The SIFT algorithm created by David Lowe, might work for that; it's commonly used in panorama stitching software to automatically determine the common points between two overlapping photos. Provided you had only a small amount of rotation between photos, it could probably give you some good results.
I know it's nothing novel to complain about the quality of Slashdot summaries, but it really would have been nice to mention that the new price for all songs is 99. The last line in the current summary gives the impression that they were all going to be $1.29...
I'm not a big fan of TicketMaster either, but anything to stop professional scalpers from buying up huge blocks of tickets is a good thing for the average fan.
I do agree that their fees are overly high; on the other hand, their site does perform rather well under huge swells of traffic when popular event tickets go online. I've had much more frustrating experiences with some other online ticket sites that just buckled under the load.
Now the newest dummies will come with a 4ft cord ending in a cigarette lighter plug, in addition to the shirt that makes it look like it's wearing a seat belt.
Er, why can't you just put the dummy in the seat belt?
Someone once posted a rough timeline on one of those "look out how my user id is!" "no, look how low _my_ user id is!" threads, giving you a general idea of the timeframe you registered based on your user id. I don't have any link to it (it was ages ago), but if a distributed effort were made, I imagine you could come up with a pretty accurate mapping.
The problem with this model is that people haven't heard the album, and therefore don't know how good it is, so they can't decide in an informed fashion how much they want to pay for it.
Then pay nothing for it (yes, that's an option), decide how good it really is, then go download another one for the price you think they deserve.
As a Verizon employee I have had FiOS for almost 2 years, and I can say, it is really not much better than other services offer by say Brighthouse or Comcast or any others. Personally, I really miss my TiVo.
Ah yes, I did that the other day. I was configuring a support email address inbox with a program I wasn't familiar with and I wasn't certain if it was leaving the mail on the server or not. I couldn't figure any good way to determine from the GUI where a particular message was stored so I just telnetted in and did a list. That confirmed conclusively.
You have to respect the wisdom of the protocol designers in making them usable even by a manually telnetting human.
Another comparison: The iPod Nano is 80% smaller than a credit card - 70mm x 52mm vs 85mm x 54mm. Not to say that some people won't miss the skinniness of the early nano, but the 3G is definitely still pretty tiny.
Whoops, I misread the summary; I thought orange was trusted, so maybe they have special consideration for redirects. Or maybe that one redirect is a fluke; I can't tell now that the/.ing has begun.
It appears they include #REDIRECT pages; the very first page the random link took me to was Cheliceriformes, with the #REDIRECT line in orange. Seems an easy way to gain trust, once a redirect is created it is hardly ever changed.
I worked at CompUSA a long while ago and there was one protection plan for printers that was actually a fairly good deal.
Don't know if it has changed now (probably not), but back then, when you bought a new printer, it didn't come with the printer cable. Due to the massive overpricing for cables at computer stores, getting the necessary cable would run you something like $20. Alternatively, you could get a package that included the exact same generic cable, a ream of paper, and a one year protection plan for $30. Customers would usually go for it, since it was $10 more and they needed the paper anyway. The store makes a nice profit, since cost on the cable is just a few bunchs. And it had a $4 SPIFF on it. Sold a good number of those (and I am far from a salesman).
You'll notice most of their example images have generous amounts of low-detail "empty space" - sky, water, sand, etc. As they point out, it falls down wrt to higher level semantics, or in high detailed backgrounds. I doubt you would ever get this to a point where you could trust it to "just work" at any size or aspect ratio (at least not without a lot of prep working hinting the important parts of the image, as they show). I see it rather as a useful artist's tool in editing and manipulating images. You need a higher level system monitoring the process that understands when an unacceptable choice has been made, e.g. cutting text in half or squashing someone's face.
And "how the FUCK" can you fail to notice that currently it is not suitable for users*their exact words)?
Yes, I am all for OpenMoko and Free Software, I hope they do a great job. But it is absolutely ridiculous for you ignore the fact that for the average non-technical user, a polished, working product that exists now has a real practical value over something that is still in "pre-alpha" (again, their words) development.
particularly since the Big Champagne chart of top-pirated tunes tends to match up nearly exactly with legitimate downloads.
I wonder, though; what about the long tail? I wouldn't be surprised if there are a relatively few mainstream artists holding the top spots but a large long tail of non-mainstream that overwhelm them in aggregate. In which case you could legitimately state that most downloads aren't into the mainstream, even if the top 100 downloads are all well-known bands.
Slashdot Mirror
The SIFT algorithm created by David Lowe, might work for that; it's commonly used in panorama stitching software to automatically determine the common points between two overlapping photos. Provided you had only a small amount of rotation between photos, it could probably give you some good results.
I doubt that any of these teams will have turned a profit on this competition
But I'm sure they'll have turned out a good number of masters, phds and scientific papers.
Depends where you live. "Reckon" is a quite common word in Australia.
