Cool idea, lots of problems for Google to work on. I live in PDX, so I checked out going from my house to work. Note that these are just my initial impressions: some of them may be wrong, but if so I doubt I'm more confused than many other potential users.
It really seems to want a comma between the city and state. Annoying, but livable.
It doesn't seem to take a fractional time like 7:30AM on the search line in any syntax I could figure out. You have to enter it in the "edit time" box. Annoying, but livable.
In spite of the fact that it lists my route through "Tualatin Park & Ride", I couldn't get it to take this place name as input in any form I could figure out. Not very livable, especially since...
Not much useful information is displayed by clicking on things. No addresses of or information about bus stops, no schedules for bus routes, etc.
Can't mix car and public transit segments in any obvious way?? Unlivable. In Portland, you don't walk to a bus stop, you drive to a Park & Ride.
Doesn't seem to do much subsumption. You can often start earlier and end up on the same bus at the end; I always want to leave as late as possible.
Can't specify segments that you definitely want to be part of the route---of course you can't with any map interface I'm aware of either, which has always driven me nuts.
Haven't checked, but I'm pretty darn sure there's a bus stop nearer my house than the one this thing thinks is closest.
Given what I'm paying for the service, I guess I can't complain. But I doubt I'll start using it until most of the above is addressed somehow.
Oh, and BTW, if you are a student at Marquette who has not yet crossed the administration, you might want to make an exit plan now, before it happens. And if you are considering Marquette, based on this story I'd recommend avoiding it. In my 20+ years of experience with a variety of universities at a variety of levels, I've found that those that treat problem students badly are usually fully prepared to treat any student badly if it serves their interests.
After being jerked around by my Department head at a largeish US research university my freshman year (around 1983) I decided that one year of that was enough, and left the school. Today, I couldn't be happier about the decision. I got a much better education, and had a much better time, than if I'd stayed---ended up becoming a college professor, in fact. YMMV, of course, but don't let inertia lock you into a potentially bad situation. There's lots of fine US colleges.
The key property DDT lacks is that it doesn't break down to environmentally harmless stuff in a reasonable amount of time under normal conditions. You don't want any weird organic accumulating in animal tissues over long periods; too many things can go wrong. And you don't want DDT killing beneficial insects long after the mosquito threat has passed.
Of course, the cynic in me suggests that the other reason DDT's persistence is viewed as bad is that it means the chemical companies will put themselves out of a market. Stuff that breaks down quickly is stuff that has to be replaced quickly.
The thing is, if you can't build an amplifier that's quite linear to 500KHz in 2005, you're doing it wrong somehow (or just being fairly cheap:-). That gives you plenty of headroom in frequency space. And again, you're talking about the total THD+N from the amp being 20-30 dB down from the speakers; no matter where in the spectrum you put that energy, it's likely to be comparatively unnoticeable.
The speaker distortion comes from goofy nonlinearities that, while open loop, are really hard to minimize. Perhaps the most significant is that the speakers are driven open loop; inertia and friction in the driver isn't compensated for well by open-loop control of coil current. Folks have messed with things like laser measurement of driver position to provide feedback. I've heard claims it helps a lot, but for some reason even high-end audiophile speakers don't seem to do it.
You are definitely right about speaker harmonics being LF, and thus less objectionable. The big concern with audiophile speakers seems to be subwoofers, which may have 10% THD+N (!), but who cares, since almost all the energy is down where we can't tell sounds apart anyhow.
My vague "common knowledge" recollection is that speakers typically range between 0.5% and 2% THD+N, with good reference headphones getting down to the 0.1% range. With modern (transistor:-) electronics, 0.01% THD+N for the rest of the system is readily achievable.
Googling around for something to back up my recollections:-), I found this piece of anecdotal evidence: THD+N in the 0.3% and up range for moderate frequencies from $3000 bookshelf speakers. Note also, however, that speaker THD tends to be measured at an absurdly loud 90dBm speaker output: numbers at a more realistic (but still loud) 70dBm level will be better, although I'm not sure by how much. I didn't spot any THD measurements for reference headphones offhand. I have no idea how much better a $40,000 speaker can be, but generally these kinds of things asymptote...
Somebody should probably find some authoritative sources to back me up or refute me. I'm out of time for it now, sorry.
It's quite straightforward to measure THD with an oscilloscope and about $15 worth of electronics.
