This baby is not for gamers or engineers. It's for marketing and sales.
... and home AV. Even a modest TV/DVR/DVD/surround setup involves an awful mess of wires. We seem to be moving towards a world where everything except power can be wireless, which will make everything much neater (instead making an invisible mess in the RF spectrum:) )
Except H.264 is the best codec. Google didn't choose WebM because it's better, they chose it because they own it and (purportedly) because it's open. They did not choose it for being a high-quality codec, they chose it for entirely meta and political/ideological reasons.
When deciding which software is "best" for any particular purpose, the price and the license terms are a factor.
They probably didn't do the image processing from scratch, they probably used a pre-existing image comparison tool to check for something like
Google Goggles is build around a pretty sophisticated image processing/classification engine. It takes an arbitrary snapshot, and recognises barcodes, QR codes, book/CD/DVD covers, product logos etc., and directs you to the appropriate Google search results.
With this, they've just added a class of image, and a service to handle it. It's a fun way to raise awareness of Goggles for them, I guess.
When I can snap a picture of my chess board and goggles gives me it's next move, I'll be impressed.
Like with Sudoku, this can be divided into two problems: recognising the board, and solving the puzzle.
Choosing a reasonable chess move is something computers can already do well -- although it's much harder than Sudoku -- so that's fine.
It doesn't feel as if recognising a chess board is too far off, for a well chosen chess set in good lighting. I'd be surprised if someone hadn't already done it. Obviously it could already work well on the kind of board diagram you get in newspaper chess columns. One that would work on any old chess set in any lighting, from a dumb user's choice of angle -- that sounds hard.
Have your phone solve the puzzle before you start, don't look at it, solve it yourself and then use the phone to check your answer??
As with all NP-complete problems (by definition!) checking your answer is easy. It involves counting from 1 to 9, 27 times. In reality, if you've screwed it up, you'll find out in the course of solving it.
Some are better than others (one hopes mine is on the upper end, of course), but it's still hard to write an algorithm for making really good Sudoku puzzles.
You sound like you know what you're talking about. Sudokus which claim to be hand-created do generally seem more satisfying to solve. I assume, though, that creating them is machine-assisted in some way. Am I right? I'm imagining some sort of interactive grid editor which shows you the ramifications of your number placement, tells you when you've constrained the grid to a single solution, etc.
Holy moley, my unoptimized naive (backtracking) solution written in C would solve the hardest puzzles in under 30 seconds, on my 900mhz netbook no less. What language did you write it in (not trolling here)?
We had a little office competition to see who could write the fastest solver, back when the Sudoku craze kicked off.
I think all our solutions came up with a solution in a fraction of a second; but I don't think any of them would have found all the solutions to a grid which had more than one. Indeed I bet some of the algorithms would have stalled on such a grid -- since one of us limited himself to applying the kind of rules that a human might apply.
(He was able to programmatically classify grids into difficulty levels, by counting how many of the rules were necessary to solve it)
Most people think that Sudoku is a math puzzle because its often associated with numbers, but thats not really the case as you can do it with any 9 unique identifiers.
Well, set theory isn't to (necessarily) do with numbers, and it's still maths.
Sudoku's a lot easier for a human to solve when the nine symbols happen to be numbers (or anything else with a well defined order), because you frequently count through the symbols to see which ones are missing.
Sudoku is an np-c problem (actually the hitting set problem or graph coloring problem), so it's "hard" by definition. It may be easy to brute force a small grid but the problem gets exponentially more difficult as you increase the grid size and brute-force quickly becomes extremely slow.
This is true, but it's just as NP complete whether you solve it by hand or by computer. Nobody's going to be publishing grids so large that a human can't solve it in reasonable time -- so it will always be easily solvable by a computer.
I'd say that the optimal algorithm is a bit more refined than "brute force" (which so me suggests "try every solution until it passes"). Prolog almost does it for you -- define the constraints in code, and off it goes into a depth-first search for the solution.
It isn't AI. AI is whatever it is that machines can't do yet.
It's a funny old term, AI. So much so that someone coined the term "machine intelligence" to mean what AI used to mean.
