Has anyone actually looked at the Student of Fortune site? There are currently TWO - yes *TWO* questions up for answering - one is worth $1.00 and the other $1.25...and that's despite the/. effect - which is probably the best advertising they'll ever get! In all of their history, there has been less than 100 questions asked and their top earner of all time has raked in less than $50 for his/her work. I think it would be hard to make any reasonable amount of money working for this site...especially since you can spend a long time answering a question and find that someone else got paid for doing the same thing - so you did all that for nothing.
I don't think they are a massive risk to academia!
What's being remarked on here is surprise that a GAME is producing community. But we've had people meeting and marrying and forming lasting friendships and committing crimes and having almighty bustups before. They've just been doing it over email, on mailing lists, usenet, blogs, IRC...none of that is at all new.
It is no surprise at all that WOW (being an online communications mechanism AND a game) promotes human-to-human interactions in exactly the same way that communities that just happen not to be games do. Put that way, there is nothing remarkable happening here.
So - yeah - WoW is a community that happens to be a community who are playing a game instead of a community that's writing a UNIX-like kernel or a community that's making 'The Elephants Dream' movie or the folks who pretend to be 'The Internet Oracle' or a community like MySpace. But as an online community, what emerges as a result is not surprising at all.
Besides, didn't The Sims Online produce much the same effects?
I always remember talking to some vendor at a usenix conference a few years after the birth of IRIX. We were talking about the relative benefits of SunOS (Solaris as it is now) versus IRIX. The guy said that using IRIX compared to SunOS was like riding a motorbike compared to driving a car. "It's fast, it's a rush, it's more fun than you can possibly imagine - but it's easy to fall off - and when you do it hurts a lot more!"...that pretty much says it all.
I spent a large fraction of my most productive years sitting in front of a million dollar computer with IRIX in my face. It was pretty good - but with SGI's market share shrinking and Linux getting so mature, it makes sense for them to dump the hideous cost of maintaining an entire OS by themselves. For SGI, it's a good decision in desperate times.
We split from using SGI to off-the-shelf PC/Linux about 5 years ago - about as soon as nVidia's graphics got good enough for our needs. A PC costs about 1% of an SGI with similar horsepower...QED.
As for MIPS, the equation is the same one Apple had to face down. Performance = Horsepower per CPU / Price per CPU -- and whilst your own solution can win on horsepower, you can't beat the price of whatever is made in the largest quantities...and it's the same deal as with IRIX - when you have to cut costs, designing your own CPU isn't the smart way to go.
Initialism is defined in Websters - it's not new. What might be new is the annoying tendance for people to argue that an acronym like 'IBM' is in fact an initialism.
Ironically 'protologism' does seem to be a neologism - there is a definition for it in The Urban Dictionary from 2003 - so it's at least 3 years old.
I'm not in any way suggesting that Wikipedia's policy is an attempt to control the language. The Academie Francaise is ineffectual because they are trying to regulate the way people speak - and there is no way to make that stick. They have made rulings about words like "Parking" which are creeping into the French language because there is no good single-word alternative. The Acadamie says "Stationary at the side of the road" is "correct" French - and make laws that say that roadside signs must use that phrase (and they do). But still - people TALK about "Parking". You can't outlaw language.
But Wikipedia's policy is not to change how people think and talk - it's an effort to control the quality of Wikipedia articles by rooting out the junk. The problem with neologisms isn't that they are so new - it's that their lifetime is so very short. A new word may get into common usage - but whether it'll still be around in a couple of years from now is much more problematic. We don't want an encyclopedia that requires to be rewritten at the rate that neologisms drop out of usage - so it's better to simply require people to avoid using them at all.
Once a neologism gets a toe-hold and falls into common usage (as "Parking" had in French) - Wikipedia is happy to use the word and to an article written about the word. There is much talk on Wikipedia about "The Google Test" - if the word gets a few thousand hits, it's probably "real".
As for articles ABOUT neologisms, the problem is that people will continually try to get some kind of recognition for inventing new words. They'll use the word once or twice in blogs or email - then write a Wikipedia article about the word that purports to say that the word is in actual usage. This might succeed if Google indexes the word - Wikipedia is heavily linked to and widely mirrored - so if a word does make it into an article, Google will report hits for it shortly afterwards...not enough to pass the "Google Test" though.
But an encyclopedia is about reporting the way the world is - not trying to change the world in it's image. So this use of Wikipedia to create new 'vanity words' really does need to be stamped out. It's as bad as spamming or 'linkspamming'.
I don't know whether Wiktionary has similar policies to Wikipedia as regards neologisms. I agree that these guys should theoretically be using Wiktionary instead of Wikipedia - but that's not what they are doing, so it's somewhat irrelevent.
