You've got a good point about the UI, but presumably you'll have a stylus for handwriting recognition and presumably that stylus can achieve far better position resolution than stubby fingers - at least as good as a mouse I'd suspect. Also, Office has already been moving toward context specific menus, I bet it's not that much further to make the office circle (previously the File menu) into a tap and rotate for your standard menus while the context specific can pop up when useful.
I really like the idea of having a stylus for interaction and text entry. It really annoys me that just because Jobs didn't like it then an entire industry and generation seem ready to throw out the oldest form of recording information - we'll just use silicon (or graphene) tablets instead of clay ones. I'm not arguing for buggy whips either; a stylus is a far more precise tool than a finger - the decision to abandon them is like giving up calculators for slide-rules (or pens for finger paint). While a slide rule can put a man on the moon, a calculator can do it better, faster, and cheaper (and if someone thinks calculators are more expensive than some stick with scratch marks, then they've never been shopping for a precision engineering slide rule which might be 6 feet in length).
...That said, in principle, it's something I'd deploy. If it wasn't barely tested, using EC (and having that be non-negotiable) and having hardly any upstream providers support it.
Why do you think they're only releasing it to minority markets at the moment? We could take the current stereotypes of the sorts of users who run the systems mentioned and do an analysis of which part of the client each is a good test bed for, but applying heuristics would probably be seen as an invitation for flaming. Other users can fill in the thread if they think it's a worthwhile discussion.
Unless you move to the Pacific Northwest - they seceded right? Although isn't the date off, I thought that was later in a different future? Unless you're not talking about human augmentation and instead are referencing the popular misconceptions about the Mayan calendar... although in that case I think people who didn't wait for SP1 might be able to get Windows 8 with an early release before the end of time. Perhaps some clarification is in order, I think I want to answer to your point, but I can't find it.
I would suggest that there could be a huge market for tablet devices which utilize native handwriting recognition and run industry standard software* (Excel, Word, etc...). Multiply by 10 if said device also can handle remote desktop with any of the previous three versions of the OS.
Who'd want to run a blackberry or iphone while on the go when they can instead be at their desk's computer?
IMHO *Software synonyms: programs, executables, applications. Synonyms may be abbreviated in written (not spoken) English with a period such as: "prog.", "exe.", or "app."; truncated forms such as "app" designate the software as either grammatically incorrect or as an inherently ironic representation of a truncated element of software development - a collection of a few subroutines instead of a full suite.
On the flip side everyone would be able to meet carbon footprint treaties; more easily for cultures who bury their dead than burning it though...
Oh, and with death rates likely much higher in the non-industrialized countries, the industrialized ones wouldn't have to worry about sharing resources with the up and coming whippersnappers. In fact, if you think it through, it's more likely that a disease like this (though it would cause massive economic damage) would actually strengthen the relative economic mastery of the industrialized nations over the less industrialized ones. So terrorists should take note that a weapon like this is rather short sided if they want to perturb the balance of power away from current industrialized states (identifiable as having lewd morals and a greater median net worth than the terrorist).
P.S. - It's worth a try convincing them to look at the long road right? Maybe the sort of people who contemplate killing off half the worlds population are just looking for a more reasonable option.
P.P.S. - If you are a terrorist like the sort mentioned in the P.S. you might want to contemplate economic superiority, technological superiority (put all that effort into science), or supporting the formation of democratic regions where your ideas can be publicly debated and made state policy when you have convinced the masses of your philosophies.
The first two Harper Hall books are actually a pretty self sufficient. The third is better understood within the context of the Dragonflight trilogy. I'd also say that the Harper Hall books probably classify as YA SF while a lot of the others are probably generic SF. I do agree with you in that even her generic SF are more likely to thrill younger readers, but they're probably enjoyable by anyone who partakes of the genera. McCaffrey story emphasis seemed to be more about people and plot rather than speculations about the deep impacts on society her worlds or technology would effect (as opposed to Brin who usually tells stories using people and plot, but uses them as a context for exploring the larger discussion - like Kiln People or Glory Season).
Have Spacesuit Will Travel is also a great introduction to Sci-Fi for any age. It's a bit more readable than Verne, but still has that old-time feel when you run across phrases along the lines of "slide rules were the greatest invention since girls." It also hits a lot of problems relevant to modern space exploration that most authors just assume technology has addressed the issue (such as thermal buildup in space) so if you give it to a young adult to read you might just encourage their science or engineering interests.
It's faster than texting, and texting is probably faster than sending an email with a modern client (keyboard shortcuts in Pine might have beaten it). So Morse is faster, more efficient, and cheaper - and my engineering professors said it was impossible to have all three!
