Sure. But it's a big - no, huge - step from taking a whack at something and actually publishing it.
Absolutely. But there has been a recent history with the Poincare Conjecture of even big names rushing to publish (albeit promising) misses, and one wonders whether the
prize money adds to the usual rush for priority that you
see in any competitive field. I think even Wiles was in some sense racing against his 40th birthday to prove FLT, since that is the informal-but-de facto limit for the Fields Medal. Which he didn't win, as it turns out (mathematicians are *tough*:-)).
It is just very rare that professionals publish findings if they don't take them seriously themselves.
OK, so I now agree I was needlessly harsh in my words
about these authors. I do have a hunch that they thought they were close if not there, but they clearly either felt time pressure of some sort (which is why their oritginal was full of typos and used non-standard notations), or they were at least a bit casual about their submission, possibly reasoning that if it really did prove to be promising, that they could get stuff ironed out during the review.
In any of the soft sciencies, that could happen, and one could stand a chance of getting away with it. But there's no fooling the mathematical community. Either you have proof or you don't.
OK, so my degree is in Psychology, and I know for sure that some marginal or under-challenged stuff gets out
into the literature, but for the *most* part, stuff like that then just lies there fairly harmlessly and uselessly, going uncited and unread, because nobody finds it interesting enough to care one way or another. The more interesting or controversial stuff, though, is much more thoroughly
examined. I would prefer myself if others in the field would be a bit more...circumspect about publishing some things, but I don't think you really get too far in any decent-sized and respected community in psych by just
cranking out noise.
I guess I just don't see what you're saying here. Is it 1) These researchers publish a proof that they believe is incorrect, and hope nobody will notice or 2) These researchers publish a proof that they believe is correct, but they are so incompetent that this is very unlikely to be the case (in fact, so unlikely it makes your BS meter run at 11). To me, neither 1) or 2) seem to obviously be the case here.
Mostly number 2. As a psychologist (although not really *that* kind of psychologist) I am always very impressed at people's ability to engage in self-deception and magical thinking, and their frequent inability to recognize their own limitations (you've seen some of me doing that in this thread, as it turns out). What we have here is a probably sincere but possibly somewhat flakey physicist whose work doesn't really carry much weight in his own field who then finds a collaborator and publishes an idiosyncratic paper on a topic where there just happens to be a large cash prize available that is well outside his area of expertise. This does not inspire confidence. Now
the point here is that we know that every attempt so far to prove this has met with utter failure, that this attempt only met with brief notice (basically negative) in the internet community as a preprint. And the last point:
In your first post you use as authorative a quote which suggests this proof hasn't received serious attention yet. This is mildly contradictory.
Ah, now that's just a misunderstanding that I did little to clarify. My take on the "graveyard of RH papers" page is not that it is pointing to possibly very worthy work (not universally true since it points to the work of Archimedes Plutonium), but to papers that likely or certainly have flaws of the type that high level math students might be able to detect and elucidate as part of their educational process. Context is everything here. The page that links to the one I quoted is a "Curiosities" page that even mentions silly discussions on Slashdot about the Riemann Hypothesis.
The Riemann Hypothesis page itself
explicitly mentions a recent rejoinder to Castro's earlier proof of RH, suggesting that the technique is flawed, and frankly doubtful that it can be fixed. I do thank you for the information that some novel approaches to the problem coming from physics are taken at least a bit seriously.
I agree that this is now going in circles, but my real point was that a months old pre-print using an approach that was previously panned, from an author who is not well-respected in his major field, using notation that the mathtematicians trying to read it thought was weird, whose only notice outside 37 posts of glory on sci.math is from the popular press (sorry to have mistaken the prestige of the newspaper) is not likely to be correct, and that the editors of slashdot might consider having a mathematician filter stories about math since I do think it is beyond their skills to do a good job.
While I have no doubt that SvD is of singular value to almost everybody (especially for its largest entries on the diagonal), the fact is that it comes from Sweden makes it orthogonal to our concerns. (Sorry about that...)
I don't understand what you mean by this, or if you are even being serious.
I wasn't. It was a joke. A really bad joke. Sorry about that.:-)
If a newspaper is respected, generally trustworthy and read by a large amount of people on a daily basis, where is happens to be located should of course be of no relevance.
It isn't, except that it is. The problem I have here is with accepting "generally trustworthy" as a blanket statement that applies equally to things we know newspapers are usually pretty good at (politics, current issues, scandals, crimes, and the like) and areas where we (or at least I) do not have high confidence in their abilities. High-level mathematics clearly falls into the second category; I am not certain I would trust *any* newspaper account of
this. Fort that matter, I can get specific here. The translation of the article you pointed us to includes this:
One of these problems was the Riemann Hypothesis, and despite great efforts it has remained unsolved. But in November 2002 Carlos Castro from Clark Atlanta University, Atlanta, USA, and Jorge Mahecha from the University of Antioquia, Medellin, Columbia, offered a solution.
Now, the problem here is that some random author or another submitting a paper that claims to solve an important math problem like this is really not newsworthy. It really does happen almost all of the time, and yet the writer of this story seems to be innocent of this fact. Indeed, if the author had asked for comment or advice from any mathematician about this particular attempt, I'm sure the answer would have been
"we see five or six of these a year". Actually, the fact that this is a *good* newspaper makes the point even more strongly: despite their expertise, they really didn't know how to evaluate this as a news story. That's the problem.
True enough, but see below, and the fact that if *I* had a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis, I probably wouldn't submit it to the high energy physics and "general math" sections of xarchiv.
Recently, as in the last couple of years, the most promising contributions to RH related stuff has come from high energy physics, and many people, both in math and in physics, believe that this is the approach that will eventually bear fruit.
OK, now that's interesting, and I did not in fact know that.
And there is no question that new lines of attack can come from unusual places. I do feel that these new lines often offer themselves up in somewhat more propitious
circumstances. So if a high energy physicicst had teamed up with an important number theorist to do the paper, and it was based on the kind of insight that is taken for granted in one community but not the other (e.g., "interesting; in our work we rewrite the integral *this* way
and then prove these bounds...")
Unfortunately, the Clay Math Prize has kind of made proving the Riemann Hypothesis a "make-money-fast" scheme.
Only for amateurs. But those have been trying to prove it, as well as Fermat's last theorem, Goldbach's conjecture, the twin prime conjecture etc. for a long time already. Serious researchers, on the other hand, very rarely put their reputation at stake if they don't believe they have something of real value. They know flaws will be detected, and they know that they would never win any prize with an unsound proof.
Well, the term "amateur" is always a relative thing. So it would be easy to see why a non-famous high energy physicist might spend a lot more time on something like RH after the prize money is publicized given that the chances of hitting on this or on any round of funding these days in physics might be the same lottery odds.:-( So a detectable number of physicists entered the field of cognitive neuroscience when the SSC went down, not necessarily for the big bucks, but to try and work on a challenging problem where there was some hope of funding. Results were mixed.
Plus, I can report that a couple of definitely professional mathematicians I have met do (prviately) admit that the Clay Prize money has actually attracted their attention to the prize problems, if only just to take a brief whack at them and see if anything new falls into place.