Gazomplat. Wow! I remember that word from the mid 1970's. Bear with me a moment...
When I was learning to program in FORTRAN in my high school math class. Our teacher (who didn't know how to program either) was trying to teach us by the age-old process of reading the book one chapter ahead of the class she was teaching. As a consequence, she was no better at it than the rest of us and we ended up debugging her code about as often as she helped with debugging ours.
Anyway, she was trying to write a program to sort words into alphabetical order - and something went horribly wrong and the program spat out a series of nonense words made up by chopping up and reordering the words it was given. Most of them were unpronouncable garbage but a couple sounded like real words.
Gazomplat was one of them. It's such a nice sounding word that it's usage spread through the math class and beyond - since it had no meaning, it could be stuck into conversation at any convenient point. So it's use as a verb: "Gazomplatting" is entirely appropriate.
Many articles about neologisms *do* get created in violation of this policy - but they are generally put up for deletion via the Wikipedia process for deleting inappropriate material - so they only exist briefly.
So, for example, the article entitled "Windows Rot" is being debated today, Although it looks like this one will be merged into an existing article, it won't survive as the name of an article - so Zeitgeist presumably won't be able to find it.
It may be that enough of these kinds of articles slip through the system to be useful to Zeitgeist but that is not by design - so coverage will be patchy at best.
A further consequence of this is that the articles that Zeitgeist does find will most likely be so new that only one person will have worked on them - which will make for poor quality.
Also, it is very common for people such as bloggers who come up with what they consider to be clever new words to try to wedge them into common usage by writing about the word in Wikipedia. This 'vanity word' problem is one of the main reasons that Wikipedia seeks to avoid articles on neologisms.
There is a peculiar concept that if something is funded by businesses it's not costing consumers anything. The trouble is that those businesses are making their money by selling something to the consumers - so if the direct cost to consumers to use the Internet goes down as a result of a non-neutral net, then the cost to businesses goes up. Those businesses have to turn a profit so either they have to cut their profit margins or pass the costs on to the consumer in the form of increased prices. Guess which?
But worse still, everyone along the chain has to make a profit - so if I pay my ISP a dollar for net access, that's the end of the line - but if the maker of my favorite widget has to pay my ISP a dollar and therefore has to charge me a dollar extra for my Widget - then WalMart has to pay a dollar extra and I have to pay a dollar fifty extra because they have to make a profit too.
It's the same with "free" services such as Google and MySpace - yes, they are free to the end user - but the Widget makers who are paying them to advertise there are charging me more for their products as a result of that cost.
I would honestly prefer that the world were utterly devoid of 'push' advertising of all kinds and that I had to pay what these services actually cost. Sure Television would cost more, there would be a penny per search on Google and so on - but the end products I buy would be vastly cheaper as a result.
According to this: www.transportation.anl.gov/pdfs/TA/57.pdf (for example), 23% of the cost of a new car is the cost of marketing it to us! Now - which would you prefer? No adverts on TV or on the web or on ugly signs everywhere - but TV and Internet that costs (say) $20 per month more than it does now ($200 per year maybe) - but the cost of almost everything you buy being 23% less...or what we have now where a fifth of the price of almost everything we buy is the cost of advertising it to us?
So - no, I don't WANT cheaper Internet paid for by businesses - I want much, much more expensive Internet with no adverts at all anywhere - because I'm smart enough to realise that it would save me money overall.
If the average consumer doesn't care about hardware specs and cares about game availability/price then the Wii will annihilate Sony. It's gonna be about a third the price and launch with maybe three times as many games at probably half to two-thirds the price *AND* have the sexy controller.
It's long been known that parents buying Xmas gifts for kids will pay $300 - but are not comfortable going higher. A successful console will be one that can be bought with a couple of games for $299 or less.
Sony have screwed up monumentally and in every direction simultaneously - it's really quite impressive!
I don't see the need for picking a more or less random word. Pluto is still going to be described as a kind of planet. The term 'pluton' (presumably meaning something like "Pluto-like-planet") is not scientific - we should use a term that has meaning and not something that means "this is kinda sorta like that".
Picking a term that's also used in geology was a terrible misstep - when geologists finally get out to these smaller planets, they are going to get horribly confused. Is the rock a Pluton - or is it FROM a Pluton - or is that a typo and it's actually from Pluto? Yuk, yuk, yuk! If you have to make up a word - especially a word that's still going to be used a thousand years from now - at least think through the consequences *carefully*.
