OK, maybe this guy is right and maybe the feds are behind the times, but I'd like to see multiple independent studies come out and say this before I'm getting rid of my drive sanitizers.
Right answer. It looks as though this guy may be wrong. Peter Gutmann, an expert in forensic data recovery, has read the report and believes they were doing it wrong, and that's why they weren't able to recover useful amounts of data.
Your only hope of keeping the government out of your pants is plausable deniability, which can be totally ruined if they can prove that you aren't fully disclosing your information.
That's not plausible deniability. That's implausible deniability.
Huh? He referenced the original studies used to claim DVORAK was superior, one of which claimed to be flawed in the study, and provided sources for his claims. What do you think is a strawman in the article?
Primarily, the lame attempts to cast doubt on the reliability of the Navy study. But secondarily, their reliance on a study by a known-biased individual who has refused to provide access to the raw data of his study, and thirdly the misrepresentation and selective reporting of the findings of a number of other studies.
First, difficulty in getting hold of the report is to be expected. It was published in the late 1930s by a military organisation, primarily for internal circulation. A lot of documents from such times have been lost. That its authors are unidentified is not a reason to doubt it either; the report was officially sanctioned, and official military reports often do not identify their authors. Claiming to become suspicious of a report because it dismisses previous reports results due to possible unfairness, and to then question whether the reason for for doing so is due to bias is absurd. Pointing out bias in one report is not reason to be considered biased in another.
A further study's result is cast into doubt because "adjustments were made in the test procedure to 'remove psychological impediments to superior performance'." To me, this sounds like a necessary step in such a study, not something that casts its results into doubt.
They then go on to claim a methodological error in the use of an averaging step to cancel some experimental error problems in the Navy study, without making any mention of the steps taken by the Navy study to counteract the effects of this averaging. While knowing this I'm still wary of trusting the results of the study, it is nothing like as bad as claimed by the authors of this article. Even accounting for the errors introduced by this averaging, the study did show a net benefit to Dvorak keyboards.
The Strong study cited also has methodological errors, but the authors don't draw any attention to those. The training regime used for the Dvorak typists in the study was extremely intensive, and it is likely by the end of the study (when the comparisons were made) that they were suffering burnout. It is also worth noting that Strong himself has a known bias towards QWERTY and destroyed the raw results of his study without allowing anyone other than himself to view them. This in itself is reason to regard the study with suspicion.
The additional studies cited are analysed in more depth in a study by Hisao Yamada from 1980, and in Prof. Yamada's opinion support Dvorak, rather than suggesting it is not useful as the brief summary in the article suggests. The numbers from the final test of the typists involved are not the whole story, because at this point the typists were still improving, and the results of fitting an appropriate curve to the figures are apparently well in Dvorak's favour, not QWERTY's.
In April 1990, we published a more detailed version of this material in a Journal of Law and Economics article titled "The Fable of the Keys." This journal is well known and has published some of the most influential articles in economics. In the six years since we published that article there has been no attempt to refute any of our factual claims, to discredit the GSA study, or to resurrect the Navy study. Unless some new evidence is produced to support a claim of QWERTY's inferiority to Dvorak, how can it even be said that there are two sides to a legitimate scientific disagreement over the keyboard?
Yet the QWERTY myth continues to be cited as if it were the truth. Krugman's book has a 1994 copyright. Frank and Cook's copyright is 1995. In a 1992 article in Industrial and Corporate Change, Paul David cites the QWERTY example, as do Michael Katz and Carl Shapiro in their Spring 1994 article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives.
Actually, the whole thrust of the article was how myths get repeated enough that they become accepted as facts. In the case of QWERTY vs DVORAK, that while many people believe DVORAK was superior; properly conducted tests show no inherent advantage to the DVORAK keyboard. As a result, there is no reason to switch.
The artice, and the research it was based on, were both written by employees of a thinktank which set out to prove that the market always finds the best solution, and on misreadings of earlier research. They tried to "debunk" the idea that Dvorak is better than QWERTY because if it is true and the market-dominant QWERTY system was inferior, their thesis was wrong. With such a biased starting point, I'm not sure I trust anything they say or that their research was in any fashion neutral.
There's a very good article here which debunks the article we've been linked to here.
Could it be that PAL has 625 lines instead of NTSCs 525 lines?
And 25fps rather than 30. 25*625 = 15,625. 30*525=15,750. So there's actually less information in a PAL stream of the same resolution than an NTSC one, so that doesn't sound likely to me.
Because Brown's government and Blair's government are different. Their disagreement wasn't just personal but ideological, and Brown is taking the country in a different direction to that for which people elected Blair.