But, like I said (in the write up, even), there is a clear possibility that this isn't the real thing. I only think you're overstating your case.
I have pretty high confidence that the current attempt has basically already joined all of the other failed attempts.
There are so many of these, and this does share many disturbing similarities with them. Thanks for your comments, though; I really had no idea that high energy physics had any implications for RH until I read your post.
It looks as if you haven't read the thread you pointed us to.
Now, I really did. My favorite quote from it is the part
where Aaron Bergman notes, "I also hope that math people realize that us physicists only read
Castro's papers for humor purposes."
The mathematicians (and abashed physicists) seem surprised by various techniques and idioms in the proof, but after some good-faith research, they find supporting documentation which they accept.
That's not what I see. What I see is that they figure out among themselves that some really non-standard usages of mathematical terminology happen in physics, and that
whether you use "ln" or "log" to refer to the notion of a natural log might reflect where you went to school or what calculator you used...idle chit-chat, really.
And the "clincher" that you cite is a plea for manpower to analyze some possible proofs that will otherwise go unanalyzed, as the rest of the math community is also slavish to the idea of "if it's true, why hasn't it already been proven".
No, my "clincher" would be that a link to this appears on the same page as work by the illlustrious Archimedes Plutonium.
Really, you just don't know how damning this is, do you?
1. SvD isn't an "obscure" Swedish newspaper. It's the biggest, counting readers in if not millions so at least hundreds of thousands.
While I have no doubt that SvD is of singular value to
almost everybody (especially for its largest entries
on the diagonal), the fact is that it comes from Sweden makes it orthogonal to our concerns. (Sorry about that...)
Here in the US, you have to understand that unless you
share a border with Iraq, we just don't have time to be
interested in you these days.:-)
2. That the proof hasn't been verified yet doesn't mean it can't be correct.
True enough, but see below, and the fact that if *I* had a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis, I probably wouldn't submit it to the high energy physics and "general math" sections of xarchiv.
3. The sci.math discussion doesn't really say anything about the validity of the proof, only that, as you say, the paper seems to not have been proof-read very well, etc.
Actually, the discussion basically says that nobody could read the thing and that it was chock full of typos. Once
again, if I had a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis, I would
probably make very certain that it was free of such interest-busting material. A mathematician can feel free to correct me, but I am assuming that while raw papers (especially from non-native speakers of the language the paper is submitted in) can be tough to get through, you
usually *do* detect the high quality of the real work at
some point pretty early on, and if you don't, you assume
the worst.
In the thread I referenced, a physicist chimed in with the observation that one of the co-authors (Castro) was not
taken seriously in his own field of physics, which makes
it even less plausible that the math in this paper would
be new and inspiriational.
But, I agree that in essence you have reasonable complaints. BS meter at 11 is quite high, though. Mine is at about 5. 11 is reserved for make-money-fast schemes and herbal viagra.
Unfortunately, the Clay Math Prize has kind of made proving the Riemann Hypothesis a "make-money-fast" scheme.:-)
Or to put it another way, here's the plan of attack I believe the authors had:
Write an incomprehensible paper on the Riemann Hypothesis and sling it up onto the xarchiv.
I know the editors of this site mean well, but what
we have here is a link to a site that defines the
Riemann Hypothesis in very abstract terms,
a link to a LANL preprint from two completely unknown researchers deposited there in November 2002, and a link to an obscure Swedish newspaper from almost two weeks ago, and no other supporting material. So my BS meter is running at 5.
The odds that "this is the one!" given that pedigree would seem to be really tiny. But the clincher for me is the following web page dedicated to would-be proofs of the Riemnann Hypothesis whose important text is (and I quote):
If you are a university mathematics lecturer who teaches analytic number theory, you might want to consider setting your students the task of deconstructing the more serious of these. They may otherwise never be given any serious attention, which would be a shame.
And the Castro and Mahecha preprint (and another grandiosely titled preprint by Mahecha) is linked to from there. Now my BS meter is running at about 9. So now
I check for messages abou this at deja.com in the sci.math group.
Read the thread yourself; it's pretty entertaining.
So, with my BS meter running at 11, the work having been submitted for coming up on 6 months, and no indication whatsoever that this is real, I suggest it is false.
And I also suggest that Slashdot might wish to consider
contacting a real mathematician to filter their potential
stories on mathematics, since I can't tell you the last time one of these "is X finally proven?" stories has panned out.
Next stop is to see if the latest Chimera is worthwhile.
And the brief answer is, "Yes it is, but Safari
is faster in some areas." So if I were running a recent Chimera nightly, I'd be happier with the speed than with Mozilla or older versions of Chimera, and MSIE just doesn't even rate anymore.
One decisive advantage for Safari is that it is a Cocoa app, so I don't have to do anything to get emacs-style editing keys in forms like the one I'm
typing in. Now that I know Safari Beta 62 has
tabs, I really wonder whether Chimera will be able to keep this a fair race for much longer.
Either way, I think the "speed and goodness of web-browsing" point that the reviewer feels now favors Windows will be completely moot by the summer solstice.
Interesting; guess I should exercise my cable modem tonight then.:-) Now the question is, is it "really fast like Safari" fast or just "noticeably faster than 1.2" fast? Guess I'll have to find out.
And the answer is, I didn't notice it as being that much
faster than Mozilla 1.2, and it is consistently 50% slower
than Safari in rendering pages I care about (e.g., Slashdot,
w3c.org stuff). The one killer feature it has that Safari has
is "type ahead to links on the web page".
Next stop is to see if the latest Chimera is worthwhile.
The new build of Mozilla (1.3b) uses Mach-O binaries instead of CFM. This makes it a hell of a lot faster at the expense of no longer working in OS9.
I now use Mozilla as my main browser on a 500Mhz iBook. It's fast.
Interesting; guess I should exercise my cable modem tonight then.:-) Now the question is, is it "really fast like Safari" fast or just "noticeably faster than 1.2" fast? Guess I'll have to find out.
Yes he did, on page 3 [techtv.com] of the article.
But, alas, he mentioned that Chimera had hung up.
More seriously, there *is* a point here about the slowness
of browsing on an iBook with either the stock MSIE or
Mozilla, compared to what you can do with MSIE on even a cheap WinTel notebook. That's why Chimera was started and why Safari will probably take over the Mac world. Unfortunately
for him, most of his review time was with the earlier betas
of Safari, which I suspect did unexpectedly quit more frequently
than one would like. (So, for example, if you go to a lot of sites
that are like devcenter.netscape.com, you could rapidly get annoyed.)
Yeah, the iBook is using a G3. Why didn't you try out a Powerbook? Or an iMac/eMac/G4 tower? And isn't Apple due to move to a new PPC chip this year anyway?
Well, there is an issue of some "bad timing" here. From what it sounds like from his review, what he really wanted to do was pick up a review unit today that just happened to be a 12" Powerbook with the latest Safari Beta on it. He then installs Virtual PC, installs his iNews thingie, and completely goes to
town (since now his video-editing stuff will also be much faster).
