Ok, can we get a vote on whether this paragraph from the article is intended to be taken seriously or not?
This animal-controlled system is also meant to be framed within the context of embodiment, intelligence, hybridity and posthumanism. While posthumanism tends to view humanity's self-reflective reference point as significantly shifted as a result of technology, this project can be viewed as affirmation or rejection of posthuman theory; either human and computational logic can be replaced with the rugged, viseral, and adaptive logic of the cockroach, or the cockroach can be viewed as the ultimate "posthuman": proof that technology has forced a re-calculation of humanity to itself, rendering the Kafkan cockroach body as a better model of intelligence than standard human embodiment within contemporary culture.
...He's the man who never returned."
With apologies to the Kingston Trio.
I'm sure you're completely uninterested in this detail, but "Charlie on the MTA" predates the 1959 Kingston Trio recording by about a decade; it was first recorded (and written) by the Almanac Singers in '48, and the chorus is basically identical to "The Ship That Never Returned", written in '65 -- that's the '65 before '48.
If OTOH [the business next to Starbucks] was a coffee-shop too, it would want a Wifi network just for the annoyance value
More like: if it's a decent coffee shop it may be that the Starbucks WiFi is the only real advantage Starbucks offers, but in high geek density areas that may be a real advantage. (On the other hand, I was working in a local coffee shop recently and had a brief chat with the guy working next to me. He was using a low-bit-rate cellular connection; I was unconnected. At one point the conversation went:
him: You know about the WiFi at Starbucks, right?
me: Yeah, but then I'd be drinking Starbucks coffee.
Whether or not this is necessary, or the right allocation of home disk storage, I find it oddly charming to think of a terabyte disk array as a home appliance.
If this thing is interacting with the tape drive mechanism in the tape player anyway, why don't they add a small generator to recharge the batteries while it plays? Obviously, I'm asking this more in the interest of technical coolness than practicality, but it would remove the need for a separate wire going from the cassette player to the cigarette lighter socket for long-term play.
Ok, say you're a lobbyist for [pick your least favorite IP trade association]. Naturally you're going to wear this helmet to get your point across to everyone that it should be mandatory. What happens when you look at a legislator you haven't paid off?
If anyone actually wants this much information, here's the full pricelist.
The article says that Intel is attributing the price cuts to higher yields, which in turn are due to large investments in its foundries. I'm a little puzzled by this, since this is suggesting that mass-market chip cost actually has something to do with supply, whereas I'd generally assumed that most chip prices were determined by some combination of development cost and demand (i.e., you'll have enough chips; just charge as much as the market will bear and if development is expensive enough you won't have enough competition to bring the price down). The latter is almost certainly true for many server chips. How much is the price of high end mass-market chips actually determined by supply limitations these days?
Re:Again, Japan gets all the cool stuff.
on
Sony PCG-U1
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· Score: 3, Interesting
A couple of years ago a rep. of one of the major Japanese manufacturers told me that there were at least three major reasons this stuff always showed up first (and sometimes only) in Japan:
The market there is (proportionally) more interested in miniaturization for its own sake.
The initial prices for high-end consumer electronics are higher than in the U.S., so they can afford more of a risk.
The market is smaller than in the U.S., so it costs less to launch something new.
The latter two are important because the smaller devices generally involve more custom engineering, and thus have a higher initial cost and greater risk to the company.
Speak 'n' Spell emulation?
on
PDAs For Kids
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Just looking at the device made me think back to the Speak'n'Spell. I'd guess that this new toy has plenty of power to do the emulation if they feel like offering it (or if someone feels like hacking it). It would be an amusing evolution of emulator technology to have even Fisher Price toys digitally emulating their ancestors.
Reading about this reminded me of the Manchester Mark 1 programming contest in 1998, to find the most interesting program that could be run on the world's first stored-program computer; the winner getting to run the program on the recently-revived hardware. For any hackers who missed it at the time, it's worth looking at the details of the machine: 32 32-bit words which were simultaneously instructions and data.
When the contest came around I played with it for a while, then something took over my time and I never got to check on the results until reminded by this story. For those who don't feel like clicking through all the links, there were some nice mathematical runners up, but the winner was an unusually interesting instant noodle timer.
With all the usual IANAL qualifications, I'll give another reason in support of this statement: not only did the Colorado court rule on actions in Colorado, as the above comment says, but the court based its decision on the Colorado constitution. My understanding is that, while the Supreme Court sometimes corrects state courts on interpretations of the US constitution, it stays away from telling them what their own state constitutions mean.
Personally, I gauge technology a little differently. To me, one of the best pieces of technology is Eyeglasses. It's (figuratively as well as literally) transparent to the user. One you are using it, you can even forget it's there.
That's how they are now. They used to be heavy and fragile, which reduced one's ability to engage in rough physical activity, which carried its own social and physical consequences. They were also likely much less well-tuned to the individual and hence more likely to produce eye-strain with extended use.