They're still the same people we voted into power. Remember, we all went and voted for the Labour party. And it isn't as if we didn't know in advance that Blair was planning on quitting, either.
The Sinclair ZX Spectrum had something like this. Its particular solution didn't exactly sweep the world off its feet it seems.
There are probably two reasons for this:
* The Spectrum's input system was designed by Sir Clive Sinclair, who really wasn't a master of sensible product design. Somebody with a good knowledge of how input techniques are learned could design a much better system. * The primary goal of the spectrum's input system was _not_ to enable faster program entry (although this was a side effect). The main point was to reduce the complexity of the BASIC interpreter and at the same time increase program storage capacity by using only a single character for storage of BASIC keywords in RAM. This enabled Sinclair BASIC to be faster and smaller than most of its competitors, and let more useful programs run in the 16K of RAM available on early model Spectrums. The easiest way of achieving this was to have extended input modes to enter those keywords as a single keystroke (the later Spectrum 128K models allowed direct text entry, but required an additional 16K of ROM that was paged in and out in order to achieve this).
By 1977, VHS could typically squeeze four hours onto a single T-120 video tape, while Betamax was limited at that time to one hour per tape. When considering whether one thing is "better" than another, you have to look at the whole picture. Betamax's picture was higher quality, but in every other respect, it failed every test. Consumers consistently chose recording length over picture quality, because it's better to get a fuzzy recording of a movie than only the first half.
And by the time VHS was launched in the UK, in 1978, both could record 3 hours (PAL VHS recorded a shorter time on the same length tape, for some reason). The benefit was entirely temporary, and the only effect that it had was that by 1980 VHS had a large established market share. By this point, Betamax was technically superior in every respect. Yet still it did not win the format war, because, as we all know, a significant investment in incompatible techology makes it much harder for a competitor with lower market share to be sold. Which is the GP's point. The parallels here are:
VHS, when introduced, was superior to Betamax, so it became most popular quickly. QWERTY, when introduced, was superior to its competitors, so it became most popular quickly. Betamax was improved and became technically superior to VHS, but by this point it was too late because VHS had a dominant market share and people did not want incompatible technology. Dvorak was introduced and was technically superior to QWERTY, but by this point it was too late because QWERTY had a dominant market share and pepole did not want to have to learn two keyboard layouts.
Which is really useful when your neighbours have all got their systems set up on essentially random channels. E.g. mine are using 1 (x3), 4 (x1), 7 (x2), 9 (x1) and 11 (x1). I do get reasonable results on 13, better than I get on 11 or 1 (which seem the most likely candidates in terms of having less shit overlapping them).
IANAP but if I understand TFA correctly, then they propose that the possibly detected graininess of reality is the result of the ratio between the surface area of our lightcone (the boundary from beyond which light has not had time to reach us in the 13.7-billion-year lifespan of the universe) to it's volume. Does this mean that we are getting grainier over time, since the radius of our lightcone increases with lightspeed?
No, it's not about our lightcone, but about the boundary of the visible universe (i.e., that area of the universe which expansion is causing to move away from us so quickly that light from here will reach it but never get beyond it). As peculiar as it seems, parts of the universe are moving away from us faster than the speed of light (at least from our perspective).
And John G. Cramer has an article here (and in the December issue of Analog, if anyone has that and hasn't read it yet). This is a very cool theory, indeed, and I'm glad to see it getting more mainstream attention.
This, along with Dark Matter, Dark Energy and String theory are typical untestable theories which scientists lately have been using to fill in holes in their own understanding of the nature of the universe. Rather than going back to the drawing board when a model does not work, they use a cop out like this one to fill in the blanks.
Actually, this theory was a predicted consequence of a combination of information theory, relativity and quantum theory before there was any evidence for it. This is not a "model didn't work, so let's invent something to account for it" scenario: this is a "model predicted something and it looks like we might have found it" scenario.
I'm puzzled as to how one gets from "the universe may have a finite resolution" to "omfg it's prolly a hologram!!!"
Answer: you don't. You start with a theory that the universe is a hologram (there are sound reasons why this might be so, related to the theory that information is not destroyed on entry into a singularity and the theory that the universe is itself a singularity within, essentially, a larger universe), and then from that you make predictions about the resolution of the universe. When noise turns up at a similar resolution in an experiment, you can see this as confirmation of the preexisting theory.
IANAQP. I just read stuff like this and vaguely understand.
First of all what's the bloody site? I'm unable to find ANY sponsored link or adsense if I look for openoffice and such (even with a German IP and with different browsers).
