Surface has nothing to do with the mechanism used for the iPhone. I don't know anything about the iPhone but I can guess that they use one of a number of techniques for LCD multitouch display; given the touch-patterns used by the iPhone, it is probably just hijacking regular touch technology to look for multitouch and then addressing this as a different set of gestures. The tech behind it uses pressure sensitive or capacitance or whatnot. However, the limitation of those technologies is that two pressure-points result in four readings. Which means that there are multiple gesture modes: one mode for "one touch" and another mode for "multitouch".
This is different from Surface which uses fiducial based technology (image segmentation); crucially, Surface (and all fiducial touch systems) I know of use a CAMERA to determine where the fiducials are. This means that the system can identify unique touches at unique positions, as opposed to the hijacked `multitouch' that apple uses. Also, please don't refer to "Surface" as MS tech. This kind of fiducially-oriented multitouch system actually predates MS as a company; it is so old that the SECOND generation of patents expired almost 10 years ago. MS simply packaged it in a nice form and then it got all internetized. In fact, LG, Siemens, HP, etc. have sold multitouch fiducial systems for years.
Now, I vaguely remember an apple patent for augmenting the LCD with a fourth 'pixel' which is actually a CCD element, which would combine a primitive equivalent to a full-blown camera-based fiducial system, but so far it looks like smoke.
I'm entirely incompetent to discuss physics, but you've pointed to a website that claims that "neither relativity nor quantum mechanics are physics." I understand scepticism of string-theory, but those are some serious claims. Anyways, you should probably read about Big Bang cosmology on wikipedia; it's a pretty good start to help with your confusion. You know, with reality.
c) Window.setAlwaysOnTop(): Used to set the window on top. Essential for displaying "Modal" dialog boxed like error boxes. Nothing sinister here.
Anyone who thinks "always on top" or "modal dialog boxes" or the infamous "needless always on-top error box" is not sinister is damaged in the GUI. I wish I could submit 10000 bug reports every time I see an always-on-top error box from some application that absolutely-freaking-insists I should know that it's had an error. You know what? I don't care! I'm just going to kill-9 and restart. And, BTW, why the *fuck* is it that the standard error-boxes for GTK/MacOSX/Win32 et al never have selectable text? Come ON! GIVE ME A BREAK!
Flip side of the coin: my first computer ca. 1985 was a Mac (it's in the closet, but it does run), followed by a whole slow of LC's, LCIII's, PowerMacs, G3's, G4's, and (most recently) MacMini. 23 *years* of Mac fanaticism. This all changed about 3 mos. ago: I develop exclusively in Linuxen (the Parasol group is Danish/Finnish and insists), and have found it fairly easy and straightforward. I wanted to write a video-capture utility to do some simple soft-real-time frame-segmentation. V4L2 was easy and worked out of the box. Win32-whatever (escapes me) was a little more difficult, but the documentation was slightly better than V4L2, so it's a wash. (This included writing a custom C->C# bridge for USB acquisition.) For Mac? Nothing. Literally, I spent >20 hours just trying to find out what the name of the functions were. I have an ADC membership, and Apple pretty much told me to go fuck myself. After that I swore off. I'm typing on my last Mac I will ever own; as soon as I can I'll be buying either a Dellbuntu or a FreeDOSHP.
>> It's a problem, because while 90% of the people only use 10% of the features
I hear this a lot. This is not what usability studies say. What they say (about feature-bloated software) is that there is a core feature group used by everyone one, but that every feature is used by some non-trivial portion of the users. If you have 20 features, and 20 users, then all 20 users use 10 of the features, and any five users use some subset of the remaining features. Thus, removing any one feature alienates a nontrivial portion of your customer base.
And right after all the anti-nuke anti-EM nut-jobs let you put a giant, nukular device in a rocket, attached to a gigawatt microwave antenna, they'll finally fund/build -my- nuclear salt-water rocket for a flyby mission of Alpha Centauri.
