You could build a whole lot of things for the money that goes into Iraq. For example, you could reduce AIDS drastically, almost eliminate child mortality due to malnutrition, malaria...
Heck, you might even build a few (read tens of) Big Science labs with the money that gets left over from the previous attempts of bettering the world. If you're feeling green, you might also want to save some of the world's biodiversity hotspots and prevent extinction of thousands of species.
Of course, the money in Iraq is doing important stuff there as well. War is expensive. I'm just lucky I'm not the one doing the difficult decisions whether to fund research or take out Saddam.
As a matter of fact, after Safari added RSS support, my blog-reading has increased.
I used to have roughly 20 sites I checked daily, including comics. Many of these were updated relatively rarely, perhaps even once a month. After I started to experiment with RSS and blogs, I'm now able to keep track of many more sites, just because I don't have to remember the state of each blog. I now have over 50 blogs and other sites in my list.
So yes, they are well-chosen, but "few"? Not very likely.
By adding these lines to the user-specified CSS file, the cursor turns to crosshair whenever it is over a link that opens in a new window.:link[target="_blank"],:visited[target="_blank"],:link[target="_new"],:visited[target="_new"] {
cursor: crosshair; }
While it doesn't remove the source of annoyance itself, it at least gives the user a warning. When I see the crosshair, I can then open it in a new tab or sometimes let the site open in a new window.
$1 per episode is the part that is going to trip any of this up.
I'm not sure. I've thought about TV distribution via Internet for a few weeks now. During that time I've also compiled some statistics about how much shows cost.
In the USA practically every show I studied remained under 50 cents per episode per viewer household. The most popular shows were also the most expensive, but the prices seem to go hand in hand. I couldn't find a single show that cost over a dollar per episode. (ER might have, but I didn't find reliable data on the budget.)
That's just the US population. Factor in the rest of the world. Canada+Mexico = 130 million people ie. half of the US market. EU = over 300 million ie. bigger than the US market. If a series has only a few hundreds of thousands of viewers globally, it probably doesn't have a huge budget either. (It's hard to see how such a series would survive today.)
Amazingly this applies in other countries as well. The Finnish TV shows I examined cost less than one euro per viewer. I'd really like to do a more comprehensive study some day to confirm that the scheme might work.
is one-directional (not as in half-duplex, but competely one-directional),
is annoyingly synchronous: certain data can only be received at pre-determined timeslots,
has poorly separated protocol stack and
whose applications see UI improvements rarely.
Yes, this is the television. If someone came up with the idea of TV today, he'd have a hard time trying to find anyone crazy enough to invest in it.
TV is a lowcost AV content distribution system. When compared to internet and P2P (why yes, I'm talking about BitTorrent) distribution, the inadequacies of the current broadcasting scheme become apparent. It is only the huge inertia of the entertainment world money that keeps the system afloat.
Based on publicly available data about TV series budgets and ratings I've calculated the average episode cost per household. For the more popular shows this is around 20 cents, with the 'fringe' shows like Stargate and Enterprise edging slightly higher. None of the shows, however, cost more than a dollar per viewer household per episode.
(This data is based on only US ratings. Imagine how low the cost will sink when we factor in the whole world!)
I'd really like to see a decentralized Internet TV, where the consumers could buy their favourite shows directly from the production houses. New episodes would be delivered as soon as they appear. (Remember to think globally.)
I think you can all immediatly see the benefits. This would put the consumers in control as shows would be produced for them, and not for the broadcasters. All new shows would be available globally instantly. (Existing subtitling and dubbing companies would need to change their operation somewhat.)
The technology should of course be time-shifting. This would free you from having to set your daily schedule to fit the TV schedule. And oh yes: since you'd pay for what you watch, there'd be no ads. (There could be, if you wanted to spare a dime. Even in that case the ads could be tailored to fit you: no more lipstick commercials for single bachelors.)
(The downsides? The broadcasting companies would have to change their business models radically. Cry me a friggin' river, but that's the way it is in the modern world that sees huge technological advances every decade.)
The best thing is that the technologies required for this are already here. BitTorrent, MPEG4 and ADSL (or other broadband technology).
I've tried really hard to find some problems in the scheme. IP and viewership rights are probably the biggest ones. I'd love to see a scheme that would allow me to pay for the episodes only once and then allow me to watch the episode an unlimited number of times. This does have an impact on the DVD sales, but then again, adapt or die.
If anyone of you/. readers is a TV Exec who happens to "Think Differently", please implement this at once.