Adsense accounts for scams don't tend to last long. Most people look at them and realise they're scams, so they get very low clickthrough rates. Google proactively cancel adverts that have too low a clickthrough rate.
One of the games I remember playing was wasteland (fallout is based on this game). In the game you came across various vendors all over the place and a lot of them sold snake oil. I bought it all up thinking it may be needed in the game, never having heard the term before (yes I have since gotten out from under the rock). Boy was I a dumb ass.
I haven't played it for like 20 years or so, but IIRC this game had the same... err... "feature".:)
But, according to LGPL 2.1 (which is OOo's license):
8. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, link with, or distribute the Library except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense, link with, or distribute the Library is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License. However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance. [emphasis added]
That term doesn't apply, however, to any additional code that's been linked with OO.o. Of course, under the GPL this wouldn't be possible, but as an LGPL product you must consider the terms of any additions.
She shouldn't forget about it, definitely not. She lives in the EU, so the Distance Selling Regulations apply. Under the terms of these regulations, she has 14 days after the purchase during which she may inform the vendor that she wishes to cancel the contract at no cost to her. She should take advantage of this.
UK was once an important nation. It now intermittently has leaders that suffer from lapses of memory or illusions of grandeur. See also King Canute and the waves.
I know for a fact (because my work ISP feed gets their feed of them) that JANET does not use the IWF blacklists.
JANet offers both uncensored and censored feeds, at the institution's choice. Presumably the theory is that universities (who JANet was originally set up to serve) will usually want an uncensored link, whereas schools are more likely to want censored.
I'm not sure whether the "RM SafetyNet Plus" filtering offered uses IWF lists or not. Based on a quick reading of RM's web site, it seems they have their own list, but they could just be rebranding IWF's.
If Palm wants to do so, they're going to have to do everything the iPhone does and do it better. That means the interface and the integration, as well.
Of course, Palm are the long-standing masters of handheld UI and desktop integration. For a long time, nothing could beat the Palm handhelds for simplicity and effectiveness of UI, and their desktop software integrated well with most popular desktop productivity software.
True, they've lagged behind a lot recently, but it'll be interesting to see what they've come up with anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, maybe this guy is right and maybe the feds are behind the times, but I'd like to see multiple independent studies come out and say this before I'm getting rid of my drive sanitizers.
Right answer. It looks as though this guy may be wrong. Peter Gutmann, an expert in forensic data recovery, has read the report and believes they were doing it wrong, and that's why they weren't able to recover useful amounts of data.
Your only hope of keeping the government out of your pants is plausable deniability, which can be totally ruined if they can prove that you aren't fully disclosing your information.
That's not plausible deniability. That's implausible deniability.
Huh? He referenced the original studies used to claim DVORAK was superior, one of which claimed to be flawed in the study, and provided sources for his claims. What do you think is a strawman in the article?
Primarily, the lame attempts to cast doubt on the reliability of the Navy study. But secondarily, their reliance on a study by a known-biased individual who has refused to provide access to the raw data of his study, and thirdly the misrepresentation and selective reporting of the findings of a number of other studies.
First, difficulty in getting hold of the report is to be expected. It was published in the late 1930s by a military organisation, primarily for internal circulation. A lot of documents from such times have been lost. That its authors are unidentified is not a reason to doubt it either; the report was officially sanctioned, and official military reports often do not identify their authors. Claiming to become suspicious of a report because it dismisses previous reports results due to possible unfairness, and to then question whether the reason for for doing so is due to bias is absurd. Pointing out bias in one report is not reason to be considered biased in another.
A further study's result is cast into doubt because "adjustments were made in the test procedure to 'remove psychological impediments to superior performance'." To me, this sounds like a necessary step in such a study, not something that casts its results into doubt.
They then go on to claim a methodological error in the use of an averaging step to cancel some experimental error problems in the Navy study, without making any mention of the steps taken by the Navy study to counteract the effects of this averaging. While knowing this I'm still wary of trusting the results of the study, it is nothing like as bad as claimed by the authors of this article. Even accounting for the errors introduced by this averaging, the study did show a net benefit to Dvorak keyboards.
The Strong study cited also has methodological errors, but the authors don't draw any attention to those. The training regime used for the Dvorak typists in the study was extremely intensive, and it is likely by the end of the study (when the comparisons were made) that they were suffering burnout. It is also worth noting that Strong himself has a known bias towards QWERTY and destroyed the raw results of his study without allowing anyone other than himself to view them. This in itself is reason to regard the study with suspicion.
