I do a decent amount of cycling and have a Garmin 305 that tracks heart rate, cadence (pedaling speed), location, and time. I always thought it would be a lot of fun to play with the data, and have been working on a site for a while with a couple friends that has some cool features (mouse over your elevation and see where it is on the map, determine time spent in heart rate zones, estimate power output in watts, calories, put it on a calendar - currently working on finding other times you rode the same section of road and race yourself)
Without a GPS unit, you can draw a route and we pull elevation data off our server if we have it (we have the continental US in 1/3 arc second accuracy, pretty good), estimate instantaneous grade, etc... fun project and people are finding it useful
Yes, it has changed a lot in the past few years, but it has only been around for four years and took time to mature. Deploying it has not been that difficult for a while now in a dedicated environment, and with Passenger (mod_rails) it is ridiculously simple even in a shared environment. Running Rails apps via CGI has not made sense for quite a while, even if you were using Fast CGI, Mongrel and a load balancing proxy have performed better and been easier to set up for quite some time.
Also, I'm not sure exactly what you mean about no debugging. ruby-debug works well, you can catch exceptions and do what you want with them, there are plenty of monitoring options, etc.
put the camera in a fixed position with consistent lighting. figure out the pixel coord of the center of each dial. pick a fixed radius from that center point where there is minimal interference (there is either dial, or its that off white color). now just look at all the pixels in the circle around that point at that radius, and it should be easy to figure out if you're pixel is part of the dial or not. it is going to be sort of close to white #ffffff or sort of close to black #000000, either way, there will be an easy to detect dramatic difference. figure out the angular range that the dial covers (eg it covers from 61 deg to 66 deg) average that, and you have a fairly precise direction its pointing, then convert that to whatever scale the dial is using.
to make it easier you could run the image through some imagemagick filters (command line image processing) to reduce noise or simplify the colors.
1) You don't see a reason to go with the consensus on materialism and determinism, but your first point assumes the "consensus" on strong AI being non-algorithmic is relevant. I'll go with Jeff Hawkins on this one and just say there is no clear consensus, and strong AI can be algorithmic.
2) Cognitive dissonance is emotional - it is uncomfortable to hold two contradictory ideas in your head. The project mentioned in this article seeks to replicate the functions of the neocortex, or the new brain. The limbic system is part of the old brain, which is arguably not part of strong AI, and handles emotion. It can also be argued that willingness to engage in cognitive dissonance is a mark of intelligence, because in order for your beliefs and ideas to evolve you must compare new ones with old ones, by holding both contradictory view points at once, and making a rationally justifiable decision to go with one idea over the other. You say that cognitive dissonance is a logical contradiction, but I say that people experience it for varying amounts of time and to varying degrees, and if it does exist I fail to see how it is a "logical contradiction of consciousness".
I have not used Microsoft's mapping service, so evaluate it separately of course... however, I have a lot of experience with the Google Maps API. You can expect your code to keep on working, firstly. They recently added a number of features, and now you need to instantiate a GMaps2 class because they were concerned about their legacy users. Their API is extremely easy to use, and is intuitively set up. Go to their documentation and check out some of the basic examples and look at the API docs for a minute. It has been a pleasure to use in my experience.
Also, if you need to do anything more advanced, you can use your own map tiles, and they provide nice methods for doing lat/lon -> pixel conversions if you need to render and cache some data that will overlay on the map. This is relatively new for GMaps, and I'm not sure if Microsoft's service offers this or not..
These designs look alright, but they all use sans-serif fonts. Even though many/. users do not read the articles linked from the stories, they do read the stories and many of the comments. I think the use of serif fonts on the site has given it a certain feel that these new designs lack. Slashdot has many long and well-written comments that keep many of us coming back, and I would think that readability trumps an aesthetically slick design.
That's fine that you have extra parts lying around, but not everyone does, and it's even less likely you'd have numerous sets of extra parts if you were looking to get a few of these.
Hello world, there's a guy who apparently is giving away: * The floorplans to the bank * The hours of the guards * Details on the type of security, and escape routes * Instruction for nerve agents to attack the staff with over at 123 Main st.
Arrest me? I hope not. But, since there are millions of these people out there that I'm pointing to, it's much more convenient to arrest me.
I didn't vote for him at all. Neither did nearly 50% of the rest of America. Those that didn't are plenty unhappy with the outcome, but to make a blanket accusation of idiocy across our entire population is offensive, irritating, and a grossly ignorant generalization.