The near-immortality proposed by the article is truly fascinating. It is hard to even imagine the scale of changes brought by 1000 year lifespan. Quite a few comments here concentrate on individuals and the rest on the society and they bring up some good points. What really interests me, however, is what happens to families.
Relationships grow as people grow. It is quite mindbogging to think about a relationship with a century of common history.
1. Sex. There'd be ten times as much. That would probably finally reveal us if it is possible to get bored of sex.
2. Marriage. The institution of marriage is already slowly losing the status it has had in the recent years. It seems difficult to find a mate for 50 years -- imagine the difficulties in finding a partner for 500! One possibility is that marriages become short-term only, ie. you get married for 20, 30, 50 years at a time. This leads to...
3. Children. Obviously you can't go on spawning children every 10 years. The population explosion would be more like a population supernova. A child would be a very very rare occurence. It wouldn't be inconcievable that marriages would be only granted for the express purpose of having a child and raising it into adulthood.
"then run naked to the pole in minus 100 F"
Why the *FUCK* would I want to do that??
Because it would be fun! As a Finn I find the whole idea terribly entertaining -- finally a worthy goal for my life:-)
I've already joined the 200F and 100C clubs. This'd be the icing on the cake.
I just want my phone to work like a regular phone. Is that too much to ask? I just want the basic features. You know, a phone that can make phone calls, has calendar, voice recognition, camera, ability to install additional software and a Python interpreter.
Re:the whole thing makes me wonder market shares
on
Doom 3 Announced for Mac
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· Score: 2, Informative
I am of course only speaking for myself, but if a suitable game (such as Rome: Total War or Star Wars Battleground) would be released for the Mac, I'd buy it in an instant.
Oh dear. I don't think I'll leave my apartment for a week or two.
Re:the whole thing makes me wonder market shares
on
Doom 3 Announced for Mac
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· Score: 3, Interesting
What matters is profitability, not market share.
The costs of porting a game are significantly lower than creating the game in the first place. Aspyr need not worry itself with level design, for instance. (I'm not saying it is easy to port a game but it's easier.)
It is also possible that due to the relatively low Mac market share, warez isn't such a big issue in Mac gaming market. (Dunno about the numbers, I'm pulling this out of my hat.) And of course, if you can afford a Mac, then how can you not afford a game?
I am of course only speaking for myself, but if a suitable game (such as Rome: Total War or Star Wars Battleground) would be released for the Mac, I'd buy it in an instant. In the meanwhile I play Master of Orion 2 on an emulator:-)
What? I always thought Slashdot people would be The People who would really appreciate features such as SSH on the phone.
In my time I've owned three phones that have had the possibility of connecting to the Internet. The first was Nokia 9000 Communicator, in 1998. It's nice to know future was invented more than six years ago.
During that time I've used SSH, Web and e-mail on the phone. Let me give you some anecdotes:
Once I was hurrying to the train station and I missed the bus. I had no idea whether I'd make it in time if I waited for another bus. It was early Saturday morning, so I couldn't call anyone at the Commuter Traffic Center. Instead of calling a taxi, I checked the timetables for the bus from the Net. No need for a taxi, so I saved some 20 Euros there.
(I've done something similar countless times on Friday evenings after the regular busses have gone and I don't know how I'll find a night-bus.)
Another time I was picking up some video tapes from the video shop. Unfortunately when I was almost there, I noticed I had left the note with the orders home. Option 1: turn back, face the rush hour, might not even make it today. Option 2: check email for said note. Option two saved me at least two hours, maybe even a full day.
(And again, other similar incidents have happened.)
I have dozens of stories like these. These features can be a real lifesaver at times! I'm not saying a smartphone is an excuse to be sloppy, but it is REALLY useful when accidents happen.
I haven't even mentioned the entertainment benefits. Tending the fire while camping, everyone else asleep? Play Doom. Stuck in a strange city at a late hour, two hours before the bus/train/plane leaves and no way to spend time? Irc or IM with your friends. Need to do something productive? Take out your laptop and copy some stuff from home server over GPRS.
Although 3D on cellphones is nothing near modern PCs, my current phone (N-Gage QD) is roughly as powerful as the PC I owned 4 years ago. (Granted, it was quite old at the time.) It is more powerful than the computer I used to play Doom and Wolfenstein 3D, and can show more colors!
I wouldn't be surprised, if Nvidia had Nokia as their main client after, say, 5 years.