The term "Dwarf Planet" seems entirely suitable here. It indicates that it is a kind of planet (which is reasonable given that it's round and orbits a star) - and it tells you something useful about it (it's evidently smaller than you might expect a typical planet to be) - and it has strong similarities with "Dwarf Star" which is a nice thing. We could then apply a kind of uniform taxonomy to those kinds of things - yielding "Dwarf Moon" for those teeny-tiny (but round) moons out there. All nice and uniform, neat and scientific.
If we got really elegant about this, we could talk about a "Dwarf X" (where X is a star, planet, moon or other body) as being an object that's in the lower tenth percentile of the size range for objects of class "X" (or twentieth percentile - or whatever makes that work). Terms like 'Red Giant' for stars and 'Gas Giant' for planets are already set up kinda like that. By implication then, our moon would be a Giant Moon or something like that since I guess it's the largest moon we know of right now.
If the astronomers don't get this 100% right this time, they are only going to have to do it all over again in another 10 years. We're already in trouble over free-floating "planets" that don't orbit stars and things that are borderline between stars and planets (Brown Dwarf Stars for example). We're also in danger of finding tiny stars that orbit humungous stars such that their barycenter lies within the diameter of the bigger star - and we could end up having to call those things planets!
We also could find moons that have their own moons - and 'double-moons' that co-orbit each other whilst together going around a common planet (actually - I think we already have some of those around Saturn).
Existing implementations (such as for example my MINI Cooper) use the engine management computer (ECU) - so to get rid of this - you have to replace (or - I guess - reprogram) that. Sadly, the law in most places already requires that you have an APPROVED ECU in order to meet emissions standards (the OBD-II spec requires this - OBD-III will be the same). So you are just as likely to be in trouble with the law and/or your insurance for disabling this gizmo as you would for refusing to disclose the information inside it.
Replacing the ECU is getting increasingly impossible though - the code inside is DRM'ed to the eyeballs and controls so many aspects of the car that it's essentially irreplacable. Drive-by-wire is coming to some cars in 2007 - we already have brakes and accellerator controls that work by wire - steering by wire is definitely on it's way. I don't know that I'd want to trust that stuff to homemade software.
The MINI Cooper (for example - probably all BMW's are the same) has this data recorded in the engine management computer. It records a couple of minutes of typical 'black box' stuff - control inputs, wheel speed sensor outputs, etc - in a loop. Recording stops and the data is locked into non-erasable memory when the airbags deploy. The computer has only enough of this special memory for (I believe) three sets of data - so if you have three accidents that result in the airbags deploying, you have to replace the engine management computer.
Since the data is there - and not easily erased - one presumes it could be subpoened in a court case if someone believed you lied about (for example) whether you were braking hard or accellerating hard immediately before the impact. They can trivially determine your speed and whether you were steering straight. Many cars contain accellerometers - you would imagine that would be recorded too. Still - it can't tell whether you were using your cellphone at the time...which is a shame really.
The only way to prevent this stuff from being recorded would be to replace the engine management computer with something else - but in a modern car that's pretty much impossible - every aspect of the vehicle being tied together these days. (eg The radio in my MINI adjusts it's volume automatically depending on your speed and whether the windows and/or sunroof are open - so expect that if you swap out the computer, your radio and windows won't work anymore even if you somehow manage to get the engine running again).
Fingerprints certainly aren't that unique. They are unique in the sense that in very fine detail there are no two alike - but they most certainly aren't unique when it comes to the resolution that these scanners work at.
A typical fingerprint scanner has to allow for rotational and translational differences and differences in pressure and pad and finger cleanliness between applications of the finger to the pad.
Then it has to cope with image recognition matters - it has to pull out features from the print and match those to the database.
If you cut your finger then it may be unreadable - so you can't buy stuff online until it heals up again a couple of weeks later? If you have a cut on your finger when you first register - then when it heals you won't be able to get in again.
It's basically horribly flawed as a technique.
Then there are a bunch of articles out there on how you can lift a fingerprint (eg from your next door neighbours car) and transfer it to latex (or even a gummy bear!) and that will fool the scanner 90% of the time...which should be plenty good enough because it's doubtful that the real finger will work 100% of the time.
Nah - this is never going to fly - and if by some horrible mischance it does, it'll be discredited the very first time some gummybear wielding teenager manages to steal a bunch of stuff with it and all of the scanners out there will be consigned to the junk heap overnight.
Microsoft want you to pay them a monthly fee to get the Microsoft anti-malware stuff. Every obstacle they can toss in the way of cheaper alternatives is (for them) a good thing.
The rule is: If you are in the business of doing X - then Microsoft announce that they are getting into doing X - then you'd better find a way to do Y instead. In the absence of government intervention, an illegal monopoly can do pretty much whatever they heck they like.
