Apparently, the guys at Television Week haven't read the Proctor & Gamble study which found that Tivo users remember ads about as well as other viewers, either because they're too lazy to skip ads, or because they're watching shows as they're being broadcast instead of time-shifting, or because they actually want to watch the ads, or because the ads are effective even at fast-forward speeds.
Personally, I sometimes forget that I'm watching through Tivo and that I can skip the ads. Other times I do skip the ads I'd have otherwise ignored, but I stop for ads that I enjoy. Still other times, I watch ads at high speed that I recognize. Frankly, I think I harbor less ill will toward companies whose ads would otherwise annoy me, and I still feel pretty good about companies whose ads (and more importantly, products) I like. So what's the harm?
I can tell one thing for sure about Apple. They have brilliant marketing
In recent years, Apple has become much more aware of what customers want. They've always made interesting technology, but they haven't always understood what customers wanted to buy, and they haven't always understood how to present their interesting technology in a way that appeals to customers. Steve Jobs is masterful in both these areas, and we have him to thank in large part for Apple's resurgence.
Will it not need some kind of cooling to prevent it overheating?
Since they can't seem to prevent their processors from emitting lots of energy, they might as well emit it at a useful frequency. Once they add the radio to the chip, it will actually function as a cooling device itself. When the chip gets too hot, you just transmit more packets.;-)
Actually, my dictionary ("The Classic Latin Dictionary," Follett Publishing Co., Chicago 1957) gives it like this:
virus -i n.I.a slimy liquid, slime, Verg....
The "-i" means that the plural is in fact viri. The "n." means that it's neuter, which is weird since -us (singular) and -i (plural) are second declension masculine endings. If it's neuter, it ought to look like "virum" in the singular and "vira" in the plural. Perhaps it's a misprint in the dictionary and virus is in fact masculine, or perhaps there are a few strange neuter words that use masculine endings. Either way, viri is surely the correct Latin plural for virus.
Locus, by the way, is an interesting word because it has two different plurals. It's a second declension masculine noun, and it's normal plural, loci refers to "single places" according to this dictionary. It's alternate plural, loca means "places connected with one another, neighbourhood [sic], region."
No, no. You're thinking of the plural of virius. As far as I know, virius is not a word in either English or Latin. But if it were, it's plural would be virii, just as the plural of radius is radii.
Now, virus did start life as a Latin word (meaning 'slime,' or 'poison,' or 'bitter taste'), so I think it's fine to use the Latin plural viri. But as it's used in English, virus has a meaning different from that of the Latin word, so I think it's also fine to use the English plural viruses. If you do go with the Latin version, however, be aware that viri also means 'men,' and you should therefore be vigilant for unintended double entendre's.
Programmer 1: "Hey, guys, we've really got to do something about the security problems we've been having with IE lately. Any ideas?"
Programmer 2: "I've got an idea! My CS prof used to joke that you could solve any problem by adding one more layer of abstraction. In this case, it's true. Imagine how totally cool it would be if IE was just a regular application. Right now we've got it tangled up in the OS, but if you think about it, there's really no good reason for that. I mean, why does IE need special priviledges just to load files and render some HTML? If we pull it out of the OS, it'll still work fine, and it'll just naturally be subject to all the OS-level protection mechanisms we've got."
Programmer 1: "What?! You're talking madness, man! Are you saying that we should subject one of our own applications to the same forces we use to prevent third parties from gaining too much market share? Egads, that's brilliant! I'll bet we can even patent that..."
Programmer 3: "Guys, the idea certainly sounds cool, but it won't work. Bill said it's impossible. Don't you remember that Netscape trial thing? I know we're not supposed to ever talk about it, but he said it was impossible during his taped deposition. If Bill says it's impossible..."
Programmer 2: "...then it must be impossible. You're right."
Porgrammer 1: "Damn, you're right. Seemed like such a good idea."
Right, but when you search through Google (or any search engine) you expect to find rankings that accurately reflect the relevance of the page. If you search on "testosterone" you probably do not want the first ten pages of links to be to "Joe's Patented Penis Enlargement System" just because hardworking Joe set up dozens of shell web sites solely to increase his site's Google rank.
If Joe (or any other web site owner) really wants to use Google as an advertising medium, he ought to pay for a sponsored link and be done with it. Joe has no right to manipulate the ranking system, and if he's going to do that he ought to be prepared to suffer the consequences.
Still photographers use flash units that are designated 'master' and 'slave,' so I guess L.A. County won't be hiring any photographers or buying any flash photography equipment. I could see that being inconvenient for a county that encompasses Hollywood.
any DRM just goes to inconvenience regular users, and doesn't stop piraters at all
Do you lock the door of your house when you leave? Or when you go to sleep at night? A funny thing about locks is that they're really not all that secure. Most can be picked without too much trouble, or broken. And given even the most advanced lock, any idiot with a Sawzall, a glass cutter, or a rock can still get into most any house.
