Actually, I use to set the encoder to 256kb/s, but there are certain artefacts that can be heard through nearly any speaker. E.g., if the song contains a very high, female voice, you'll notice very ugly effects. And orchestral crash type sounds also seem to be affected. However, your every day Clapton should come out just fine, except that you'll not be able to separate the hairs on the left and right nostril.
With "not common" you mean: not common in the limited part of the world you see everyday. People who trade live bootlegs are not really representative. Hell, with the number of iTunes and iPods out there, Apple's format is probably the most widely supported.
Secondly, lossless compression requires much less computation at decompression than other formats, such as AAC. It's the usual tradeoff: storage vs. computation. And any hard disk should be able to transfer 130Mb in the 20 minutes or so it would take to play, so there's absolutely no reason why it should hiccough.
I didn't read it (only the summaries), but a modelling approach of the process is quite viable. It shows that your alpha isn't worth a thing if not all assumptions have been satisfied completely.
I work in cognitive neuro-psychology (a misnomer, but well), and I know that nearly all studies use students for subjects. That's not representative. I know they do all their testing using MANOVAs, even when the data cannot possibly be normally distributed. I know of people running dozens of variations on an experiment before finally "hitting" significance, and omitting to report this in the publication. And there are more errors that can be made.
If you take the risks for all these factors into account, I think 50% is a mild estimation...
It's like responding to the difference in price between Macs and PCs by talking about how great OSX is and how you don't need antivirus.
That doesn't mean a Mac isn't more expensive,...
You started the thread by comparing prices. An antivirus subscription is a legitimate argument in that case. Silence is also an economic commodity. Check out the prices on powerful yet silent PCs (e.g. for use in recording studios).
Consequently following that line would reduce all your argumentation to: it has features I don't need and some I don't want. Well, the Dell has the same problem. It all boils down to comparing Apples and Pears, doesn't it?
Macs always have been more expensive than PCs, but only in the way that Mercedes is more expensive than Hyundai...
The drive, ok, but that buys you a very silent computer. But the new versions do have a wireless card, and Bluetooth. Cost $529 nowadays. The low-signal video driver is also fixed (or so they claim), and it is considered a manufacturing error, so you can get it repaired under warranty. And although I haven't tested it for a long time, the iPod mini seems to charge properly. And the Ethernet interface seems faster than on low-end PCs.
For the rest, you have to buy what you need. If you need a fast graphics card, you have to buy something else. And while Norton may be $10 a year where you live, the upgrades here are 50 euros a year.
No, it's a perfect machine for normal people. It runs all games but the likes of Doom 3, Word, mail, browsers. There's no reason to be disappointed.
And you get the development environment for free, and you can run bash. Them's pure geek points!
The mini is hardly cripled, is it? The latest versions have 512Mb RAM and a wireless card, and they perform at the speed of approximately 2.2GHz Pentium. Plus it has a much better video card and firewire, is small and doesn't make any noise.
And you don't need the $80/yr firewall/anti-ad/anti-virus subscription...
Yes, especially for lame bugs, like trying to find out why "while ( && )" doesn't work.
No, PERL was badly defined, just to hack a few scripts and then extended by people who knew absolutely nothing about syntax, orthogonality or readability. A horrid language.
By the way, there's only one language for building large scale web-sites: AWK!
Saying OSX powers this vehicle is about the same as saying that the NASA canteen in Houston powers the Space Shuttle. It's nice to see that a relatively prestigious project runs on OSX, but OSX doesn't make any real contribution to the task at hand. Or did I miss something in Tiger's 200 new features?
After reading the abstract (which I assume correctly reflects the contents), I agree, people should "stop jumping to conclusions". I don't agree that this fact "should not make us worry that clinical research is being done wrong."
These articles are supposed to be of a very high quality, much higher than other articles in less rigourously reviewed journals. In normal experimental research, a false positive in one out of 20 cases is accepted. However, here it turns out that one out of three is a false positive, and only around 50% can be replicated. If that doesn't cast a doubt on the validity of the lesser studies, I don't know what does.
