Yes, this one does have a solution. I got it from my logic professor, one of Quine's students.
You, the budding cultural anthropologist, have found yourself in yet another sticky situation. You have come across a village by accident during your travels, and the natives have forced you into a situation. Before you are two doors. Between the doors stands a man, and a sign written in your native language. The sign tells you that one door leads to a kingly feast, the other to certain death. You are allowed to ask one and only one yes-or-no question of the man standing there. However, the man either always lies or always tells the truth. Moreover, the man only speaks his own native language (but understands yours!): you know that 'yes' and 'no' are rendered as 'da' and 'na'...but you don't know which is which.
So. How do you get the kingly feast and avoid certain death? What one question do you ask?
The fact that on a Mac, the menubar is attached to the top of the screen, whereas the spoof tries to create a fake menubar attached inside the window (ala Windows or X)...it a) doesn't quite work and b) even if it did, it would look highly suspicious to a Mac user. That said, I'm sure there's a way around it, it may only be a matter of time...so I won't say "invulnerable", just "not many people are going to code in that special condition to capture another small percentage". maybe.
Oh, I did this at my wedding, and while about half the shots aren't particularly interesting, many of them were spectacular, enough to have made it worthwhile. Especially when the little kids got ahold of them...those were really surprising, in a good way.
You, my friend, have never owned a BMW. My family had (until trees crushed them) a couple of late 80's or early 90's BMW's that they picked up cheap used. Turns out they could only take them to one garage in the county to be worked on....over 20 miles away. You see, to do any sort of serious maintenance, you have to have a special key (like the ones for your car or house) that only authorized BMW service centers are allowed to own. Oh, sure, you could buy them from the backs of magazines or the Internet, but this was a pretty gray area, legally. In my parents case, that one guy was apparently a worthless jackass, as more often than not, they'd find themselves driving to the second closes authorized repair center in Birmingham, 2 hours away, for any sort of maintenance...do you really want to drive a broken car 2 hours, let alone 20 minutes? Or heaven forbid, tow it? Only to have to deal with the biggest jackass in the county who overcharges by a factor of 2 or more?
Point is, this sort of thing has been going on for over 15 years with cars already. And there are lots of downsides.
Well, it turns out you can't just duplicate frames (pairs of fields) wholesale, or else you get weird, jerky action. The solution is to do a little quasi-interpolation: by taking fields from different frames and interlacing them together to create a new composite frame, the action appears much smoother. It's not true interlacing, as it's only done on a few frames out of the 30 each second (rather than all of them), and the pattern is (for all intents and purposes) nearly random for deciding which frames to "interpolate" in this way...But in the end, you have 24 frames to work with, which means you have to somehow create 6 new ones using only those 24 available. Which means, since you can't just duplicate frames, there will be some small scale interlacing.
I watch a lot of anime, and what's with all these movies I'm seeing interlaced lately?
It's called telecining, and as long as anime is produced at 24fps, you're gonna see it. Telecine is a method for producing 29.97fps DVDs from 24fps material: essentially extra copies of existing fields are interlaced together to create the extra frames needed each second. Sometimes in awkward ways which are really obvious on a computer screen. There's really nothing that can be done, unless you rip the DVD and create a 24fps avi file using computationally expensive un-telecine algorithms (not the same as de-interlacing!).
Support for your argument. Here in Mississippi, the problem seems to be the worst (just offering context). Recently, there was a case in which a woman with cancer had to have her uterus removed. The doctor, following standard procedure, removed the uterus and branded his initials into it. This practice serves two purposes: it identifies anterior and posterior, and who removed the uterus (as well as who it was removed from) for the lab guys. Nevertheless, the woman found out about this, and sued for maliciously and cravenly defiling her body. She won, might I add. Nevertheless, the doctor followed proper procedure, made no flaws, and the patient recovered quite nicely thanks to timely intervention. How's that for gratitude?
Unfortunately, most people expect a computer to just work.
Why is this unfortunate? Why is it too much to expect a computer to just work? People have been told over and over again that they do, and so it should come as no surprise when people treat them as if they do just work (i.e., not patching them).
As an HCI guy with something like 12 years of professional programming experience (i.e., I know better), I am constantly appaled not by most end users reactions, which are rational and reasonably, but to the reactions of computer people who can't understand "stupid users" who "don't get it." Nay, it is us, the fucking engineers who struggle like Moses with exceedingly complex systems who try to impart some notion of at least determinism if not simplicity to these untamable beasts we call computers who have failed. Computers should be easy to use, they should "just work", but in fact not only do they not, but they are doomed to continue to not, if systems theory has any say in the matter. This is excruciatingly painful.
So, this leaves two options: either a) deal with people who expect computers to "just work" instead of complaining about them and bitching about how stupid they are or b) removing the computer as a tool from the "unwashed masses", who have reasonable but impossible expectations of how computers should work. Neither of these are really tenable, and I've resigned myself to this fact, more or less. Instead, I try to promote what sort of usablility can be imparted onto the infernal machines, and flame people like you who cannot seem to see things from somone else's point of view.