So, why do most of us continue to lock our doors?
It's because a lock makes it inconvenient for someone to cross the threshold without your permission. A lock is a physical manifestation of the notion that "the stuff inside is my stuff, and you shouldn't enter unless I invite you in." A lock creates a barrier that's as much psychological as it is physical, and because most of us respect that barrier we feel relatively safe in our own homes.
DRM may indeed inconvenience regular users. But the fact is that regular users were for quite a long time swapping music files on the Internet with zero remorse simply because they had no idea that it was wrong, or because it was so cheap and easy to do that they found some rationalization for it. These would be the "convenience pirates" in your terms. DRM is _meant_ to inconvenience these people just a bit, to make sharing copyrighted stuff difficult enough that you really have to think about what you're doing. When it's cheaper and easier for the average Joe to go out and buy a CD for $15 or download an album for $10 than it is to download it for $0, then DRM has succeeded.
Yeah, sure, there are differences between the lock on your door and DRM. For one thing, you put the lock on your door, whereas the RIAA and the computer industry came up with DRM. DRM on "your" music seems as objectionable as having to get permission from, say, Wal-Mart to enter your own home, at least to some people. So I ask you: when was the last time you opened up your electric or gas meter? All it takes is a wire cutter...
[Intelligence is] The ability to Solve a Task with an infinite Problem space
That's a nice idea, but it doesn't help much. For one thing, it's most likely wrong. Examples of computers solving problems in "infinite" problem spaces are many. The realm of numbers is infinite, yet computers can do things such as solve complex systems of equations and prove theorems. What's more, humans often make mistakes, which is to say that the solutions we find to problems are often not the best ones.
Chess to an incredible digitised number cruncher is not infinite. It has a colossal but ultimately finite number of board states and moves. But to a human it *is* infinite, or might as well be. We simply cannot get anywhere near coping with consideration of every possible move, and we're certainly light years behind the computers processing power.
I'm no expert on the subject, but I'm pretty sure that chess programs don't work entirely by brute force. They look at the available moves, weed out the ones that are obviously bad, and consider more deeply the moves that are not obviously bad. This would seem to be similar to what humans do. And human chess playing may rely more heavily on brute force than we know... we don't consciously look at hundreds of moves per second, but it may be that our brains do exactly that, and only bother to inform the conscious part of us about the ones that are looking pretty good.
I hear what you're saying, but I think in fact that most people are _not_ looking for "an experience," at least not in front of their computers. Most people are looking to get some work done with less pain than they had doing things however they did them before. Most people want a solution that works for them, that they don't have to put together or optimize or spend a lot of time understanding.
Can she settle the case with the stipulation that the settlement does not consitute an admission of guilt?
If the SEC can settle with Putnam and Morgan Stanley without forcing them to admit wrongdoing after they committed fraud on a huge scale and victimized thousands of innocent people, it seems to me that the RIAA could see its way to giving a 15 year old girl the same courtesy.
IT is a ubiquitous part of a larger world
on
Does IT Matter?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
We all need to stop thinking of IT as a field apart from the rest of the world, and start looking at the world and to see how it can be made better. Sometimes IT will be part of that solution. Sometimes not. Sometimes the solution will be to remove (gasp!) high tech "solutions" that failed to deliver.
Most of the IT companies spent the last 25 years convincing companies and consumers to buy desktop computers, laptop computers, servers, and software in order to boost productivity. Plenty of low tech jobs were replaced by a bunch of high tech solutions and a smaller number of high tech jobs. Companies now routinely process zillions of transactions very quickly using very few workers. It may be that productivity can be increased even further in this way, but the huge gains of the last two decades are probably tapped out. IT may not be the motivation for the next huge runup in stock prices, but saying that it doesn't matter is like saying that mutual funds don't matter in the market. They may have fallen out of favor, but they're still a huge force to be reckoned with.
I'd like to see IT applied in ways that really make our world better, instead of (just) more efficient. IT has long promised to improve health care, and has largely delivered on that, but it has also lead in part to the increased cost of health care. Let's use it to drive down costs. IT has made a lot of things much more convenient, but at the cost of privacy. Let's use IT to protect privacy and better control our own information.
There are a million directions that IT can go in, and thanks to massive parallelism in our society it can go in those directions all at once. Let's get on it.
normal intelligence is just the ability to make our own choices
That's a pretty big 'just'. You could build a rock paper scissors simulator using a decent random number generator, and it would win as often as it lost. Humans, on the other hand, play using actual strategies in order to try to win more often than they lose, which is interesting.
It's that very act of making our own choices that we don't understand. And if we could understand it, perhaps we'd have a good start at building machines that could make their own choices as well.