* Telling people where to stand and how to look - posing the photo - adding props. * Framing the original photo to leave out things that spoil the story. * Lying about when the photo was taken, where it was taken. Distorting the facts of what we are seeing. * Brightness/Contrast/Gamma settings * Colour adjustment * Cropping - not really any different from framing the photo in the first place. * Cleaning up speckles. * Taking out distracting objects that don't affect the meaning of the photo. * Taking out objects to change the meaning of the photo. * Blurring company logos. * Painting in whole new objects (like the smoke in the Reuters images).
There is a whole spectrum of 'manipulation' - some before the photo is taken, some in the camera, some outside the camera and some even just in how the photo is captioned.
It's a hard call as to where to place the limits.
Some of the Reuters photos that have recently exposed clearly exceed all reasonable limits of behavior - others don't. The most outrageous thing is how ineptly these were documented - it sends the message "You guys are complete idiots who'll believe even this low grade manipulation."
Those are REALLY badly doctored photos - easy to spot. I think quite a few amateur GIMP/Photoshop users could have done a much better job (I know I can).
If such obviously doctored photos are making it past the editors - who knows what more subtly done stuff has escaped detection.
The numbers presented here are very misleading. You get the impression that your eyes are transferring video images as a bunch of pixels at the relatively slow speed of an Ethernet connection. But that's not true. Video processing starts right there in the retina and steadily changes the data from pixel-like date to edges, lines, shape to recognised objects to high level concepts that are conveniently tagged with memories, emotions and other relevent data.
At what point are we measuring the data? If the data that's actually being measured is something like "My Mom standing next to a table with a vase full of flowers on it" - then having 10 Mbits/sec is a heck of a lot of data. If it's raw video - then it's pathetically little.
We can estimate the bandwidth your eyes could theoretically produce if they were transmitting "raw video". We know that the retina has a resolution of around 5k x 5k "pixels" and we can see motion at around 60Hz and we have more dynamic range than we can display with 12 pixels each for Red, Green and Blue. So at the 'most raw', two eyes would require 5k x 5k x 60Hz x 2 x 12 x 3 bits per second. That's 108 Gbits/sec - which is vastly more than the 10Mbits to 100Mbits this article suggests. You can argue about the details of the numbers I used here - but we're looking at four orders of magnitude - so I have to be a LOT wrong!
So it's pretty certain that what they are measuring in TFA is some kind of condensed or summarized version of the visual data.
That being the case, it's pretty silly to be comparing "My Mom standing next to a table with a vase full of flowers on it" to a 640x480 JPEG file. It's simply not an 'apples and apples' comparison.
SGI didn't see the writing on the wall - PC graphics adapters were coming - SGI did nothing. They arrived (but weren't great) - SGI proved they could make one by designing the Nintendo 64 graphics chip - but still did nothing. Then, suddenly a bunch of their engineers saw the impending doom and fled to nVidia - and on that day SGI's fate was sealed.
If they'd have come out with a PC graphics adaptor while they still had a billion dollar turnover - they could have squashed the teeny-tiny nVidia, 3Dfx, ATI and others like so many bugs. SGI's name and reputation would have made SGI-branded graphics cards the standard for the others to aspire to. They would have been today's nVidia.
They even had the technology right there in their hands in the form of the N64 chip around 1994 - two full years before 3Dfx (started by SGI employees) started to get into the market.
It's the classic story of the mainframe manufacturers not understanding that minicomputers were going to eat their lunch - then the minicomputer guys not understanding PC's. SGI didn't believe that a $200 PC card could outperform their $100,000+ Reality Engine boxes.
Their corporate culture ideas ultimately failed them. The idea that the engineer was king and that 'management' were merely there to smooth the path for engineering was a good one. They started out with a rule that every engineer got a proper office with a door and every manager would have a cube out in the corridor. But by 1994, engineer's offices were smaller than a typical cube-farm cube with their only windows facing out into tight corridors - management 'cubes' were huge affairs with tall cube-walls that came close to the ceiling, placed alongside windows with nice views.
It's sad - SGI deserved to win - but they just somehow couldn't decide to change.
Re:Add a stability value to a page?
on
When Wikipedia Fails
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· Score: 2, Informative
Look for the little gold star in the top right corner of articles that have been through the 'Featured Article' mill. My own article on the "Mini" for example.