... but there's no reason I couldn't fork the GPLv2 project and make it into a GPLv3 project. If Apple ever takes the copyright "private", then developers will stop working on their code and move to the open source project. This is the whole *point* of the GPL (as pointed out above).
Almost: it's not even preventative: it's health care INSURANCE. When I break my leg, I want a DOCTOR. Not an INSURANCE AGENT. My Allstate agent is a family friend, and a good guy, but I don't want him *near* my car. This law is just another swindle.
I loved your comment. I live in a certain very large southern state, so I'm typically surrounded by knee-jerk idiocy. However, I wanted to expand on your comment about security. First, I don't think there should be *any* airport security. Like NONE. There's no security at the Starbucks down the street, or the public library in the other direction. There's no security at the nat. gas well that's 80 meters from my house. None. Airport security is a mechanism to bottleneck citizens of the USA (and more broadly), people, in general. What we really need---and never really get---is AIRPLANE security. I'm talking armed, ex-airforce pilots, a federal marshal or three, and rifle-proof cabin doors. It's hard to hijack a plane when -real- police keep putting holes in you. If you're concerned with baggage then have an automatic conveyor belt with x-ray/other detectors and a big yes/no switch. Pipe the signal to three randomly chosen locations elsewhere. If all three (randomly) chosen viewers say "OK" then the baggage goes in, else it's shunted back to the ground. This stuff seems so obvious, and it would provide *real* security and not just a breach of my constitutional rights, and the waste of my tax dollars.
Also, on a slightly more tangential note, I am irritated how the Constitution has been corrupted to only provide protections to USA citizens. The constitution is a political ideology which (most) of my fellow citizens believe in: it applies generally to all people, not those in our borders. The fact that it has been corrupted to mean `protect the few here and screw the rest' makes my blood boil.
What I don't understand is that if the flood covered the dinosaurs with a crapload of dirt, what happened, you know, to all the giraffes and people? Why don't we find very-deep fossils of cats, dogs, human beings, horses, or any currant animal? Where are the birds? I seem to remember (dimly) that only Noah and his family survived the flood, and that there were whole cities around. Where are the deeply buried cities? I think any sudden-onset (deluvian) theory must explain why these aren't found.
I'm not so sure about that. First, I would say that many high-paying jobs in Finance/Accounting actually get a lot of `borderline' mathematicians: mathematically able people who are not interested in `pure mathematics;' the same is true for statistics, actuaries, etc. etc. I distinctly remember being stunned to find out that there were >1000 `math majors' at my undergrad, since all of my courses were invariably attended by the same 8-15 students.
As an answer to his question, I would say `anywhere.' You should start by finding the R&D (or equivalent) positions at medium/large companies. (For instance, try Minute Maid (sp?), Pepsi, etc. My best offers for math-related work came from companies similar to this; they are always looking and will train you on the job for any applied maths/statistics you will need. The cool part is running `small' experiments---say Ohio---to test market penetration models.) If you are unskilled in programming this might complicate things a bit, since most companies are going to be interested in application more than theory.
Although you probably don't want to hear it, an MS in Math would take you a lot further; specifically, if you are interested in pure research, you're going to need a doctorate. I received a surprisingly in-depth undergrad compared to most other Math majors I've met, and yet the number of topics and depth is still astoundingly larger than what I learned.
It's been a while since I looked at QC, and the blog is a bit vague and hand-wavey, but he seems to intimate that their machine reduces NP-complete to "just polynomial." I was under the impression that QC could solve certain hard problems (Shor's algorithm for factorization), but couldn't reduce NP-complete to P. I'm rather skeptical.
(Also saw the talk at OOPSLA) I think they should have spent more time to fix the F-bounded polymorphism problem---there are good solutions out there, other than using the CRTP as a built-in facility. I think the nutty thing is the typographic layout, I can't *possibly* type it here, but variables are not only case-sensitive, but font-sensive, e.g./m/ (italic 'm') is different from/m (slant 'm') and _m_ (underline 'm'), bold 'm', ams 'm', etc. etc. The compiler accepts unicode, so you can have variables like the Greek rho; hell, you can even have subscripts \rho{}_{0} is a different variable from \rho etc. etc. He actually suggested in the talk using LaTeX to do the layout.