What, if any, is the difference between "simulated intelligence" and "actual intelligence"? How do you know that our brains don't function as massivlely parallel search/inference engines?
Discussions about AI usually degenerate pretty quickly into arguments about whether or not we have some invisible, intangible, God-given "soul" or "spirit" or "spark." You're use of the phrase "*miracle of real intelligence*" would lead me to guess that you'd probably come down on the side that favors such a thing.
We humans are self-aware, yet we have not yet explained the mechanism of our self-awareness. Many of us assume that it therefore cannot be explained, that it is miraculous. I think that's a poor assumption. It may be, however, that we are incapable of understanding our own self-awareness, and incapable of understanding our own intelligence. Whether that's true or not, it does not follow that other animals and even machines cannot develop intelligence.
Why is it necessary to build a machine that plays chess "*as a human does*"? It's unlikely that any two humans play chess the same way, so which human would you have the machine emulate? Wouldn't it be better to build a machine that plays chess its own way?
It was a pretty big deal when Babbage built a machine that could do basic arithmetic. I'm sure people thought of his Difference Engine as being a "smart" machine, particularly since it could generate tables of numbers a good deal faster than a human. But if you looked at the machine, it was all cogs and shafts and springs and levers... I'm sure that once you got over the astonishment that a machine could do this seemingly difficult thing, you'd look at it and know that it really was still just a machine, and not truly a thinking thing.
We consider ourselves to do this mysterious thing we call "thinking," but we don't understand in a precise way what this means. It could be that our brains work in an algorithmic fashion, or at least that our brains can be simulated by a machine that works in an algorithmic fashion. The former seems unlikely to me, the latter very likely. Is there a difference between actual thinking and simulated thinking? It's hard to say.
When you look at these chess-playing computers, they're pretty amazing. They can certainly play one hell of a game of chess. But when you get right down to it, they're really solid-state versions of cogs and shafts and springs and levers. Are they thinking? (I want to say 'no', but I can't prove it.) Are they simulating thinking? (Maybe... it's hard to say since we don't know what thinking entails.) Is there a difference?
Who is this Joe Consumer who doesn't know that any product embodies a number of trade-offs, and who doesn't realize that he should find the device that best meets his needs?
Yes, if you have a need for more than 6 hours of battery life, you should look for a unit with more than 6 hours of battery life. Yes, if your budget allows you to spend no more than x, you should look for a unit priced = x. And if you want a recording studio, portable or otherwise, you've got a large number of trade-off related decisions ahead of you.
It's not that the points aren't valid. It's that I had the very strong impression that the author was making a bunch of contrarian points just because that's what pundits often think they have to do to get noticed, and to make people believe that they're informed, creative minds on the cutting edge.
Even if he's just being a devil's advocate, he could have done a lot better. There are plenty more than 5 reasons not to buy an iPod......if you work in an area with strong magnetic fields, such as an MRI facility, you probably shouldn't use a HDD-based device....if you travel frequently in an area with significant personal crime, the iPod with its high price, flashy silver back, and distinctive white earphones could make you a target....if you consider yourself a part of the ultra-hip counter-culture, and particularly if you live in lower Manhattan, the iPod may currently be way too popular for you. You should instead assemble your own Linux-based, solar powered Ogg player....if you don't much care for music, an iPod would probably be a waste of money for you....if you love music and insist on nothing but the best, the tiny earbuds and the lossy compression associated with any of the current crop of players just can't match your front row seats at Carnegie Hall....if you're one of those people who just hates Apple, then don't buy an iPod.
I don't think I missed the pointat all. And I don't expect anyone to change their requirements or work around the iPod's shortcomings, such as they are. I absolutely agree that people should buy a device that suits their needs if and when they need a device. But it's not like the column was a fair and balanced (except perhaps in the Fox News sense) analysis of mp3 players. He set up what, in my opinion, were a bunch of straw men, and I have no problem knocking them down.
This article seems like little more than a ploy meant to increase CNet readership, not unlike the grumpy columns that John Dvorak spouted years ago on the pages of MacUser. But at least Dvorak usually took a position and stuck to it for the duration of his column, unlike this CNet author who can't make up his mind.
