The robot was playing the violin and the crowd was clapping. The crowd was wowing and cheering, but the player did not understand or even know about this.
If I were there, I would have applauded - not for the benefit of the robot, but for its creators, who have demonstrated a remarkable achievement. Clearly, there's more work to do, but I am very impressed with what they've accomplished so far.
Question: was the robot just performing pre-programmed moves, was it really playing as if from notes and did it rely on its hearing to compensate for the sound at all?
...going to a robot concert will be exactly like listening to a CD, the robot doesn't know you're there, doesn't care and doesn't feel the music even if plays (im)perfectly like a human.
Two objections: first, plenty of people enjoy listening to CDs recorded by real musicians, and the music sounds full of "soul" to them. Yet a CD is just a bunch of 1s and 0s, a perfect (enough) mechanical reproduction of a human performance. If you can build a robot that can mechanically duplicate a human performance, then a recording of the robot will sound basically the same as a recording of the human.
Second, microphones and speakers cannot reproduce the sound of live instruments. There's a huge difference between the sound of a player piano live in the room, and a recording of the same player piano playing on a CD. The same is true of other instruments. If you can play live instruments robotically, you can get the sound of live instruments without live musicians.
Since when is being "pro-america" a bad thing for Americans?
When it leads you to believe that everything this nation has ever done has been a positive force for good in the world. That means that kids are being taught either that the despicable things our country has done are in fact not despicable, or that they didn't happen. If we fail to learn from history, we're doomed to repeat it...
That's the thing if you're delusional enough just about any opinion can become indistinguishable from fact.
If you're poorly educated and don't know how to think and apply critical reasoning, which describes a large percentage of the US population, then you probably have a poor grasp of the difference between opinion and fact, and can easily confuse the two.
Such as death panels in the health care bill or Iraq being a war about terrorism, both are demonstrably false, but a bunch of nut jobs hang to it anyways to the bitter end.
Once again, THESE ARE NOT OPINIONS.
Would it be a good idea to set up government-run committees charged with rationing health care coverage to save money ("death panels")? Some people think it would; if we're to offer universal coverage, then without some restrictions in place, costs could easily explode and bankrupt the system. Other people think it wouldn't; there are other ways of effectively controlling costs without the government deciding when to pull the plug on Grandma. THESE ARE OPINIONS.
Did any version of the health care reform bill recently passed by Congress and signed by President Obama call for establishing these "death panels"? Some people think so; several prominent politicians tried to warn the public that the bill contained such a provision. Other people don't think so; there was a section of the bill dealing with end-of-life care, but it was about conversations between doctors, patients and patients' families about what options are available, not about a government-run panel and there was nothing about encouraging euthanasia. THESE ARE NOT OPINIONS.
...colleges are bending over backwards to allow entry to the dumbest among us. My University's Math department had a Math 001 course for preparation to take Algebra courses (001 taught basic math like fractions). But apparently 001 was too hard for some high school graduates; a Math010 course was developed to teach things like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. In &$#%#%*ing college!
I applaud your university for offering these courses. If an adult doesn't know how to multiply and divide, where are they supposed to go to learn?
Obviously the fact that there are adults who don't know how to do basic arithmetic points to a huge failing in our elementary education system, but don't blame the colleges for trying to do something about it.
Why would you use a signed integer for a value like this? I mean, you're never going to have a negative score, and it's not like there's a performance benefit to using a signed integer instead of an unsigned integer. It would take up the same 32 bits of memory. Sure, a score of two billion should be enough and four billion is overkill, but that's really not the point - if you know you're never going to need negative values, why would you reserve a bit for them?
I see this sort of thing all the time. For example, various IMAP clients (including Mozilla Thunderbird and Apple Mail) use a signed integer for the message UID, which breaks horribly in the unlikely event that you happen to have a message in your mailbox with a UID above 2^31. (Unlikely, unless your IMAP server stores the UID within the message itself as an X-UID header, and your SMTP server doesn't strip X-UID headers from incoming messages, allowing spammers to cause all sorts of interesting problems.)
Is it really that much easier to use signed integers? Or are people just idiots?
He never said his publisher isn't willing to go with one of the other options. Also, he didn't say that he likes options 2, 3 or 4 any better than option 1.
One detail I did miss in the original article though - Amazon's policy rules out option #3.
It sounds like the problem is really between you and your publisher, not between you and Apple. It may be time for you to find a publisher that shares your position on the situation, because it doesn't sound like your publisher does.
Did you RTFA? This is Apple's policy, not the publisher's. His options are: 1) Raise his prices across the board 2) Lower his already-low prices across the board 3) Lower his prices on the Apple iBooks store to below the prices on other stores 4) Not make his books available to iPad users
His publisher has chosen option 1 for him, but if he wanted to go with one of the other options, I'm sure an agreement could be reached. The problem is that none of these options are desirable.