If you can afford to keep your computer running all the time, ie. the noise doesn't keep you up at nights, then the only true bottleneck is the time you spend sitting at the computer.
When I ripped my CD collection, I used a two-step process. I first ripped the CDs into AIFF. This step is lossless, so there's no quality lost. It does take up some hard drive space, 600-700 megabytes/CD.
Step two: convert these to MP3/AAC/whatever with iTunes or iTunes LAME. The simplest way to do it (in my opinion) is to use a smart playlist that has the rule Kind is AIFF. (Convert to XX is in the Advanced menu, assuming you've set the encoder to be XX in preferences.) I did this when I went to bed or to work.
The smart playlist is handy in that sense that after you've converted the current batch to mp3 or whatever, you can select all the AIFF-versions in the smart playlist and delete them (from iTunes and from hard drive) with option-backspace.
And how does this relate to Finder? Well, if you insert a CD and iTunes is running, it can automatically name both the album and the songs within it. If you drag the songs off the CD, Finder will rip them as AIFF. You can later import those files to iTunes and do the conversion I explained earlier.
This method is not without downsides, though. You have to manually name the albums you've inserted as Finder only names the tracks. One could probably invent an applescript to do this.
If hundreds of thousands of years of evolution in geographicly isolated populations lead to clearly visable diffrence in then fenotype. Then, praytell, why are is it impossibe for geneticly inherited diffrences in behevioral paterns to exist. It doesn't imply that groups of people are inherently iferior (eg.: caucasians people are antisocial or mongolodis despotic), just that diffrent sets of traits where benefical in diffrent enviroments.
Homo sapiens learned to speak about 50 thousand years ago, so that's the upper estimate on how much time we've had to evolve into different species. That hasn't happened, though, since we still can procreate with any other race.
Cosmetic evolution is rather commonplace with both humans and animals. Since appearance is/was the main reason for selecting a mate, it has felt considerable evolutionary pressure. Naturally this leads to rather fast superficial changes.
Behavioral patterns have, however, been practically the same for millenia. People were hunter-gatherers for tens of thousands of years. Their way of life was rather universal around the world and there was no great pressure to evolve distinct behavioral patterns. Assuming agriculture and society would have changed that we still have at most only 12 millenia to evolve. (It feels slightly far fetched, though.)
It is possible that there are fundamental genetic differences that would for example cause certain people to be eg. very blood thirsty. But so far I have not seen it. Culture and upbringing seem to dominate that field quite completely. The more I meet people from other countries and continents, the more I believe that there are no built-in differences. The more I hear stories of joke-telling Tanzanians from my friends, the more convinced I become.
I repeat my previous suggestions: Get to know those people. Read books. Look beneath the surface. For example, in his Annals Tacitus quite well shows how the Romans were very much like you and me. I especially remember a short segment about a fallen apartment building; the constructor had used substandard material to make more profit.
You are completely right. I have no genetic or medical or sosiological proof. All I have are my empirical observations and those of long gone historians, and naturally my gut-feeling. I tend to trust them, though.
It's not just geeks. It's not just USA and Saudi-Arabia.
Physiologically people are quite the same. Some have folds in their eyes, some have lost pigment from their skin and some have fat in different places. These are only cosmetical differences. Inside we're all the same.
If you look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you'll see that the bottom layers are physiological, safety, and love. These are what every person in the world wants. They don't want to sit in the cold, they don't want to be hungry and they don't want to be afraid. (Yet some are.) And people want love and want to love.
The only substantial difference between different nations is due to culture. Some are born in conservative countries, some in liberal. Others live in religious areas, others have secular rule. Yet despite this, people still practice arts, science, whatever. You have geeks in Saudi-Arabia and deeply religious people in USA.
Whatever group of people you look, you'll find innovative people there. I recently received a revelation about this subject while reading "Guns, Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond. (Excellent book, recommended). His examples showed how people have adapted to all sorts of environments and made the best use of available resources. If this does not restore your faith in mankind, nothing will.
It is true that there is a deep cultural divide between the Western world and the countries of the East, and I don't see the current political situation to lessen the situation at all. However, this is mostly due to ignorance. If you see two small children playing with toys, do you care if one of them is a Jew and another one an Arab? Do the children care? No.
If Mr. Bush had met Mr. Hussein in a neutral and safe environment before the war, would they have fought with their bare fists. Probably not. Their nations fought one another, perhaps even their ideologies. But the people themselves... you can hardly ever find a good reason to strike at your fellow man. (This teaching, it would seem, lies at the heart of every religion. Sadly it is not observed very often.)