Of course, if you don't care about low battery life, aren't fond of jogging, have ample disposable income, don't need to record/encode music portably, and want to purchase music downloads only from the iTunes Music Store, then the iPod is the best the way to go. While not ideal for some niche activities, it's still hands down the best-designed MP3 player in the world.
battery life: If, after listening to your iPod for 6+ hours straight, you cannot stand to be without your music for a short while, I think you should be concerned about your own life, and not your battery life.
price: Price is always an issue, but you get what you pay for. If you have modest needs and not much money, go elsewhere. But if you want a good value, the iPod's not a bad bet.
jogging: I suppose this could be a problem, but that's true for any disk-based player. Apple's current TV ads show dancers boogying like crazy while holding an iPod in hand or clipped to a belt, and I don't recall that the iPod comes with any particular warnings about motion.
recording: Possible with iPod (plus add-on), but quality probably not great. However, if you want great quality, you probably want to record raw data and not compress it until after production. And you want a decent mic, and mixing, and and and... I don't think there are any tiny, battery powered, highly portable devices that would do the job. Get a PowerBook, a good mic, and an amp instead.
iTunes Music Store only: Fair enough, but you've got to pick your poison. You can be tied to Apple and AAC, which at least has reasonable DRM and improved sound quality, or you can be tied to Microsoft and WMA, which has no quality improvement over mp3 and shitty track record for any sort of reasonableness.
still hands down the best-designed MP3 player in the world: In other words, the author already knows all of the above, and is just looking to raise people's hackles for a cheap spike in readership and maybe a mention on Slashdot. I guess he knows what he's doing, but I think it points to a lack of integrity.
It should be Blatantly Obvious To The Most Casual Observer that the iPod is not the perfect player for all consumers, just as a BMW 325i is not the perfect car for all drivers. But it's a pretty nice player, and it offers a lot of features that others do not.
You're right. I sure haven't seen a lot of colored plastic inserts on hardware since Apple dropped the colored iMacs and went with white, silver, and gray. Now it seems that most of the hardware I see is......white, silver, and gray.
Quick, easy, and here's the best part: you don't care about file-swappers because you get the customer at the exact point where they decide they like the music. You don't care if the 5 billion people who never come to your club swap this music around. What you care about is that your club (and the artist who gets a cut) made some extra money from a customer. You win, they win and the band wins.
On the contrary. The same folks who download music today without paying for it will say "Why should I pay to go to a show and then pay again to buy the music when I can download it for free and listen to it at home?"
The medium is not the problem. The problem is:
a fundamental lack of self respect and respect for the law on the part of downloaders combined with
price fixing and other forms of overcharging on the part of the record companies and
a stunningly poor performance on the part of the RIAA.
Online music stores such as MTV's or Apple's will make it easy for honest people to stay honest. And sure, a business model where clubs and artists agree to jointly market concerts via online services like the iTMS could make a lot of sense. But there will always be people who steal the music anyway, and it'll just take a little while for them to come up with plausible-sounding rationalizations for breaking the DRM on music downloaded from legitimate services.
It makes sense to me. Don't rely on someone else to keep your computer secure.
Well, we don't all have the time or the know-how to write our own firewall, or even install it. It's fine to ask users to take responsibility for security, but if Microsoft wants to do that, it ought to stop marketing Windows as a safe, secure, fun-for-the-whole-family operating system that anyone can use to make their life easier.
Microsoft asks "Where would you like to go today?" and I say "Just across town, please, but I'd like to avoid getting car-jacked along the way." (Given that BMW and other manufacturers are starting to use Windows in their vehicles, you should take that quite literally.)
Take steps yourself.
Step 1: Install an operating system made by anyone other than Microsoft.
I was interested when I saw the Belkin reader, and I'm still interested. Sure, I'd love to see it perform a little better, but the device would serve me reasonably well the way it is. I carry a compact 3.2mp camera and two or three CF cards. I've already got an iPod, so the Belkin reader would make it really easy to dump the cards onto a device that I already own, and avoid toting my PowerBook with me when I take a trip. So, yes, let's be honest here... when I'm using my digital Elph, a $99 CF reader that works with my existing iPod is exactly what I'd like.
I can see why those of you shooting 10mp digital SLR's on multiple 1GB CF cards might be disappointed with slow transfer speeds, but really... if you're going to invest that much in digital photography, do you really want to use some consumer-level hack to store your images on your MP3 player? And if you're going to lug an SLR around with a full kit of lenses, flashes, filters, and tripods, would it really kill you to add a 12" PowerBook or iBook?
This product may or may not work for you. If it's performance doesn't meet your needs, don't buy it. But the fact is that there are lots of people out there that DO use CF cards in the 64MB-256MB range.
The ultimate solution to this and many other health-related problems that techies suffer is a proper diet coupled with a multivitamin supplement and regular exercise. Too bad that these choices are so unpopular.
I hereby reject the notion that poor nutrition and lack of exercise are problems that "techies" suffer any more than other groups of similar composition (age, gender, education, etc.). Not all "techies" are anti-social pasty-faced overweight Jolt-drinking pizza-gobbling couch potatoes. In fact, I don't currently know any of those.
I'd be glad to see Congress tell broadcasters that we're going to take back the free spectrum they were given if they don't start using it for digital TV in the next n months.
In other words, use it or lose it.
I'm sure there are folks out there that would be happy to start up digital-only stations if they could get free spectrum to do it.