And, let's not forget, this is medical research. Practitioners make decisions based on these studies.
Works for me. It's not easy to create a bootable image, but there are utilities to help you (I think it was called BootCD), which also allow you to add a few essentials. Then burn and boot away...
But that's a rather special condition. People with written language disorders tend to see such words as homographs, i.e. words with the same spelling but different meaning. People with normal reading abilities do not. Consequently, when normal readers see the sentence "but their their", they get confused, since they are not used to interpreting "their" as "they are" or "there". Other readers are used to this, so do not necessarily see a problem, depending on the type of disorder.
I have a PhD in psycho-linguistics and majored in computer science, and I can tell you: there is syntax. The rules are complex, but their their.
You see? Did you immediately read: but they're there? No, you got confused, just like everybody else when confronted with a grammatical error. In the institute where I work, we put people in big fMRI scanners and watch EEG readings of language processing, and let me tell you: quite a few of the grammatical errors are spotted by readers/listeners.
Anyway, without syntax you wouldn't be able to distinguish between "The dog bit the man" and "the man bit the dog". So syntax aids communication.
Evolutionary psychology has got a few, minor drawbacks.
Of course we have to assume that our brain and thus our cognition has been moulded by evolution, but the concept is not scientific. It doesn't explain why we think, nor how we think. It just adds a load of unnecessary claims onto the back of basic cognitive psychology.
Our reading skills are a case in point. There is no evolutionary need to develop a reading skill, and evolution cannot have worked this miracle in a couple of hundred years. Consequently, we shouldn't be able to read.
Now you can start with arguments that the neo-cortex is very general, tabula rasa, whatever, but there's no evolutionary need to develop a general computation mechanism. EP very strongly supports the idea that brain areas are dedicated (the Wiki page mentions the laughable idea of Universal Grammar) to certain tasks, so it seems to me as if EP has no relevance at all to reading.
First of all, I happen to be doing computational modelling of psycholinguistic processes, and I know (some of) Spivey's work.
The claims that are made in the article do not contradict the idea of continuous attraction, but they do not prove it either. There is a much simpler explanatation, which is hinted at near the end of the article: one or more processes that try to solve the problem using competition. As a matter of fact, this study simply provides a little bit more evidence of what has been en vogue for a long time.
This behaviour *can* be mimicked quite easily using digital computers, and is definitely not shown by all biological processes.
So, our minds don't work like digital computers in the sense that they cannot store and delete information in the same way. That's been known for a long time, and this experiment doesn't prove it.
Some of the basic cognitive processes can be modelled on a computer, though, but that's not surprising either, since computers are supposed to be able to compute "everything computable" and there is still no reason to assume that the workings of our brain cannot be approached by a computational model.
So, nothing to see, only of interest to psycholinguistic experts. Move on, please.
It's not that you don't know what you're talking about, it's that you're missing a (subtle) point.
These people see the GPU as an extra processor that you can use to do arbitrary tasks. Ok, we know that you can use it rather effectively to render pictures from procedural calls, but, since rendering is basically number crunching, can you also use it to do general computation, e.g. qsort? Well, the answer is yes, and it seems you can get quite some mileage out of it.
And yes, of course, it would be rather inefficient to share the GPU for both sorting and rendering in the same application, unless of course your sorting duties are much heavier than rendering...
Less light means less photosynthesis, which means more carbon-dioxide. If that's what this rather expensive ring is supposed to be counterbalancing, the originators are quite out of their heads.
No, you're bullshitting. Can doctors cure you? According to you, they cannot: doctors are merely instrumental in matching symptoms to a treatment. Treatments don't cure you either.
You are seriously mistaking the meaning of the word "to cure".
I've just checked some of your responses to other slashdot discussions, and I noticed that the thing they have in common is contempt for anyone writing something that doesn't match your preconceptions, and an insulting style.
I suggest you seriously lighten up, before you turn your rage into anti-social behaviour and consequently ruin your life. If you cannot do that by yourself, please look for professional help.
A bit misleading, but only in the same sense than saying a doctor can cure you is misleading. The linked article may be bad, but the effect is pretty real.