The actual language is being designed to support built-in multithread/process primitives. It's one of three gov't sponsored languages, one of the others is X10, and I can't remember the third.
Another thing kind of "unique" to Fortress is that it doesn't define primitives like 'addition' or 'subtraction'. Instead it supports register-level addressing to 'pattern transformations' and fixed length bit-arrays (and patterns thereof). The result is that there are libraries that support 'int', 'float', etc. without loss of efficiency.
As for Lois Lane? I was just 'splainin' this to my girlfriend: she still has all of her downward velocity. Falling into Superman's super-arms is no different than falling onto the concrete; in fact, this is something all the last-second-saves-from-falling fail to take into account: Lois still comes to a sudden halt. The reason it would be *more* painful? It's the difference between falling off a ladder onto the floor, and falling off of a ladder onto monkey-bars: less surface area.
I actually agree with you--my roommates, when they see my desktop (I'm running XGL+Compiz on DD Flight 4) say things like "that's cool, but I'd turn it off: it would distract me(us?)." I'll be honest, when I first turned it on my normally low at-home productivity dropped to zero, but now that I'm "used to it" I find dealing with a normal desktop (FC3 at work) to be drab... and unresponsive. If you have a machine that can support it, you should try out XGL+Compiz. Now, which of AIGLX or XGL+Compiz to go with (for me) is pretty trivial right now--AIGLX isn't running on nVidia.
However, the lack of a serious window-manager for XGL/Compiz is a serious problem; I didn't realized before now that the WM could actually effect my user experience, but going from Metacity to Compiz is like being shot in the head.
Anyways, good stuff all around and very exciting.
Re:No language that I like better
on
What is Perl 6?
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· Score: 1
If Stepanov were dead, he'd be rolling in his grave. The STL is primarily an algorithms library; secondarily, a definition for a standardized interface to data-structures--and a nontrivial one at that. The STL containers are just "one example" of any of a number of possible implementations. Teaching STL containers as a beginners course is block-headed.
There's no more fraud now than in the past; it's simply media hype. Anyone who has ever done review, participated in a review, or simply reviewed the literature, will commonly find `bad` science; it's normally self-evident. Fraudulent science is even worse, but tends to be exposed (eventually or immediately) due to the nature of scientific inquiry.
Peer review is our best attempt, and I would say it works far better than patent-review, but the comparison is hardly fair. Peer review tends to be by other scientists who are also "expert" in the same field. Patent review is, at best, by an amateur or at best a novice in the field.
Now to your last point; I have worked with a large number of academic scientists, and (to my everlasting misery) a number of coporate scientists all working with government money. The corporations were... not run with the best interest of the public. I would also say that it is the rare company that supports "pure" research; probably about as likely as corporations are to fund the Arts (and with probably similar economics).
The viruses are not "evolving." Please do not anthropromorphize the process of evolution; the viruses are being specifically manipulated by a progammer(s) to have different functionality.
If ID is presented for criticism by the scientific community, then it has entered the "realm of science." This does not mean it's a useful, or particularly elegant theory; it also doesn't mean it's "true" or "right," any more than evolution is "true" or "right." What it does mean is that you should be able to form a hypothesis based on the theory of ID, then test that hypothesis for validity. If ID is able to explain more, or have more accurate results, or be a simpler and as effective, then ID is a better theory (than evolution). End of story. However, chances are that ID isn't a better theory; most formulations of ID I've seen can't even seem to get the concept of complexity right, nonetheless bootstrap themselves to any sort of sound theoretical basis.
Slashdot Mirror
Surface has nothing to do with the mechanism used for the iPhone. I don't know anything about the iPhone but I can guess that they use one of a number of techniques for LCD multitouch display; given the touch-patterns used by the iPhone, it is probably just hijacking regular touch technology to look for multitouch and then addressing this as a different set of gestures. The tech behind it uses pressure sensitive or capacitance or whatnot. However, the limitation of those technologies is that two pressure-points result in four readings. Which means that there are multiple gesture modes: one mode for "one touch" and another mode for "multitouch".
