A better question is- do the results of voluntary genetic testing fall under the ' full disclosure' clauses in your typical health insurance policy? You know. The clauses under which you agree to disclose anything that you, or a generic but legally 'reasonable' version of you might have some bearing on your policy.
Not so much of an issue in Oz, where private health insurance works very differently than in the US. Might be more of a concern for those dwelling across the Pacific...
I didn't read anything that said we were losing our capacity to think innovatively. In fact, the article makes a point of the showing what might be considered the opposite - that the brain patterns demonstrated when Googling and surfing the internet were associated with making sharp decisions. What the author of the study articulated was a theory that this was in conflict with concentrated calm retention of knowledge like reading a book or memorizing a million and one routes through London.
What the article didn't expand on was why this might be very bad. Unless you think that someone is going to take away your GPS or the Internet then it doesn't matter any more than inventing the written word put story-telling as a means of retaining history out of business was a bad thing. Surely that train of thought would rely on the notion that something very very bad was going to happen to the world and at that point I fear that the skills you would need were lost generations ago by the vast majority of people. Surely the author is not suggesting that the fact that the vast majority have almost certainly lost or at least have diminished the patterns of thinking that supported primal hunter-gather life was necessarily a bad thing for our evolution?
Well that would be until Skynet takes control, anyway.
Firstly, politicians tackle complex, real-world issues with overly simplistic solutions. Often these 'solutions' are the result of 'think of the children' or 'homeland security' knee-jerk reactions to challenging geopolitical events. Pollies seem to regard the value of the solution is in being seen to react rather than being seen to react appropriately. The overly simplistic solution is usually broad, poorly bounded legislation. Any boundaries that are imposed are often badly defined from a legal perspective, or worse deliberately vague as a result of the need for a simple and broad solution to the complex problem. Politicians frequently then fall back on the mantra that new powers or laws will be used infrequently and only in special, unique or exceptional instances.
This leads to the second problem. The agencies responsible implementing the legislation or using the new powers are not bound by the politicians admonitions about their use. In fact, quite the opposite it true- their very nature and mission encourages them to take the full advantage of whatever powers, rules or procedural changes are implemented in the framework of legislation and common law under which they operate. The only way they can determine the true boundaries of their new powers or a new law is by a process of trial and error, generally involving court cases and other legal mechanisms.
Which is all fine and is the way that laws have been passed and refined by courts for a considerable period of time (if disasterous if you are the individual caught up in a grey area). However it becomes rather more slippery when the implementation of the legislation in question is subject to national security constraints, secret courts, exceptions for back-filling of paperwork and other get-out clauses.
Whilst I might object strenously to the notion that the FBI should be able to tap into my conversations without a warrant or that the UK govt. might like to lock me up for 42 days without charge on spurious 'security' related charges, my most strenuous objections are to the lack of transparency and oversight by independent judiciary in open court or similarly ungagged proceedings.
I've been looking into OCR packages as part of a custom data capture work-flow desired by one of my customers.
The OCR / document image layout analysis world is dominated by a handful of commercial companies. There is a dearth of OCR and document analysis code available in the open source community. That which is available on any sort of 'free' basis is not going to be of a lot of use other than as a starting point for some serious development of your own, I would suggest.
Both Nuance and Abbyy offer an SDK for OCR integration at a code level which might suit depending on your budget. Certainly the price (probably between $500 and $5000 for a license) represent a good deal if you look at the costs and time it would take to write anything that does serious OCR work yourself.
BTW, if anyone out there knows of any good document layout analysis code available to have a look at, I would be particularly interested. I am looking into document layout analysis for a personal project and although there is a fair bit of academic research available at Citeseer, I actually haven't found much in the way of good sample code that I can use as a starting point for some of my own ideas.
I am waiting for a company for the courage of its convictions. The company that won't sell it's soul for the NASDAQ. Maybe it's Google. Maybe it's not.
I like Google 'cause they are GOOD. Good at what they do. Yahoo is worthless as a portal and a search engine.