It's great to mandate the sale of digital-capable TV's, but increasing the amount of digital broadcasts will give consumers a reason to demand these things.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently, the guys at Television Week haven't read the Proctor & Gamble study which found that Tivo users remember ads about as well as other viewers, either because they're too lazy to skip ads, or because they're watching shows as they're being broadcast instead of time-shifting, or because they actually want to watch the ads, or because the ads are effective even at fast-forward speeds.
Personally, I sometimes forget that I'm watching through Tivo and that I can skip the ads. Other times I do skip the ads I'd have otherwise ignored, but I stop for ads that I enjoy. Still other times, I watch ads at high speed that I recognize. Frankly, I think I harbor less ill will toward companies whose ads would otherwise annoy me, and I still feel pretty good about companies whose ads (and more importantly, products) I like. So what's the harm?
I can tell one thing for sure about Apple. They have brilliant marketing
In recent years, Apple has become much more aware of what customers want. They've always made interesting technology, but they haven't always understood what customers wanted to buy, and they haven't always understood how to present their interesting technology in a way that appeals to customers. Steve Jobs is masterful in both these areas, and we have him to thank in large part for Apple's resurgence.
Will it not need some kind of cooling to prevent it overheating?
;-)
Since they can't seem to prevent their processors from emitting lots of energy, they might as well emit it at a useful frequency. Once they add the radio to the chip, it will actually function as a cooling device itself. When the chip gets too hot, you just transmit more packets.
Actually, my dictionary ("The Classic Latin Dictionary," Follett Publishing Co., Chicago 1957) gives it like this:
...
virus -i n. I. a slimy liquid, slime, Verg.
The "-i" means that the plural is in fact viri. The "n." means that it's neuter, which is weird since -us (singular) and -i (plural) are second declension masculine endings. If it's neuter, it ought to look like "virum" in the singular and "vira" in the plural. Perhaps it's a misprint in the dictionary and virus is in fact masculine, or perhaps there are a few strange neuter words that use masculine endings. Either way, viri is surely the correct Latin plural for virus.
Locus, by the way, is an interesting word because it has two different plurals. It's a second declension masculine noun, and it's normal plural, loci refers to "single places" according to this dictionary. It's alternate plural, loca means "places connected with one another, neighbourhood [sic], region."
No, no. You're thinking of the plural of virius. As far as I know, virius is not a word in either English or Latin. But if it were, it's plural would be virii, just as the plural of radius is radii.
Now, virus did start life as a Latin word (meaning 'slime,' or 'poison,' or 'bitter taste'), so I think it's fine to use the Latin plural viri. But as it's used in English, virus has a meaning different from that of the Latin word, so I think it's also fine to use the English plural viruses. If you do go with the Latin version, however, be aware that viri also means 'men,' and you should therefore be vigilant for unintended double entendre's.
Programmer 1: "Hey, guys, we've really got to do something about the security problems we've been having with IE lately. Any ideas?"
Programmer 2: "I've got an idea! My CS prof used to joke that you could solve any problem by adding one more layer of abstraction. In this case, it's true. Imagine how totally cool it would be if IE was just a regular application. Right now we've got it tangled up in the OS, but if you think about it, there's really no good reason for that. I mean, why does IE need special priviledges just to load files and render some HTML? If we pull it out of the OS, it'll still work fine, and it'll just naturally be subject to all the OS-level protection mechanisms we've got."
Programmer 1: "What?! You're talking madness, man! Are you saying that we should subject one of our own applications to the same forces we use to prevent third parties from gaining too much market share? Egads, that's brilliant! I'll bet we can even patent that..."
Programmer 3: "Guys, the idea certainly sounds cool, but it won't work. Bill said it's impossible. Don't you remember that Netscape trial thing? I know we're not supposed to ever talk about it, but he said it was impossible during his taped deposition. If Bill says it's impossible..."
Programmer 2: "...then it must be impossible. You're right."
Porgrammer 1: "Damn, you're right. Seemed like such a good idea."
Right, but when you search through Google (or any search engine) you expect to find rankings that accurately reflect the relevance of the page. If you search on "testosterone" you probably do not want the first ten pages of links to be to "Joe's Patented Penis Enlargement System" just because hardworking Joe set up dozens of shell web sites solely to increase his site's Google rank.
If Joe (or any other web site owner) really wants to use Google as an advertising medium, he ought to pay for a sponsored link and be done with it. Joe has no right to manipulate the ranking system, and if he's going to do that he ought to be prepared to suffer the consequences.