THD is a conservative measurement of audio fidelity. It measures a wide range of artifacts of nonlinearity of audio systems. Quite a lot of THD can be masked (from those of us with normal hearing); conversely, however, a system with low THD is likely to be a good system. The other obvious measurement to make is intermodulation distortion (IMD). This is an even easier measurement to make on an oscilloscope, and reveals some problems that THD measurement cannot.
The big farce in all of this is that speakers (and even reference headphones) are a disaster. The distortion introduced in turning electrical currents into sound waves dwarfs anything modern electronics will do to the signal.
What would be really cool is if the crew of one of these shows was smart/interested enough to actually produce "enhanced" camera shots as they would look coming out of one of these experimental image reconstruction algorithms. You know, crazy mis-prediction artifacts, blocking, pseudocolor, hokey text overlays. Heck, go nuts and have the reconstructed license plate have a character that could be an 8 (40%) or a B (60%).
Doing this would cost the producers almost nothing, greatly increase the versimilitude of the show, and make us geeks feel good. I won't hold my breath.
Roedy Green's fine How To Write Unmaintainable Code has been widely cited all over the web since its original publication in 1997. Surely at least a mention of the author and date of the article could have made the front page, so that those of us who've already seen it multiple times could know to skip it?
The Linux Format folks really need to change the default font for their webpages, which appears to be Tahoma. I just spent two minutes of my life trying to figure out what a "dustering filesystem" is. Found a Googlewhack, anyhow.
Re:Leave them to their jobs as patent clerks.
on
The Prodigy Puzzle
·
· Score: 2, Funny
True brilliance is (by definition) extraordinarily rare. Thus, it is difficult to exclude the possibility that the majority of brilliant folks we see are those with both brilliance and the ability to overcome adversity, while many other more delicate geniuses wither on the vine. My experience with life has been that whatever adversity doesn't kill me nonetheless makes me weaker. Seems to me that the guy famous for reporting the opposite experience is widely considered to have been mentally ill.
Re: I'm really really smart
on
The Prodigy Puzzle
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
First off, IQ is quite poorly defined above about 125, because the set of 15 or 20 skills that make up the IQ spectrum become increasingly uncorrelated. I won't say what my IQ is, but let's just say that that my score on a test of verbal IQ is way different than on a mathematical test, and way way different than on a test of visual reasoning. So I'm not really buying your distinction (or Mensa's for that matter) between 99th percentile IQs and 99.9th percentile IQs. At any rate, if you quote your IQ as "151", I think you need to go examine some material on significant digits: it's an easy concept, and someone like you should get it right off.
Second, if you believe that "Coming up with good ideas for projects and entertaining yourself have [sic] very very ["Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very'; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be." --Mark Twain] little to do with intelligence," I think you probably are overestimating your own intelligence (perhaps with professional help). All of the brightest people I've known (and I've known some scarily bright ones) are full of this kind of creativity and energy.
One thing you said that did resonate with me, though, is the idea that it might be better to help gifted students develop coping skills for their unique societal situation rather than simply help them further develop their intellectual capabilities (which they can usually do fine on their own anyhow). My biggest problem in childhood was mild episodic depression resulting from getting taunted and beat up a lot and excluded from the society of my peers. Teaching me basic psychology and sociology to help me handle relations with my peers, together with effective self-defense for when that other stuff didn't work:-), might have been a vast improvement for me. I don't know.
Certainly providing a physically and socially safe school environment is at least as important to gifted kids as to the general populace. I find it amazing that many parents put up with sending their kids to schools that can't even guarantee simple safety from physical brutality. Fortunately, my boy's public school seems to be first rate in this regard so far. I'm having huge fun watching this immensely gifted kid learn like crazy and really enjoying himself.
Phil Foglio's a very talented and professional artist, and I absolutely hate his idiomatic art style, to the point where I try not to look at his illustrations in print work. So, while I'd like to like Girl Genius, it just isn't the comic for me.
Perhaps it's obvious, perhaps it's off-topic, but in any case...thanks much for compress. That thing was truly cool contribution to the community. Can't say I missed pack for even a minute.
In particular, Voice Stress Analysis appears to be a totalfantasy. Don't believe it? Get some VSA freeware and run some double-blind experiments yourself.
If you want to try monitoring your high-bandwidth campus network let me recommend our open source solution, Ourmon. We've been using it for several years with good results.
"In the original paper, published by the journal Science last year, the scientists said the eggs all came from anonymous donors."
...and there is the key fact everyone seems to be missing. Lying about your data is the cardinal sin of experimental science. Regardless of the reasons, if you're caught lying about your data in a paper in Science, expect to be shunned by the respectable scientific community.