At first glance this argument may be a straw man (subbing in texting for email), but it's probably a legitimate substitution. Comments welcome.
How many people might die if I have failed eyesight or don't remember what a stop sign means and I get out on the highway, compared to the vast number of deaths and excessive carnage if I forget that SSTV runs at 240 lpm and turn on the box that does it for me and transmit a piccy?
The scary thing is that most states never recheck more than the eyesight. The knowledge exams seem to me more of a learn once and discard according to your location's enforcement protocols. And in this case, I'm pretty sure people do die because some idiot forgets corresponding lane changes, or can't remember which car at a 4 way stop gets the right of way...
There have got to be several bad horror stories related to this idea. "Grandpa's dead, but we can still hear him on the old radio..." or "While helping clear out Uncle Gerald's attic, a nasty old cuss, we switched on his radio and could listen to torment screams..."
"Goodnight golden path" is a particularly brilliant replacement for "Goodnight nobody." Although I think there should have been a "Goodnight Duncan Idaho. Goodnight betrayal jumping over Duncan Idaho" or something like that.
I think this is more tragically a lesson in how a baby-killing statement only around for 12 years ('58 to '70) can persist for at least another 20 years (and more in some minority groups) because researchers tried to combat a logical sounding (but erroneous) statement: "babies on backs choke on vomit" with: "statistics show..." Visions of waking to find your baby dead in his or her own vomit summon a lot more staying power than some research papers on bulk trends among foreign babies. Once they finally woke up and made some serious efforts to tell parents to put the babies on their back or they'd suffocate in a small pocket of CO2, or smother themselves on their blanket, or any number of other (possibly incorrect) but terrifying images of walking in to find a dead child who had been perfectly healthy before taking a nap.
Some people say we need better education in this country. I agree, scientists need to be better educated on how to communicate what they learn into public knowledge.
Such as the potential danger for relying on a wavy green underline to tell you that a lot is two words rather than listening to the flesh-teachers who repeated that lesson for at least twelve years of publicly provided education?
No, common sense is just over rated. What people generally mean by the phrase is: the uncommon sense to see what is actually there combined with superior cogitation to nearly instantly identify a solution so elegant that it appears simple and understandable when pointed out to those with just average, or common, senses.
So, if common sense was replaced by the uncommon described above, we'd have a lot of elegant solutions to common problems.
NASA has lost the focus they used for their "moon shot." It's been long speculated (and shown on paper) that the Moon, or even Mars is quite doable for a budget containing several digits less than NASA routinely goes through in any given year. A few years back I attended a seminar given by Zubrin about Mars Direct where he highlighted a pretty neat method for getting people there and back as well as outlining some of the extra vulnerabilities science programs face with entrenchment when run by a bureaucracy (it was at a different federal research center and relevant;it wasn't NASA bashing - just NASA explaining).
Never even heard of the series (do I fail because I don't watch television?), but if it's related to Hiro Protagonist from Snow Crash I'd say it's fair game. If you can count zero experience with cyberpunk, then you don't really qualify in my book. (You pass if you caught the pun, or play on words, in the last sentence). You don't have to like it, but you should at least have tried it. After all, Gibson could give anyone a migraine at first inoculation, but Stephenson is a pretty good initial choice.
ps - Did anything of Stephenson's make it to the screen?
No, this is a different research group experimenting with some of the same stuff another research group tossed an article out about a few years back. That other group is known for doing weird Friday afternoon studies that have caught the attention of the fun scientists and boring scientists alike.
No, what's dumb is alleging that a single crystal ceramic has no significant differences than an amorphous powder of the same chemical compound.
Now perhaps you have unique knowledge of a new elemental aluminum allotrope, but the rest of us used our brains to figure out that "transparent aluminum" would require at the very least some alloying material and crystalline behavior.
Unless of course you're suggesting that Star Trek had no use for science fiction and relied instead on magic;)
You'd expect a few studies to come out with that result due to chance....
Perhaps - one in twenty is the worst case scenario for an incorrect conclusion though.
A properly done study will tell you what the chance is that they've come to the wrong conclusion. The typically minimum accepted chance of an incorrect conclusion is 5% among most scientific literature - some fields are far more stringent. If you can't meet that margin you try physical ways of improving your resolution (power to detect: use a larger population, reduce the measurement noise, etc...) and if you still can't show that the group on the left is different than the one on the right you start to play with the math (transform the data and run your stats on that (i.e. log)). Finally, if the first two don't work you can still try to analyze for variance based on ranks & etc... Your conclusions can't be as strong, but you can still say that your conclusion is more than just a gut reaction to your data.