In pursuing machine intelligence, computer scientists developed a load of techniques which came to be generally useful for other purposes. LISP and Prolog came out of this. As it happens, Prolog is a very good choice of language if you ever want to write a Sudoku solver. And LISP is a good choice of language if you want to write an image recognition algorithm which processes photographs of Sudoku grids (which is the impressive part of this).
Every smart phone commercial you see boasts about how when you buy smart phone X on network Y you can browse, e-mail, watch videos, stream music, download huge documents and do anything you can with a laptop on your smart phone. Hell the phones come with apps preinstalled to do many of these high bandwidth thing. However when you look at the agreements most will specifically say only basic web browsing and e-mail is allowed. Isn't that considered false advertising? How long until a law suit comes up?
Well, lawyers in a false advertising case are wont to get pretty pedantic; so I'll play devil's advocate. You *can* do all of that high bandwidth stuff, on your smartphone, without using up your mobile internet quota. You simply have to use WiFi when it's available, and restrict the high bandwidth stuff -- e.g. video -- to those times. This is essentially what the T-Mobile statement says.
Not that I'm defending T-Mobile. In my opinion if it says "unlimited" it should be unlimited.
I bet their T&Cs allow them to pull this kind of thing though -- the solution is to vote with your wallet next time your contract is up.
I'm on a 500MB tariff. I use my phone's data connection quite a lot -- a Twitter client, email and browsing, and uploading 5MP pictures from the camera. I seldom get anywhere near the limit. I don't stream videos or -- extensively -- audio over the mobile internet, because I know that would use up my allowance quickly.
The difference is, I *chose* a 500MB tariff because it was cheaper. If I'd bought an "unlimited" tariff, I'd be wanting to stream audio and video all the time.
Re:Is Facebook a viable long term business model ?
on
Facebook's Revenues Leaked
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Is Facebook a viable long term business model ?
I have never been using Facebook although I have heard a lot about it. Obviously some people, mostly mainstream from what I can understand, seem to enjoy it a lot.
What would be the percentage of "Facebook penetration" amongst the/. users ?
Among/. users, lower than average because we have a lot of privacy nuts here.
However, among the general population, Facebook is huge. Go on, sign up and see how many of your friends are on there (you can always put fake details in and delete the account afterwards). If you're in an English speaking country and younger than 50, I bet it's more than half.... and it's a medium that lends itself well to ads etc.
My biggest issue is, penetration is so high already, how much bigger can it grow? How can it monetize the existing user base more, without alienating them? Possibly by "replacing" the internet. I already see things like nightclubs choosing to have a Facebook page *instead* of their own dedicated site. There are lots of people who send each other FB messages instead of using email. Will we see an Amazon-like store hosted inside Facebook -- with a cut going to Facebook on every sale?
I'm sorry, did somebody use the phrase "journalistic standards" and "The Guardian" in the same sentence?
OK, I'm a knit-your-own-sandals-from-muesli long term Guardian reader since childhood, so I'm a bit biased -- but The Guardian seems to be at *least* the equal in terms of journalistic standards of any other UK broadsheet. It has strong claims to be the best.
As the article says, it's the only British newspaper with a daily corrections column, and was the first to appoint an ombudsman (their "Readers' Editor").
If you think The Guardian is seriously wanting in journalistic integrity, perhaps you should take it up with said ombudsman? Or at least cite a specific example of where they've failed.
Ah, you'll say, there's competition amongst supermarkets. But not so much. Most people just go to their local one. And virtually no one can be bothered to do product by product price comparisons.
I started writing something longer, but suffice to say that competition between supermarkets is *intense*.
Except in very rural areas, almost everyone in Britain has a choice of two or more large supermarkets within a short drive.
Price isn't the only factor; they also compete on quality, the pleasantness of the shopping experience and all sorts of other things.
If it's not competition, what else is it you think that's making supermarkets pleasant and cheap? Benevolence?
You don't have to be connected to 3G at the moment you connect to the Market, but your device still has to be capable of it. See this article.
Oh I see. Google hasn't done what's necessary to filter out apps that require a phone, so they'd rather not support the Market at all than have users installing apps that won't work. A bit lame, but being fixed RSN as far as I can tell.