That'll show 'em! Friend, step away from your television, take your automobile to the nearest aeroplane portal, and don't forget to stop at the automatic teller machine (did you remember your personal identification number?) We need to join Master SuperBanana in this grand protest. Don't worry, I've sent him electronic mail to let him know you're coming.
Slashdot Mirror
Cool idea, lots of problems for Google to work on. I live in PDX, so I checked out going from my house to work. Note that these are just my initial impressions: some of them may be wrong, but if so I doubt I'm more confused than many other potential users.
Given what I'm paying for the service, I guess I can't complain. But I doubt I'll start using it until most of the above is addressed somehow.
Oh, and BTW, if you are a student at Marquette who has not yet crossed the administration, you might want to make an exit plan now, before it happens. And if you are considering Marquette, based on this story I'd recommend avoiding it. In my 20+ years of experience with a variety of universities at a variety of levels, I've found that those that treat problem students badly are usually fully prepared to treat any student badly if it serves their interests.
After being jerked around by my Department head at a largeish US research university my freshman year (around 1983) I decided that one year of that was enough, and left the school. Today, I couldn't be happier about the decision. I got a much better education, and had a much better time, than if I'd stayed---ended up becoming a college professor, in fact. YMMV, of course, but don't let inertia lock you into a potentially bad situation. There's lots of fine US colleges.
The key property DDT lacks is that it doesn't break down to environmentally harmless stuff in a reasonable amount of time under normal conditions. You don't want any weird organic accumulating in animal tissues over long periods; too many things can go wrong. And you don't want DDT killing beneficial insects long after the mosquito threat has passed.
Of course, the cynic in me suggests that the other reason DDT's persistence is viewed as bad is that it means the chemical companies will put themselves out of a market. Stuff that breaks down quickly is stuff that has to be replaced quickly.
The thing is, if you can't build an amplifier that's quite linear to 500KHz in 2005, you're doing it wrong somehow (or just being fairly cheap :-). That gives you plenty of headroom in frequency space. And again, you're talking about the total THD+N from the amp being 20-30 dB down from the speakers; no matter where in the spectrum you put that energy, it's likely to be comparatively unnoticeable.
The speaker distortion comes from goofy nonlinearities that, while open loop, are really hard to minimize. Perhaps the most significant is that the speakers are driven open loop; inertia and friction in the driver isn't compensated for well by open-loop control of coil current. Folks have messed with things like laser measurement of driver position to provide feedback. I've heard claims it helps a lot, but for some reason even high-end audiophile speakers don't seem to do it.
You are definitely right about speaker harmonics being LF, and thus less objectionable. The big concern with audiophile speakers seems to be subwoofers, which may have 10% THD+N (!), but who cares, since almost all the energy is down where we can't tell sounds apart anyhow.
And now we're definitely off topic. :-)
(We're pretty far off topic here, but oh well.)
My vague "common knowledge" recollection is that speakers typically range between 0.5% and 2% THD+N, with good reference headphones getting down to the 0.1% range. With modern (transistor :-) electronics, 0.01% THD+N for the rest of the system is readily achievable.
Googling around for something to back up my recollections :-), I found this piece of anecdotal evidence: THD+N in the 0.3% and up range for moderate frequencies from $3000 bookshelf speakers. Note also, however, that speaker THD tends to be measured at an absurdly loud 90dBm speaker output: numbers at a more realistic (but still loud) 70dBm level will be better, although I'm not sure by how much. I didn't spot any THD measurements for reference headphones offhand. I have no idea how much better a $40,000 speaker can be, but generally these kinds of things asymptote...
Somebody should probably find some authoritative sources to back me up or refute me. I'm out of time for it now, sorry.
Yes. It was much better than Cats. I want to see it again and again.
Nope. You need to meet at least 3 of the criteria to even score marginally.
It's quite straightforward to measure THD with an oscilloscope and about $15 worth of electronics.
THD is a conservative measurement of audio fidelity. It measures a wide range of artifacts of nonlinearity of audio systems. Quite a lot of THD can be masked (from those of us with normal hearing); conversely, however, a system with low THD is likely to be a good system. The other obvious measurement to make is intermodulation distortion (IMD). This is an even easier measurement to make on an oscilloscope, and reveals some problems that THD measurement cannot.
The big farce in all of this is that speakers (and even reference headphones) are a disaster. The distortion introduced in turning electrical currents into sound waves dwarfs anything modern electronics will do to the signal.
Excellent!