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Has anyone actually looked at the Student of Fortune site? There are currently TWO - yes *TWO* questions up for answering - one is worth $1.00 and the other $1.25...and that's despite the /. effect - which is probably the best advertising they'll ever get! In all of their history, there has been less than 100 questions asked and their top earner of all time has raked in less than $50 for his/her work. I think it would be hard to make any reasonable amount of money working for this site...especially since you can spend a long time answering a question and find that someone else got paid for doing the same thing - so you did all that for nothing.
I don't think they are a massive risk to academia!
What's being remarked on here is surprise that a GAME is producing community. But we've had people meeting and marrying and forming lasting friendships and committing crimes and having almighty bustups before. They've just been doing it over email, on mailing lists, usenet, blogs, IRC...none of that is at all new.
It is no surprise at all that WOW (being an online communications mechanism AND a game) promotes human-to-human interactions in exactly the same way that communities that just happen not to be games do. Put that way, there is nothing remarkable happening here.
So - yeah - WoW is a community that happens to be a community who are playing a game instead of a community that's writing a UNIX-like kernel or a community that's making 'The Elephants Dream' movie or the folks who pretend to be 'The Internet Oracle' or a community like MySpace. But as an online community, what emerges as a result is not surprising at all.
Besides, didn't The Sims Online produce much the same effects?
I always remember talking to some vendor at a usenix conference a few years after the birth of IRIX. We were talking about the relative benefits of SunOS (Solaris as it is now) versus IRIX. The guy said that using IRIX compared to SunOS was like riding a motorbike compared to driving a car. "It's fast, it's a rush, it's more fun than you can possibly imagine - but it's easy to fall off - and when you do it hurts a lot more!"...that pretty much says it all.
I spent a large fraction of my most productive years sitting in front of a million dollar computer with IRIX in my face. It was pretty good - but with SGI's market share shrinking and Linux getting so mature, it makes sense for them to dump the hideous cost of maintaining an entire OS by themselves. For SGI, it's a good decision in desperate times.
We split from using SGI to off-the-shelf PC/Linux about 5 years ago - about as soon as nVidia's graphics got good enough for our needs. A PC costs about 1% of an SGI with similar horsepower...QED.
As for MIPS, the equation is the same one Apple had to face down. Performance = Horsepower per CPU / Price per CPU -- and whilst your own solution can win on horsepower, you can't beat the price of whatever is made in the largest quantities...and it's the same deal as with IRIX - when you have to cut costs, designing your own CPU isn't the smart way to go.
Sad - but inevitable.
Neo = New
Logism = Word
Once it's not new, it's not a neologism anymore.
Initialism is defined in Websters - it's not new. What might be new is the annoying tendance for people to argue that an acronym like 'IBM' is in fact an initialism.
Ironically 'protologism' does seem to be a neologism - there is a definition for it in The Urban Dictionary from 2003 - so it's at least 3 years old.
I'm not in any way suggesting that Wikipedia's policy is an attempt to control the language. The Academie Francaise is ineffectual because they are trying to regulate the way people speak - and there is no way to make that stick. They have made rulings about words like "Parking" which are creeping into the French language because there is no good single-word alternative. The Acadamie says "Stationary at the side of the road" is "correct" French - and make laws that say that roadside signs must use that phrase (and they do). But still - people TALK about "Parking". You can't outlaw language.
But Wikipedia's policy is not to change how people think and talk - it's an effort to control the quality of Wikipedia articles by rooting out the junk. The problem with neologisms isn't that they are so new - it's that their lifetime is so very short. A new word may get into common usage - but whether it'll still be around in a couple of years from now is much more problematic. We don't want an encyclopedia that requires to be rewritten at the rate that neologisms drop out of usage - so it's better to simply require people to avoid using them at all.
Once a neologism gets a toe-hold and falls into common usage (as "Parking" had in French) - Wikipedia is happy to use the word and to an article written about the word. There is much talk on Wikipedia about "The Google Test" - if the word gets a few thousand hits, it's probably "real".
As for articles ABOUT neologisms, the problem is that people will continually try to get some kind of recognition for inventing new words. They'll use the word once or twice in blogs or email - then write a Wikipedia article about the word that purports to say that the word is in actual usage. This might succeed if Google indexes the word - Wikipedia is heavily linked to and widely mirrored - so if a word does make it into an article, Google will report hits for it shortly afterwards...not enough to pass the "Google Test" though.
But an encyclopedia is about reporting the way the world is - not trying to change the world in it's image. So this use of Wikipedia to create new 'vanity words' really does need to be stamped out. It's as bad as spamming or 'linkspamming'.
I don't know whether Wiktionary has similar policies to Wikipedia as regards neologisms. I agree that these guys should theoretically be using Wiktionary instead of Wikipedia - but that's not what they are doing, so it's somewhat irrelevent.
started creating its own gazornaplatting words
Gazomplat. Wow! I remember that word from the mid 1970's. Bear with me a moment...