They may have been worth it, but the user had to adapt his or her lifestyle to them for them to be useful. The trick is always to make the tradeoff worth it, and to keep working to diminish the costs. You should never assume the user will put up with just anything, but you also shouldn't hold back from filling a need just because the user will have to adapt.
Put another way, I agree that you don't want the best to be sacrificed to the good enough; but you can't afford to be timid in what you produce just because you don't know how achieve perfection. People will adapt to technology, and today's accomodation will often become tomorrow's ubiquitous habit.
They all require *you* to adapt to work around their obvious limitations, and IMHO that's not what technology should be about.
I disagree; this is always what technology is about. Any new technology requires you to adapt; to give up old habits and adopt new ones. Good design is about making the tradeoffs worthwhile. The telegraph introduced constraints on written communication; the automobile was a cranky (sorry) machine that had to be nursed along; dealing with telephones required all the hassles of operators, party lines, lack of privacy and lost connections; and all of those were worth adapting to. Many of the problems were overcome with later technology, but the earlier technology was still worthwhile.
In the particular case of PDAs, when I shifted to using a bare-bones PalmOS device a few years ago it was, and still is, the most limited option available in many ways. But it worked; it provided useful functionality not available in a low-tech form in a good form-factor; and the penalties weren't hard to adapt to. So it became a habit.
But finding a native speaker of Klingon is a royal pain. And yes, I'm speaking from experience, here, having been at a company that came out with a Klingon speech recognition system once upon a time. The usual practice of collecting speech samples from native speakers had to be... modified slightly.
Babel Fish kinds of translators have already been out for quite some time.
According to the article, the point of the system is to provide some level of translation for those languages that don't have an available translation system. There are a lot of language that aren't likely to get the attention of translation system developers any time soon.
Can you configure it to decide if a glass is half full or half empty? I'd say the pessimist glasses from Despair.com already provide a clear enough indication.
Or see the recent 9 Chickweed Lane takes on the question (starting around the beginning of March).
I was thinking about this while reading the article. Much of the music I actually listen to these days comes from another setting with different rules: social dance bands. (I'm thinking of contra dance here, but if someone tells me the same applies to other types of social dance I'll believe it.) The primary setting for these bands is at a dance, interacting directly with a floor full of dancers. What's valued in a good dance band is not just the quality of music but the ability to work with the crowd. A recording is an unacceptable substitute in this setting, however perfect.
All the focus on recordings misses the settings where music and recordings still don't mix easily. I buy the recordings of my favorite dance bands, and I'll listen to them as background or to learn tunes, but it's the participatory setting that makes this kind of music worthwhile, and not even a DJ can produce that kind of effect at a contra dance.
The most interesting (if not original) point in the article for me was summed up in the future possibility:
So many amateur remixed versions of a hit tune are circulating on the Net that it's worth $5 to you to buy an authenticated official version.
While I don't think this is likely any time soon -- it's so much easier to make a clean copy than a warped one -- I like the idea of the tools for music manipulation and analysis reaching the point where this is a possibility. The tools out there allow an awful lot of audio manipulation, but they don't make it easy to "X-ray the guts of music and outline its structure, and then alter it". They let you do gross cut-and-paste maneuvers, but that's about it.
I've seen various research projects and half-completed products for dissecting music -- finding the chords, pulling out the melodies, profiling the rhythmic structures -- but imagine if the sort of "music processor" implied by this work was as ubiquitous as vi, Emacs or Wordpad. Then we'd really see some remarkable (and remarkably awful) music variations floating around.
Then I might be willing to pay just to get someone's digital certificate of authenticity. But I'd still be looking for the best comic variations on everything, of course.
Ok, struggling to find some/. relevance to this, I'll just point out that the name Beowulf does, in fact mean "bear" (it's an Old English compound "beo" ("bee") + "wulf" ("wolf") = "bee predator" = "bear"). So this is clearly the right infrastructure for hooking up a Beowulf cluster.
Ok, slim material, but I did like seeing the status LEDs in the eyes.
What information, factoids or rumors have been around about Banias (mentioned briefly in the press piece)? A quick search found only the following:
It's an ultra-low-power x86 chip line.
It's due in 2003.
It's not based on the P-4 core, but is a fresh design, possibly related to the P6 core. (Boy, that's a bad pair of abbreviations, but you know what I mean.)
It probably has a completely redesigned instruction decoder; I found some mention of combining instructions into common bundles.
It's capable of turning off unused portions of the chip to save power.
It's intended for laptops and blades (of course).
It's being designed in Israel.
That's a slim set of factoids; anyone have any more? Or any corrections?
There's a good side and a bad side to this, considering the companies working on it. The good news is that whenever the researchers are talking about Byzantine fault tolerance you can translate that as "assume the machines on the network are unsecured Windows PCs". In that sense it's great to hear of Microsoft feeding a reporter that phrase, since it suggests a from-the-ground-up specification that doesn't inherit the security holes of the past and is robust against insecure machines.