But note that I think the comment about waiting until Apple moves to a faster PPC late this year is a bit of a problem. If the question being asked is "should I switch today?" the answer should not be "well, it will all be faster in a year" if in fact there
is a machine that fits your needs right now. And if you're somebody who wanted an iBook formfactor notebook that you could use to edit video and run an oddball PC program, then
you're *golden* right now. But he started in December, so I can't gripe too much about his choice of machine.
OK, so this was a strange little review. As best as I could tell, the system performed flawlessly, and better in fact (by implication) than his Windows machines, but then he whined about precisely 3 things about his set-up that weren't good for him.
The guy borrowed and used an iBook (=slowest machine in the Mac line-up), then talked about how the G4 doesn't cut it, speed-wise. Especially for video editing. Does anybody else see something wrong with this picture?
His entire on-line work-life depends on a bizzaro application that I'll bet 95% of the world has never even heard of that is PC only. Unsurprisingly, it won't run on his Mac, and that's a problem.
He doesn't like the browser situation, which is fair enough,
but then reports on experiences that I think I can safely say are
somewhat atypical. So Chimera was never tops on my "force quit" list, Safari is and was very impressive (and not "unstable even for a beta") and he is apparently the only person I know who can't get Preview or Acrobat to start-up automatically for PDF files from the browser. (For that matter, he seems to think that if Acrobat is running inside a browser window, that it doesn't download the document?)
Another oddity in this review was that the things that went
well with the platform usually only barely deserved mention.
His evaluation model had Airport built-in, and the iBook
pretty much is the ideal wireless notebook. But
this apparently wasn't worthy of mention. Another awesome feature of Apple laptops is the "instant wake-up" upon opening thing. Again, no mention. I guess I can't blame him for not
worshipping Rendezvous since he only had the one Mac to play with, but even still...
I am glad he noticed that iTunes rules, though. But then puzzled that he thought AppleWorks was so great when it's just...well, Appleworks. In summary, this article is not worth
bringing down their server over.:-)
I think that you are missing one basic point. Most "human intelligence" is also a "trying to scan the system". Not all, but most. The remainder is the part that coordinates the scams, and figures out which one to use. And the tiny part that tries to figure out new scams.
Actually, I am happy to accept the point almost exactly
as stated, as long as "human intelligence" means something more like "aspects of intelligence unique to humans". I think part of the confusion comes from the fact that "intelligence" is a very loaded word; in the field of AI, I think it is used interchangably for "any cognitive phenomena", while in many other places, it means something more high falutin'.
Now, the reason why "scamming the system" is such a neat
definition of the goal of intelligent behavior is that it predicts a lot of the great abilities we have evolved over time and develop during our lives. Quite obviously in this context, the notion of a "theory of mind". Speaking of which, though, I'd better stop typing this now or there's no way I'll be able to get to class on time and deliver what I hope will be a coherent lecture on the retina.:-)
I have the distinct feeling that "worthy" AI objectives are defined by the AI community as "those things we think we can do reasonably well at the moment."
Not hardly. As it turns out, one of the more frustrating
aspects of AI is that once some particular computation
that would appear to be correlated with intelligence
can be performed, then it invariably doesn't count as AI
anymore. So there are lots of practical systems out there
today that can prove theorems, do symbolic algebra, play chess better than 99.999% of all people, a whole bunch of
stuff. But hardly any of this strikes us as AI anymore. On the other hand, there are lots of
horribly difficult problems out there whose solutions we
really can't expect to get at within 10 years, and those
are all "good" AI problems. Now, one thing that makes them good problems is that we know they contain many different thesis-sized projects that correspond to sub-goals for the "real" problem, and because it is possible
that knocking off some of these subgoals could yield some real insights.
Now the interesting thing to notice here is that Turing
was a *very* smart guy, and any program that successfully passes the strong version of the Turing Test has almost by definition solved every hard problem that
confronts AI, and all of the subproblems that compose
those problems, and... It's a truly gargantuan task, and one where even your most advanced programs are almost guaranteed to look really bad in competition.
Having said that, I do still think there is some point in holding contests like the Loebner, not for what they will tell us about the state of how fast AI is progressing, but
because the programmers who compete at this point really are trying to scam the system and "get away with"
producing a program that is NOT intelligent but that might LOOK like they are intelligent. Understanding how clever these deceptions can be, and why we fall for them,
is itself an interesting by product of the competition. So the importance of ELIZA in the end was not that it was a
great piece of code or introduced techniques that we could build on directly, but because it taught us a *lot* about people's implicit assumptions about a conversational partner, and how you could generate conversational situations that could finesse the hard stuff.
So people don't go out to talk to ELIZA with the goal of determining that it is just a program; they don't go looking for the disconfirming evidence. That's a pretty
key point in itself.
It is that convenient size factor that has allowed DVD's to take off in popularity; the MCA/Philips Laserdisc and RCA Selectavision disc formats didn't become widely popular due to fairly stiff storage requirements, while in contrast DVD's same size factor as CD's made them very popular even though most DVD packaging is about 25% larger than CD's.
Ah, but the *reason* the packaging is 25% larger is so that your DVDs can be stored on the same height/depth shelf
as you VHS casette tapes. This is what happens when technology meets currently existing furniture: a kludge is introduced.:-)
I have one of these machines, and the only thing I can say is: man, is that fan loud. Something really had to be done, and while I could quibble about the price, I have to say that I'll be very happy to have a nice, new-ish shiny mirrored
door Mac that is quieter than a 1200 watt hairdryer.:-)
Seriously, the fan noise is the only complaint I have about
my dual processor G4 system, which is otherwise a complete joy to use. I do still wonder how in the world they signed off on this design in the first place...
The new 12 inch Powerbook G4 is really a ibook 12 inch with a G4 + metal case.
Well, that together with 802.11g capability, Bluetooth, NVIDIA GeForce4 420 Go graphics, a *slot-loading* combo drive and the option for a Superdrive, a vastly better keyboard and a hinge that should last longer.
Really, if you see one up close, you note both the similarity in spirit to the iBook, but also way too many improvements and changes to make your summary or their comparison especially useful. Or, to put it another way, if they are comparing it to the Powerbook, that is truly being extra cheesy since the Lindows book doesn't even have a CD-ROM or an option for better than hamster-powered graphics, much less the wireless features.
The reason why they didn't compare it to the entry level iBook (at $999), is that, just as everybody here has done, the intended audience would say You mean that for $200 more I can get an iBook instead? And I'm guessing that's not a great marketing position for them.
Quite so. In fact one might say it's a rather unfortunate side-effect of being British. I would venture to say that within that milieu there are shades of subtlety that would be lost on the typical brash overstimulated American, who for the most part has no appreciation for understatement, having beaten his head against life for so long.
And your so-called point is what exactly?:-)
OK, so while we're on the topic of amusing British things, I am
reminded of the fact that if you
want to buy up all of the works of Wendy Cope, you can
finally do so from Amazon.com directly. It used to be
the case that you couldn't get Cope at all from them (only
from Amazon.co.uk
or from Alibris if you
wanted to save money on shipping and the currency conversion.