When I was learning to program in FORTRAN in my high school math class. Our teacher (who didn't know how to program either) was trying to teach us by the age-old process of reading the book one chapter ahead of the class she was teaching. As a consequence, she was no better at it than the rest of us and we ended up debugging her code about as often as she helped with debugging ours.
Anyway, she was trying to write a program to sort words into alphabetical order - and something went horribly wrong and the program spat out a series of nonense words made up by chopping up and reordering the words it was given. Most of them were unpronouncable garbage but a couple sounded like real words.
Gazomplat was one of them. It's such a nice sounding word that it's usage spread through the math class and beyond - since it had no meaning, it could be stuck into conversation at any convenient point. So it's use as a verb: "Gazomplatting" is entirely appropriate.
The trouble is that Wikipedia has a policy of not writing about (or using) Neologisms:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:Neologism
Many articles about neologisms *do* get created in violation of this policy - but they are generally put up for deletion via the Wikipedia process for deleting inappropriate material - so they only exist briefly.
So, for example, the article entitled "Windows Rot" is being debated today, Although it looks like this one will be merged into an existing article, it won't survive as the name of an article - so Zeitgeist presumably won't be able to find it.
It may be that enough of these kinds of articles slip through the system to be useful to Zeitgeist but that is not by design - so coverage will be patchy at best.
A further consequence of this is that the articles that Zeitgeist does find will most likely be so new that only one person will have worked on them - which will make for poor quality.
Also, it is very common for people such as bloggers who come up with what they consider to be clever new words to try to wedge them into common usage by writing about the word in Wikipedia. This 'vanity word' problem is one of the main reasons that Wikipedia seeks to avoid articles on neologisms.
There is a peculiar concept that if something is funded by businesses it's not costing consumers anything. The trouble is that those businesses are making their money by selling something to the consumers - so if the direct cost to consumers to use the Internet goes down as a result of a non-neutral net, then the cost to businesses goes up. Those businesses have to turn a profit so either they have to cut their profit margins or pass the costs on to the consumer in the form of increased prices. Guess which?
But worse still, everyone along the chain has to make a profit - so if I pay my ISP a dollar for net access, that's the end of the line - but if the maker of my favorite widget has to pay my ISP a dollar and therefore has to charge me a dollar extra for my Widget - then WalMart has to pay a dollar extra and I have to pay a dollar fifty extra because they have to make a profit too.
It's the same with "free" services such as Google and MySpace - yes, they are free to the end user - but the Widget makers who are paying them to advertise there are charging me more for their products as a result of that cost.
I would honestly prefer that the world were utterly devoid of 'push' advertising of all kinds and that I had to pay what these services actually cost. Sure Television would cost more, there would be a penny per search on Google and so on - but the end products I buy would be vastly cheaper as a result.
According to this: www.transportation.anl.gov/pdfs/TA/57.pdf (for example), 23% of the cost of a new car is the cost of marketing it to us! Now - which would you prefer? No adverts on TV or on the web or on ugly signs everywhere - but TV and Internet that costs (say) $20 per month more than it does now ($200 per year maybe) - but the cost of almost everything you buy being 23% less...or what we have now where a fifth of the price of almost everything we buy is the cost of advertising it to us?
So - no, I don't WANT cheaper Internet paid for by businesses - I want much, much more expensive Internet with no adverts at all anywhere - because I'm smart enough to realise that it would save me money overall.
It desperately needs larger pictures - at that scale it's very hard to see what they are.
If the average consumer doesn't care about hardware specs and cares about game availability/price then the Wii will annihilate Sony. It's gonna be about a third the price and launch with maybe three times as many games at probably half to two-thirds the price *AND* have the sexy controller.
It's long been known that parents buying Xmas gifts for kids will pay $300 - but are not comfortable going higher. A successful console will be one that can be bought with a couple of games for $299 or less.
Sony have screwed up monumentally and in every direction simultaneously - it's really quite impressive!
Yeah - it's non-functional after three airbag deployments - that's why you have to replace it.
I don't see the need for picking a more or less random word. Pluto is still going to be described as a kind of planet. The term 'pluton' (presumably meaning something like "Pluto-like-planet") is not scientific - we should use a term that has meaning and not something that means "this is kinda sorta like that".
Picking a term that's also used in geology was a terrible misstep - when geologists finally get out to these smaller planets, they are going to get horribly confused. Is the rock a Pluton - or is it FROM a Pluton - or is that a typo and it's actually from Pluto? Yuk, yuk, yuk! If you have to make up a word - especially a word that's still going to be used a thousand years from now - at least think through the consequences *carefully*.