This is different from Surface which uses fiducial based technology (image segmentation); crucially, Surface (and all fiducial touch systems) I know of use a CAMERA to determine where the fiducials are. This means that the system can identify unique touches at unique positions, as opposed to the hijacked `multitouch' that apple uses. Also, please don't refer to "Surface" as MS tech. This kind of fiducially-oriented multitouch system actually predates MS as a company; it is so old that the SECOND generation of patents expired almost 10 years ago. MS simply packaged it in a nice form and then it got all internetized. In fact, LG, Siemens, HP, etc. have sold multitouch fiducial systems for years.
Now, I vaguely remember an apple patent for augmenting the LCD with a fourth 'pixel' which is actually a CCD element, which would combine a primitive equivalent to a full-blown camera-based fiducial system, but so far it looks like smoke.
Anyways, just sort of irritated me.
"phrigging big radiators since you don't have the luxury of a river to carry away your waste heat"
It's too bad that laser cooling doesn't exist. Because then all you'd need is a big laser.
I'm entirely incompetent to discuss physics, but you've pointed to a website that claims that "neither relativity nor quantum mechanics are physics." I understand scepticism of string-theory, but those are some serious claims. Anyways, you should probably read about Big Bang cosmology on wikipedia; it's a pretty good start to help with your confusion. You know, with reality.
c) Window.setAlwaysOnTop(): Used to set the window on top. Essential for displaying "Modal" dialog boxed like error boxes. Nothing sinister here.
Anyone who thinks "always on top" or "modal dialog boxes" or the infamous "needless always on-top error box" is not sinister is damaged in the GUI. I wish I could submit 10000 bug reports every time I see an always-on-top error box from some application that absolutely-freaking-insists I should know that it's had an error. You know what? I don't care! I'm just going to kill-9 and restart. And, BTW, why the *fuck* is it that the standard error-boxes for GTK/MacOSX/Win32 et al never have selectable text? Come ON! GIVE ME A BREAK!
Flip side of the coin: my first computer ca. 1985 was a Mac (it's in the closet, but it does run), followed by a whole slow of LC's, LCIII's, PowerMacs, G3's, G4's, and (most recently) MacMini. 23 *years* of Mac fanaticism. This all changed about 3 mos. ago: I develop exclusively in Linuxen (the Parasol group is Danish/Finnish and insists), and have found it fairly easy and straightforward. I wanted to write a video-capture utility to do some simple soft-real-time frame-segmentation. V4L2 was easy and worked out of the box. Win32-whatever (escapes me) was a little more difficult, but the documentation was slightly better than V4L2, so it's a wash. (This included writing a custom C->C# bridge for USB acquisition.) For Mac? Nothing. Literally, I spent >20 hours just trying to find out what the name of the functions were. I have an ADC membership, and Apple pretty much told me to go fuck myself. After that I swore off. I'm typing on my last Mac I will ever own; as soon as I can I'll be buying either a Dellbuntu or a FreeDOSHP.
>> It's a problem, because while 90% of the people only use 10% of the features
I hear this a lot. This is not what usability studies say. What they say (about feature-bloated software) is that there is a core feature group used by everyone one, but that every feature is used by some non-trivial portion of the users. If you have 20 features, and 20 users, then all 20 users use 10 of the features, and any five users use some subset of the remaining features. Thus, removing any one feature alienates a nontrivial portion of your customer base.
And right after all the anti-nuke anti-EM nut-jobs let you put a giant, nukular device in a rocket, attached to a gigawatt microwave antenna, they'll finally fund/build -my- nuclear salt-water rocket for a flyby mission of Alpha Centauri.
Here's to unfettered optimism!
... but there's no reason I couldn't fork the GPLv2 project and make it into a GPLv3 project. If Apple ever takes the copyright "private", then developers will stop working on their code and move to the open source project. This is the whole *point* of the GPL (as pointed out above).