Still photographers use flash units that are designated 'master' and 'slave,' so I guess L.A. County won't be hiring any photographers or buying any flash photography equipment. I could see that being inconvenient for a county that encompasses Hollywood.
any DRM just goes to inconvenience regular users, and doesn't stop piraters at all
Do you lock the door of your house when you leave? Or when you go to sleep at night? A funny thing about locks is that they're really not all that secure. Most can be picked without too much trouble, or broken. And given even the most advanced lock, any idiot with a Sawzall, a glass cutter, or a rock can still get into most any house.
So, why do most of us continue to lock our doors?
It's because a lock makes it inconvenient for someone to cross the threshold without your permission. A lock is a physical manifestation of the notion that "the stuff inside is my stuff, and you shouldn't enter unless I invite you in." A lock creates a barrier that's as much psychological as it is physical, and because most of us respect that barrier we feel relatively safe in our own homes.
DRM may indeed inconvenience regular users. But the fact is that regular users were for quite a long time swapping music files on the Internet with zero remorse simply because they had no idea that it was wrong, or because it was so cheap and easy to do that they found some rationalization for it. These would be the "convenience pirates" in your terms. DRM is _meant_ to inconvenience these people just a bit, to make sharing copyrighted stuff difficult enough that you really have to think about what you're doing. When it's cheaper and easier for the average Joe to go out and buy a CD for $15 or download an album for $10 than it is to download it for $0, then DRM has succeeded.
Yeah, sure, there are differences between the lock on your door and DRM. For one thing, you put the lock on your door, whereas the RIAA and the computer industry came up with DRM. DRM on "your" music seems as objectionable as having to get permission from, say, Wal-Mart to enter your own home, at least to some people. So I ask you: when was the last time you opened up your electric or gas meter? All it takes is a wire cutter...
[Intelligence is] The ability to Solve a Task with an infinite Problem space
That's a nice idea, but it doesn't help much. For one thing, it's most likely wrong. Examples of computers solving problems in "infinite" problem spaces are many. The realm of numbers is infinite, yet computers can do things such as solve complex systems of equations and prove theorems. What's more, humans often make mistakes, which is to say that the solutions we find to problems are often not the best ones.
Chess to an incredible digitised number cruncher is not infinite. It has a colossal but ultimately finite number of board states and moves. But to a human it *is* infinite, or might as well be. We simply cannot get anywhere near coping with consideration of every possible move, and we're certainly light years behind the computers processing power.
I'm no expert on the subject, but I'm pretty sure that chess programs don't work entirely by brute force. They look at the available moves, weed out the ones that are obviously bad, and consider more deeply the moves that are not obviously bad. This would seem to be similar to what humans do. And human chess playing may rely more heavily on brute force than we know... we don't consciously look at hundreds of moves per second, but it may be that our brains do exactly that, and only bother to inform the conscious part of us about the ones that are looking pretty good.
Most people are looking for an experience.
I hear what you're saying, but I think in fact that most people are _not_ looking for "an experience," at least not in front of their computers. Most people are looking to get some work done with less pain than they had doing things however they did them before. Most people want a solution that works for them, that they don't have to put together or optimize or spend a lot of time understanding.
What I'd really like to know is this:
Can she settle the case with the stipulation that the settlement does not consitute an admission of guilt?
If the SEC can settle with Putnam and Morgan Stanley without forcing them to admit wrongdoing after they committed fraud on a huge scale and victimized thousands of innocent people, it seems to me that the RIAA could see its way to giving a 15 year old girl the same courtesy.
We all need to stop thinking of IT as a field apart from the rest of the world, and start looking at the world and to see how it can be made better. Sometimes IT will be part of that solution. Sometimes not. Sometimes the solution will be to remove (gasp!) high tech "solutions" that failed to deliver.
Most of the IT companies spent the last 25 years convincing companies and consumers to buy desktop computers, laptop computers, servers, and software in order to boost productivity. Plenty of low tech jobs were replaced by a bunch of high tech solutions and a smaller number of high tech jobs. Companies now routinely process zillions of transactions very quickly using very few workers. It may be that productivity can be increased even further in this way, but the huge gains of the last two decades are probably tapped out. IT may not be the motivation for the next huge runup in stock prices, but saying that it doesn't matter is like saying that mutual funds don't matter in the market. They may have fallen out of favor, but they're still a huge force to be reckoned with.
I'd like to see IT applied in ways that really make our world better, instead of (just) more efficient. IT has long promised to improve health care, and has largely delivered on that, but it has also lead in part to the increased cost of health care. Let's use it to drive down costs. IT has made a lot of things much more convenient, but at the cost of privacy. Let's use IT to protect privacy and better control our own information.
There are a million directions that IT can go in, and thanks to massive parallelism in our society it can go in those directions all at once. Let's get on it.
normal intelligence is just the ability to make our own choices
That's a pretty big 'just'. You could build a rock paper scissors simulator using a decent random number generator, and it would win as often as it lost. Humans, on the other hand, play using actual strategies in order to try to win more often than they lose, which is interesting.