The term "Dwarf Planet" seems entirely suitable here. It indicates that it is a kind of planet (which is reasonable given that it's round and orbits a star) - and it tells you something useful about it (it's evidently smaller than you might expect a typical planet to be) - and it has strong similarities with "Dwarf Star" which is a nice thing. We could then apply a kind of uniform taxonomy to those kinds of things - yielding "Dwarf Moon" for those teeny-tiny (but round) moons out there. All nice and uniform, neat and scientific.
If we got really elegant about this, we could talk about a "Dwarf X" (where X is a star, planet, moon or other body) as being an object that's in the lower tenth percentile of the size range for objects of class "X" (or twentieth percentile - or whatever makes that work). Terms like 'Red Giant' for stars and 'Gas Giant' for planets are already set up kinda like that. By implication then, our moon would be a Giant Moon or something like that since I guess it's the largest moon we know of right now.
If the astronomers don't get this 100% right this time, they are only going to have to do it all over again in another 10 years. We're already in trouble over free-floating "planets" that don't orbit stars and things that are borderline between stars and planets (Brown Dwarf Stars for example). We're also in danger of finding tiny stars that orbit humungous stars such that their barycenter lies within the diameter of the bigger star - and we could end up having to call those things planets!
We also could find moons that have their own moons - and 'double-moons' that co-orbit each other whilst together going around a common planet (actually - I think we already have some of those around Saturn).
Existing implementations (such as for example my MINI Cooper) use the engine management computer (ECU) - so to get rid of this - you have to replace (or - I guess - reprogram) that. Sadly, the law in most places already requires that you have an APPROVED ECU in order to meet emissions standards (the OBD-II spec requires this - OBD-III will be the same). So you are just as likely to be in trouble with the law and/or your insurance for disabling this gizmo as you would for refusing to disclose the information inside it.
Replacing the ECU is getting increasingly impossible though - the code inside is DRM'ed to the eyeballs and controls so many aspects of the car that it's essentially irreplacable. Drive-by-wire is coming to some cars in 2007 - we already have brakes and accellerator controls that work by wire - steering by wire is definitely on it's way. I don't know that I'd want to trust that stuff to homemade software.
The MINI Cooper (for example - probably all BMW's are the same) has this data recorded in the engine management computer. It records a couple of minutes of typical 'black box' stuff - control inputs, wheel speed sensor outputs, etc - in a loop. Recording stops and the data is locked into non-erasable memory when the airbags deploy. The computer has only enough of this special memory for (I believe) three sets of data - so if you have three accidents that result in the airbags deploying, you have to replace the engine management computer.
Since the data is there - and not easily erased - one presumes it could be subpoened in a court case if someone believed you lied about (for example) whether you were braking hard or accellerating hard immediately before the impact. They can trivially determine your speed and whether you were steering straight. Many cars contain accellerometers - you would imagine that would be recorded too. Still - it can't tell whether you were using your cellphone at the time...which is a shame really.
The only way to prevent this stuff from being recorded would be to replace the engine management computer with something else - but in a modern car that's pretty much impossible - every aspect of the vehicle being tied together these days. (eg The radio in my MINI adjusts it's volume automatically depending on your speed and whether the windows and/or sunroof are open - so expect that if you swap out the computer, your radio and windows won't work anymore even if you somehow manage to get the engine running again).
Fingerprints certainly aren't that unique. They are unique in the sense that in very fine detail there are no two alike - but they most certainly aren't unique when it comes to the resolution that these scanners work at.
A typical fingerprint scanner has to allow for rotational and translational differences and differences in pressure and pad and finger cleanliness between applications of the finger to the pad.
Then it has to cope with image recognition matters - it has to pull out features from the print and match those to the database.
If you cut your finger then it may be unreadable - so you can't buy stuff online until it heals up again a couple of weeks later? If you have a cut on your finger when you first register - then when it heals you won't be able to get in again.
It's basically horribly flawed as a technique.
Then there are a bunch of articles out there on how you can lift a fingerprint (eg from your next door neighbours car) and transfer it to latex (or even a gummy bear!) and that will fool the scanner 90% of the time...which should be plenty good enough because it's doubtful that the real finger will work 100% of the time.
Nah - this is never going to fly - and if by some horrible mischance it does, it'll be discredited the very first time some gummybear wielding teenager manages to steal a bunch of stuff with it and all of the scanners out there will be consigned to the junk heap overnight.
Microsoft want you to pay them a monthly fee to get the Microsoft anti-malware stuff. Every obstacle they can toss in the way of cheaper alternatives is (for them) a good thing.