And, for you Philistines who don't know Wendy Cope from a Page Three Girl, just buy a copy of "Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis" and find out. Once upon a time, my review of this book
at Amazon.com was both accurate and well-regarded:
There once was a poet named Wendy,
Who I desperately wish would befriend me.
For her out-of-print rhymes
I would give my last dimes,
But Amazon thinks they're not trendy.
OK, so it was well-regarded by everybody except one Brit who got his nickers in a twist over the fact that I titled my review "the most enjoyable book of English poetry ever written!". Evidently, excitement and hyperbole are
not very much appreciated in England these days, where Tony Blair is apparently considered to be a pretty wild guy...
You're complaining about `doddle', right? (Process of elimination.) Okay, it means `something easily done or achieved'. It's a perfectly common* word round our way. Everyone happy now?
I was perfectly happy before. I could guess the meaning
from context, but I was also struck by how amusingly British the whole sentence sounded. So I made a joke.
Laugh! It's Score: 3 funny!:-)
Meanwhile, I did do some research on the word after posting,
and found that some wags insist the term is of Scottish origin.
So I was even wrong about the "English in club chairs drinking"
angle, although nobody called me on it...
[fx: wanders off muttering about who invented the bloody language in the first place...]
Well, I'm too closely related to certain psycholinguists to stop myself from pointing out that the people who (re)invent the language are, oddly enough, our children. If only we had been
able to expose our children to an unbowdlerized Harry Potter at the right age...
A doddle to put right, but rather worrying nonetheless.
So, am I the only one who thinks that some people in the UK must spend altogether too much time sitting around in club chairs drinking and inventing new words and idiomatic expressions that mean nothing but *sound* extremely British, and are thus adopted by the pretentious?
OK, so maybe only 5000 people in the world would fully appreciate the pun. I think that's worth it.:-)
Re:Not Sun and Sony, but *Apple* and Sony
on
The Faded Sun
·
· Score: 1
For Sony, it's the entertainment division
Hello? The entertainment division of sony is the only part that's profitable.
You mean at this very moment? I'd have to look more carefully, but, from memory, I know that earnings in entertainment have been *very* volatile and most of their
assets there were not bought especially cheaply. Moreover, if you're not *very* suspicious about the continued profitability of any pre-recorded music vendor, I would like to know why. It's clear to me that the supposed synergy between entertainment and consumer electronics has never really existed, and at the moment, the tension between the two businesses is very noticeable. On the one hand, Sony
can make good money selling CD-RW drives and computers
that include these, while on the other hand, entertainment (throught the RIAA and friends) wants to place draconian limits on their use. Meanwhile, the "software" for consumer computers and electronics won't turn out to be CDs and DVDs as much as it turns out to be the kind of programs that Apple basically excels at producing. To put it another way, the fact that Sony is the parent of this year's hot movie does nothing to sell more DVD players or home theater systems, but the future fact that Apple's innovations can mean that Sony's DVD players and home theater systems are superior to those of others because they work so much better with the household PCs and notebooks (yes, plural)...that's going to be crucial.
Not Sun and Sony, but *Apple* and Sony
on
The Faded Sun
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Ok, his first points are very valid and I will agree. Sun is in serious trouble. They're betting the company on N1. Apple won't buy them. Java wasn't the smoking gun.
But to say that a merger with Sony would be better than Apple is just plain dumb. What have the two in common? Absolutely nothing. Sony has no interest in the server market - if they had they'd be there already. Furthermore, the technology that Sun pioneers has absolutely NOTHING to do with ANY Sony market.
You are absolutely correct, but you miss the really big
reason why Sun will not merge with Sony. The company that needs to merge with Sony is Apple. When you get right down to it, both are essentially consumer electronics companies right now with some distractions tacked on. (For Sony, it's the entertainment division; for Apple, it's the endless fight for survival.) If you merge Sony and Apple, though, you get something very interesting:
A Sony that can pitch its entertainment division and become "your digital hub company".
An Apple that can spread its OS to every kind of consumer device.
A Sony that can offer state-of-the-art consumer software with all of its digital cameras/camcorders/stereos/etc.
A company big enough to matter to Microsoft in a very serious way (still).
An Apple that doesn't have to suck up to consumer electronics firms to get support.
A Sony that can offer what I guess I'd call "boutique IT" solutions.
I think the big weakness after the merger is that Sony really doesn't have a printer line, but that's okay; they'll be able to pick up the dried up remains of HP for almost nothing in, say, 2 years.
Do you realize that when you remember commands to type your brain blocks your senses and blocks your sense of time?
Why, no I didn't, and I'd *love* to see a cite for this since this is pretty closely related to what I do for a living.
In the mean time, if you read carefully (I'll admit I was rushing when I typed the original) you will see that what
I am arguing for is not trying to remember any command short cut, but just typing the
text you see on the title bar. This is the so-called "type ahead on links" that you have in the current Mozilla. To the extent that typing is automatic in some people anyway,
this is a big win. Moreover, type ahead on links is pretty obviously a big UI win when the alternative is to use a hockey puck to move your pointer to, e.g., one of the hundreds of links on a page like "yahoo.com".
[snip]
So you want keyboard control over the Window menu. That's a cool thing to ask as this is slashdot, and should be an easy hack.
Absolutely not. The window menu, being a pull-down of limited horizontal extent, has more than just the lack of keyboard commands going against it.
This is (I think) exactly why Apple ditched the concept of having a pull-down menu for bookmarks in favor of "book mark view," although that could be improved as well.
But realize that this will not make the average person get quicker or better organized.
Oh, I completely realize this. And, in fact, the whole point was not to make the average person faster or better organized, but to help out strong typists and expert users without confusing the average person. The beauty of most command shortcuts, keyboard navigation aids, and advanced features like "type ahead to links on the page" is precisely that they can be used by those who want them without forcing anybody to use them.
I even doubt that the average slashdotter will get quicker than with tabs as they lock their brains in a dynamic (not even a right on the money shortcut) association game 'tabs' > 'on slashdot' > 'safari beta update' 'type saf ' and 'tabs' > 'on macnn' > 'macnn' 'multiple macnn windows open' > 'type macnn tab', without them even realizing you are staring at thin air.
Now I have no idea what you're getting at. What I proposed
was more like:
Type cmd-opt-W (to get to window view)
Type "macnn" RETURN (to select the first window with
macnn in the title)
In this case, that would be one-compound plus 6 simple
keystrokes. Now the nice thing is that this is essentially a constant cost if you know you have
a MacNN window open, and the constant plus a short scanning time if you don't know exactly what's there beforehand. Definitely faster than hitting cmd-~ a bunch of times, and probably about as fast as tabbing through 8 tabs, but with the advantage that your choices are not limited by what is visible in a 70-pixel or so wide chunk of screen (like a tab).
Now, I appreciated (and used) Mozilla's tabs, but I recognized their shortcomings. I *really* appreciated (and used) type ahead to links in Mozilla, and for that there is
really no replacement. If you want a UI buzzword to throw at this, what I propose (and prefer, to some extent) is similar to what was called the "anti-mac" interface by Jakob Nielsen. Interestingly, OS X can support to a considerable degree both the Mac and anti-Mac styles of interaction. I'm pretty happy about that, myself.:-)
I don't really see how you can easily deal with (say) 20 open windows effectively with this idea.