The only way to fight this is to get rid of the prejudice and the fear. If you can, travel to different countries and try to see beneath the surface. People are the same, even in France. Try to learn about different cultures. If you can't spare the money, go to http://www.wikipedia.org/ and read about the different achievements of cultures both long gone and present. Read about their times of glory and downfall. Go to a library and read a book. (Once again I recommend "Guns, Germs and Steel".
I'd like to end this rant with a quote from Charlie Chaplin. At the end of "The Dictator," the Jewish barber (who looks like Adolf Hynkel) gives a rather touching speech about universal harmony. (Emphasis mine.)
"I'm sorry but I don't want to be an emperor. That's not my business. I don't want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone if possible; Jew, Gentile, black men, white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each others' happiness, not by each other's misery. We don't want to hate and despise one another.
In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men's souls; has barricaded the world with hate; has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge as made us cynical; our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little.
More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost. The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these things cries out for the goodness in man; cries out for universal brotherhood; for the unity of us all."
From the data it's easy to calculate the average bitrate, which seems to be 66 kbit/s. (1,5 gigabytes * 1024**2 * 8 / 2.2 days * 24 hours/day * 3600 s/hour)
By using a bitrate of 32 kbit/s, you could double the amount of songs on a 2 GB player. This is fine for those who do not hear the compression artifacts. Most people would say it sounds like crap, though.
Apple, however, uses the default iTunes bitrate when quoting the amount of songs. Most Apple sites follow this as well.
As a Finn I can tell you that the trailer isn't funny even in Finnish:). But then again, it's probably not supposed to be. Sort of a parody of the usual Bruckheimer-trailers... "THIS IS THE END OF THE WORLD" etc. etc.
Most people in the inteded audience (before the slashdotting, at least) already know what humor and the jokes are going to be like; after all, this is the group's sixth SW-production. They're just showing "this is what it will be like", and keeping all the jokes 'secret'.
If you have the time, look through their earlier work, for example the hilarious Star Wreck V: The Lost Contact. See http://www.starwreck.com/oldies/downloads.php for more details.
--Antti, a SW fan since 1998
PS. Well the fragfest-joke was actually quite funny.
Re:Paramount ain't gonna like this...
on
Star Wreck Trailer
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· Score: 3, Informative
If you look at the trailer at all, you'd notice that the CGI sequences are not clips from ST episodes. After all, how many times did we see B5... B13, I mean, in Star Trek?
While it is quite cool (in the gadget-gee-whiz-sense) to have wireless connection to a digital camera, it is not in my view even close to the Holy Grail of digital photography. The main reasons to use this feature are a) convinience (which is eaten away by the fact that you need an external unit) or b) people who really need to send pictures to somewhere else ASAP.
In the case b) the photographer loses his/her chances to edit the pictures later or even to choose the best pictures. Good for first impresssions, not much for anything else.
Holy grail for professional digital photography are for example cameras that use a full-sized sensor; then you wouldn't need different lenses for digital and film photography.
On the hobbyist front I'd like to see more standards. The Four Thirds -standard sounds promising, and I'm hoping Canon or Nikon would embrace it.
I recently had the opportunity to try both GnomeMeeting and iChat AV. These remarks are only for audio, though.
GnomeMeeting has an impressive feature list and it's adherence to open standards is naturally very appealing.
However, when comparing it to beta iChat the differences were planet-sized. Apple has created a wonderful UI; I could concentrate on communication, not on the software itself.
It is true that GnomeMeeting allows you to use different codecs and is slightly more hacker-friendly. However, when I want to talk to someone, I usually don't feel like configuring loads of stuff. In some cases ease of use simply blows features away, and human communication is one of them.
(Not to mention the sound quality of the iChat audio chat. Wow.)
The messages the article and the submitter are talking about are the various alerts, instant messages etc. that interrupt our concentration.
The device described in the article monitors the attention of the user and uses it to prioritise different messages the user sees; the pdf-link gives more details about the technology.
I repeat: the article is far more interesting than Yet Another Solution to Spam.
Another good book that explains the basics of data mining is Principles of Data Mining by Hand et al.
It is perhaps not the most simple book around, but it covers a lot of important issues. Furthermore it doesn't ignore the role of computer science, as two of the authors have a CS background.
You won't find explicit instructions about how to build your own Google, but it surely does wonders for your insight.