Precisely. I had a pretty good time Friday night, but if I didn't have a Facebook account, the girl who invited me to the party probably wouldn't have gone out of her way to find another way to invite me.
Even better: I misread this as an obituary for obituaries of newspapers. There has to be some contrarian out there who is writing that newspapers are here to stay...
When your computer is known by people before you yourself are, that's an achievement.
Most people would consider that an anti-achievement in social skills. That's nerds for you, I guess.
Having a social life is totally different than achieving something. To create something, and have your creation become widely known and respected, without you saying "hey everybody, look at this thing I made!" is a good feeling - whether it's a painting or a novel or a piece of software or a social networking web site or a search engine or a college porn server.
In contrast to ActiveState's ActivePerl (a Windows port of Perl, sponsored by Microsoft, which works well but changes things enough that you generally can't just download some random CPAN module and compile it, you have to use one of the precompiled binary modules they make available), Strawberry Perl is a Windows port of Perl that tries to remain as close as possible to the original UNIX version, but tweaking just enough to get it to work well on the platform. I believe the goal is to move toward Vanilla Perl, which would be essentially taking the plain old normal Perl that runs on UNIX, and just running that on Windows without changing anything.
I would be severely disappointed in any kid who couldn't come up with some sort of replacement for a confiscated ethernet cable. Not saying I'd encourage them to do so, just that I'd expect it.
Spend some money and get some real scientists and engineers to teach. Teach hard science and math to the kids. Let's try to stop the reverence for idiocy while we can.
How about, let's teach kids how to USE science and math. At this point, most of them think it's a pointless waste of time that they only have to remember long enough to pass the final, and then they're free to forget everything because they'll never use it later in life. Change that attitude, and you'll find kids who actually WANT to learn.
I saw a commercial on TV the other day, I'm not entirely sure what they were advertising - some sort of non-profit organization promoting a mentoring program over webcams? I dunno. Anyway, they had a little girl asking an adult, how do you find the area of a triangle? The adult says "well, the formula to find the area of a triangle is 1/2b*h, so you multiply the base times the height, and divide by two." The kid smiles and says "thanks!" but I'm thinking to myself, "That's a terrible answer!"
Try this approach:
To find the area of a 3x5 index card, take a pencil and a ruler and fill it with one-inch square boxes. You can see that there are a total of 15 of them. If you simply multiply the length and width together, this will also give you the same answer, without drawing little boxes, and it always works with any rectangle.
Now, take a peanut butter sandwich and cut the crust off to make a perfect rectangle. Cut it in half diagonally, and you get two right triangles. The area of each half of the sandwich is obviously half the area of the whole sandwich, and to find the area of the whole sandwich, you can multiply the height and width. So, if all you have is half a sandwich, you can measure the two sides to figure out how big the whole sandwich was, and divide by two to get the area.
Next, rotate the half sandwich so the cut edge (hypotenuse) is at the bottom. Find a way to cut the other half sandwich in half such that it makes two triangles which together can complete a rectangle around the first half sandwich. We know the area of the big piece is identical to the sum of the area of the two little pieces. Measure it. The shape is different but the area is the same, and 1/2b*h still works.
Now figure out how to do it with non-right triangles. Now add a third dimension and measure volume. Now learn A=pi*r^2 and V=pi*r^2*h. Now take a few cylinders and prisms of various sizes, measure the area of the base, solve for h if you assume the volume to be 1 liter, mark how high h should be, then pour in a liter of water and see if you did it right.
Those kids are going to remember how to find the area of a triangle for a very long time. The kids who only memorized A=1/2b*h are going to forget the formula after they pass the test, because a formula is all it was to them.
Holy crap you're a moron. Get rid of teacher work days? Seriously? If anything, we need MORE teacher work days, because an effective teacher needs time to prepare. Currently all the good teachers do all of that stuff at home in their free time, which means they don't really have any free time left over, which means they burn out and stop being good teachers.
I don't remember WinAmp 2.x being able to rip and burn CDs; could it always do this, or was this added in 3.x or 5.x? WinAmp also didn't use a database, so wasn't great at managing a 5,000-song library (although many people thought this was one of its greatest strengths).
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The robot was playing the violin and the crowd was clapping. The crowd was wowing and cheering, but the player did not understand or even know about this.
If I were there, I would have applauded - not for the benefit of the robot, but for its creators, who have demonstrated a remarkable achievement. Clearly, there's more work to do, but I am very impressed with what they've accomplished so far.
Question: was the robot just performing pre-programmed moves, was it really playing as if from notes and did it rely on its hearing to compensate for the sound at all?
Those are good questions.
...going to a robot concert will be exactly like listening to a CD, the robot doesn't know you're there, doesn't care and doesn't feel the music even if plays (im)perfectly like a human.