Stay with it boys and girls. Don't be a NASDAQ whore. Take the long view. Ignore the market. Do what the geeks do best.
Yeah but the thing is that battery life is only a technological problem to be solved.
My perspective is that I would LOVE the combination of a decent phone and decent MP3 player. There isn't one out there. I find that to be a far more compelling combination than a camera / phone.
The 'camera phone' idea seems to have been driven more by the concept of video conferencing than what users actually use their phones for which is a low- to mid-range digital still camera.
What I want is a phone about the size of my Nokia. That phone is almost cell phone nirvana. All I really want is about three times more battery life in the same form factor. I don't want a battery crushing colour screen. I don't want a camera. I don't want a QWERTY keyboard to send emails with. I just want to make calls and not have to charge it up more than once a week. BUT I would trade my battery life if the tradeoff didn't completely destroy the phone's utility. Unlike my el-cheapo MP3 player, I am sure that they could engineer in a Lithium - Something battery and built in charger controller too.
Usually I carry one of those memory stick MP3 players. So what would be true convergence? A slightly bigger than Nokia 8130-sized MP3 player / phone with good battery life, reasonable 2-gig+ storage and a decent set of ear-bud headphones. Hell, all they need to do is add a reasonable mic in the bit where the two sides of the phones join in the middle and you would be sorted.
You cannot tell me that the iPod design team haven't thought of it. The iPod's circular touch pad controller screams old school rotary telephone.
Shame the iPod / iTunes thing was originally so US-centric simply because the GSM / SIM card thing makes the idea of a cross-network iPod phone combo very compelling. If Apple built an iPod that was about 2 cm's narrower, with a built in GSM phone and good battery life I would go buy it in a heartbeat.
1- Your shiny new hardware from the top end of the manufacturer's range will depreciate at a rate that makes your car appear to be a excellent investment.
2- 'Future proofing' never happens. Manufacturers and software companies invent new buses, interfaces, pin counts, slot types, power requirements, driver levels and all manner of interesting 'features' specifically so that your two year old hardware is obselete.
3- Even if you have a 130 fps, the fastest processor on the market, a TB of disk, a massive 5.1 surround sound setup and the biggest, fastest CRT monitor out there, you will still get your ass handed to you in Counter-Strike by a spotty 12 year old who's voice hasn't broken.
As I recall, they claimed that part one of the article took something like 300 hours to put together. Seems like a lot of work to tell me that processors have become a lot faster in the last 10 years.
Actually I shouldn't give Tom's Hardware a hard time (like everyone else seems to). As articles go, the reviews of high-end ink-jets, the 8-channel RAID6 card and the Viewsonic media center were quite interesting (and a lot more recent than the CPU round-up too).
These days though, my favourite reviewer is Dan (who posts here now and then). Dan seems to understand that a million graphs showing you the statistically insignificant difference between the latest mobos / graphic cards / processors / ram sinks don't really make a great site.
Interesting Read on ITX Cluster
on
Clusters at Home?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
If you have the sort of application which scales well across a parallel processing environment then even the rather underpowered Via Mini-Itx boards would do a good job.
If you had a cluster of Prescott P4's you could probably heat your house all winter.
The problem is of course that if the employees succeed but the judgement is enforceable only in California, all the gaming companies will simply move their operations somewhere more condusive to their business practices.
Which is not to say that the employees shouldn't be pursuing the matter but simply that attempting to change the employer's practices through a state court action might not, in the longer term, have the desired result.
A second issue is would such a judgement set good precedent that applies to the software industry in California as a whole. It would seem likely that it would have a fairly 'chilling' effect on the development industry in California if it did.
Perhaps you could combine it with one of those transparent panels they use for autocues. From the front you see the projected image. From the back you see right through it.
Re:Does it so well?
on
Singularity Sky
·
· Score: 3, Informative
You are so right...Rendezvous With Rama is one of the seminal works of SF.