Slashdot Mirror
You could build a whole lot of things for the money that goes into Iraq. For example, you could reduce AIDS drastically, almost eliminate child mortality due to malnutrition, malaria...
Heck, you might even build a few (read tens of) Big Science labs with the money that gets left over from the previous attempts of bettering the world. If you're feeling green, you might also want to save some of the world's biodiversity hotspots and prevent extinction of thousands of species.
Of course, the money in Iraq is doing important stuff there as well. War is expensive. I'm just lucky I'm not the one doing the difficult decisions whether to fund research or take out Saddam.
As a matter of fact, after Safari added RSS support, my blog-reading has increased.
/. as a web page, though =)
I used to have roughly 20 sites I checked daily, including comics. Many of these were updated relatively rarely, perhaps even once a month. After I started to experiment with RSS and blogs, I'm now able to keep track of many more sites, just because I don't have to remember the state of each blog. I now have over 50 blogs and other sites in my list.
So yes, they are well-chosen, but "few"? Not very likely.
I still read
For most browsers there is at least a workaround.
:link[target="_blank"], :visited[target="_blank"], :link[target="_new"], :visited[target="_new"] {
By adding these lines to the user-specified CSS file, the cursor turns to crosshair whenever it is over a link that opens in a new window.
cursor: crosshair;
}
While it doesn't remove the source of annoyance itself, it at least gives the user a warning. When I see the crosshair, I can then open it in a new tab or sometimes let the site open in a new window.
Nope, the gram isn't correct unit in this case; the kilogram is. grams*(m/s)^2 equals millijoules.
& q=5000+g+*+c%5E2
If you don't believe, ask google: http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en
When you can sign up for Netflix and get them delivered to your home for about 66 cents each!
Where I live it takes at most an hour to download a popular movie, while Netflix does not deliver anything here (ie. Finland).
--A
$1 per episode is the part that is going to trip any of this up.
I'm not sure. I've thought about TV distribution via Internet for a few weeks now. During that time I've also compiled some statistics about how much shows cost.
In the USA practically every show I studied remained under 50 cents per episode per viewer household. The most popular shows were also the most expensive, but the prices seem to go hand in hand. I couldn't find a single show that cost over a dollar per episode. (ER might have, but I didn't find reliable data on the budget.)
That's just the US population. Factor in the rest of the world. Canada+Mexico = 130 million people ie. half of the US market. EU = over 300 million ie. bigger than the US market. If a series has only a few hundreds of thousands of viewers globally, it probably doesn't have a huge budget either. (It's hard to see how such a series would survive today.)
Amazingly this applies in other countries as well. The Finnish TV shows I examined cost less than one euro per viewer. I'd really like to do a more comprehensive study some day to confirm that the scheme might work.
Yes, this is the television. If someone came up with the idea of TV today, he'd have a hard time trying to find anyone crazy enough to invest in it.
TV is a lowcost AV content distribution system. When compared to internet and P2P (why yes, I'm talking about BitTorrent) distribution, the inadequacies of the current broadcasting scheme become apparent. It is only the huge inertia of the entertainment world money that keeps the system afloat.
Based on publicly available data about TV series budgets and ratings I've calculated the average episode cost per household. For the more popular shows this is around 20 cents, with the 'fringe' shows like Stargate and Enterprise edging slightly higher. None of the shows, however, cost more than a dollar per viewer household per episode.
(This data is based on only US ratings. Imagine how low the cost will sink when we factor in the whole world!)
I'd really like to see a decentralized Internet TV, where the consumers could buy their favourite shows directly from the production houses. New episodes would be delivered as soon as they appear. (Remember to think globally.)
I think you can all immediatly see the benefits. This would put the consumers in control as shows would be produced for them, and not for the broadcasters. All new shows would be available globally instantly. (Existing subtitling and dubbing companies would need to change their operation somewhat.)
The technology should of course be time-shifting. This would free you from having to set your daily schedule to fit the TV schedule. And oh yes: since you'd pay for what you watch, there'd be no ads. (There could be, if you wanted to spare a dime. Even in that case the ads could be tailored to fit you: no more lipstick commercials for single bachelors.)
(The downsides? The broadcasting companies would have to change their business models radically. Cry me a friggin' river, but that's the way it is in the modern world that sees huge technological advances every decade.)
The best thing is that the technologies required for this are already here. BitTorrent, MPEG4 and ADSL (or other broadband technology).
