the stagnation pressure which is marginally above ambient due to your velocity as you fall. Either way, it wouldn't be a large enough pressure differential to do much of anything. You'd still be able to breathe, it may just take a bit more effort.
I agree. One version later and they drop support for all of the old cartridges and accessories. If I upgrade, my dot matrix printer, 5.25" floppy, joystick and sega genesis controllers will be useless.
I would think that this method would eventually increase your carbon footprints when your ash is tracked all over the place by the maintenance crew.
When you use amazon's cloud to stream your music, it's your music, and you've done nothing wrong. But amazon has. Because every time you stream it, they are effectively selling it to you again. They either charge you per usage, or advertise to you, or promote additional services. That means amazon is redistributing and reselling the music. you don't have the right to grant that permission to them. and they don't have it in the first place.
So what you're saying is that it is copyright infringement on the part of a cloud service provider to allow the storage of files that the end user does not own the copyright to? I agree that Amazon would be infringing copyright if they allowed access to someone other than the proper owner of that copy, but that's not what this service does. It allows the owner of a copy to store said copy and retrieve it. Nothing else. Amazon is taking a risk here in that if the service isn't secured well enough and the files are somehow made publicly accessible, they could end up unintentionally committing copyright infringement on a huge scale.
Actually, I'm not sure why the music industry would be against a service like this. It would allow a very easy means to track and catch copyright infringers. All they'd have to do is request that the cloud service provider give them info on users that upload a large number of files matching naming/hashes/watermarks of music on known illegal file sharing sites.
Not really. It is cold on the dark side of the moon, but since there's no atmosphere to conduct heat away, you'd need a relatively complicated cooling system to keep it from overheating.
what's your workload that works if you can write at 315 MB/s, but fails if you're limited to a measly 250?
While it may not fail at the ~150MB/s that the striped HDD array I'm using gets, but doubling the read/write speed will cut the solution time nearly in half for much of what I do. I run FEA that is limited by continuous writes and reads in the 50-60 GB range. One of these SSDs would allow me to get almost twice as much done. Even better would be a PCI-e SSD that has write speeds approaching 1GB/s, but those would be tough to justify since they still cost more than the rest of the Workstation.
In a desktop, the read/write speed is less important than the random access times. I have a SSD as a boot drive on my home desktop and it makes freshly opened programs feel like they were already loaded in RAM.
Who said anything about RAID? If you're concerned about TRIM support, don't use SSDs in an array. Individual drives are fast enough for most purposes and if you want redundancy, then just drop periodic images on a spare.
There's a reason ATCs use very outdated tech ... It Works. These systems have already been certified by the appropriate regulatory agencies and there is a lot of experience built up using them over the years. There is plenty of room for improvement (using GPS for example), but extensive testing and oversight is needed to ensure that any new system that is put in place will actually improve cost or efficiency without adversely impacting safety.
The way I understand it, the models predict that at a given collision energy level, there will be a certain probability that a Higgs boson can be detected. If a particle accelerator is run at this energy for a certain number of collisions (at lower energies this could take years due to the extremely low probabilities involved) and there is no indication of the Higgs, it means that the model is very unlikely to be valid. Supposedly at the levels the LHC has been operating without finding evidence of the Higgs, a subset of the hypotheses that predict measurable effects at lower energies are less likely now. Apparently, the upcoming two year run will cover a large portion of the current models' predictions and could invalidate them if it's not found. Since the most popular versions of the standard model rely on a measurable Higgs boson, not finding it could mean that we don't understand the universe as well as we think and would need new models that explain how particles have mass without it.
This may be a dumb question (IANAWD), but does this also block javascript from the same site? If so, it seems like MS is making the basic features of NoScript available to IE users. Seems like a good idea to me. With this I might not hate IE9 that much as long as they move the home, stop and refresh buttons back to a sane location.
I agree, in general, that a properly mastered 16 bit file would sound close enough to 24 bit. Although, for music that has very high dynamic range (mostly classical) it could have an audible, but not terribly significant difference.
I think a bit higher sampling rate might be worthwhile though. 44.1kHz only gives a 2kHz band for the low pass filter to roll off which is difficult to make without significantly affecting audible frequencies (This PDF, gives a good explanation). Back when the CD format was chosen space and sampling rate were at a premium, but now it would be much cheaper to use a 96kHz sampling rate throughout and just let the extra inaudible data add headroom so that the DACs filter can slowly roll off past the range of human hearing.
I'm really not sure what the advantage of a 192kHz sample rate would be, unless you're analyzing impacts or other highly dynamic events.
It's hard to overstate my satisfaction.
- GLADOS
While it's true that Watson had to ring the buzzer in the same way as the other contestants, as others have already pointed out, Watson had a head start since it received the question electronically. It takes a good amount of time (on the order of seconds) for a human to either hear or read the clue before they get a chance begin parsing the language. The clue was delivered to Watson as a text file, so it received the entire clue in a few milliseconds and had a at least a couple of seconds after that to parse, and begin understanding it before the human contestants had the full clue. For many of the easier questions, it had probably already decided that it intended to answer before Alex finished reading the first couple of words. The only advantage Ken and Brad could have had was that they could decide to ring in when they had confidence that they would be able to find the correct question instead of waiting until they were confident in a specific question. I think the additional time Watson had made that slight tactical advantage meaningless.
Additionally, I don't remember seeing very many clues where Watson had a high confidence and didn't buzz in first. I'd like to see some plots of the buzzer timing data.
Nokia Meego, the phone for people who don't want to mess about with shady app sellers. Try the N900. Anyone who has KNOWS why it was such a good idea. It blows everything else out of the water.
I have a N900 and I can definitely see the potential of MeeGo. Maemo is great, but it lacks that last bit of polish that takes something from being good to being the best. If Meego can improve the interface and allow even easier development across a wider set of devices, then I could see it becoming a dominant platform very quickly. iOS is limited by only being supplied by one vendor and Android can't take advantage of the existing Linux code base as easily or scale to a full desktop like MeeGo can.
Actually, if Intel et. al. can get MeeGo to be a serious competitor on netbooks and tablets, smart phone handsets will follow whether Nokia produces them or not. If Nokia did stay on board, there's a good chance that MeeGo could become not just a leading competitor, but the dominant platform on mobile computing devices. What they would need to do is collaborate with Intel and another hardware manufacturer on a simultaneous release of netbook, tablet and handset hardware accompanied by a marketing program that highlights MeeGo as a unified platform with seamless integration to the desktop and between these mobile devices.
It may not push Android out of the market immediately, but why buy an Android phone or tablet when MeeGo can run all Android apps and integrates better with your other devices? The only stumbling block I can see is that, in the US at least, the mobile service providers may not accept such an open platform since they seem to like having control over their customer's devices.
Good point. I wonder if there will be any video or picture categories? It seems like there's usually at least one category per game that requires interpretation of images. Unless IBM made some huge breakthroughs in machine vision, Watson wouldn't have a chance even against an average human on these clues.