Most likely two separate windows, each with ten tabs. And 8 tab-collections in the dock if you want to have 100 windows open.
OK, so I should have phrased that more simply. I notice that in Mozilla, I frequently can't get full titles on even *4* open tabs, let alone 8 or 20. I really do think that full visibility is a possible design goal here.
[concerning the fact that Power-users can cycle the windows in a tab-like fashion using the [option] key.]
I am not sure how this is any improvement over cycling through windows using cmd-~.
Predictability, you see a line of tabs, with one missing in the middle. That's the one you have active below, if you want to go to the right you press [option]+[command]+[~]. If you want to go to the tird tab you press it three times, no counting what number the tab is (perhaps [command 7]) no jumping to almost random windows like with [command]+[~].
OK, I think the problem here is that I don't want to explicitly navigate to the left or the right or anywhere spatially, I want to go to the window with the slashdot article (say) in it. The virtue of Safari's being fast is that
if you have only a moderate number (less than say 7)
of open windows, you can cmd-~ around all of them in
a couple of seconds, tops, random or not. But what I *really* want to do is just type text that matches the window I want to go to. That way I read the "tab", i type the "tab", and I'm there; just like type-ahead highlight links in Mozilla (now there's a feature I miss a *lot* more than tabs.) I think this is actually easily achievable: just have an "open windows mode" (opt-cmd-w or something) that displays all of the open windows) and make typing at that mode highlight (if possible) one of the open windows; hit return, and you're there). No muss, no fuss, no additional widgets, and the partial precedent of "bookmark view" which we now have to solve the similar-in-spirit problem of how do you navigate between scads of bookmarks. You could put them all on the bookmark bar, or hit opt-cmd-B and browse around. Bookmark view, alas, still lacks anything like real keyboard navigation control, which is too bad.
In any case, I thought the idea was interesting (certainly novel). I'm just not sure it's the right idea for this purpose, and this is an idea that really has to be done right for a lot of reasons.
It would be interesting to see what the Relax-NG schema looks like, and whether it is strong enough to represent (a) every feature of the w3c schema, and (b) the things the w3c schema wasn't up to.
Man, I hate it when somebody has the same cool idea I have
and has time to get it posted here before I do.:-)
Seriously: what he said. I looked at the XML Schema for
this, and I want my mommy to make it stop. Now then, with apologies to the original author (Jamie Zawinski?) who was writing about X11 (brrr):
Stop the XML Schema Virus!
First, a little history. The XML Schema spec escaped from the W3C at MIT where it was being held in isolation. When notified, MIT stated piblicly that "MIT assumes no resonsibility...". This is a very disturbing statement. It then infiltrated Apple Computer
where it has since corrupted the technical judgement of this
organization.
After sabotaging Apple, a sinister web standards consortium
was created to find a way to use XML Schema as part of a plan to dominate and control XML and by extension the world. interactive window systems. The XML Schema spec is sometimes distributed by the W3C free of charge and over the web to unsuspecting victims. The destructive cost of XML Schema cannot even be guessed.
The XML Schema spec is truly obese - whether it's mutilating your hard disk or actively clogging your bandwidth,
you can be sure it's up to no good. Innocent users need to be protected from this dangerous virus. Even as you read
this, software that relies on an XML Schema is being
maintained on millions of computers, maybe even your own.
Apple Computer is already shipping software that carries
this dreaded infestation. It must be destroyed.
This is what happens when software with good intentions goes bad. It victimizes innocent users by distorting their perception of what is and what is not good software. This malignant specification must be destroyed.
Ultimately the W3C and MIT must be held accountable for this heinous software crime, brought to justice, and made to pay for a software cleanup. Until the W3C and MIT answer to these charges, they both should be assumed to be protecting dangerous software criminals.
Don't be fooled! Just say no to XML Schema!
XML Schema
A mistake carried out to perfection.
XML Schema
Dissatisfaction
guaranteed.
XML Schema
Don't get frustrated without it.
XML Schema
Even
your dog won't like it.
XML Schema
Flaky and built to stay that way.
XML Schema
Complex nonsolutions to simple nonproblems.
XML Schema
Flawed
beyond belief.
XML Schema
Form follows malfunction.
XML Schema
Garbage at your fingertips.
XML Schema
Ignorance of Relax-NG is our most important resource.
XML Schema
It could be worse, but it'll take time.
XML Schema
Please wait
as least 90 days before pressing charges.
XML Schema
Let it get in
*your* way.
XML Schema
Live the nightmare.
XML Schema
More than
enough rope.
XML Schema
Never had it, never will.
XML Schema
No markup is safe.
XML Schema
Power tools for power fools.
XML Schema
Power tools for power losers.
XML Schema
Putting new limits on productivity.
XML Schema
Simplicity made complex.
XML Schema
The cutting edge of obsolescence.
XML Schema
The charm of SGML lives on!
XML Schema
The defacto substandard.
XML Schema
The first fully modular software disaster.
XML Schema
The joke that kills but might not validate.
XML Schema
The problem for your problem.
XML Schema
There's got to be a better way.
XML Schema
You don't want to know about it.
XML Schema
Warn your friends
about it.
XML Schema
You'd better sit down.
XML Schema
Don't press your luck.
XML Schema
You'll envy the dead.
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely. But there has been a recent history with the Poincare Conjecture of even big names rushing to publish (albeit promising) misses, and one wonders whether the prize money adds to the usual rush for priority that you see in any competitive field. I think even Wiles was in some sense racing against his 40th birthday to prove FLT, since that is the informal-but-de facto limit for the Fields Medal. Which he didn't win, as it turns out (mathematicians are *tough* :-)).
OK, so I now agree I was needlessly harsh in my words about these authors. I do have a hunch that they thought they were close if not there, but they clearly either felt time pressure of some sort (which is why their oritginal was full of typos and used non-standard notations), or they were at least a bit casual about their submission, possibly reasoning that if it really did prove to be promising, that they could get stuff ironed out during the review.
OK, so my degree is in Psychology, and I know for sure that some marginal or under-challenged stuff gets out into the literature, but for the *most* part, stuff like that then just lies there fairly harmlessly and uselessly, going uncited and unread, because nobody finds it interesting enough to care one way or another. The more interesting or controversial stuff, though, is much more thoroughly examined. I would prefer myself if others in the field would be a bit more...circumspect about publishing some things, but I don't think you really get too far in any decent-sized and respected community in psych by just cranking out noise.