I've tried really hard to find some problems in the scheme. IP and viewership rights are probably the biggest ones. I'd love to see a scheme that would allow me to pay for the episodes only once and then allow me to watch the episode an unlimited number of times. This does have an impact on the DVD sales, but then again, adapt or die.
If anyone of you
The near-immortality proposed by the article is truly fascinating. It is hard to even imagine the scale of changes brought by 1000 year lifespan. Quite a few comments here concentrate on individuals and the rest on the society and they bring up some good points. What really interests me, however, is what happens to families.
...
Relationships grow as people grow. It is quite mindbogging to think about a relationship with a century of common history.
1. Sex. There'd be ten times as much. That would probably finally reveal us if it is possible to get bored of sex.
2. Marriage. The institution of marriage is already slowly losing the status it has had in the recent years. It seems difficult to find a mate for 50 years -- imagine the difficulties in finding a partner for 500! One possibility is that marriages become short-term only, ie. you get married for 20, 30, 50 years at a time. This leads to
3. Children. Obviously you can't go on spawning children every 10 years. The population explosion would be more like a population supernova. A child would be a very very rare occurence. It wouldn't be inconcievable that marriages would be only granted for the express purpose of having a child and raising it into adulthood.
I've already joined the 200F and 100C clubs. This'd be the icing on the cake.
I just want my phone to work like a regular phone. Is that too much to ask? I just want the basic features. You know, a phone that can make phone calls, has calendar, voice recognition, camera, ability to install additional software and a Python interpreter.
Oh dear. I don't think I'll leave my apartment for a week or two.
What matters is profitability, not market share.
The costs of porting a game are significantly lower than creating the game in the first place. Aspyr need not worry itself with level design, for instance. (I'm not saying it is easy to port a game but it's easier.)
It is also possible that due to the relatively low Mac market share, warez isn't such a big issue in Mac gaming market. (Dunno about the numbers, I'm pulling this out of my hat.) And of course, if you can afford a Mac, then how can you not afford a game?
I am of course only speaking for myself, but if a suitable game (such as Rome: Total War or Star Wars Battleground) would be released for the Mac, I'd buy it in an instant. In the meanwhile I play Master of Orion 2 on an emulator :-)
What? I always thought Slashdot people would be The People who would really appreciate features such as SSH on the phone.
In my time I've owned three phones that have had the possibility of connecting to the Internet. The first was Nokia 9000 Communicator, in 1998. It's nice to know future was invented more than six years ago.
During that time I've used SSH, Web and e-mail on the phone. Let me give you some anecdotes:
Once I was hurrying to the train station and I missed the bus. I had no idea whether I'd make it in time if I waited for another bus. It was early Saturday morning, so I couldn't call anyone at the Commuter Traffic Center. Instead of calling a taxi, I checked the timetables for the bus from the Net. No need for a taxi, so I saved some 20 Euros there.
(I've done something similar countless times on Friday evenings after the regular busses have gone and I don't know how I'll find a night-bus.)
Another time I was picking up some video tapes from the video shop. Unfortunately when I was almost there, I noticed I had left the note with the orders home. Option 1: turn back, face the rush hour, might not even make it today. Option 2: check email for said note. Option two saved me at least two hours, maybe even a full day.
(And again, other similar incidents have happened.)
I have dozens of stories like these. These features can be a real lifesaver at times! I'm not saying a smartphone is an excuse to be sloppy, but it is REALLY useful when accidents happen.
I haven't even mentioned the entertainment benefits. Tending the fire while camping, everyone else asleep? Play Doom. Stuck in a strange city at a late hour, two hours before the bus/train/plane leaves and no way to spend time? Irc or IM with your friends. Need to do something productive? Take out your laptop and copy some stuff from home server over GPRS.
Although 3D on cellphones is nothing near modern PCs, my current phone (N-Gage QD) is roughly as powerful as the PC I owned 4 years ago. (Granted, it was quite old at the time.) It is more powerful than the computer I used to play Doom and Wolfenstein 3D, and can show more colors!
I wouldn't be surprised, if Nvidia had Nokia as their main client after, say, 5 years.
If you can afford to keep your computer running all the time, ie. the noise doesn't keep you up at nights, then the only true bottleneck is the time you spend sitting at the computer.
When I ripped my CD collection, I used a two-step process. I first ripped the CDs into AIFF. This step is lossless, so there's no quality lost. It does take up some hard drive space, 600-700 megabytes/CD.