It's that very act of making our own choices that we don't understand. And if we could understand it, perhaps we'd have a good start at building machines that could make their own choices as well.
What, if any, is the difference between "simulated intelligence" and "actual intelligence"? How do you know that our brains don't function as massivlely parallel search/inference engines?
Discussions about AI usually degenerate pretty quickly into arguments about whether or not we have some invisible, intangible, God-given "soul" or "spirit" or "spark." You're use of the phrase "*miracle of real intelligence*" would lead me to guess that you'd probably come down on the side that favors such a thing.
We humans are self-aware, yet we have not yet explained the mechanism of our self-awareness. Many of us assume that it therefore cannot be explained, that it is miraculous. I think that's a poor assumption. It may be, however, that we are incapable of understanding our own self-awareness, and incapable of understanding our own intelligence. Whether that's true or not, it does not follow that other animals and even machines cannot develop intelligence.
Why is it necessary to build a machine that plays chess "*as a human does*"? It's unlikely that any two humans play chess the same way, so which human would you have the machine emulate? Wouldn't it be better to build a machine that plays chess its own way?
Are you sure it wasn't some 14 year old teenage girl masquerading as an old man on the Internet?
These things have been known to happen.
It was a pretty big deal when Babbage built a machine that could do basic arithmetic. I'm sure people thought of his Difference Engine as being a "smart" machine, particularly since it could generate tables of numbers a good deal faster than a human. But if you looked at the machine, it was all cogs and shafts and springs and levers... I'm sure that once you got over the astonishment that a machine could do this seemingly difficult thing, you'd look at it and know that it really was still just a machine, and not truly a thinking thing.
We consider ourselves to do this mysterious thing we call "thinking," but we don't understand in a precise way what this means. It could be that our brains work in an algorithmic fashion, or at least that our brains can be simulated by a machine that works in an algorithmic fashion. The former seems unlikely to me, the latter very likely. Is there a difference between actual thinking and simulated thinking? It's hard to say.
When you look at these chess-playing computers, they're pretty amazing. They can certainly play one hell of a game of chess. But when you get right down to it, they're really solid-state versions of cogs and shafts and springs and levers. Are they thinking? (I want to say 'no', but I can't prove it.) Are they simulating thinking? (Maybe... it's hard to say since we don't know what thinking entails.) Is there a difference?
Who is this Joe Consumer who doesn't know that any product embodies a number of trade-offs, and who doesn't realize that he should find the device that best meets his needs?
...if you work in an area with strong magnetic fields, such as an MRI facility, you probably shouldn't use a HDD-based device. ...if you travel frequently in an area with significant personal crime, the iPod with its high price, flashy silver back, and distinctive white earphones could make you a target. ...if you consider yourself a part of the ultra-hip counter-culture, and particularly if you live in lower Manhattan, the iPod may currently be way too popular for you. You should instead assemble your own Linux-based, solar powered Ogg player. ...if you don't much care for music, an iPod would probably be a waste of money for you. ...if you love music and insist on nothing but the best, the tiny earbuds and the lossy compression associated with any of the current crop of players just can't match your front row seats at Carnegie Hall. ...if you're one of those people who just hates Apple, then don't buy an iPod.
Yes, if you have a need for more than 6 hours of battery life, you should look for a unit with more than 6 hours of battery life. Yes, if your budget allows you to spend no more than x, you should look for a unit priced = x. And if you want a recording studio, portable or otherwise, you've got a large number of trade-off related decisions ahead of you.
It's not that the points aren't valid. It's that I had the very strong impression that the author was making a bunch of contrarian points just because that's what pundits often think they have to do to get noticed, and to make people believe that they're informed, creative minds on the cutting edge.
Even if he's just being a devil's advocate, he could have done a lot better. There are plenty more than 5 reasons not to buy an iPod...
I don't think I missed the pointat all. And I don't expect anyone to change their requirements or work around the iPod's shortcomings, such as they are. I absolutely agree that people should buy a device that suits their needs if and when they need a device. But it's not like the column was a fair and balanced (except perhaps in the Fox News sense) analysis of mp3 players. He set up what, in my opinion, were a bunch of straw men, and I have no problem knocking them down.
This article seems like little more than a ploy meant to increase CNet readership, not unlike the grumpy columns that John Dvorak spouted years ago on the pages of MacUser. But at least Dvorak usually took a position and stuck to it for the duration of his column, unlike this CNet author who can't make up his mind.