Rama is perhaps the first SF book I read where alien technology is just incomprehensible to humans. Rama comes, Rama goes and we are not much the wiser at the end of the book about what it is. Far more likely than the Star Trek ubiquitous humanoid scenario.
Sadly the 4 follow-up books (which I seem to recall are co-written with someone) are a waste of paper.
Having worked on the sales side of the house for a couple of big enterprise software companies, I find it interesting that Microsoft are now very publically having to do what the rest of the enterprise software industry has done for a long time.. sell software when and how customers want it.
All CIOs know it... don't buy 'till the last week of the quarter, suddenly discover an alternative solution at the last minute, wheel out competitor's products, competitor's salesguys, consultants and competitor. Beat that software vendor to death.
Must be hard being a Microsoft enterprise rep or sales consultant these days. I am sure they are thoroughly sick of hearing the words 'Linux', and 'Open Source' at every sales meeting they attend.
Not that I feel terribly sorry for them mind you...
Arguably though, early adopters are the only ones with PC-based 'digital convergence' systems. They are based on expensive motherboards and fast, hot chips. As a result they are either noisy, or a lot of money was spent to make them quiet. The market is waiting for a small, quiet, powerful (in relative terms) platform.
The Via Epia boards are almost there but are just a little short of processor horsepower to handle DivX decoding (and other processor intensive operations). The rumours are that there will be a 1.2Ghz Via C3 processor on a new core revision (C5P) out shortly. C3's provide roughly 50% of the horsepower of a similarly clocked P3 in the current core so at 1.2 Ghz (with some potential improvements in the new version core) you are almost at the level where you have a cool, quiet platform with enough horsepower to be a serious media-center PC.
Of course, Via are rumoured to have some very cool stuff on the horizon, included a possible dual-cpu board and a new processor codenamed 'Esther' to be produced in IBM's fab.
Maybe this is what I am waiting for?
So perhaps this is the year when digital convergence becomes a reality for the masses?
I was thinking that something like this would be a great idea... sort of an automatic whitelist.
And then it occured to me that spammers would probably find some devious way to use this feature to generate lists of valid email addresses. Rather than sending a zillion emails based on a dictionary attack, they could send a zillion emails to known good addresses.
Unless all the email servers in the world worked on the new protocol all the servers with the validation functionality would be MORE vunerable to spam and not less.
Slashdot Mirror
'Sales and marketing budgets are astronomical because the expenses pay off more than investments in product.'
Ah, so textbooks are the same as 'enterprise' software then...
Is Fred Brook's "The Mythical Man-Month".
A better question is- do the results of voluntary genetic testing fall under the ' full disclosure' clauses in your typical health insurance policy? You know. The clauses under which you agree to disclose anything that you, or a generic but legally 'reasonable' version of you might have some bearing on your policy.
Not so much of an issue in Oz, where private health insurance works very differently than in the US. Might be more of a concern for those dwelling across the Pacific...
I didn't read anything that said we were losing our capacity to think innovatively. In fact, the article makes a point of the showing what might be considered the opposite - that the brain patterns demonstrated when Googling and surfing the internet were associated with making sharp decisions. What the author of the study articulated was a theory that this was in conflict with concentrated calm retention of knowledge like reading a book or memorizing a million and one routes through London.
What the article didn't expand on was why this might be very bad. Unless you think that someone is going to take away your GPS or the Internet then it doesn't matter any more than inventing the written word put story-telling as a means of retaining history out of business was a bad thing. Surely that train of thought would rely on the notion that something very very bad was going to happen to the world and at that point I fear that the skills you would need were lost generations ago by the vast majority of people. Surely the author is not suggesting that the fact that the vast majority have almost certainly lost or at least have diminished the patterns of thinking that supported primal hunter-gather life was necessarily a bad thing for our evolution?
Well that would be until Skynet takes control, anyway.