Mostly number 2. As a psychologist (although not really *that* kind of psychologist) I am always very impressed at people's ability to engage in self-deception and magical thinking, and their frequent inability to recognize their own limitations (you've seen some of me doing that in this thread, as it turns out). What we have here is a probably sincere but possibly somewhat flakey physicist whose work doesn't really carry much weight in his own field who then finds a collaborator and publishes an idiosyncratic paper on a topic where there just happens to be a large cash prize available that is well outside his area of expertise. This does not inspire confidence. Now the point here is that we know that every attempt so far to prove this has met with utter failure, that this attempt only met with brief notice (basically negative) in the internet community as a preprint. And the last point:
Ah, now that's just a misunderstanding that I did little to clarify. My take on the "graveyard of RH papers" page is not that it is pointing to possibly very worthy work (not universally true since it points to the work of Archimedes Plutonium), but to papers that likely or certainly have flaws of the type that high level math students might be able to detect and elucidate as part of their educational process. Context is everything here. The page that links to the one I quoted is a "Curiosities" page that even mentions silly discussions on Slashdot about the Riemann Hypothesis. The Riemann Hypothesis page itself explicitly mentions a recent rejoinder to Castro's earlier proof of RH, suggesting that the technique is flawed, and frankly doubtful that it can be fixed. I do thank you for the information that some novel approaches to the problem coming from physics are taken at least a bit seriously.
I agree that this is now going in circles, but my real point was that a months old pre-print using an approach that was previously panned, from an author who is not well-respected in his major field, using notation that the mathtematicians trying to read it thought was weird, whose only notice outside 37 posts of glory on sci.math is from the popular press (sorry to have mistaken the prestige of the newspaper) is not likely to be correct, and that the editors of slashdot might consider having a mathematician filter stories about math since I do think it is beyond their skills to do a good job.
I wasn't. It was a joke. A really bad joke. Sorry about that. :-)
It isn't, except that it is. The problem I have here is with accepting "generally trustworthy" as a blanket statement that applies equally to things we know newspapers are usually pretty good at (politics, current issues, scandals, crimes, and the like) and areas where we (or at least I) do not have high confidence in their abilities. High-level mathematics clearly falls into the second category; I am not certain I would trust *any* newspaper account of this. Fort that matter, I can get specific here. The translation of the article you pointed us to includes this:
Now, the problem here is that some random author or another submitting a paper that claims to solve an important math problem like this is really not newsworthy. It really does happen almost all of the time, and yet the writer of this story seems to be innocent of this fact. Indeed, if the author had asked for comment or advice from any mathematician about this particular attempt, I'm sure the answer would have been "we see five or six of these a year". Actually, the fact that this is a *good* newspaper makes the point even more strongly: despite their expertise, they really didn't know how to evaluate this as a news story. That's the problem.
OK, now that's interesting, and I did not in fact know that. And there is no question that new lines of attack can come from unusual places. I do feel that these new lines often offer themselves up in somewhat more propitious circumstances. So if a high energy physicicst had teamed up with an important number theorist to do the paper, and it was based on the kind of insight that is taken for granted in one community but not the other (e.g., "interesting; in our work we rewrite the integral *this* way and then prove these bounds...")
Well, the term "amateur" is always a relative thing. So it would be easy to see why a non-famous high energy physicist might spend a lot more time on something like RH after the prize money is publicized given that the chances of hitting on this or on any round of funding these days in physics might be the same lottery odds. :-( So a detectable number of physicists entered the field of cognitive neuroscience when the SSC went down, not necessarily for the big bucks, but to try and work on a challenging problem where there was some hope of funding. Results were mixed.
Plus, I can report that a couple of definitely professional mathematicians I have met do (prviately) admit that the Clay Prize money has actually attracted their attention to the prize problems, if only just to take a brief whack at them and see if anything new falls into place.
I have pretty high confidence that the current attempt has basically already joined all of the other failed attempts. There are so many of these, and this does share many disturbing similarities with them. Thanks for your comments, though; I really had no idea that high energy physics had any implications for RH until I read your post.
Now, I really did. My favorite quote from it is the part where Aaron Bergman notes, "I also hope that math people realize that us physicists only read Castro's papers for humor purposes."
That's not what I see. What I see is that they figure out among themselves that some really non-standard usages of mathematical terminology happen in physics, and that whether you use "ln" or "log" to refer to the notion of a natural log might reflect where you went to school or what calculator you used...idle chit-chat, really.
No, my "clincher" would be that a link to this appears on the same page as work by the illlustrious Archimedes Plutonium. Really, you just don't know how damning this is, do you?
While I have no doubt that SvD is of singular value to almost everybody (especially for its largest entries on the diagonal), the fact is that it comes from Sweden makes it orthogonal to our concerns. (Sorry about that...)
Here in the US, you have to understand that unless you share a border with Iraq, we just don't have time to be interested in you these days. :-)
True enough, but see below, and the fact that if *I* had a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis, I probably wouldn't submit it to the high energy physics and "general math" sections of xarchiv.
Actually, the discussion basically says that nobody could read the thing and that it was chock full of typos. Once again, if I had a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis, I would probably make very certain that it was free of such interest-busting material. A mathematician can feel free to correct me, but I am assuming that while raw papers (especially from non-native speakers of the language the paper is submitted in) can be tough to get through, you usually *do* detect the high quality of the real work at some point pretty early on, and if you don't, you assume the worst.
In the thread I referenced, a physicist chimed in with the observation that one of the co-authors (Castro) was not taken seriously in his own field of physics, which makes it even less plausible that the math in this paper would be new and inspiriational.
Unfortunately, the Clay Math Prize has kind of made proving the Riemann Hypothesis a "make-money-fast" scheme. :-)
Or to put it another way, here's the plan of attack I believe the authors had:
I know the editors of this site mean well, but what we have here is a link to a site that defines the Riemann Hypothesis in very abstract terms, a link to a LANL preprint from two completely unknown researchers deposited there in November 2002, and a link to an obscure Swedish newspaper from almost two weeks ago, and no other supporting material. So my BS meter is running at 5.
The odds that "this is the one!" given that pedigree would seem to be really tiny. But the clincher for me is the following web page dedicated to would-be proofs of the Riemnann Hypothesis whose important text is (and I quote):
And the Castro and Mahecha preprint (and another grandiosely titled preprint by Mahecha) is linked to from there. Now my BS meter is running at about 9. So now I check for messages abou this at deja.com in the sci.math group. Read the thread yourself; it's pretty entertaining.
So, with my BS meter running at 11, the work having been submitted for coming up on 6 months, and no indication whatsoever that this is real, I suggest it is false.
And I also suggest that Slashdot might wish to consider contacting a real mathematician to filter their potential stories on mathematics, since I can't tell you the last time one of these "is X finally proven?" stories has panned out.
And the brief answer is, "Yes it is, but Safari is faster in some areas." So if I were running a recent Chimera nightly, I'd be happier with the speed than with Mozilla or older versions of Chimera, and MSIE just doesn't even rate anymore. One decisive advantage for Safari is that it is a Cocoa app, so I don't have to do anything to get emacs-style editing keys in forms like the one I'm typing in. Now that I know Safari Beta 62 has tabs, I really wonder whether Chimera will be able to keep this a fair race for much longer.
Either way, I think the "speed and goodness of web-browsing" point that the reviewer feels now favors Windows will be completely moot by the summer solstice.
And the answer is, I didn't notice it as being that much faster than Mozilla 1.2, and it is consistently 50% slower than Safari in rendering pages I care about (e.g., Slashdot, w3c.org stuff). The one killer feature it has that Safari has is "type ahead to links on the web page".