Having a cell phone does not automatically put you at the fingertips of others. Cell phones have the following convenient features: silent mode, call ignore, and most importantly, the ability to be left at home or in the car. As long as I pay my cell phone bill, I see no reason why my having a phone should empower anyone buy myself and others I select. I consider it rude when others use their cell phones when we're getting together, but they are convenient to have around when you need to get some information (from a person or a business) and you are not at home or wanting to use a pay phone.
Trust me, some of these patents people are crying foul on are more patentable then they realize.
What is this even supposed to mean? They were patented, so of course they are patentable. What is in question is not their "patentability" but rather the rules governing that patentability in the first place. Sure, they are patentable, but people are disagreeing with what *should* constitute patentability.
Probably not for a little while still. The singularity as Kurzweil foresees it requires cheaply available computational power equivalent to or exceeding what is estimated of the human brain, and until that day comes, we're still approaching the elbow to this double exponential growth in technological advancement.
Whatever it is I may be interested in, it can be assumed that there is a community somewhere online to gather people who share that interest. I am significantly more interested in what other consumers like myself have to say about a product than what the company has to say about it. As soon as companies stop using annoying tactics (bandwagon / glittering generalities / dramatized comparisons) in their advertisements to put a falsely positive light on their products, perhaps I will stop using Adblock/Flashblock/popup blocking. Until then, it's easy and effective to utilize the internet to tap into the world of "word of mouth" advertising.
The question is: Is it worth spending my time on them?
Let's see... waste an hour cutting the grass... or bill $150/hour on a consulting contract and pay the gardener $50/month? Hmmmm...
Getting paid to do work is something I do to support my way of living. Outside of work, I can't imagine having the same mentality. Mowing the lawn is rewarding and enjoyable usually.
As for printing, my.02 is that printing labs are great for batch processing, and that inexpensive photo printer at home is great for the picture you took five minutes ago and want to give to someone or take with you somewhere. But, I definitely do not think home printers are oriented toward high volume printing. The damn things oftentimes stop working under normal use. Unfortunately, they are marketed to be something they were not engineered to be.
>Probably some Macromedia executives don't like
>that they just give Flash away for free. When
>approached by Yahoo executives who would like
>their toolbar installed on more computers, these
>Macromedia executives were happy to learn that
>they could generate extra revenue from Yahoo by
>bundling the toolbar.
I think you need to differentiate between the Flash Player and Macromedia Flash, the development program. I highly doubt there are Macromedia executives naive enough to believe Flash would be used by anyone if the Flash Player was not free and easily downloaded and installed without any hassling (notice that there is a link on macromedia.com that takes you directly to a Flash Player download page that does not ask for any registration or whatnot before downloading).
What I see as most likely is that Yahoo! offered Macromedia an extremely tempting pile of money and Macromedia felt that its Flash Player already has such a deep market penetration that it stands on firm ground. I don't think anyone seeing this really believes that this spells the downfall of the Flash Player, but I do agree with those who think that this is a bad decision by Macromedia. I thought that Macromedia was trying to push Flash as a more serious tool (as opposed to it being a cartooning tool) with Flash Remoting/Flashcom Server, and I think if anyone is going to really change their mind about utilizing Flash for a project due to this, its the developers who might be using these tools.
Who knows, just my.02
True, although another poster mentioned the potential for a few things (although they seemed unrealistic considering the difficult-to-create environment that's required)
This is definitley intriguing, but I can't gather frmo the article if there are any uses that have been thought of for a super fluid like this. Although its inconvenient to make (have to cool it to near absolute zero then pressurize it quite a bit), I don't doubt some of you out there have some ideas about what any of this means besides "hey isn't that cool it swirls forever". Anyone?
Kurzweil's very interesting piece The Age of Spiritual Machines details exactly how this technology will lead to a very Matrix-like future. Figured it was worth mentioning the book since everyone here was seeing this as being analogous to the Matrix even though its in such infancy. Definitely an interesting and applicable book to take a look at in light of the technology that's finally starting to emerge (nanotech, advances in distributed networks, advances in neural networks, and of course this sort of psuedo matrix stuff).
The choice in music services are there and will continue to be, and I'm sure there are a good number of folks who want to use their pre-existing mp3 players (or not buy an i-pod when they do decide to get a portable player) who won't be subscribing to i-tunes. I just think this is a case of Microsoft using a valid point (choice is good) to illustrate nothing (choice exists).