This leads to the second problem. The agencies responsible implementing the legislation or using the new powers are not bound by the politicians admonitions about their use. In fact, quite the opposite it true- their very nature and mission encourages them to take the full advantage of whatever powers, rules or procedural changes are implemented in the framework of legislation and common law under which they operate. The only way they can determine the true boundaries of their new powers or a new law is by a process of trial and error, generally involving court cases and other legal mechanisms.
Which is all fine and is the way that laws have been passed and refined by courts for a considerable period of time (if disasterous if you are the individual caught up in a grey area). However it becomes rather more slippery when the implementation of the legislation in question is subject to national security constraints, secret courts, exceptions for back-filling of paperwork and other get-out clauses.
Whilst I might object strenously to the notion that the FBI should be able to tap into my conversations without a warrant or that the UK govt. might like to lock me up for 42 days without charge on spurious 'security' related charges, my most strenuous objections are to the lack of transparency and oversight by independent judiciary in open court or similarly ungagged proceedings.
The OCR / document image layout analysis world is dominated by a handful of commercial companies. There is a dearth of OCR and document analysis code available in the open source community. That which is available on any sort of 'free' basis is not going to be of a lot of use other than as a starting point for some serious development of your own, I would suggest.
The big names commercially are:
Abbyy's Finereader
Nuance's (formerly Scansoft) Omnipage
and then a number of smaller players like SimpleOCR
In the open source world, some places to start looking are:
GOCR
and GNU's OCRAD
Both Nuance and Abbyy offer an SDK for OCR integration at a code level which might suit depending on your budget. Certainly the price (probably between $500 and $5000 for a license) represent a good deal if you look at the costs and time it would take to write anything that does serious OCR work yourself.
BTW, if anyone out there knows of any good document layout analysis code available to have a look at, I would be particularly interested. I am looking into document layout analysis for a personal project and although there is a fair bit of academic research available at Citeseer, I actually haven't found much in the way of good sample code that I can use as a starting point for some of my own ideas.
I am waiting for a company for the courage of its convictions. The company that won't sell it's soul for the NASDAQ. Maybe it's Google. Maybe it's not.
I like Google 'cause they are GOOD. Good at what they do. Yahoo is worthless as a portal and a search engine.
Stay with it boys and girls. Don't be a NASDAQ whore. Take the long view. Ignore the market. Do what the geeks do best.
My perspective is that I would LOVE the combination of a decent phone and decent MP3 player. There isn't one out there. I find that to be a far more compelling combination than a camera / phone.
The 'camera phone' idea seems to have been driven more by the concept of video conferencing than what users actually use their phones for which is a low- to mid-range digital still camera.
What I want is a phone about the size of my Nokia. That phone is almost cell phone nirvana. All I really want is about three times more battery life in the same form factor. I don't want a battery crushing colour screen. I don't want a camera. I don't want a QWERTY keyboard to send emails with. I just want to make calls and not have to charge it up more than once a week. BUT I would trade my battery life if the tradeoff didn't completely destroy the phone's utility. Unlike my el-cheapo MP3 player, I am sure that they could engineer in a Lithium - Something battery and built in charger controller too.
Usually I carry one of those memory stick MP3 players. So what would be true convergence? A slightly bigger than Nokia 8130-sized MP3 player / phone with good battery life, reasonable 2-gig+ storage and a decent set of ear-bud headphones. Hell, all they need to do is add a reasonable mic in the bit where the two sides of the phones join in the middle and you would be sorted.
You cannot tell me that the iPod design team haven't thought of it. The iPod's circular touch pad controller screams old school rotary telephone.
Shame the iPod / iTunes thing was originally so US-centric simply because the GSM / SIM card thing makes the idea of a cross-network iPod phone combo very compelling. If Apple built an iPod that was about 2 cm's narrower, with a built in GSM phone and good battery life I would go buy it in a heartbeat.
And in other news, only old people in Korea use silicon semiconductors.
2- 'Future proofing' never happens. Manufacturers and software companies invent new buses, interfaces, pin counts, slot types, power requirements, driver levels and all manner of interesting 'features' specifically so that your two year old hardware is obselete.