What would be really cool is if the crew of one of these shows was smart/interested enough to actually produce "enhanced" camera shots as they would look coming out of one of these experimental image reconstruction algorithms. You know, crazy mis-prediction artifacts, blocking, pseudocolor, hokey text overlays. Heck, go nuts and have the reconstructed license plate have a character that could be an 8 (40%) or a B (60%).
Doing this would cost the producers almost nothing, greatly increase the versimilitude of the show, and make us geeks feel good. I won't hold my breath.
Roedy Green's fine How To Write Unmaintainable Code has been widely cited all over the web since its original publication in 1997. Surely at least a mention of the author and date of the article could have made the front page, so that those of us who've already seen it multiple times could know to skip it?
The Linux Format folks really need to change the default font for their webpages, which appears to be Tahoma. I just spent two minutes of my life trying to figure out what a "dustering filesystem" is. Found a Googlewhack, anyhow.
True brilliance is (by definition) extraordinarily rare. Thus, it is difficult to exclude the possibility that the majority of brilliant folks we see are those with both brilliance and the ability to overcome adversity, while many other more delicate geniuses wither on the vine. My experience with life has been that whatever adversity doesn't kill me nonetheless makes me weaker. Seems to me that the guy famous for reporting the opposite experience is widely considered to have been mentally ill.
First off, IQ is quite poorly defined above about 125, because the set of 15 or 20 skills that make up the IQ spectrum become increasingly uncorrelated. I won't say what my IQ is, but let's just say that that my score on a test of verbal IQ is way different than on a mathematical test, and way way different than on a test of visual reasoning. So I'm not really buying your distinction (or Mensa's for that matter) between 99th percentile IQs and 99.9th percentile IQs. At any rate, if you quote your IQ as "151", I think you need to go examine some material on significant digits: it's an easy concept, and someone like you should get it right off.
Second, if you believe that "Coming up with good ideas for projects and entertaining yourself have [sic] very very ["Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very'; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be." --Mark Twain] little to do with intelligence," I think you probably are overestimating your own intelligence (perhaps with professional help). All of the brightest people I've known (and I've known some scarily bright ones) are full of this kind of creativity and energy.
One thing you said that did resonate with me, though, is the idea that it might be better to help gifted students develop coping skills for their unique societal situation rather than simply help them further develop their intellectual capabilities (which they can usually do fine on their own anyhow). My biggest problem in childhood was mild episodic depression resulting from getting taunted and beat up a lot and excluded from the society of my peers. Teaching me basic psychology and sociology to help me handle relations with my peers, together with effective self-defense for when that other stuff didn't work :-), might have been a vast improvement for me. I don't know.
Certainly providing a physically and socially safe school environment is at least as important to gifted kids as to the general populace. I find it amazing that many parents put up with sending their kids to schools that can't even guarantee simple safety from physical brutality. Fortunately, my boy's public school seems to be first rate in this regard so far. I'm having huge fun watching this immensely gifted kid learn like crazy and really enjoying himself.
For a first post.
"All we can do is hope that someone will recopy the files periodically."
Yes, this is a big worry. I can't even remember the last time I heard of anyone duplicating and storing audio data.
Phil Foglio's a very talented and professional artist, and I absolutely hate his idiomatic art style, to the point where I try not to look at his illustrations in print work. So, while I'd like to like Girl Genius, it just isn't the comic for me.
...film now.
This is /., friend. http://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/
Perhaps it's obvious, perhaps it's off-topic, but in any case...thanks much for compress. That thing was truly cool contribution to the community. Can't say I missed pack for even a minute.
In particular, Voice Stress Analysis appears to be a total fantasy. Don't believe it? Get some VSA freeware and run some double-blind experiments yourself.
If you want to try monitoring your high-bandwidth campus network let me recommend our open source solution, Ourmon. We've been using it for several years with good results.
"In the original paper, published by the journal Science last year, the scientists said the eggs all came from anonymous donors."
...and there is the key fact everyone seems to be missing. Lying about your data is the cardinal sin of experimental science. Regardless of the reasons, if you're caught lying about your data in a paper in Science, expect to be shunned by the respectable scientific community.
Keith Packard, ahead of his time as usual, demonstrates an important step in this direction.
"(I refuse to call them blogs)"
That'll show 'em! Friend, step away from your television, take your automobile to the nearest aeroplane portal, and don't forget to stop at the automatic teller machine (did you remember your personal identification number?) We need to join Master SuperBanana in this grand protest. Don't worry, I've sent him electronic mail to let him know you're coming.