The rule is: If you are in the business of doing X - then Microsoft announce that they are getting into doing X - then you'd better find a way to do Y instead. In the absence of government intervention, an illegal monopoly can do pretty much whatever they heck they like.
There are lots of levels of manipulation:
* Telling people where to stand and how to look - posing the photo - adding props.
* Framing the original photo to leave out things that spoil the story.
* Lying about when the photo was taken, where it was taken. Distorting the facts of what we are seeing.
* Brightness/Contrast/Gamma settings
* Colour adjustment
* Cropping - not really any different from framing the photo in the first place.
* Cleaning up speckles.
* Taking out distracting objects that don't affect the meaning of the photo.
* Taking out objects to change the meaning of the photo.
* Blurring company logos.
* Painting in whole new objects (like the smoke in the Reuters images).
There is a whole spectrum of 'manipulation' - some before the photo is taken, some in the camera, some outside the camera and some even just in how the photo is captioned.
It's a hard call as to where to place the limits.
Some of the Reuters photos that have recently exposed clearly exceed all reasonable limits of behavior - others don't. The most outrageous thing is how ineptly these were documented - it sends the message "You guys are complete idiots who'll believe even this low grade manipulation."
Those are REALLY badly doctored photos - easy to spot. I think quite a few amateur GIMP/Photoshop users could have done a much better job (I know I can).
If such obviously doctored photos are making it past the editors - who knows what more subtly done stuff has escaped detection.
The numbers presented here are very misleading. You get the impression that your eyes are transferring video images as a bunch of pixels at the relatively slow speed of an Ethernet connection. But that's not true. Video processing starts right there in the retina and steadily changes the data from pixel-like date to edges, lines, shape to recognised objects to high level concepts that are conveniently tagged with memories, emotions and other relevent data.
At what point are we measuring the data? If the data that's actually being measured is something like "My Mom standing next to a table with a vase full of flowers on it" - then having 10 Mbits/sec is a heck of a lot of data. If it's raw video - then it's pathetically little.
We can estimate the bandwidth your eyes could theoretically produce if they were transmitting "raw video". We know that the retina has a resolution of around 5k x 5k "pixels" and we can see motion at around 60Hz and we have more dynamic range than we can display with 12 pixels each for Red, Green and Blue. So at the 'most raw', two eyes would require 5k x 5k x 60Hz x 2 x 12 x 3 bits per second. That's 108 Gbits/sec - which is vastly more than the 10Mbits to 100Mbits this article suggests. You can argue about the details of the numbers I used here - but we're looking at four orders of magnitude - so I have to be a LOT wrong!
So it's pretty certain that what they are measuring in TFA is some kind of condensed or summarized version of the visual data.
That being the case, it's pretty silly to be comparing "My Mom standing next to a table with a vase full of flowers on it" to a 640x480 JPEG file. It's simply not an 'apples and apples' comparison.
OpenGL?
For chrissakes don't drop one of those atoms - if it rolls off onto the floor - you'll *NEVER* find it again.
SGI didn't see the writing on the wall - PC graphics adapters were coming - SGI did nothing. They arrived (but weren't great) - SGI proved they could make one by designing the Nintendo 64 graphics chip - but still did nothing. Then, suddenly a bunch of their engineers saw the impending doom and fled to nVidia - and on that day SGI's fate was sealed.
If they'd have come out with a PC graphics adaptor while they still had a billion dollar turnover - they could have squashed the teeny-tiny nVidia, 3Dfx, ATI and others like so many bugs. SGI's name and reputation would have made SGI-branded graphics cards the standard for the others to aspire to. They would have been today's nVidia.
They even had the technology right there in their hands in the form of the N64 chip around 1994 - two full years before 3Dfx (started by SGI employees) started to get into the market.
It's the classic story of the mainframe manufacturers not understanding that minicomputers were going to eat their lunch - then the minicomputer guys not understanding PC's. SGI didn't believe that a $200 PC card could outperform their $100,000+ Reality Engine boxes.
Their corporate culture ideas ultimately failed them. The idea that the engineer was king and that 'management' were merely there to smooth the path for engineering was a good one. They started out with a rule that every engineer got a proper office with a door and every manager would have a cube out in the corridor. But by 1994, engineer's offices were smaller than a typical cube-farm cube with their only windows facing out into tight corridors - management 'cubes' were huge affairs with tall cube-walls that came close to the ceiling, placed alongside windows with nice views.
It's sad - SGI deserved to win - but they just somehow couldn't decide to change.
Look for the little gold star in the top right corner of articles that have been through the 'Featured Article' mill. My own article on the "Mini" for example.