Of course, if you don't care about low battery life, aren't fond of jogging, have ample disposable income, don't need to record/encode music portably, and want to purchase music downloads only from the iTunes Music Store, then the iPod is the best the way to go. While not ideal for some niche activities, it's still hands down the best-designed MP3 player in the world.
battery life: If, after listening to your iPod for 6+ hours straight, you cannot stand to be without your music for a short while, I think you should be concerned about your own life, and not your battery life.
price: Price is always an issue, but you get what you pay for. If you have modest needs and not much money, go elsewhere. But if you want a good value, the iPod's not a bad bet.
jogging: I suppose this could be a problem, but that's true for any disk-based player. Apple's current TV ads show dancers boogying like crazy while holding an iPod in hand or clipped to a belt, and I don't recall that the iPod comes with any particular warnings about motion.
recording: Possible with iPod (plus add-on), but quality probably not great. However, if you want great quality, you probably want to record raw data and not compress it until after production. And you want a decent mic, and mixing, and and and... I don't think there are any tiny, battery powered, highly portable devices that would do the job. Get a PowerBook, a good mic, and an amp instead.
iTunes Music Store only: Fair enough, but you've got to pick your poison. You can be tied to Apple and AAC, which at least has reasonable DRM and improved sound quality, or you can be tied to Microsoft and WMA, which has no quality improvement over mp3 and shitty track record for any sort of reasonableness.
still hands down the best-designed MP3 player in the world: In other words, the author already knows all of the above, and is just looking to raise people's hackles for a cheap spike in readership and maybe a mention on Slashdot. I guess he knows what he's doing, but I think it points to a lack of integrity.
It should be Blatantly Obvious To The Most Casual Observer that the iPod is not the perfect player for all consumers, just as a BMW 325i is not the perfect car for all drivers. But it's a pretty nice player, and it offers a lot of features that others do not.
You're right. I sure haven't seen a lot of colored plastic inserts on hardware since Apple dropped the colored iMacs and went with white, silver, and gray. Now it seems that most of the hardware I see is... ...white, silver, and gray.
On the contrary. The same folks who download music today without paying for it will say "Why should I pay to go to a show and then pay again to buy the music when I can download it for free and listen to it at home?"
The medium is not the problem. The problem is:
Online music stores such as MTV's or Apple's will make it easy for honest people to stay honest. And sure, a business model where clubs and artists agree to jointly market concerts via online services like the iTMS could make a lot of sense. But there will always be people who steal the music anyway, and it'll just take a little while for them to come up with plausible-sounding rationalizations for breaking the DRM on music downloaded from legitimate services.
It makes sense to me. Don't rely on someone else to keep your computer secure.
Well, we don't all have the time or the know-how to write our own firewall, or even install it. It's fine to ask users to take responsibility for security, but if Microsoft wants to do that, it ought to stop marketing Windows as a safe, secure, fun-for-the-whole-family operating system that anyone can use to make their life easier.
Microsoft asks "Where would you like to go today?" and I say "Just across town, please, but I'd like to avoid getting car-jacked along the way." (Given that BMW and other manufacturers are starting to use Windows in their vehicles, you should take that quite literally.)
Take steps yourself.
Step 1: Install an operating system made by anyone other than Microsoft.
I was interested when I saw the Belkin reader, and I'm still interested. Sure, I'd love to see it perform a little better, but the device would serve me reasonably well the way it is. I carry a compact 3.2mp camera and two or three CF cards. I've already got an iPod, so the Belkin reader would make it really easy to dump the cards onto a device that I already own, and avoid toting my PowerBook with me when I take a trip. So, yes, let's be honest here... when I'm using my digital Elph, a $99 CF reader that works with my existing iPod is exactly what I'd like.
I can see why those of you shooting 10mp digital SLR's on multiple 1GB CF cards might be disappointed with slow transfer speeds, but really... if you're going to invest that much in digital photography, do you really want to use some consumer-level hack to store your images on your MP3 player? And if you're going to lug an SLR around with a full kit of lenses, flashes, filters, and tripods, would it really kill you to add a 12" PowerBook or iBook?
This product may or may not work for you. If it's performance doesn't meet your needs, don't buy it. But the fact is that there are lots of people out there that DO use CF cards in the 64MB-256MB range.
The ultimate solution to this and many other health-related problems that techies suffer is a proper diet coupled with a multivitamin supplement and regular exercise. Too bad that these choices are so unpopular.
I hereby reject the notion that poor nutrition and lack of exercise are problems that "techies" suffer any more than other groups of similar composition (age, gender, education, etc.). Not all "techies" are anti-social pasty-faced overweight Jolt-drinking pizza-gobbling couch potatoes. In fact, I don't currently know any of those.
I'd be glad to see Congress tell broadcasters that we're going to take back the free spectrum they were given if they don't start using it for digital TV in the next n months.
In other words, use it or lose it.
I'm sure there are folks out there that would be happy to start up digital-only stations if they could get free spectrum to do it.
It's great to mandate the sale of digital-capable TV's, but increasing the amount of digital broadcasts will give consumers a reason to demand these things.