Almost: it's not even preventative: it's health care INSURANCE. When I break my leg, I want a DOCTOR. Not an INSURANCE AGENT. My Allstate agent is a family friend, and a good guy, but I don't want him *near* my car. This law is just another swindle.
I loved your comment. I live in a certain very large southern state, so I'm typically surrounded by knee-jerk idiocy. However, I wanted to expand on your comment about security. First, I don't think there should be *any* airport security. Like NONE. There's no security at the Starbucks down the street, or the public library in the other direction. There's no security at the nat. gas well that's 80 meters from my house. None. Airport security is a mechanism to bottleneck citizens of the USA (and more broadly), people, in general. What we really need---and never really get---is AIRPLANE security. I'm talking armed, ex-airforce pilots, a federal marshal or three, and rifle-proof cabin doors. It's hard to hijack a plane when -real- police keep putting holes in you. If you're concerned with baggage then have an automatic conveyor belt with x-ray/other detectors and a big yes/no switch. Pipe the signal to three randomly chosen locations elsewhere. If all three (randomly) chosen viewers say "OK" then the baggage goes in, else it's shunted back to the ground. This stuff seems so obvious, and it would provide *real* security and not just a breach of my constitutional rights, and the waste of my tax dollars.
Also, on a slightly more tangential note, I am irritated how the Constitution has been corrupted to only provide protections to USA citizens. The constitution is a political ideology which (most) of my fellow citizens believe in: it applies generally to all people, not those in our borders. The fact that it has been corrupted to mean `protect the few here and screw the rest' makes my blood boil.
Thank God there's no way to get dust & stuff on the Earth-bound mirrors they already use. Otherwise, there might be problems.
What I don't understand is that if the flood covered the dinosaurs with a crapload of dirt, what happened, you know, to all the giraffes and people? Why don't we find very-deep fossils of cats, dogs, human beings, horses, or any currant animal? Where are the birds? I seem to remember (dimly) that only Noah and his family survived the flood, and that there were whole cities around. Where are the deeply buried cities? I think any sudden-onset (deluvian) theory must explain why these aren't found.
I'm not so sure about that. First, I would say that many high-paying jobs in Finance/Accounting actually get a lot of `borderline' mathematicians: mathematically able people who are not interested in `pure mathematics;' the same is true for statistics, actuaries, etc. etc. I distinctly remember being stunned to find out that there were >1000 `math majors' at my undergrad, since all of my courses were invariably attended by the same 8-15 students.
As an answer to his question, I would say `anywhere.' You should start by finding the R&D (or equivalent) positions at medium/large companies. (For instance, try Minute Maid (sp?), Pepsi, etc. My best offers for math-related work came from companies similar to this; they are always looking and will train you on the job for any applied maths/statistics you will need. The cool part is running `small' experiments---say Ohio---to test market penetration models.) If you are unskilled in programming this might complicate things a bit, since most companies are going to be interested in application more than theory.
Although you probably don't want to hear it, an MS in Math would take you a lot further; specifically, if you are interested in pure research, you're going to need a doctorate. I received a surprisingly in-depth undergrad compared to most other Math majors I've met, and yet the number of topics and depth is still astoundingly larger than what I learned.
It's been a while since I looked at QC, and the blog is a bit vague and hand-wavey, but he seems to intimate that their machine reduces NP-complete to "just polynomial." I was under the impression that QC could solve certain hard problems (Shor's algorithm for factorization), but couldn't reduce NP-complete to P. I'm rather skeptical.
(Also saw the talk at OOPSLA) I think they should have spent more time to fix the F-bounded polymorphism problem---there are good solutions out there, other than using the CRTP as a built-in facility. I think the nutty thing is the typographic layout, I can't *possibly* type it here, but variables are not only case-sensitive, but font-sensive, e.g. /m/ (italic 'm') is different from /m (slant 'm') and _m_ (underline 'm'), bold 'm', ams 'm', etc. etc. The compiler accepts unicode, so you can have variables like the Greek rho; hell, you can even have subscripts \rho{}_{0} is a different variable from \rho etc. etc. He actually suggested in the talk using LaTeX to do the layout.