Next stop is to see if the latest Chimera is worthwhile.
Interesting; guess I should exercise my cable modem tonight then. :-) Now the question is, is it "really fast like Safari" fast or just "noticeably faster than 1.2" fast? Guess I'll have to find out.
But, alas, he mentioned that Chimera had hung up. More seriously, there *is* a point here about the slowness of browsing on an iBook with either the stock MSIE or Mozilla, compared to what you can do with MSIE on even a cheap WinTel notebook. That's why Chimera was started and why Safari will probably take over the Mac world. Unfortunately for him, most of his review time was with the earlier betas of Safari, which I suspect did unexpectedly quit more frequently than one would like. (So, for example, if you go to a lot of sites that are like devcenter.netscape.com, you could rapidly get annoyed.)
Well, there is an issue of some "bad timing" here. From what it sounds like from his review, what he really wanted to do was pick up a review unit today that just happened to be a 12" Powerbook with the latest Safari Beta on it. He then installs Virtual PC, installs his iNews thingie, and completely goes to town (since now his video-editing stuff will also be much faster).
But note that I think the comment about waiting until Apple moves to a faster PPC late this year is a bit of a problem. If the question being asked is "should I switch today?" the answer should not be "well, it will all be faster in a year" if in fact there is a machine that fits your needs right now. And if you're somebody who wanted an iBook formfactor notebook that you could use to edit video and run an oddball PC program, then you're *golden* right now. But he started in December, so I can't gripe too much about his choice of machine.
Another oddity in this review was that the things that went well with the platform usually only barely deserved mention. His evaluation model had Airport built-in, and the iBook pretty much is the ideal wireless notebook. But this apparently wasn't worthy of mention. Another awesome feature of Apple laptops is the "instant wake-up" upon opening thing. Again, no mention. I guess I can't blame him for not worshipping Rendezvous since he only had the one Mac to play with, but even still...
I am glad he noticed that iTunes rules, though. But then puzzled that he thought AppleWorks was so great when it's just...well, Appleworks. In summary, this article is not worth bringing down their server over. :-)
Actually, I am happy to accept the point almost exactly as stated, as long as "human intelligence" means something more like "aspects of intelligence unique to humans". I think part of the confusion comes from the fact that "intelligence" is a very loaded word; in the field of AI, I think it is used interchangably for "any cognitive phenomena", while in many other places, it means something more high falutin'.
Now, the reason why "scamming the system" is such a neat definition of the goal of intelligent behavior is that it predicts a lot of the great abilities we have evolved over time and develop during our lives. Quite obviously in this context, the notion of a "theory of mind". Speaking of which, though, I'd better stop typing this now or there's no way I'll be able to get to class on time and deliver what I hope will be a coherent lecture on the retina. :-)
Not hardly. As it turns out, one of the more frustrating aspects of AI is that once some particular computation that would appear to be correlated with intelligence can be performed, then it invariably doesn't count as AI anymore. So there are lots of practical systems out there today that can prove theorems, do symbolic algebra, play chess better than 99.999% of all people, a whole bunch of stuff. But hardly any of this strikes us as AI anymore. On the other hand, there are lots of horribly difficult problems out there whose solutions we really can't expect to get at within 10 years, and those are all "good" AI problems. Now, one thing that makes them good problems is that we know they contain many different thesis-sized projects that correspond to sub-goals for the "real" problem, and because it is possible that knocking off some of these subgoals could yield some real insights.
Now the interesting thing to notice here is that Turing was a *very* smart guy, and any program that successfully passes the strong version of the Turing Test has almost by definition solved every hard problem that confronts AI, and all of the subproblems that compose those problems, and... It's a truly gargantuan task, and one where even your most advanced programs are almost guaranteed to look really bad in competition.
Having said that, I do still think there is some point in holding contests like the Loebner, not for what they will tell us about the state of how fast AI is progressing, but because the programmers who compete at this point really are trying to scam the system and "get away with" producing a program that is NOT intelligent but that might LOOK like they are intelligent. Understanding how clever these deceptions can be, and why we fall for them, is itself an interesting by product of the competition. So the importance of ELIZA in the end was not that it was a great piece of code or introduced techniques that we could build on directly, but because it taught us a *lot* about people's implicit assumptions about a conversational partner, and how you could generate conversational situations that could finesse the hard stuff. So people don't go out to talk to ELIZA with the goal of determining that it is just a program; they don't go looking for the disconfirming evidence. That's a pretty key point in itself.
Ah, but the *reason* the packaging is 25% larger is so that your DVDs can be stored on the same height/depth shelf as you VHS casette tapes. This is what happens when technology meets currently existing furniture: a kludge is introduced. :-)
I have one of these machines, and the only thing I can say is: man, is that fan loud. Something really had to be done, and while I could quibble about the price, I have to say that I'll be very happy to have a nice, new-ish shiny mirrored door Mac that is quieter than a 1200 watt hairdryer. :-)
Seriously, the fan noise is the only complaint I have about my dual processor G4 system, which is otherwise a complete joy to use. I do still wonder how in the world they signed off on this design in the first place...
Well, that together with 802.11g capability, Bluetooth, NVIDIA GeForce4 420 Go graphics, a *slot-loading* combo drive and the option for a Superdrive, a vastly better keyboard and a hinge that should last longer.
Really, if you see one up close, you note both the similarity in spirit to the iBook, but also way too many improvements and changes to make your summary or their comparison especially useful. Or, to put it another way, if they are comparing it to the Powerbook, that is truly being extra cheesy since the Lindows book doesn't even have a CD-ROM or an option for better than hamster-powered graphics, much less the wireless features. The reason why they didn't compare it to the entry level iBook (at $999), is that, just as everybody here has done, the intended audience would say You mean that for $200 more I can get an iBook instead? And I'm guessing that's not a great marketing position for them.
And your so-called point is what exactly? :-)
OK, so while we're on the topic of amusing British things, I am reminded of the fact that if you want to buy up all of the works of Wendy Cope, you can finally do so from Amazon.com directly. It used to be the case that you couldn't get Cope at all from them (only from Amazon.co.uk or from Alibris if you wanted to save money on shipping and the currency conversion.
And, for you Philistines who don't know Wendy Cope from a Page Three Girl, just buy a copy of "Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis" and find out. Once upon a time, my review of this book at Amazon.com was both accurate and well-regarded:
OK, so it was well-regarded by everybody except one Brit who got his nickers in a twist over the fact that I titled my review "the most enjoyable book of English poetry ever written!". Evidently, excitement and hyperbole are not very much appreciated in England these days, where Tony Blair is apparently considered to be a pretty wild guy...
I was perfectly happy before. I could guess the meaning from context, but I was also struck by how amusingly British the whole sentence sounded. So I made a joke.
Laugh! It's Score: 3 funny! :-)
Meanwhile, I did do some research on the word after posting, and found that some wags insist the term is of Scottish origin. So I was even wrong about the "English in club chairs drinking" angle, although nobody called me on it...
Well, I'm too closely related to certain psycholinguists to stop myself from pointing out that the people who (re)invent the language are, oddly enough, our children. If only we had been able to expose our children to an unbowdlerized Harry Potter at the right age...