The additional studies cited are analysed in more depth in a study by Hisao Yamada from 1980, and in Prof. Yamada's opinion support Dvorak, rather than suggesting it is not useful as the brief summary in the article suggests. The numbers from the final test of the typists involved are not the whole story, because at this point the typists were still improving, and the results of fitting an appropriate curve to the figures are apparently well in Dvorak's favour, not QWERTY's.
Could it be because (1) these authors fe
Actually, the whole thrust of the article was how myths get repeated enough that they become accepted as facts. In the case of QWERTY vs DVORAK, that while many people believe DVORAK was superior; properly conducted tests show no inherent advantage to the DVORAK keyboard. As a result, there is no reason to switch.
The artice, and the research it was based on, were both written by employees of a thinktank which set out to prove that the market always finds the best solution, and on misreadings of earlier research. They tried to "debunk" the idea that Dvorak is better than QWERTY because if it is true and the market-dominant QWERTY system was inferior, their thesis was wrong. With such a biased starting point, I'm not sure I trust anything they say or that their research was in any fashion neutral.
There's a very good article here which debunks the article we've been linked to here.
Could it be that PAL has 625 lines instead of NTSCs 525 lines?
And 25fps rather than 30. 25*625 = 15,625. 30*525=15,750. So there's actually less information in a PAL stream of the same resolution than an NTSC one, so that doesn't sound likely to me.
Because Brown's government and Blair's government are different. Their disagreement wasn't just personal but ideological, and Brown is taking the country in a different direction to that for which people elected Blair.
They're still the same people we voted into power. Remember, we all went and voted for the Labour party. And it isn't as if we didn't know in advance that Blair was planning on quitting, either.
The Sinclair ZX Spectrum had something like this. Its particular solution didn't exactly sweep the world off its feet it seems.
There are probably two reasons for this:
* The Spectrum's input system was designed by Sir Clive Sinclair, who really wasn't a master of sensible product design. Somebody with a good knowledge of how input techniques are learned could design a much better system.
* The primary goal of the spectrum's input system was _not_ to enable faster program entry (although this was a side effect). The main point was to reduce the complexity of the BASIC interpreter and at the same time increase program storage capacity by using only a single character for storage of BASIC keywords in RAM. This enabled Sinclair BASIC to be faster and smaller than most of its competitors, and let more useful programs run in the 16K of RAM available on early model Spectrums. The easiest way of achieving this was to have extended input modes to enter those keywords as a single keystroke (the later Spectrum 128K models allowed direct text entry, but required an additional 16K of ROM that was paged in and out in order to achieve this).
By 1977, VHS could typically squeeze four hours onto a single T-120 video tape, while Betamax was limited at that time to one hour per tape. When considering whether one thing is "better" than another, you have to look at the whole picture. Betamax's picture was higher quality, but in every other respect, it failed every test. Consumers consistently chose recording length over picture quality, because it's better to get a fuzzy recording of a movie than only the first half.
And by the time VHS was launched in the UK, in 1978, both could record 3 hours (PAL VHS recorded a shorter time on the same length tape, for some reason). The benefit was entirely temporary, and the only effect that it had was that by 1980 VHS had a large established market share. By this point, Betamax was technically superior in every respect. Yet still it did not win the format war, because, as we all know, a significant investment in incompatible techology makes it much harder for a competitor with lower market share to be sold. Which is the GP's point. The parallels here are:
VHS, when introduced, was superior to Betamax, so it became most popular quickly.
QWERTY, when introduced, was superior to its competitors, so it became most popular quickly.
Betamax was improved and became technically superior to VHS, but by this point it was too late because VHS had a dominant market share and people did not want incompatible technology.
Dvorak was introduced and was technically superior to QWERTY, but by this point it was too late because QWERTY had a dominant market share and pepole did not want to have to learn two keyboard layouts.
The analogy is pretty good.
Which is really useful when your neighbours have all got their systems set up on essentially random channels. E.g. mine are using 1 (x3), 4 (x1), 7 (x2), 9 (x1) and 11 (x1). I do get reasonable results on 13, better than I get on 11 or 1 (which seem the most likely candidates in terms of having less shit overlapping them).
You know, some people get fish for pets.
It's quite hard to train a fish to climb onto your shoulder.
IANAP but if I understand TFA correctly, then they propose that the possibly detected graininess of reality is the result of the ratio between the surface area of our lightcone (the boundary from beyond which light has not had time to reach us in the 13.7-billion-year lifespan of the universe) to it's volume. Does this mean that we are getting grainier over time, since the radius of our lightcone increases with lightspeed?