The actual language is being designed to support built-in multithread/process primitives. It's one of three gov't sponsored languages, one of the others is X10, and I can't remember the third.
Another thing kind of "unique" to Fortress is that it doesn't define primitives like 'addition' or 'subtraction'. Instead it supports register-level addressing to 'pattern transformations' and fixed length bit-arrays (and patterns thereof). The result is that there are libraries that support 'int', 'float', etc. without loss of efficiency.
As for Lois Lane? I was just 'splainin' this to my girlfriend: she still has all of her downward velocity. Falling into Superman's super-arms is no different than falling onto the concrete; in fact, this is something all the last-second-saves-from-falling fail to take into account: Lois still comes to a sudden halt. The reason it would be *more* painful? It's the difference between falling off a ladder onto the floor, and falling off of a ladder onto monkey-bars: less surface area.
"These nanotubes, OTOH look awfully easy to break."
Isn't the space-elevator being made from these bad-boys?
Any topologist worth his deformable-doughnut knows it has one-handle, whereas a cup has no handles!
I actually agree with you--my roommates, when they see my desktop (I'm running XGL+Compiz on DD Flight 4) say things like "that's cool, but I'd turn it off: it would distract me(us?)." I'll be honest, when I first turned it on my normally low at-home productivity dropped to zero, but now that I'm "used to it" I find dealing with a normal desktop (FC3 at work) to be drab ... and unresponsive. If you have a machine that can support it, you should try out XGL+Compiz. Now, which of AIGLX or XGL+Compiz to go with (for me) is pretty trivial right now--AIGLX isn't running on nVidia.
However, the lack of a serious window-manager for XGL/Compiz is a serious problem; I didn't realized before now that the WM could actually effect my user experience, but going from Metacity to Compiz is like being shot in the head.
Anyways, good stuff all around and very exciting.
If Stepanov were dead, he'd be rolling in his grave. The STL is primarily an algorithms library; secondarily, a definition for a standardized interface to data-structures--and a nontrivial one at that. The STL containers are just "one example" of any of a number of possible implementations. Teaching STL containers as a beginners course is block-headed.
There's no more fraud now than in the past; it's simply media hype. Anyone who has ever done review, participated in a review, or simply reviewed the literature, will commonly find `bad` science; it's normally self-evident. Fraudulent science is even worse, but tends to be exposed (eventually or immediately) due to the nature of scientific inquiry.
... not run with the best interest of the public. I would also say that it is the rare company that supports "pure" research; probably about as likely as corporations are to fund the Arts (and with probably similar economics).
Peer review is our best attempt, and I would say it works far better than patent-review, but the comparison is hardly fair. Peer review tends to be by other scientists who are also "expert" in the same field. Patent review is, at best, by an amateur or at best a novice in the field.
Now to your last point; I have worked with a large number of academic scientists, and (to my everlasting misery) a number of coporate scientists all working with government money. The corporations were
I think you're looking for this website.
The viruses are not "evolving." Please do not anthropromorphize the process of evolution; the viruses are being specifically manipulated by a progammer(s) to have different functionality.
"Since Google is providing end-user software, it must be held to the same standards that you would hold other desktop software vendors to," he said.
That's when I realized this was an article by 'The Onion'.
If ID is presented for criticism by the scientific community, then it has entered the "realm of science." This does not mean it's a useful, or particularly elegant theory; it also doesn't mean it's "true" or "right," any more than evolution is "true" or "right." What it does mean is that you should be able to form a hypothesis based on the theory of ID, then test that hypothesis for validity. If ID is able to explain more, or have more accurate results, or be a simpler and as effective, then ID is a better theory (than evolution). End of story. However, chances are that ID isn't a better theory; most formulations of ID I've seen can't even seem to get the concept of complexity right, nonetheless bootstrap themselves to any sort of sound theoretical basis.