So, am I the only one who thinks that some people in the UK must spend altogether too much time sitting around in club chairs drinking and inventing new words and idiomatic expressions that mean nothing but *sound* extremely British, and are thus adopted by the pretentious?
Ooh...here's one:
Tabula Aqua
OK, so maybe only 5000 people in the world would fully appreciate the pun. I think that's worth it. :-)
You mean at this very moment? I'd have to look more carefully, but, from memory, I know that earnings in entertainment have been *very* volatile and most of their assets there were not bought especially cheaply. Moreover, if you're not *very* suspicious about the continued profitability of any pre-recorded music vendor, I would like to know why. It's clear to me that the supposed synergy between entertainment and consumer electronics has never really existed, and at the moment, the tension between the two businesses is very noticeable. On the one hand, Sony can make good money selling CD-RW drives and computers that include these, while on the other hand, entertainment (throught the RIAA and friends) wants to place draconian limits on their use. Meanwhile, the "software" for consumer computers and electronics won't turn out to be CDs and DVDs as much as it turns out to be the kind of programs that Apple basically excels at producing. To put it another way, the fact that Sony is the parent of this year's hot movie does nothing to sell more DVD players or home theater systems, but the future fact that Apple's innovations can mean that Sony's DVD players and home theater systems are superior to those of others because they work so much better with the household PCs and notebooks (yes, plural)...that's going to be crucial.
You are absolutely correct, but you miss the really big reason why Sun will not merge with Sony. The company that needs to merge with Sony is Apple. When you get right down to it, both are essentially consumer electronics companies right now with some distractions tacked on. (For Sony, it's the entertainment division; for Apple, it's the endless fight for survival.) If you merge Sony and Apple, though, you get something very interesting:
I think the big weakness after the merger is that Sony really doesn't have a printer line, but that's okay; they'll be able to pick up the dried up remains of HP for almost nothing in, say, 2 years.
Why, no I didn't, and I'd *love* to see a cite for this since this is pretty closely related to what I do for a living.
In the mean time, if you read carefully (I'll admit I was rushing when I typed the original) you will see that what I am arguing for is not trying to remember any command short cut, but just typing the text you see on the title bar. This is the so-called "type ahead on links" that you have in the current Mozilla. To the extent that typing is automatic in some people anyway, this is a big win. Moreover, type ahead on links is pretty obviously a big UI win when the alternative is to use a hockey puck to move your pointer to, e.g., one of the hundreds of links on a page like "yahoo.com".
Absolutely not. The window menu, being a pull-down of limited horizontal extent, has more than just the lack of keyboard commands going against it. This is (I think) exactly why Apple ditched the concept of having a pull-down menu for bookmarks in favor of "book mark view," although that could be improved as well.
Oh, I completely realize this. And, in fact, the whole point was not to make the average person faster or better organized, but to help out strong typists and expert users without confusing the average person. The beauty of most command shortcuts, keyboard navigation aids, and advanced features like "type ahead to links on the page" is precisely that they can be used by those who want them without forcing anybody to use them.
Now I have no idea what you're getting at. What I proposed was more like:
- Type cmd-opt-W (to get to window view)
- Type "macnn" RETURN (to select the first window with
macnn in the title)
In this case, that would be one-compound plus 6 simple keystrokes. Now the nice thing is that this is essentially a constant cost if you know you have a MacNN window open, and the constant plus a short scanning time if you don't know exactly what's there beforehand. Definitely faster than hitting cmd-~ a bunch of times, and probably about as fast as tabbing through 8 tabs, but with the advantage that your choices are not limited by what is visible in a 70-pixel or so wide chunk of screen (like a tab).Now, I appreciated (and used) Mozilla's tabs, but I recognized their shortcomings. I *really* appreciated (and used) type ahead to links in Mozilla, and for that there is really no replacement. If you want a UI buzzword to throw at this, what I propose (and prefer, to some extent) is similar to what was called the "anti-mac" interface by Jakob Nielsen. Interestingly, OS X can support to a considerable degree both the Mac and anti-Mac styles of interaction. I'm pretty happy about that, myself. :-)
OK, so I should have phrased that more simply. I notice that in Mozilla, I frequently can't get full titles on even *4* open tabs, let alone 8 or 20. I really do think that full visibility is a possible design goal here.
OK, I think the problem here is that I don't want to explicitly navigate to the left or the right or anywhere spatially, I want to go to the window with the slashdot article (say) in it. The virtue of Safari's being fast is that if you have only a moderate number (less than say 7) of open windows, you can cmd-~ around all of them in a couple of seconds, tops, random or not. But what I *really* want to do is just type text that matches the window I want to go to. That way I read the "tab", i type the "tab", and I'm there; just like type-ahead highlight links in Mozilla (now there's a feature I miss a *lot* more than tabs.) I think this is actually easily achievable: just have an "open windows mode" (opt-cmd-w or something) that displays all of the open windows) and make typing at that mode highlight (if possible) one of the open windows; hit return, and you're there). No muss, no fuss, no additional widgets, and the partial precedent of "bookmark view" which we now have to solve the similar-in-spirit problem of how do you navigate between scads of bookmarks. You could put them all on the bookmark bar, or hit opt-cmd-B and browse around. Bookmark view, alas, still lacks anything like real keyboard navigation control, which is too bad.
In any case, I thought the idea was interesting (certainly novel). I'm just not sure it's the right idea for this purpose, and this is an idea that really has to be done right for a lot of reasons.
Man, I hate it when somebody has the same cool idea I have and has time to get it posted here before I do. :-)
Seriously: what he said. I looked at the XML Schema for this, and I want my mommy to make it stop. Now then, with apologies to the original author (Jamie Zawinski?) who was writing about X11 (brrr):
Stop the XML Schema Virus!
First, a little history. The XML Schema spec escaped from the W3C at MIT where it was being held in isolation. When notified, MIT stated piblicly that "MIT assumes no resonsibility...". This is a very disturbing statement. It then infiltrated Apple Computer where it has since corrupted the technical judgement of this organization.
After sabotaging Apple, a sinister web standards consortium was created to find a way to use XML Schema as part of a plan to dominate and control XML and by extension the world. interactive window systems. The XML Schema spec is sometimes distributed by the W3C free of charge and over the web to unsuspecting victims. The destructive cost of XML Schema cannot even be guessed.
The XML Schema spec is truly obese - whether it's mutilating your hard disk or actively clogging your bandwidth, you can be sure it's up to no good. Innocent users need to be protected from this dangerous virus. Even as you read this, software that relies on an XML Schema is being maintained on millions of computers, maybe even your own.
Apple Computer is already shipping software that carries this dreaded infestation. It must be destroyed. This is what happens when software with good intentions goes bad. It victimizes innocent users by distorting their perception of what is and what is not good software. This malignant specification must be destroyed.
Ultimately the W3C and MIT must be held accountable for this heinous software crime, brought to justice, and made to pay for a software cleanup. Until the W3C and MIT answer to these charges, they both should be assumed to be protecting dangerous software criminals.
Don't be fooled! Just say no to XML Schema!