The statistical methods should be mentioned in the paper, or the editor wasn't doing his or her job. Sometimes a result is too obvious to be worth going through the stats (like when the error bars are smaller than the data points and each data point is at least a dozen standard deviations from the next), but even then the author should at least mentioned how he calculated the error bars (they're not always the Excel function "StDev," you've got standard deviation for the population vs group, standard error (which is my preference), generic standard deviations, etc...). I'll skip the entire discussion between Type I and Type II error.
So the point is, yes you should know whether the results of that study were due to random chance - or at least the degree to which random chance could have given that result.
Don't forget cases in which a company (e.g. NVIDIA) settled with Rambus.
Previously, the International Trade Commission (ITC) ruled that Nvidia, HP and other firms were infringing two Barth I patents owned by Rambus. This led to Nvidia settling with Rambus.
The courts ruled that there was an infringement, but the deal to use the technology after that wasn't court mediated. That could mean a reversal in the patent status won't automatically even give valid justification for a refund - it'll depend on the settlement terms. If it's written such that one party is paying for technical expertise, design parameters, surcharge per unit installed, or etc... it could be pretty murky.
For example, if someone promised to give me a penny for every breath they took, even if I don't own their air, I should still be able to collect on that (of course it's again murky if I had previously convinced them I owned the air, or I would poison it if they didn't pay,...). Probably the most common version of this sort of agreement that I run across is when some kid comes up to me and asks for $0.25 to go toward cancer research fundraiser personnel for every lap he walks on the high school track.
Unless you're just going off of the initial information gleaned from the title to determine if the rest is worth reading. (i.e. the classic science literature parsing strategy: read the title, the abstract, the conclusion, and occasionally the rest of the paper...). My first impression was perhaps one of the international space station workers did a jumper and someone else took pics. It's just a fraction of a second, but sometimes the brain has to catch up to itself - Google not needed.
I think the parent was commenting more about the degree of clarity and efficiency with which this title conveyed information about the content of the article summarized and posted. Particularly in regards to an internationally read website in reference to some backwater gathering in the desert (for global events 50 kilo-persons isn't all that much after all - how many sports teams do that on a semi-regular basis?). It wouldn't have been that hard for an editor to add one word to the title: "Satellite Captures Burning Man [Festival] From Space." Of course it wouldn't have been anywhere as much fun:)
Slashdot Mirror
You've got a good point about the UI, but presumably you'll have a stylus for handwriting recognition and presumably that stylus can achieve far better position resolution than stubby fingers - at least as good as a mouse I'd suspect. Also, Office has already been moving toward context specific menus, I bet it's not that much further to make the office circle (previously the File menu) into a tap and rotate for your standard menus while the context specific can pop up when useful.
I really like the idea of having a stylus for interaction and text entry. It really annoys me that just because Jobs didn't like it then an entire industry and generation seem ready to throw out the oldest form of recording information - we'll just use silicon (or graphene) tablets instead of clay ones. I'm not arguing for buggy whips either; a stylus is a far more precise tool than a finger - the decision to abandon them is like giving up calculators for slide-rules (or pens for finger paint). While a slide rule can put a man on the moon, a calculator can do it better, faster, and cheaper (and if someone thinks calculators are more expensive than some stick with scratch marks, then they've never been shopping for a precision engineering slide rule which might be 6 feet in length).
...That said, in principle, it's something I'd deploy. If it wasn't barely tested, using EC (and having that be non-negotiable) and having hardly any upstream providers support it.
Why do you think they're only releasing it to minority markets at the moment? We could take the current stereotypes of the sorts of users who run the systems mentioned and do an analysis of which part of the client each is a good test bed for, but applying heuristics would probably be seen as an invitation for flaming. Other users can fill in the thread if they think it's a worthwhile discussion.
R.O.F.L. I wish I could mod this post. I salute you Sir, Darth, or whatever honored title you prefer.
Unless you move to the Pacific Northwest - they seceded right? Although isn't the date off, I thought that was later in a different future? Unless you're not talking about human augmentation and instead are referencing the popular misconceptions about the Mayan calendar... although in that case I think people who didn't wait for SP1 might be able to get Windows 8 with an early release before the end of time. Perhaps some clarification is in order, I think I want to answer to your point, but I can't find it.
I would suggest that there could be a huge market for tablet devices which utilize native handwriting recognition and run industry standard software* (Excel, Word, etc...). Multiply by 10 if said device also can handle remote desktop with any of the previous three versions of the OS.
Who'd want to run a blackberry or iphone while on the go when they can instead be at their desk's computer?