Two objections: first, plenty of people enjoy listening to CDs recorded by real musicians, and the music sounds full of "soul" to them. Yet a CD is just a bunch of 1s and 0s, a perfect (enough) mechanical reproduction of a human performance. If you can build a robot that can mechanically duplicate a human performance, then a recording of the robot will sound basically the same as a recording of the human.
Second, microphones and speakers cannot reproduce the sound of live instruments. There's a huge difference between the sound of a player piano live in the room, and a recording of the same player piano playing on a CD. The same is true of other instruments. If you can play live instruments robotically, you can get the sound of live instruments without live musicians.
I'm not saying they're there yet, of course.
Once again someone is comparing a codec to H264 using some small as hell resolution.
Welcome to 2010, if it's not encoded at 1080p nobody cares.
On a cell phone, that's not true.
Since when is being "pro-america" a bad thing for Americans?
When it leads you to believe that everything this nation has ever done has been a positive force for good in the world. That means that kids are being taught either that the despicable things our country has done are in fact not despicable, or that they didn't happen. If we fail to learn from history, we're doomed to repeat it...
That's the thing if you're delusional enough just about any opinion can become indistinguishable from fact.
If you're poorly educated and don't know how to think and apply critical reasoning, which describes a large percentage of the US population, then you probably have a poor grasp of the difference between opinion and fact, and can easily confuse the two.
Such as death panels in the health care bill or Iraq being a war about terrorism, both are demonstrably false, but a bunch of nut jobs hang to it anyways to the bitter end.
Once again, THESE ARE NOT OPINIONS.
Would it be a good idea to set up government-run committees charged with rationing health care coverage to save money ("death panels")? Some people think it would; if we're to offer universal coverage, then without some restrictions in place, costs could easily explode and bankrupt the system. Other people think it wouldn't; there are other ways of effectively controlling costs without the government deciding when to pull the plug on Grandma. THESE ARE OPINIONS.
Did any version of the health care reform bill recently passed by Congress and signed by President Obama call for establishing these "death panels"? Some people think so; several prominent politicians tried to warn the public that the bill contained such a provision. Other people don't think so; there was a section of the bill dealing with end-of-life care, but it was about conversations between doctors, patients and patients' families about what options are available, not about a government-run panel and there was nothing about encouraging euthanasia. THESE ARE NOT OPINIONS.
"Open source" textbooks don't grow on trees; somebody has to write them. Of course, once they've been written, they can be shared...
...colleges are bending over backwards to allow entry to the dumbest among us. My University's Math department had a Math 001 course for preparation to take Algebra courses (001 taught basic math like fractions). But apparently 001 was too hard for some high school graduates; a Math010 course was developed to teach things like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. In &$#%#%*ing college!
I applaud your university for offering these courses. If an adult doesn't know how to multiply and divide, where are they supposed to go to learn?
Obviously the fact that there are adults who don't know how to do basic arithmetic points to a huge failing in our elementary education system, but don't blame the colleges for trying to do something about it.
You knew you had to hide the weed to avoid getting caught. Would you have been similarly careful with a piece of candy?
Why would you use a signed integer for a value like this? I mean, you're never going to have a negative score, and it's not like there's a performance benefit to using a signed integer instead of an unsigned integer. It would take up the same 32 bits of memory. Sure, a score of two billion should be enough and four billion is overkill, but that's really not the point - if you know you're never going to need negative values, why would you reserve a bit for them?
I see this sort of thing all the time. For example, various IMAP clients (including Mozilla Thunderbird and Apple Mail) use a signed integer for the message UID, which breaks horribly in the unlikely event that you happen to have a message in your mailbox with a UID above 2^31. (Unlikely, unless your IMAP server stores the UID within the message itself as an X-UID header, and your SMTP server doesn't strip X-UID headers from incoming messages, allowing spammers to cause all sorts of interesting problems.)
Is it really that much easier to use signed integers? Or are people just idiots?
How does this affect things like being able to sign into AIM using an ICQ number, and adding ICQ numbers to your AIM buddy list?
He never said his publisher isn't willing to go with one of the other options. Also, he didn't say that he likes options 2, 3 or 4 any better than option 1.
One detail I did miss in the original article though - Amazon's policy rules out option #3.
It sounds like the problem is really between you and your publisher, not between you and Apple. It may be time for you to find a publisher that shares your position on the situation, because it doesn't sound like your publisher does.
Did you RTFA? This is Apple's policy, not the publisher's. His options are:
1) Raise his prices across the board
2) Lower his already-low prices across the board
3) Lower his prices on the Apple iBooks store to below the prices on other stores
4) Not make his books available to iPad users
His publisher has chosen option 1 for him, but if he wanted to go with one of the other options, I'm sure an agreement could be reached. The problem is that none of these options are desirable.