RearShowseat onePronographyminoron the riseJacksHeadww wbad guysc mochild pornfickingorgytoolfreeusefacesThis broad availabils, exexperts to datestreamingmassagescomehand
My god!
And now I see that /. doesn't like the cent symbol. That's supposed to be 99c.
I know it's nothing novel to complain about the quality of Slashdot summaries, but it really would have been nice to mention that the new price for all songs is 99. The last line in the current summary gives the impression that they were all going to be $1.29...
I'm not a big fan of TicketMaster either, but anything to stop professional scalpers from buying up huge blocks of tickets is a good thing for the average fan.
I do agree that their fees are overly high; on the other hand, their site does perform rather well under huge swells of traffic when popular event tickets go online. I've had much more frustrating experiences with some other online ticket sites that just buckled under the load.
Now the newest dummies will come with a 4ft cord ending in a cigarette lighter plug, in addition to the shirt that makes it look like it's wearing a seat belt.
Er, why can't you just put the dummy in the seat belt?
Someone once posted a rough timeline on one of those "look out how my user id is!" "no, look how low _my_ user id is!" threads, giving you a general idea of the timeframe you registered based on your user id. I don't have any link to it (it was ages ago), but if a distributed effort were made, I imagine you could come up with a pretty accurate mapping.
Harder for the average person, perhaps. But look around, there's plenty of vinyl-only releases on P2P sites.
It's harder for the average person, but check around the P2P sites. There are plenty of vinyl-only releases available in digital form.
The problem with this model is that people haven't heard the album, and therefore don't know how good it is, so they can't decide in an informed fashion how much they want to pay for it.
Then pay nothing for it (yes, that's an option), decide how good it really is, then go download another one for the price you think they deserve.
As a Verizon employee I have had FiOS for almost 2 years, and I can say, it is really not much better than other services offer by say Brighthouse or Comcast or any others. Personally, I really miss my TiVo.
Er, why can't you use your TiVo on FiOS?
Ah yes, I did that the other day. I was configuring a support email address inbox with a program I wasn't familiar with and I wasn't certain if it was leaving the mail on the server or not. I couldn't figure any good way to determine from the GUI where a particular message was stored so I just telnetted in and did a list. That confirmed conclusively.
You have to respect the wisdom of the protocol designers in making them usable even by a manually telnetting human.
How about a thought-controlled musical synthesiser?
Hmm. You're right, in that I'm wrong. But then wouldn't 80% smaller be 20%?
Another comparison: The iPod Nano is 80% smaller than a credit card - 70mm x 52mm vs 85mm x 54mm.
Not to say that some people won't miss the skinniness of the early nano, but the 3G is definitely still pretty tiny.
Whoops, I misread the summary; I thought orange was trusted, so maybe they have special consideration for redirects. Or maybe that one redirect is a fluke; I can't tell now that the /.ing has begun.
It appears they include #REDIRECT pages; the very first page the random link took me to was Cheliceriformes, with the #REDIRECT line in orange. Seems an easy way to gain trust, once a redirect is created it is hardly ever changed.
I worked at CompUSA a long while ago and there was one protection plan for printers that was actually a fairly good deal.
Don't know if it has changed now (probably not), but back then, when you bought a new printer, it didn't come with the printer cable. Due to the massive overpricing for cables at computer stores, getting the necessary cable would run you something like $20. Alternatively, you could get a package that included the exact same generic cable, a ream of paper, and a one year protection plan for $30. Customers would usually go for it, since it was $10 more and they needed the paper anyway. The store makes a nice profit, since cost on the cable is just a few bunchs. And it had a $4 SPIFF on it. Sold a good number of those (and I am far from a salesman).
"Snail mail? What's snail mail? Mail comes from the internet, not from some pretentious slug..."
You'll notice most of their example images have generous amounts of low-detail "empty space" - sky, water, sand, etc. As they point out, it falls down wrt to higher level semantics, or in high detailed backgrounds. I doubt you would ever get this to a point where you could trust it to "just work" at any size or aspect ratio (at least not without a lot of prep working hinting the important parts of the image, as they show). I see it rather as a useful artist's tool in editing and manipulating images. You need a higher level system monitoring the process that understands when an unacceptable choice has been made, e.g. cutting text in half or squashing someone's face.
And "how the FUCK" can you fail to notice that currently it is not suitable for users*their exact words)?
Yes, I am all for OpenMoko and Free Software, I hope they do a great job. But it is absolutely ridiculous for you ignore the fact that for the average non-technical user, a polished, working product that exists now has a real practical value over something that is still in "pre-alpha" (again, their words) development.
particularly since the Big Champagne chart of top-pirated tunes tends to match up nearly exactly with legitimate downloads.
I wonder, though; what about the long tail? I wouldn't be surprised if there are a relatively few mainstream artists holding the top spots but a large long tail of non-mainstream that overwhelm them in aggregate. In which case you could legitimately state that most downloads aren't into the mainstream, even if the top 100 downloads are all well-known bands.
Oh boy, I smell the premise for a new episode of Law & Order...