Step two: convert these to MP3/AAC/whatever with iTunes or iTunes LAME. The simplest way to do it (in my opinion) is to use a smart playlist that has the rule Kind is AIFF. (Convert to XX is in the Advanced menu, assuming you've set the encoder to be XX in preferences.) I did this when I went to bed or to work.
The smart playlist is handy in that sense that after you've converted the current batch to mp3 or whatever, you can select all the AIFF-versions in the smart playlist and delete them (from iTunes and from hard drive) with option-backspace.
And how does this relate to Finder? Well, if you insert a CD and iTunes is running, it can automatically name both the album and the songs within it. If you drag the songs off the CD, Finder will rip them as AIFF. You can later import those files to iTunes and do the conversion I explained earlier.
This method is not without downsides, though. You have to manually name the albums you've inserted as Finder only names the tracks. One could probably invent an applescript to do this.
Hope this helps.
If hundreds of thousands of years of evolution in geographicly isolated populations lead to clearly visable diffrence in then fenotype. Then, praytell, why are is it impossibe for geneticly inherited diffrences in behevioral paterns to exist. It doesn't imply that groups of people are inherently iferior (eg.: caucasians people are antisocial or mongolodis despotic), just that diffrent sets of traits where benefical in diffrent enviroments.
Homo sapiens learned to speak about 50 thousand years ago, so that's the upper estimate on how much time we've had to evolve into different species. That hasn't happened, though, since we still can procreate with any other race.
Cosmetic evolution is rather commonplace with both humans and animals. Since appearance is/was the main reason for selecting a mate, it has felt considerable evolutionary pressure. Naturally this leads to rather fast superficial changes.
Behavioral patterns have, however, been practically the same for millenia. People were hunter-gatherers for tens of thousands of years. Their way of life was rather universal around the world and there was no great pressure to evolve distinct behavioral patterns. Assuming agriculture and society would have changed that we still have at most only 12 millenia to evolve. (It feels slightly far fetched, though.)
It is possible that there are fundamental genetic differences that would for example cause certain people to be eg. very blood thirsty. But so far I have not seen it. Culture and upbringing seem to dominate that field quite completely. The more I meet people from other countries and continents, the more I believe that there are no built-in differences. The more I hear stories of joke-telling Tanzanians from my friends, the more convinced I become.
I repeat my previous suggestions: Get to know those people. Read books. Look beneath the surface. For example, in his Annals Tacitus quite well shows how the Romans were very much like you and me. I especially remember a short segment about a fallen apartment building; the constructor had used substandard material to make more profit.
You are completely right. I have no genetic or medical or sosiological proof. All I have are my empirical observations and those of long gone historians, and naturally my gut-feeling. I tend to trust them, though.
I haven't checked the tally yet, but last time I checked, Israel had a confortable lead in kills. They'll probably make the playoffs.
"How come we play war and not peace?"
Substitute nation X and nation Y for USA and USSR.
It's not just geeks. It's not just USA and Saudi-Arabia.
Physiologically people are quite the same. Some have folds in their eyes, some have lost pigment from their skin and some have fat in different places. These are only cosmetical differences. Inside we're all the same.
If you look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you'll see that the bottom layers are physiological, safety, and love. These are what every person in the world wants. They don't want to sit in the cold, they don't want to be hungry and they don't want to be afraid. (Yet some are.) And people want love and want to love.
The only substantial difference between different nations is due to culture. Some are born in conservative countries, some in liberal. Others live in religious areas, others have secular rule. Yet despite this, people still practice arts, science, whatever. You have geeks in Saudi-Arabia and deeply religious people in USA.
Whatever group of people you look, you'll find innovative people there. I recently received a revelation about this subject while reading "Guns, Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond. (Excellent book, recommended). His examples showed how people have adapted to all sorts of environments and made the best use of available resources. If this does not restore your faith in mankind, nothing will.
It is true that there is a deep cultural divide between the Western world and the countries of the East, and I don't see the current political situation to lessen the situation at all. However, this is mostly due to ignorance. If you see two small children playing with toys, do you care if one of them is a Jew and another one an Arab? Do the children care? No.
If Mr. Bush had met Mr. Hussein in a neutral and safe environment before the war, would they have fought with their bare fists. Probably not. Their nations fought one another, perhaps even their ideologies. But the people themselves... you can hardly ever find a good reason to strike at your fellow man. (This teaching, it would seem, lies at the heart of every religion. Sadly it is not observed very often.)