Anyway, the model wasn't just mathematics, it's based in chemical research.
No, the treatment would not have been tried if it hadn't been for this model. They were not really specific about the treatment (mind you, it was the nine o'clock news), but it involved medicins normally used in other illnesses to increase the number of white blood cells (if I understood it properly).
So yes, it did cure, unless you want to be ex-tre-me-ly literal about it, in which case the patients cured themselves, thankyouverymuch.
The item was also on the Spanish news last night, and they showed two (isolated) cases in which a therapy based on this model was successfully applied to patients in a terminal stadium of liver cancer. That *is* impressive, even though two patients is not a proof.
When the author says that some part of the brain is active during a cognitive task, it clearly refers to a comparison between different conditions (namely one with and one without the task).
Comparing conditions is a good and fundamental idea, but it's not sufficient for good research. Check out one of the latest issues of Nature (perhaps Nature Neuroscience), where they gave a real or a fake acupuncture treatment to 11 subjects and could notice a difference in the BOLD response (that's what shows up in fMRI) when people were really pricked with needles. OMG! The brain notices pain! Give the man a Nobel prize!
Why do I bother writing this. Nobody's going to read it...
The researchers did not find the part of the brain responsible for detecting sarcasm, and I'm not being sarcastic. What they did (claim to) find is that some part of the brain (roughly speaking the upper part from right above your eyes until the nearly the center of your skull) is needed to detect sarcasm. There might be some "methodological" issues with their study (if even one of their patients did get some of the sarcasm, the indicated area is obviously not uniquely responsible, not all types of brain damage can be compared, "pre-frontal" is quite a big area, etc.), but the main point to understand is that they did not find a sarcasm center.
For a simple analogy, think what would happen if you compared the lights on cars with damage somewhere in the engine compartment and cars that are undamaged. You will find that the lights of the damaged cars are more often broken than those of the undamaged cars. But that does not mean the main function of the engine compartment is lighting, it is just related and perhaps necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I use to set the encoder to 256kb/s, but there are certain artefacts that can be heard through nearly any speaker. E.g., if the song contains a very high, female voice, you'll notice very ugly effects. And orchestral crash type sounds also seem to be affected. However, your every day Clapton should come out just fine, except that you'll not be able to separate the hairs on the left and right nostril.
You don't have a clue, do you?
With "not common" you mean: not common in the limited part of the world you see everyday. People who trade live bootlegs are not really representative. Hell, with the number of iTunes and iPods out there, Apple's format is probably the most widely supported.
Secondly, lossless compression requires much less computation at decompression than other formats, such as AAC. It's the usual tradeoff: storage vs. computation. And any hard disk should be able to transfer 130Mb in the 20 minutes or so it would take to play, so there's absolutely no reason why it should hiccough.
I didn't read it (only the summaries), but a modelling approach of the process is quite viable. It shows that your alpha isn't worth a thing if not all assumptions have been satisfied completely.
I work in cognitive neuro-psychology (a misnomer, but well), and I know that nearly all studies use students for subjects. That's not representative. I know they do all their testing using MANOVAs, even when the data cannot possibly be normally distributed. I know of people running dozens of variations on an experiment before finally "hitting" significance, and omitting to report this in the publication. And there are more errors that can be made.
If you take the risks for all these factors into account, I think 50% is a mild estimation...
You started the thread by comparing prices. An antivirus subscription is a legitimate argument in that case. Silence is also an economic commodity. Check out the prices on powerful yet silent PCs (e.g. for use in recording studios).
Consequently following that line would reduce all your argumentation to: it has features I don't need and some I don't want. Well, the Dell has the same problem. It all boils down to comparing Apples and Pears, doesn't it?
Macs always have been more expensive than PCs, but only in the way that Mercedes is more expensive than Hyundai...
The drive, ok, but that buys you a very silent computer. But the new versions do have a wireless card, and Bluetooth. Cost $529 nowadays. The low-signal video driver is also fixed (or so they claim), and it is considered a manufacturing error, so you can get it repaired under warranty. And although I haven't tested it for a long time, the iPod mini seems to charge properly. And the Ethernet interface seems faster than on low-end PCs.