IMHO *Software synonyms: programs, executables, applications. Synonyms may be abbreviated in written (not spoken) English with a period such as: "prog.", "exe.", or "app."; truncated forms such as "app" designate the software as either grammatically incorrect or as an inherently ironic representation of a truncated element of software development - a collection of a few subroutines instead of a full suite.
I beg to differ
On the flip side everyone would be able to meet carbon footprint treaties; more easily for cultures who bury their dead than burning it though...
Oh, and with death rates likely much higher in the non-industrialized countries, the industrialized ones wouldn't have to worry about sharing resources with the up and coming whippersnappers. In fact, if you think it through, it's more likely that a disease like this (though it would cause massive economic damage) would actually strengthen the relative economic mastery of the industrialized nations over the less industrialized ones. So terrorists should take note that a weapon like this is rather short sided if they want to perturb the balance of power away from current industrialized states (identifiable as having lewd morals and a greater median net worth than the terrorist).
P.S. - It's worth a try convincing them to look at the long road right? Maybe the sort of people who contemplate killing off half the worlds population are just looking for a more reasonable option.
P.P.S. - If you are a terrorist like the sort mentioned in the P.S. you might want to contemplate economic superiority, technological superiority (put all that effort into science), or supporting the formation of democratic regions where your ideas can be publicly debated and made state policy when you have convinced the masses of your philosophies.
The first two Harper Hall books are actually a pretty self sufficient. The third is better understood within the context of the Dragonflight trilogy. I'd also say that the Harper Hall books probably classify as YA SF while a lot of the others are probably generic SF. I do agree with you in that even her generic SF are more likely to thrill younger readers, but they're probably enjoyable by anyone who partakes of the genera. McCaffrey story emphasis seemed to be more about people and plot rather than speculations about the deep impacts on society her worlds or technology would effect (as opposed to Brin who usually tells stories using people and plot, but uses them as a context for exploring the larger discussion - like Kiln People or Glory Season).
Have Spacesuit Will Travel is also a great introduction to Sci-Fi for any age. It's a bit more readable than Verne, but still has that old-time feel when you run across phrases along the lines of "slide rules were the greatest invention since girls." It also hits a lot of problems relevant to modern space exploration that most authors just assume technology has addressed the issue (such as thermal buildup in space) so if you give it to a young adult to read you might just encourage their science or engineering interests.
At first glance this argument may be a straw man (subbing in texting for email), but it's probably a legitimate substitution. Comments welcome.
How many people might die if I have failed eyesight or don't remember what a stop sign means and I get out on the highway, compared to the vast number of deaths and excessive carnage if I forget that SSTV runs at 240 lpm and turn on the box that does it for me and transmit a piccy?
The scary thing is that most states never recheck more than the eyesight. The knowledge exams seem to me more of a learn once and discard according to your location's enforcement protocols. And in this case, I'm pretty sure people do die because some idiot forgets corresponding lane changes, or can't remember which car at a 4 way stop gets the right of way...
There have got to be several bad horror stories related to this idea. "Grandpa's dead, but we can still hear him on the old radio..." or "While helping clear out Uncle Gerald's attic, a nasty old cuss, we switched on his radio and could listen to torment screams..."
"Goodnight golden path" is a particularly brilliant replacement for "Goodnight nobody." Although I think there should have been a "Goodnight Duncan Idaho. Goodnight betrayal jumping over Duncan Idaho" or something like that.
And that's what happens if kids get technology too early :)
I think this is more tragically a lesson in how a baby-killing statement only around for 12 years ('58 to '70) can persist for at least another 20 years (and more in some minority groups) because researchers tried to combat a logical sounding (but erroneous) statement: "babies on backs choke on vomit" with: "statistics show..." Visions of waking to find your baby dead in his or her own vomit summon a lot more staying power than some research papers on bulk trends among foreign babies. Once they finally woke up and made some serious efforts to tell parents to put the babies on their back or they'd suffocate in a small pocket of CO2, or smother themselves on their blanket, or any number of other (possibly incorrect) but terrifying images of walking in to find a dead child who had been perfectly healthy before taking a nap.
Some people say we need better education in this country. I agree, scientists need to be better educated on how to communicate what they learn into public knowledge.
Such as the potential danger for relying on a wavy green underline to tell you that a lot is two words rather than listening to the flesh-teachers who repeated that lesson for at least twelve years of publicly provided education?
No, common sense is just over rated. What people generally mean by the phrase is: the uncommon sense to see what is actually there combined with superior cogitation to nearly instantly identify a solution so elegant that it appears simple and understandable when pointed out to those with just average, or common, senses.
So, if common sense was replaced by the uncommon described above, we'd have a lot of elegant solutions to common problems.