3- Even if you have a 130 fps, the fastest processor on the market, a TB of disk, a massive 5.1 surround sound setup and the biggest, fastest CRT monitor out there, you will still get your ass handed to you in Counter-Strike by a spotty 12 year old who's voice hasn't broken.
Actually I shouldn't give Tom's Hardware a hard time (like everyone else seems to). As articles go, the reviews of high-end ink-jets, the 8-channel RAID6 card and the Viewsonic media center were quite interesting (and a lot more recent than the CPU round-up too).
These days though, my favourite reviewer is Dan (who posts here now and then). Dan seems to understand that a million graphs showing you the statistically insignificant difference between the latest mobos / graphic cards / processors / ram sinks don't really make a great site.
If you have the sort of application which scales well across a parallel processing environment then even the rather underpowered Via Mini-Itx boards would do a good job.
If you had a cluster of Prescott P4's you could probably heat your house all winter.
The problem is of course that if the employees succeed but the judgement is enforceable only in California, all the gaming companies will simply move their operations somewhere more condusive to their business practices.
Which is not to say that the employees shouldn't be pursuing the matter but simply that attempting to change the employer's practices through a state court action might not, in the longer term, have the desired result.
A second issue is would such a judgement set good precedent that applies to the software industry in California as a whole. It would seem likely that it would have a fairly 'chilling' effect on the development industry in California if it did.
Perhaps you could combine it with one of those transparent panels they use for autocues. From the front you see the projected image. From the back you see right through it.
You are so right...Rendezvous With Rama is one of the seminal works of SF.
Rama is perhaps the first SF book I read where alien technology is just incomprehensible to humans. Rama comes, Rama goes and we are not much the wiser at the end of the book about what it is. Far more likely than the Star Trek ubiquitous humanoid scenario.
Sadly the 4 follow-up books (which I seem to recall are co-written with someone) are a waste of paper.
All CIOs know it... don't buy 'till the last week of the quarter, suddenly discover an alternative solution at the last minute, wheel out competitor's products, competitor's salesguys, consultants and competitor. Beat that software vendor to death.
Must be hard being a Microsoft enterprise rep or sales consultant these days. I am sure they are thoroughly sick of hearing the words 'Linux', and 'Open Source' at every sales meeting they attend.
Not that I feel terribly sorry for them mind you...
Arguably though, early adopters are the only ones with PC-based 'digital convergence' systems. They are based on expensive motherboards and fast, hot chips. As a result they are either noisy, or a lot of money was spent to make them quiet. The market is waiting for a small, quiet, powerful (in relative terms) platform.
The Via Epia boards are almost there but are just a little short of processor horsepower to handle DivX decoding (and other processor intensive operations). The rumours are that there will be a 1.2Ghz Via C3 processor on a new core revision (C5P) out shortly. C3's provide roughly 50% of the horsepower of a similarly clocked P3 in the current core so at 1.2 Ghz (with some potential improvements in the new version core) you are almost at the level where you have a cool, quiet platform with enough horsepower to be a serious media-center PC.
Of course, Via are rumoured to have some very cool stuff on the horizon, included a possible dual-cpu board and a new processor codenamed 'Esther' to be produced in IBM's fab.
Maybe this is what I am waiting for? So perhaps this is the year when digital convergence becomes a reality for the masses?
Sometimes group members will send files to other sites themselves, using a technique called File Transfer Protocol instead of e-mail.
Ah yes.. those sneaky hi-tech pirates thinking of a clever and novel way to avoid clogging up their inbox with 700 meg email attachments.
They have images available for just about any OS you need.
And then it occured to me that spammers would probably find some devious way to use this feature to generate lists of valid email addresses. Rather than sending a zillion emails based on a dictionary attack, they could send a zillion emails to known good addresses.
Unless all the email servers in the world worked on the new protocol all the servers with the validation functionality would be MORE vunerable to spam and not less.