On my HTC desire
How much did your HTC Desire cost, and is there a low-end model under $250 for the iPod touch crowd?
Well, it's a phone so it doesn't compare with an iPod Touch. And I got it free on a contract, so it's not really clear how much it "cost". The Wildfire is a lower-end almost-equivalent.
Well if you add having to submit to multiple app stores, each with their own submission rules and payout rules, and Android becomes even less and less attractive for people like me.
There's a business opportunity for someone; a front-end that submits apps to multiple app stores on behalf of the developer, and consolidates the income from sales. How much of a cut they could charge would be decided by just how much hassle they save.
OTOH, my guess is that the stores will be in competition to make submission hassle-free enough to be worth the developers' effort. It's in everyone's interest.
It's a pain in the arse having multiple stores charging different amounts of money. No sarcasm.
Either you have to piss around comparing prices before you buy, or you find out after you bought the item that you could have bought it cheaper elsewhere. Both are annoyances. Neither add to the sum total of happy experiences in life.
Competition is overrated.
Paying too much is better if there's no opportunity to pay less?
Would you be happy if all the shops in your town but one closed down, with the remaining one setting all its prices to the maximum previously charged? Or even the median or the mean?
But unless they get some kind of deal with Google, you will have to turn off the option to 'only allow applications from the market place'.
And if they don't get some kind of deal with Google so their apps are accepted without having to do that, then I'm actually not happy about it encouraging so many security-NOT-concious people to do that.
I imagine hardware vendors/networks will bake it into their distro, so you won't need to uncheck that box.
it's interesting how when it comes to Apple, people argue that only having one store is anti-competitive, over-controlling and locked down. On Android, when someone actually tries to make another store, people complain about lockdown (???) and fragmentation.
Slashdot Mirror
This baby is not for gamers or engineers. It's for marketing and sales.
... and home AV. Even a modest TV/DVR/DVD/surround setup involves an awful mess of wires. We seem to be moving towards a world where everything except power can be wireless, which will make everything much neater (instead making an invisible mess in the RF spectrum :) )
Intrinsically, lag involves both input and output. It's the delay between you performing input and perceiving the output.
Except H.264 is the best codec. Google didn't choose WebM because it's better, they chose it because they own it and (purportedly) because it's open. They did not choose it for being a high-quality codec, they chose it for entirely meta and political/ideological reasons.
When deciding which software is "best" for any particular purpose, the price and the license terms are a factor.
They probably didn't do the image processing from scratch, they probably used a pre-existing image comparison tool to check for something like
Google Goggles is build around a pretty sophisticated image processing/classification engine. It takes an arbitrary snapshot, and recognises barcodes, QR codes, book/CD/DVD covers, product logos etc., and directs you to the appropriate Google search results.
With this, they've just added a class of image, and a service to handle it. It's a fun way to raise awareness of Goggles for them, I guess.
I'm sure I've also seen a demo of an AR sudoku solver, which superimposes the solution onto video of the grid.
When I can snap a picture of my chess board and goggles gives me it's next move, I'll be impressed.
Like with Sudoku, this can be divided into two problems: recognising the board, and solving the puzzle.
Choosing a reasonable chess move is something computers can already do well -- although it's much harder than Sudoku -- so that's fine.
It doesn't feel as if recognising a chess board is too far off, for a well chosen chess set in good lighting. I'd be surprised if someone hadn't already done it. Obviously it could already work well on the kind of board diagram you get in newspaper chess columns. One that would work on any old chess set in any lighting, from a dumb user's choice of angle -- that sounds hard.
Have your phone solve the puzzle before you start, don't look at it, solve it yourself and then use the phone to check your answer??
As with all NP-complete problems (by definition!) checking your answer is easy. It involves counting from 1 to 9, 27 times. In reality, if you've screwed it up, you'll find out in the course of solving it.
Some are better than others (one hopes mine is on the upper end, of course), but it's still hard to write an algorithm for making really good Sudoku puzzles.