For the rest, you have to buy what you need. If you need a fast graphics card, you have to buy something else. And while Norton may be $10 a year where you live, the upgrades here are 50 euros a year.
No, it's a perfect machine for normal people. It runs all games but the likes of Doom 3, Word, mail, browsers. There's no reason to be disappointed.
And you get the development environment for free, and you can run bash. Them's pure geek points!
The mini is hardly cripled, is it? The latest versions have 512Mb RAM and a wireless card, and they perform at the speed of approximately 2.2GHz Pentium. Plus it has a much better video card and firewire, is small and doesn't make any noise.
And you don't need the $80/yr firewall/anti-ad/anti-virus subscription...
Yes, especially for lame bugs, like trying to find out why "while ( && )" doesn't work.
No, PERL was badly defined, just to hack a few scripts and then extended by people who knew absolutely nothing about syntax, orthogonality or readability. A horrid language.
By the way, there's only one language for building large scale web-sites: AWK!
You may think you're kidding, but Safari (under OSX) actually has it (FireFox doesn't).
Saying OSX powers this vehicle is about the same as saying that the NASA canteen in Houston powers the Space Shuttle. It's nice to see that a relatively prestigious project runs on OSX, but OSX doesn't make any real contribution to the task at hand. Or did I miss something in Tiger's 200 new features?
These articles are supposed to be of a very high quality, much higher than other articles in less rigourously reviewed journals. In normal experimental research, a false positive in one out of 20 cases is accepted. However, here it turns out that one out of three is a false positive, and only around 50% can be replicated. If that doesn't cast a doubt on the validity of the lesser studies, I don't know what does.
And, let's not forget, this is medical research. Practitioners make decisions based on these studies.
Works for me. It's not easy to create a bootable image, but there are utilities to help you (I think it was called BootCD), which also allow you to add a few essentials. Then burn and boot away...
But that's a rather special condition. People with written language disorders tend to see such words as homographs, i.e. words with the same spelling but different meaning. People with normal reading abilities do not. Consequently, when normal readers see the sentence "but their their", they get confused, since they are not used to interpreting "their" as "they are" or "there". Other readers are used to this, so do not necessarily see a problem, depending on the type of disorder.
A common error you'll find (particularly in electronic texts) is confounding they're, their and there. What confused you?
I have a PhD in psycho-linguistics and majored in computer science, and I can tell you: there is syntax. The rules are complex, but their their.
You see? Did you immediately read: but they're there? No, you got confused, just like everybody else when confronted with a grammatical error. In the institute where I work, we put people in big fMRI scanners and watch EEG readings of language processing, and let me tell you: quite a few of the grammatical errors are spotted by readers/listeners.
Anyway, without syntax you wouldn't be able to distinguish between "The dog bit the man" and "the man bit the dog". So syntax aids communication.
Evolutionary psychology has got a few, minor drawbacks.
Of course we have to assume that our brain and thus our cognition has been moulded by evolution, but the concept is not scientific. It doesn't explain why we think, nor how we think. It just adds a load of unnecessary claims onto the back of basic cognitive psychology.
Our reading skills are a case in point. There is no evolutionary need to develop a reading skill, and evolution cannot have worked this miracle in a couple of hundred years. Consequently, we shouldn't be able to read.
Now you can start with arguments that the neo-cortex is very general, tabula rasa, whatever, but there's no evolutionary need to develop a general computation mechanism. EP very strongly supports the idea that brain areas are dedicated (the Wiki page mentions the laughable idea of Universal Grammar) to certain tasks, so it seems to me as if EP has no relevance at all to reading.
First of all, I happen to be doing computational modelling of psycholinguistic processes, and I know (some of) Spivey's work.
The claims that are made in the article do not contradict the idea of continuous attraction, but they do not prove it either. There is a much simpler explanatation, which is hinted at near the end of the article: one or more processes that try to solve the problem using competition. As a matter of fact, this study simply provides a little bit more evidence of what has been en vogue for a long time.