NASA has lost the focus they used for their "moon shot." It's been long speculated (and shown on paper) that the Moon, or even Mars is quite doable for a budget containing several digits less than NASA routinely goes through in any given year. A few years back I attended a seminar given by Zubrin about Mars Direct where he highlighted a pretty neat method for getting people there and back as well as outlining some of the extra vulnerabilities science programs face with entrenchment when run by a bureaucracy (it was at a different federal research center and relevant;it wasn't NASA bashing - just NASA explaining).
Never even heard of the series (do I fail because I don't watch television?), but if it's related to Hiro Protagonist from Snow Crash I'd say it's fair game. If you can count zero experience with cyberpunk, then you don't really qualify in my book. (You pass if you caught the pun, or play on words, in the last sentence). You don't have to like it, but you should at least have tried it. After all, Gibson could give anyone a migraine at first inoculation, but Stephenson is a pretty good initial choice.
ps - Did anything of Stephenson's make it to the screen?
No, this is a different research group experimenting with some of the same stuff another research group tossed an article out about a few years back. That other group is known for doing weird Friday afternoon studies that have caught the attention of the fun scientists and boring scientists alike.
No, what's dumb is alleging that a single crystal ceramic has no significant differences than an amorphous powder of the same chemical compound.
Now perhaps you have unique knowledge of a new elemental aluminum allotrope, but the rest of us used our brains to figure out that "transparent aluminum" would require at the very least some alloying material and crystalline behavior.
Unless of course you're suggesting that Star Trek had no use for science fiction and relied instead on magic ;)
Places like the United States have moral superiority because they were isolationists and invented their own industrial revolution... Right?
Now imagine if we had to pay modern style IP violation penalties for our industrial revolution and derivative works...
You'd expect a few studies to come out with that result due to chance. ...
Perhaps - one in twenty is the worst case scenario for an incorrect conclusion though.
A properly done study will tell you what the chance is that they've come to the wrong conclusion. The typically minimum accepted chance of an incorrect conclusion is 5% among most scientific literature - some fields are far more stringent. If you can't meet that margin you try physical ways of improving your resolution (power to detect: use a larger population, reduce the measurement noise, etc...) and if you still can't show that the group on the left is different than the one on the right you start to play with the math (transform the data and run your stats on that (i.e. log)). Finally, if the first two don't work you can still try to analyze for variance based on ranks & etc... Your conclusions can't be as strong, but you can still say that your conclusion is more than just a gut reaction to your data.
The statistical methods should be mentioned in the paper, or the editor wasn't doing his or her job. Sometimes a result is too obvious to be worth going through the stats (like when the error bars are smaller than the data points and each data point is at least a dozen standard deviations from the next), but even then the author should at least mentioned how he calculated the error bars (they're not always the Excel function "StDev," you've got standard deviation for the population vs group, standard error (which is my preference), generic standard deviations, etc...). I'll skip the entire discussion between Type I and Type II error.
So the point is, yes you should know whether the results of that study were due to random chance - or at least the degree to which random chance could have given that result.
Don't forget cases in which a company (e.g. NVIDIA) settled with Rambus.
The courts ruled that there was an infringement, but the deal to use the technology after that wasn't court mediated. That could mean a reversal in the patent status won't automatically even give valid justification for a refund - it'll depend on the settlement terms. If it's written such that one party is paying for technical expertise, design parameters, surcharge per unit installed, or etc... it could be pretty murky.
For example, if someone promised to give me a penny for every breath they took, even if I don't own their air, I should still be able to collect on that (of course it's again murky if I had previously convinced them I owned the air, or I would poison it if they didn't pay, ...). Probably the most common version of this sort of agreement that I run across is when some kid comes up to me and asks for $0.25 to go toward cancer research fundraiser personnel for every lap he walks on the high school track.
Unless you're just going off of the initial information gleaned from the title to determine if the rest is worth reading. (i.e. the classic science literature parsing strategy: read the title, the abstract, the conclusion, and occasionally the rest of the paper...). My first impression was perhaps one of the international space station workers did a jumper and someone else took pics. It's just a fraction of a second, but sometimes the brain has to catch up to itself - Google not needed.
I think the parent was commenting more about the degree of clarity and efficiency with which this title conveyed information about the content of the article summarized and posted. Particularly in regards to an internationally read website in reference to some backwater gathering in the desert (for global events 50 kilo-persons isn't all that much after all - how many sports teams do that on a semi-regular basis?). It wouldn't have been that hard for an editor to add one word to the title: "Satellite Captures Burning Man [Festival] From Space." Of course it wouldn't have been anywhere as much fun :)