The bad side, which is closer to reality, is that a computer company working in an "extend our existing market" mode will find find it irresistable to tie new things tightly to the innards of what already been deployed. That's a great way to ensure that you inherit security flaws from whatever old model you had, however good the theory of your new system is.
Large vocabulary recognizers have been around for 8-10 years. Nuance, SpeechWorks, Philips, and Temic end up being the big four in this market, allthough there is also a large vocabulary implementation of ViaVoice and others.
Slashdot Mirror
a) Hasn't this been out for a while? b) Why do I want a USB drive I can't take on a plane?
- him: You know about the WiFi at Starbucks, right?
- me: Yeah, but then I'd be drinking Starbucks coffee.
- him: Good point.
So perhaps it's not a world-beating advantage.)Whether or not this is necessary, or the right allocation of home disk storage, I find it oddly charming to think of a terabyte disk array as a home appliance.
If this thing is interacting with the tape drive mechanism in the tape player anyway, why don't they add a small generator to recharge the batteries while it plays? Obviously, I'm asking this more in the interest of technical coolness than practicality, but it would remove the need for a separate wire going from the cassette player to the cigarette lighter socket for long-term play.
Ok, say you're a lobbyist for [pick your least favorite IP trade association]. Naturally you're going to wear this helmet to get your point across to everyone that it should be mandatory. What happens when you look at a legislator you haven't paid off?
The article says that Intel is attributing the price cuts to higher yields, which in turn are due to large investments in its foundries. I'm a little puzzled by this, since this is suggesting that mass-market chip cost actually has something to do with supply, whereas I'd generally assumed that most chip prices were determined by some combination of development cost and demand (i.e., you'll have enough chips; just charge as much as the market will bear and if development is expensive enough you won't have enough competition to bring the price down). The latter is almost certainly true for many server chips. How much is the price of high end mass-market chips actually determined by supply limitations these days?
- The market there is (proportionally) more interested in miniaturization for its own sake.
- The initial prices for high-end consumer electronics are higher than in the U.S., so they can afford more of a risk.
- The market is smaller than in the U.S., so it costs less to launch something new.
The latter two are important because the smaller devices generally involve more custom engineering, and thus have a higher initial cost and greater risk to the company.Just looking at the device made me think back to the Speak'n'Spell. I'd guess that this new toy has plenty of power to do the emulation if they feel like offering it (or if someone feels like hacking it). It would be an amusing evolution of emulator technology to have even Fisher Price toys digitally emulating their ancestors.
When the contest came around I played with it for a while, then something took over my time and I never got to check on the results until reminded by this story. For those who don't feel like clicking through all the links, there were some nice mathematical runners up, but the winner was an unusually interesting instant noodle timer.
They may have been worth it, but the user had to adapt his or her lifestyle to them for them to be useful. The trick is always to make the tradeoff worth it, and to keep working to diminish the costs. You should never assume the user will put up with just anything, but you also shouldn't hold back from filling a need just because the user will have to adapt.
Put another way, I agree that you don't want the best to be sacrificed to the good enough; but you can't afford to be timid in what you produce just because you don't know how achieve perfection. People will adapt to technology, and today's accomodation will often become tomorrow's ubiquitous habit.
In the particular case of PDAs, when I shifted to using a bare-bones PalmOS device a few years ago it was, and still is, the most limited option available in many ways. But it worked; it provided useful functionality not available in a low-tech form in a good form-factor; and the penalties weren't hard to adapt to. So it became a habit.
Or see the recent 9 Chickweed Lane takes on the question (starting around the beginning of March).
All the focus on recordings misses the settings where music and recordings still don't mix easily. I buy the recordings of my favorite dance bands, and I'll listen to them as background or to learn tunes, but it's the participatory setting that makes this kind of music worthwhile, and not even a DJ can produce that kind of effect at a contra dance.
I've seen various research projects and half-completed products for dissecting music -- finding the chords, pulling out the melodies, profiling the rhythmic structures -- but imagine if the sort of "music processor" implied by this work was as ubiquitous as vi, Emacs or Wordpad. Then we'd really see some remarkable (and remarkably awful) music variations floating around.
Then I might be willing to pay just to get someone's digital certificate of authenticity. But I'd still be looking for the best comic variations on everything, of course.
Ok, slim material, but I did like seeing the status LEDs in the eyes.
- It's an ultra-low-power x86 chip line.
- It's due in 2003.
- It's not based on the P-4 core, but is a fresh design, possibly related to the P6 core. (Boy, that's a bad pair of abbreviations, but you know what I mean.)
- It probably has a completely redesigned instruction decoder; I found some mention of combining instructions into common bundles.
- It's capable of turning off unused portions of the chip to save power.
- It's intended for laptops and blades (of course).
- It's being designed in Israel.
That's a slim set of factoids; anyone have any more? Or any corrections?The bad side, which is closer to reality, is that a computer company working in an "extend our existing market" mode will find find it irresistable to tie new things tightly to the innards of what already been deployed. That's a great way to ensure that you inherit security flaws from whatever old model you had, however good the theory of your new system is.