This behaviour *can* be mimicked quite easily using digital computers, and is definitely not shown by all biological processes.
So, our minds don't work like digital computers in the sense that they cannot store and delete information in the same way. That's been known for a long time, and this experiment doesn't prove it.
Some of the basic cognitive processes can be modelled on a computer, though, but that's not surprising either, since computers are supposed to be able to compute "everything computable" and there is still no reason to assume that the workings of our brain cannot be approached by a computational model.
So, nothing to see, only of interest to psycholinguistic experts. Move on, please.
It's not that you don't know what you're talking about, it's that you're missing a (subtle) point.
These people see the GPU as an extra processor that you can use to do arbitrary tasks. Ok, we know that you can use it rather effectively to render pictures from procedural calls, but, since rendering is basically number crunching, can you also use it to do general computation, e.g. qsort? Well, the answer is yes, and it seems you can get quite some mileage out of it.
And yes, of course, it would be rather inefficient to share the GPU for both sorting and rendering in the same application, unless of course your sorting duties are much heavier than rendering...
Less light means less photosynthesis, which means more carbon-dioxide. If that's what this rather expensive ring is supposed to be counterbalancing, the originators are quite out of their heads.
No, you're bullshitting. Can doctors cure you? According to you, they cannot: doctors are merely instrumental in matching symptoms to a treatment. Treatments don't cure you either.
You are seriously mistaking the meaning of the word "to cure".
I've just checked some of your responses to other slashdot discussions, and I noticed that the thing they have in common is contempt for anyone writing something that doesn't match your preconceptions, and an insulting style.
I suggest you seriously lighten up, before you turn your rage into anti-social behaviour and consequently ruin your life. If you cannot do that by yourself, please look for professional help.
A bit misleading, but only in the same sense than saying a doctor can cure you is misleading. The linked article may be bad, but the effect is pretty real.
Anyway, the model wasn't just mathematics, it's based in chemical research.
No, the treatment would not have been tried if it hadn't been for this model. They were not really specific about the treatment (mind you, it was the nine o'clock news), but it involved medicins normally used in other illnesses to increase the number of white blood cells (if I understood it properly).
So yes, it did cure, unless you want to be ex-tre-me-ly literal about it, in which case the patients cured themselves, thankyouverymuch.
The item was also on the Spanish news last night, and they showed two (isolated) cases in which a therapy based on this model was successfully applied to patients in a terminal stadium of liver cancer. That *is* impressive, even though two patients is not a proof.
When the author says that some part of the brain is active during a cognitive task, it clearly refers to a comparison between different conditions (namely one with and one without the task).
Comparing conditions is a good and fundamental idea, but it's not sufficient for good research. Check out one of the latest issues of Nature (perhaps Nature Neuroscience), where they gave a real or a fake acupuncture treatment to 11 subjects and could notice a difference in the BOLD response (that's what shows up in fMRI) when people were really pricked with needles. OMG! The brain notices pain! Give the man a Nobel prize!
Why do I bother writing this. Nobody's going to read it...
I didn't know Simula had virtual members, but if it has, I agree it's polymorphic. And by analogy, so is Objective-C.
But about true polymorphism: there are loads of older programming languages that have it and cannot be called object-oriented. That was my point.
What the hell, nobody's going to read this anyway...
The researchers did not find the part of the brain responsible for detecting sarcasm, and I'm not being sarcastic. What they did (claim to) find is that some part of the brain (roughly speaking the upper part from right above your eyes until the nearly the center of your skull) is needed to detect sarcasm. There might be some "methodological" issues with their study (if even one of their patients did get some of the sarcasm, the indicated area is obviously not uniquely responsible, not all types of brain damage can be compared, "pre-frontal" is quite a big area, etc.), but the main point to understand is that they did not find a sarcasm center.
For a simple analogy, think what would happen if you compared the lights on cars with damage somewhere in the engine compartment and cars that are undamaged. You will find that the lights of the damaged cars are more often broken than those of the undamaged cars. But that does not mean the main function of the engine compartment is lighting, it is just related and perhaps necessary.