No, it's not about our lightcone, but about the boundary of the visible universe (i.e., that area of the universe which expansion is causing to move away from us so quickly that light from here will reach it but never get beyond it). As peculiar as it seems, parts of the universe are moving away from us faster than the speed of light (at least from our perspective).
IANAP either, in case you couldn't guess. :)
Actually, in this case it is. The hologram and the universe that it projects are one and the same, theoretically speaking.
And John G. Cramer has an article here (and in the December issue of Analog, if anyone has that and hasn't read it yet). This is a very cool theory, indeed, and I'm glad to see it getting more mainstream attention.
This, along with Dark Matter, Dark Energy and String theory are typical untestable theories which scientists lately have been using to fill in holes in their own understanding of the nature of the universe. Rather than going back to the drawing board when a model does not work, they use a cop out like this one to fill in the blanks.
Actually, this theory was a predicted consequence of a combination of information theory, relativity and quantum theory before there was any evidence for it. This is not a "model didn't work, so let's invent something to account for it" scenario: this is a "model predicted something and it looks like we might have found it" scenario.
I'm puzzled as to how one gets from "the universe may have a finite resolution" to "omfg it's prolly a hologram!!!"
Answer: you don't. You start with a theory that the universe is a hologram (there are sound reasons why this might be so, related to the theory that information is not destroyed on entry into a singularity and the theory that the universe is itself a singularity within, essentially, a larger universe), and then from that you make predictions about the resolution of the universe. When noise turns up at a similar resolution in an experiment, you can see this as confirmation of the preexisting theory.
IANAQP. I just read stuff like this and vaguely understand.
First of all what's the bloody site? I'm unable to find ANY sponsored link or adsense if I look for openoffice and such (even with a German IP and with different browsers).
Adsense accounts for scams don't tend to last long. Most people look at them and realise they're scams, so they get very low clickthrough rates. Google proactively cancel adverts that have too low a clickthrough rate.
One of the games I remember playing was wasteland (fallout is based on this game). In the game you came across various vendors all over the place and a lot of them sold snake oil. I bought it all up thinking it may be needed in the game, never having heard the term before (yes I have since gotten out from under the rock). Boy was I a dumb ass.
I haven't played it for like 20 years or so, but IIRC this game had the same ... err ... "feature". :)
But, according to LGPL 2.1 (which is OOo's license):
8. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, link with, or distribute the Library except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense, link with, or distribute the Library is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License. However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance. [emphasis added]
That term doesn't apply, however, to any additional code that's been linked with OO.o. Of course, under the GPL this wouldn't be possible, but as an LGPL product you must consider the terms of any additions.
She shouldn't forget about it, definitely not. She lives in the EU, so the Distance Selling Regulations apply. Under the terms of these regulations, she has 14 days after the purchase during which she may inform the vendor that she wishes to cancel the contract at no cost to her. She should take advantage of this.
IANAL, so talk to one before doing anything.
UK was once an important nation. It now intermittently has leaders that suffer from lapses of memory or illusions of grandeur. See also King Canute and the waves.
King Cnut was Danish.
The current government wasn't elected, and the one it replaced was a long way short of a majority.
Huh? I distinctly remember going out to vote, some time in ... what, 2005 was it? Why would you say the government wasn't elected?
I know for a fact (because my work ISP feed gets their feed of them) that JANET does not use the IWF blacklists.
JANet offers both uncensored and censored feeds, at the institution's choice. Presumably the theory is that universities (who JANet was originally set up to serve) will usually want an uncensored link, whereas schools are more likely to want censored.
I'm not sure whether the "RM SafetyNet Plus" filtering offered uses IWF lists or not. Based on a quick reading of RM's web site, it seems they have their own list, but they could just be rebranding IWF's.
Once you start censoring internet things it tends to snowball until it gets in the way of agtually getting information.
Actually, it seems once you start censoring the Internet, it starts getting harder to censor the Internet.
For instance, my ISP, which did get involved in the wikpedia censorship fiasco, seems to have stayed clear of this one.
On the other hand, it's nice to hear Palm is finally maybe going to actually release a new OS.
Yes. Does anyone know if this is the Linux-based system they've been talking about for years, or is this something entirely new?
If Palm wants to do so, they're going to have to do everything the iPhone does and do it better. That means the interface and the integration, as well.
Of course, Palm are the long-standing masters of handheld UI and desktop integration. For a long time, nothing could beat the Palm handhelds for simplicity and effectiveness of UI, and their desktop software integrated well with most popular desktop productivity software.
True, they've lagged behind a lot recently, but it'll be interesting to see what they've come up with anyway.