Slashdot Mirror
I do a decent amount of cycling and have a Garmin 305 that tracks heart rate, cadence (pedaling speed), location, and time. I always thought it would be a lot of fun to play with the data, and have been working on a site for a while with a couple friends that has some cool features (mouse over your elevation and see where it is on the map, determine time spent in heart rate zones, estimate power output in watts, calories, put it on a calendar - currently working on finding other times you rode the same section of road and race yourself)
Without a GPS unit, you can draw a route and we pull elevation data off our server if we have it (we have the continental US in 1/3 arc second accuracy, pretty good), estimate instantaneous grade, etc... fun project and people are finding it useful
Anyway, check it out if you want: ridewithgps.com
Yes, it has changed a lot in the past few years, but it has only been around for four years and took time to mature. Deploying it has not been that difficult for a while now in a dedicated environment, and with Passenger (mod_rails) it is ridiculously simple even in a shared environment. Running Rails apps via CGI has not made sense for quite a while, even if you were using Fast CGI, Mongrel and a load balancing proxy have performed better and been easier to set up for quite some time.
Also, I'm not sure exactly what you mean about no debugging. ruby-debug works well, you can catch exceptions and do what you want with them, there are plenty of monitoring options, etc.
You can format it to be case-sensitive, just don't try and install Adobe Creative Suite 3, or you will sadly get this message.
put the camera in a fixed position with consistent lighting. figure out the pixel coord of the center of each dial. pick a fixed radius from that center point where there is minimal interference (there is either dial, or its that off white color). now just look at all the pixels in the circle around that point at that radius, and it should be easy to figure out if you're pixel is part of the dial or not. it is going to be sort of close to white #ffffff or sort of close to black #000000, either way, there will be an easy to detect dramatic difference. figure out the angular range that the dial covers (eg it covers from 61 deg to 66 deg) average that, and you have a fairly precise direction its pointing, then convert that to whatever scale the dial is using.
to make it easier you could run the image through some imagemagick filters (command line image processing) to reduce noise or simplify the colors.
1) You don't see a reason to go with the consensus on materialism and determinism, but your first point assumes the "consensus" on strong AI being non-algorithmic is relevant. I'll go with Jeff Hawkins on this one and just say there is no clear consensus, and strong AI can be algorithmic. 2) Cognitive dissonance is emotional - it is uncomfortable to hold two contradictory ideas in your head. The project mentioned in this article seeks to replicate the functions of the neocortex, or the new brain. The limbic system is part of the old brain, which is arguably not part of strong AI, and handles emotion. It can also be argued that willingness to engage in cognitive dissonance is a mark of intelligence, because in order for your beliefs and ideas to evolve you must compare new ones with old ones, by holding both contradictory view points at once, and making a rationally justifiable decision to go with one idea over the other. You say that cognitive dissonance is a logical contradiction, but I say that people experience it for varying amounts of time and to varying degrees, and if it does exist I fail to see how it is a "logical contradiction of consciousness".
I have not used Microsoft's mapping service, so evaluate it separately of course... however, I have a lot of experience with the Google Maps API. You can expect your code to keep on working, firstly. They recently added a number of features, and now you need to instantiate a GMaps2 class because they were concerned about their legacy users. Their API is extremely easy to use, and is intuitively set up. Go to their documentation and check out some of the basic examples and look at the API docs for a minute. It has been a pleasure to use in my experience.
Also, if you need to do anything more advanced, you can use your own map tiles, and they provide nice methods for doing lat/lon -> pixel conversions if you need to render and cache some data that will overlay on the map. This is relatively new for GMaps, and I'm not sure if Microsoft's service offers this or not..
You could download images and upload ring tones I suppose...
These designs look alright, but they all use sans-serif fonts. Even though many /. users do not read the articles linked from the stories, they do read the stories and many of the comments. I think the use of serif fonts on the site has given it a certain feel that these new designs lack. Slashdot has many long and well-written comments that keep many of us coming back, and I would think that readability trumps an aesthetically slick design.
Yes. Certainly more mature posters, at least when I don't read at -1.
That's fine that you have extra parts lying around, but not everyone does, and it's even less likely you'd have numerous sets of extra parts if you were looking to get a few of these.
I'll bite.