If the whole rest of the planet isn't using it, what's the point? Facebook is what we're stuck with. Get over it.
Precisely. I had a pretty good time Friday night, but if I didn't have a Facebook account, the girl who invited me to the party probably wouldn't have gone out of her way to find another way to invite me.
Fry's Electronics will generally take back anything but software.
Even better: I misread this as an obituary for obituaries of newspapers. There has to be some contrarian out there who is writing that newspapers are here to stay...
This was my first reading as well.
When your computer is known by people before you yourself are, that's an achievement.
Most people would consider that an anti-achievement in social skills. That's nerds for you, I guess.
Having a social life is totally different than achieving something. To create something, and have your creation become widely known and respected, without you saying "hey everybody, look at this thing I made!" is a good feeling - whether it's a painting or a novel or a piece of software or a social networking web site or a search engine or a college porn server.
I've been waiting nearly a decade for Perl 6.
Why? Just because you've heard the hype?
In contrast to ActiveState's ActivePerl (a Windows port of Perl, sponsored by Microsoft, which works well but changes things enough that you generally can't just download some random CPAN module and compile it, you have to use one of the precompiled binary modules they make available), Strawberry Perl is a Windows port of Perl that tries to remain as close as possible to the original UNIX version, but tweaking just enough to get it to work well on the platform. I believe the goal is to move toward Vanilla Perl, which would be essentially taking the plain old normal Perl that runs on UNIX, and just running that on Windows without changing anything.
Hell yes, especially if I'm driving a big truck full of equipment and I know I'll need extra time to stop comfortably.
I would be severely disappointed in any kid who couldn't come up with some sort of replacement for a confiscated ethernet cable. Not saying I'd encourage them to do so, just that I'd expect it.
I'd suggest that if you're only having the chat after your daughter starts googling birth control, you've probably left it a little late.
On the other hand, if she's responsible enough to be thinking about using birth control, you've probably done something right.
Spend some money and get some real scientists and engineers to teach. Teach hard science and math to the kids. Let's try to stop the reverence for idiocy while we can.
How about, let's teach kids how to USE science and math. At this point, most of them think it's a pointless waste of time that they only have to remember long enough to pass the final, and then they're free to forget everything because they'll never use it later in life. Change that attitude, and you'll find kids who actually WANT to learn.
I saw a commercial on TV the other day, I'm not entirely sure what they were advertising - some sort of non-profit organization promoting a mentoring program over webcams? I dunno. Anyway, they had a little girl asking an adult, how do you find the area of a triangle? The adult says "well, the formula to find the area of a triangle is 1/2b*h, so you multiply the base times the height, and divide by two." The kid smiles and says "thanks!" but I'm thinking to myself, "That's a terrible answer!"
Try this approach:
To find the area of a 3x5 index card, take a pencil and a ruler and fill it with one-inch square boxes. You can see that there are a total of 15 of them. If you simply multiply the length and width together, this will also give you the same answer, without drawing little boxes, and it always works with any rectangle.
Now, take a peanut butter sandwich and cut the crust off to make a perfect rectangle. Cut it in half diagonally, and you get two right triangles. The area of each half of the sandwich is obviously half the area of the whole sandwich, and to find the area of the whole sandwich, you can multiply the height and width. So, if all you have is half a sandwich, you can measure the two sides to figure out how big the whole sandwich was, and divide by two to get the area.
Next, rotate the half sandwich so the cut edge (hypotenuse) is at the bottom. Find a way to cut the other half sandwich in half such that it makes two triangles which together can complete a rectangle around the first half sandwich. We know the area of the big piece is identical to the sum of the area of the two little pieces. Measure it. The shape is different but the area is the same, and 1/2b*h still works.
Now figure out how to do it with non-right triangles. Now add a third dimension and measure volume. Now learn A=pi*r^2 and V=pi*r^2*h. Now take a few cylinders and prisms of various sizes, measure the area of the base, solve for h if you assume the volume to be 1 liter, mark how high h should be, then pour in a liter of water and see if you did it right.
Those kids are going to remember how to find the area of a triangle for a very long time. The kids who only memorized A=1/2b*h are going to forget the formula after they pass the test, because a formula is all it was to them.
Holy crap you're a moron. Get rid of teacher work days? Seriously? If anything, we need MORE teacher work days, because an effective teacher needs time to prepare. Currently all the good teachers do all of that stuff at home in their free time, which means they don't really have any free time left over, which means they burn out and stop being good teachers.
I don't remember WinAmp 2.x being able to rip and burn CDs; could it always do this, or was this added in 3.x or 5.x? WinAmp also didn't use a database, so wasn't great at managing a 5,000-song library (although many people thought this was one of its greatest strengths).