The only way to fight this is to get rid of the prejudice and the fear. If you can, travel to different countries and try to see beneath the surface. People are the same, even in France. Try to learn about different cultures. If you can't spare the money, go to http://www.wikipedia.org/ and read about the different achievements of cultures both long gone and present. Read about their times of glory and downfall. Go to a library and read a book. (Once again I recommend "Guns, Germs and Steel".
I'd like to end this rant with a quote from Charlie Chaplin. At the end of "The Dictator," the Jewish barber (who looks like Adolf Hynkel) gives a rather touching speech about universal harmony. (Emphasis mine.)
"I'm sorry but I don't want to be an emperor. That's not my business. I don't want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone if possible; Jew, Gentile, black men, white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each others' happiness, not by each other's misery. We don't want to hate and despise one another.
In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men's souls; has barricaded the world with hate; has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge as made us cynical; our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little.
More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost. The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these things cries out for the goodness in man; cries out for universal brotherhood; for the unity of us all."
From the data it's easy to calculate the average bitrate, which seems to be 66 kbit/s. (1,5 gigabytes * 1024**2 * 8 / 2.2 days * 24 hours/day * 3600 s/hour)
By using a bitrate of 32 kbit/s, you could double the amount of songs on a 2 GB player. This is fine for those who do not hear the compression artifacts. Most people would say it sounds like crap, though.
Apple, however, uses the default iTunes bitrate when quoting the amount of songs. Most Apple sites follow this as well.
As a Finn I can tell you that the trailer isn't funny even in Finnish :). But then again, it's probably not supposed to be. Sort of a parody of the usual Bruckheimer-trailers... "THIS IS THE END OF THE WORLD" etc. etc.
Most people in the inteded audience (before the slashdotting, at least) already know what humor and the jokes are going to be like; after all, this is the group's sixth SW-production. They're just showing "this is what it will be like", and keeping all the jokes 'secret'.
If you have the time, look through their earlier work, for example the hilarious Star Wreck V: The Lost Contact. See http://www.starwreck.com/oldies/downloads.php for more details.
--Antti, a SW fan since 1998
PS. Well the fragfest-joke was actually quite funny.
If you look at the trailer at all, you'd notice that the CGI sequences are not clips from ST episodes. After all, how many times did we see B5... B13, I mean, in Star Trek?
The 3d models used could be a problem, though.
Star Wreck V was already called "Lost Contact" :-)
For more info see the site for the movie.
While it is quite cool (in the gadget-gee-whiz-sense) to have wireless connection to a digital camera, it is not in my view even close to the Holy Grail of digital photography. The main reasons to use this feature are a) convinience (which is eaten away by the fact that you need an external unit) or b) people who really need to send pictures to somewhere else ASAP.
In the case b) the photographer loses his/her chances to edit the pictures later or even to choose the best pictures. Good for first impresssions, not much for anything else.
Holy grail for professional digital photography are for example cameras that use a full-sized sensor; then you wouldn't need different lenses for digital and film photography.
On the hobbyist front I'd like to see more standards. The Four Thirds -standard sounds promising, and I'm hoping Canon or Nikon would embrace it.
I recently had the opportunity to try both GnomeMeeting and iChat AV. These remarks are only for audio, though.
GnomeMeeting has an impressive feature list and it's adherence to open standards is naturally very appealing.
However, when comparing it to beta iChat the differences were planet-sized. Apple has created a wonderful UI; I could concentrate on communication, not on the software itself.
It is true that GnomeMeeting allows you to use different codecs and is slightly more hacker-friendly. However, when I want to talk to someone, I usually don't feel like configuring loads of stuff. In some cases ease of use simply blows features away, and human communication is one of them.
(Not to mention the sound quality of the iChat audio chat. Wow.)
A four-letter word springs to mind: RTFA.
(Or RTFS - read the la-la-laa submission)
The messages the article and the submitter are talking about are the various alerts, instant messages etc. that interrupt our concentration.
The device described in the article monitors the attention of the user and uses it to prioritise different messages the user sees; the pdf-link gives more details about the technology.
I repeat: the article is far more interesting than Yet Another Solution to Spam.
--Antti
Another good book that explains the basics of data mining is Principles of Data Mining by Hand et al.
It is perhaps not the most simple book around, but it covers a lot of important issues. Furthermore it doesn't ignore the role of computer science, as two of the authors have a CS background.
You won't find explicit instructions about how to build your own Google, but it surely does wonders for your insight.