You sound like you know what you're talking about. Sudokus which claim to be hand-created do generally seem more satisfying to solve. I assume, though, that creating them is machine-assisted in some way. Am I right? I'm imagining some sort of interactive grid editor which shows you the ramifications of your number placement, tells you when you've constrained the grid to a single solution, etc.
Holy moley, my unoptimized naive (backtracking) solution written in C would solve the hardest puzzles in under 30 seconds, on my 900mhz netbook no less. What language did you write it in (not trolling here)?
We had a little office competition to see who could write the fastest solver, back when the Sudoku craze kicked off.
I think all our solutions came up with a solution in a fraction of a second; but I don't think any of them would have found all the solutions to a grid which had more than one. Indeed I bet some of the algorithms would have stalled on such a grid -- since one of us limited himself to applying the kind of rules that a human might apply.
(He was able to programmatically classify grids into difficulty levels, by counting how many of the rules were necessary to solve it)
Most people think that Sudoku is a math puzzle because its often associated with numbers, but thats not really the case as you can do it with any 9 unique identifiers.
Well, set theory isn't to (necessarily) do with numbers, and it's still maths.
Sudoku's a lot easier for a human to solve when the nine symbols happen to be numbers (or anything else with a well defined order), because you frequently count through the symbols to see which ones are missing.
Kakuro FTW, by the way.
Sudoku is an np-c problem (actually the hitting set problem or graph coloring problem), so it's "hard" by definition. It may be easy to brute force a small grid but the problem gets exponentially more difficult as you increase the grid size and brute-force quickly becomes extremely slow.
This is true, but it's just as NP complete whether you solve it by hand or by computer. Nobody's going to be publishing grids so large that a human can't solve it in reasonable time -- so it will always be easily solvable by a computer.
I'd say that the optimal algorithm is a bit more refined than "brute force" (which so me suggests "try every solution until it passes"). Prolog almost does it for you -- define the constraints in code, and off it goes into a depth-first search for the solution.
It isn't AI. AI is whatever it is that machines can't do yet.
It's a funny old term, AI. So much so that someone coined the term "machine intelligence" to mean what AI used to mean.
In pursuing machine intelligence, computer scientists developed a load of techniques which came to be generally useful for other purposes. LISP and Prolog came out of this. As it happens, Prolog is a very good choice of language if you ever want to write a Sudoku solver. And LISP is a good choice of language if you want to write an image recognition algorithm which processes photographs of Sudoku grids (which is the impressive part of this).
3 do genuinely unlimited data "from" £25/mo
Every smart phone commercial you see boasts about how when you buy smart phone X on network Y you can browse, e-mail, watch videos, stream music, download huge documents and do anything you can with a laptop on your smart phone. Hell the phones come with apps preinstalled to do many of these high bandwidth thing. However when you look at the agreements most will specifically say only basic web browsing and e-mail is allowed. Isn't that considered false advertising? How long until a law suit comes up?
Well, lawyers in a false advertising case are wont to get pretty pedantic; so I'll play devil's advocate. You *can* do all of that high bandwidth stuff, on your smartphone, without using up your mobile internet quota. You simply have to use WiFi when it's available, and restrict the high bandwidth stuff -- e.g. video -- to those times. This is essentially what the T-Mobile statement says.
Not that I'm defending T-Mobile. In my opinion if it says "unlimited" it should be unlimited.
I bet their T&Cs allow them to pull this kind of thing though -- the solution is to vote with your wallet next time your contract is up.
Follow suit? O2's standard packages have come with 500 MB of data for some time now.
But did they call that "unlimited"? That's the difference.
I'm on a 500MB tariff. I use my phone's data connection quite a lot -- a Twitter client, email and browsing, and uploading 5MP pictures from the camera. I seldom get anywhere near the limit. I don't stream videos or -- extensively -- audio over the mobile internet, because I know that would use up my allowance quickly.
The difference is, I *chose* a 500MB tariff because it was cheaper. If I'd bought an "unlimited" tariff, I'd be wanting to stream audio and video all the time.
Is Facebook a viable long term business model ?
I have never been using Facebook although I have heard a lot about it. Obviously some people, mostly mainstream from what I can understand, seem to enjoy it a lot.