Hello world, there's a guy who apparently is giving away:
* The floorplans to the bank
* The hours of the guards
* Details on the type of security, and escape routes
* Instruction for nerve agents to attack the staff with
over at 123 Main st.
Arrest me? I hope not. But, since there are millions of these people out there that I'm pointing to, it's much more convenient to arrest me.
I didn't vote for him at all. Neither did nearly 50% of the rest of America. Those that didn't are plenty unhappy with the outcome, but to make a blanket accusation of idiocy across our entire population is offensive, irritating, and a grossly ignorant generalization.
I still see many pay phones around around stores, but I haven't seen even one of the once-ubiquitous phone booths in quite a while.
Having a cell phone does not automatically put you at the fingertips of others. Cell phones have the following convenient features: silent mode, call ignore, and most importantly, the ability to be left at home or in the car. As long as I pay my cell phone bill, I see no reason why my having a phone should empower anyone buy myself and others I select. I consider it rude when others use their cell phones when we're getting together, but they are convenient to have around when you need to get some information (from a person or a business) and you are not at home or wanting to use a pay phone.
How did this get modded funny??!
What is this even supposed to mean? They were patented, so of course they are patentable. What is in question is not their "patentability" but rather the rules governing that patentability in the first place. Sure, they are patentable, but people are disagreeing with what *should* constitute patentability.
Probably not for a little while still. The singularity as Kurzweil foresees it requires cheaply available computational power equivalent to or exceeding what is estimated of the human brain, and until that day comes, we're still approaching the elbow to this double exponential growth in technological advancement.
Whatever it is I may be interested in, it can be assumed that there is a community somewhere online to gather people who share that interest. I am significantly more interested in what other consumers like myself have to say about a product than what the company has to say about it. As soon as companies stop using annoying tactics (bandwagon / glittering generalities / dramatized comparisons) in their advertisements to put a falsely positive light on their products, perhaps I will stop using Adblock/Flashblock/popup blocking. Until then, it's easy and effective to utilize the internet to tap into the world of "word of mouth" advertising.
As for printing, my
>Probably some Macromedia executives don't like
.02
>that they just give Flash away for free. When
>approached by Yahoo executives who would like
>their toolbar installed on more computers, these
>Macromedia executives were happy to learn that
>they could generate extra revenue from Yahoo by
>bundling the toolbar.
I think you need to differentiate between the Flash Player and Macromedia Flash, the development program. I highly doubt there are Macromedia executives naive enough to believe Flash would be used by anyone if the Flash Player was not free and easily downloaded and installed without any hassling (notice that there is a link on macromedia.com that takes you directly to a Flash Player download page that does not ask for any registration or whatnot before downloading).
What I see as most likely is that Yahoo! offered Macromedia an extremely tempting pile of money and Macromedia felt that its Flash Player already has such a deep market penetration that it stands on firm ground. I don't think anyone seeing this really believes that this spells the downfall of the Flash Player, but I do agree with those who think that this is a bad decision by Macromedia. I thought that Macromedia was trying to push Flash as a more serious tool (as opposed to it being a cartooning tool) with Flash Remoting/Flashcom Server, and I think if anyone is going to really change their mind about utilizing Flash for a project due to this, its the developers who might be using these tools. Who knows, just my
True, although another poster mentioned the potential for a few things (although they seemed unrealistic considering the difficult-to-create environment that's required)
This is definitley intriguing, but I can't gather frmo the article if there are any uses that have been thought of for a super fluid like this. Although its inconvenient to make (have to cool it to near absolute zero then pressurize it quite a bit), I don't doubt some of you out there have some ideas about what any of this means besides "hey isn't that cool it swirls forever". Anyone?
Kurzweil's very interesting piece The Age of Spiritual Machines details exactly how this technology will lead to a very Matrix-like future. Figured it was worth mentioning the book since everyone here was seeing this as being analogous to the Matrix even though its in such infancy. Definitely an interesting and applicable book to take a look at in light of the technology that's finally starting to emerge (nanotech, advances in distributed networks, advances in neural networks, and of course this sort of psuedo matrix stuff).
The choice in music services are there and will continue to be, and I'm sure there are a good number of folks who want to use their pre-existing mp3 players (or not buy an i-pod when they do decide to get a portable player) who won't be subscribing to i-tunes. I just think this is a case of Microsoft using a valid point (choice is good) to illustrate nothing (choice exists).