What would be the percentage of "Facebook penetration" amongst the /. users ?
Among /. users, lower than average because we have a lot of privacy nuts here.
However, among the general population, Facebook is huge. Go on, sign up and see how many of your friends are on there (you can always put fake details in and delete the account afterwards). If you're in an English speaking country and younger than 50, I bet it's more than half. ... and it's a medium that lends itself well to ads etc.
My biggest issue is, penetration is so high already, how much bigger can it grow? How can it monetize the existing user base more, without alienating them? Possibly by "replacing" the internet. I already see things like nightclubs choosing to have a Facebook page *instead* of their own dedicated site. There are lots of people who send each other FB messages instead of using email. Will we see an Amazon-like store hosted inside Facebook -- with a cut going to Facebook on every sale?
I'm sorry, did somebody use the phrase "journalistic standards" and "The Guardian" in the same sentence?
OK, I'm a knit-your-own-sandals-from-muesli long term Guardian reader since childhood, so I'm a bit biased -- but The Guardian seems to be at *least* the equal in terms of journalistic standards of any other UK broadsheet. It has strong claims to be the best.
As the article says, it's the only British newspaper with a daily corrections column, and was the first to appoint an ombudsman (their "Readers' Editor").
If you think The Guardian is seriously wanting in journalistic integrity, perhaps you should take it up with said ombudsman? Or at least cite a specific example of where they've failed.
Ah, you'll say, there's competition amongst supermarkets. But not so much. Most people just go to their local one. And virtually no one can be bothered to do product by product price comparisons.
I started writing something longer, but suffice to say that competition between supermarkets is *intense*.
Except in very rural areas, almost everyone in Britain has a choice of two or more large supermarkets within a short drive.
Price isn't the only factor; they also compete on quality, the pleasantness of the shopping experience and all sorts of other things.
If it's not competition, what else is it you think that's making supermarkets pleasant and cheap? Benevolence?
Except I'm in the UK - and I can't be bothered to do the research or the maths :)
You don't have to be connected to 3G at the moment you connect to the Market, but your device still has to be capable of it. See this article.
Oh I see. Google hasn't done what's necessary to filter out apps that require a phone, so they'd rather not support the Market at all than have users installing apps that won't work. A bit lame, but being fixed RSN as far as I can tell.
On my HTC desire
How much did your HTC Desire cost, and is there a low-end model under $250 for the iPod touch crowd?
Well, it's a phone so it doesn't compare with an iPod Touch. And I got it free on a contract, so it's not really clear how much it "cost". The Wildfire is a lower-end almost-equivalent.
Well if you add having to submit to multiple app stores, each with their own submission rules and payout rules, and Android becomes even less and less attractive for people like me.
There's a business opportunity for someone; a front-end that submits apps to multiple app stores on behalf of the developer, and consolidates the income from sales. How much of a cut they could charge would be decided by just how much hassle they save.
OTOH, my guess is that the stores will be in competition to make submission hassle-free enough to be worth the developers' effort. It's in everyone's interest.
It's a pain in the arse having multiple stores charging different amounts of money. No sarcasm.
Either you have to piss around comparing prices before you buy, or you find out after you bought the item that you could have bought it cheaper elsewhere. Both are annoyances. Neither add to the sum total of happy experiences in life.
Competition is overrated.
Paying too much is better if there's no opportunity to pay less?
Would you be happy if all the shops in your town but one closed down, with the remaining one setting all its prices to the maximum previously charged? Or even the median or the mean?
But unless they get some kind of deal with Google, you will have to turn off the option to 'only allow applications from the market place'.
And if they don't get some kind of deal with Google so their apps are accepted without having to do that, then I'm actually not happy about it encouraging so many security-NOT-concious people to do that.
I imagine hardware vendors/networks will bake it into their distro, so you won't need to uncheck that box.
it's interesting how when it comes to Apple, people argue that only having one store is anti-competitive, over-controlling and locked down. On Android, when someone actually tries to make another store, people complain about lockdown (???) and fragmentation.
There's just no pleasing some people.
That's because they're different people.