New Orleans: why? Coffee. Frankly, if you're the coffee-consuming sort of nerd, who could pass up the Cafe du Monde? Really? And beignets....yum. And hell, if you find yourself in Rural MS (read: Starkville) and need a place to stay, drop me a line. As if. Starkville: A town full of engineering geeks with nothing to do.
Re:Yeah, blind people playing
on
Hacking the XBox
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I had this next door neighbor once, who liked to come over to my apartment for two reasons: the first was to hit on cute girls, the second was to play our copy of "Punch-Out" on our vintage Nintendo. sometimes he would combine the two. Invariably, he'd come over, sit himself down, and start playing Punch-Out. No one would really pay attention, because there was always someone playing the nintendo: it was something we were used to. Eventually he would make it to Mike Tyson. This is where people would start paying attention; a murmur would rise up: "hey, he's about to beat the game again! let's watch!". And he'd beat Mike Tyson. Then whoever hadn't been to my apartment before would be informed that the player was totally blind, and he would either play the game again just to annoy the person, or hit on her if she was cute (how would he know, you ask? well, that's a different story. let's just say my friend was pretty damn smooth...) Turns out Punch-Out provides lots of audio cues; since he wasn't distracted by the images on the screen, he was actually much better than most. He hated that most games' use of sound was of no use to the blind...
I was refering to the post itself, but the article wasn't easily decipherable to anyone not famliar with.AU phone systems... But thanks, your summary clarified a lot for me.
Mine came with my parents' long dead IBM PS/2 model 30 (a 80286-10, for those who can remember that far back). Incept date: 1987. Still working perfectly after 16 years of daily constant use, happily attached to my desktop.
I've got a Mini-ITX board with that Cyrix CPU on it...I love it to death, it's small, requires only the faintest amount of power, and runs really really cool...but it's not what I'd call a speed daemon. hardly. It weighs in, performancewise, at about the same as a 500MHz PIII. But...it's a) ideal for notbooks for all the above reasons and b) it's dirt freaking cheap. Cheap.
No, his analogy is more like knocking at the door. You knock at my door (GET request), stating that you'd like entry to collect my TV. Now, normally, I don't have a problem with my neighbors coming in and taking my TV, so normally I just haul it to the door and hand it over. Sometimes, though, some stranger wears a mask that makes him look like my neighbors, and so gets my TV that way, but most of the time I really don't care anyway 'cause most people will watch the ads on the TV anyway (which is my source of income).
One: there's no detail in this review. It sounds like the author is suggesting behaviourism (cf. Skinner) as a theory of cognition, an idea that was discarded before I was born. Someone give me some details and prove me wrong.
Two: What is being said here that Simon hasn't already said in his essays on complexity of behaviour well before this book was published? In otherwords, even in 1986, is this really new?
Although it is interesting that he describes a neural network here: it is clear to me that the reason the description is so shrouded is because prior to 1989, ANN's were taboo in the literature (Minsky having ripped perceptrons to peices back in the 60s).
The OS X 10.1 was NOT available over the Software Update service. My iBook shipped with 10.0.3, and believe me, it needed 10.1 to work. One could either a) during October of last year pack their bags and head to the big city to collect a complimentary CD at a participating Apple Store or Authorised Apple dealer or b) send in one of their upgrade coupons and some cash and have it mailed to them. I live in bumfuck Mississippi, so I got to send in one of my rather scarce upgrade coupons and $20 because it was cheaper than taking a couple days off from work, taking the bus to Jackson, trying to find one of the few cabs that exist there and convincing them to help me find an Apple dealer =)
But no, 10.1 was/never/ available over Software Update
I believe the words you are looking for are: "Medial Forebrain Bundle" There are others, but my exam on this material was last week, so it's leaving me already...
before those two software packages came out, people had been doing this by hand anyway. Those two developers just took an idea more or less in the public domain and wrote software to make it easier. Apple simply added in the functionality people had been hacking into the iPod on their own to begin with...
Man, S.E. Lain would so go over the heads of Joe Moviegoer without a lot of preparation...Hell, I watch way too much anime, and Lain just clips the top of my hair. What I'm saying is that it makes an awful awful introduction to anime. Without an understanding of the fundamentals of what makes good anime, it would leave the first-time viewer alone, confused, and with a nasty, bitter taste in thier mouths.
Cowboy Bebop, on the other hand, is immediatly accessible, while still demonstrating all that makes anime good. I've managed to suck all nearly all my friends into Cowboy Bebop.
Oddly, Neon Genesis Evangelion has proved to be a good anime for first time viewers around where I live, too. Though its complex and hard to follow, and more than a little disturbing, it draws you in bit by bit until you can't let go. It's a shocking introduction, but it doesn't seem to turn people off. Lain, though...no, that would just leave people with less of a desire to watch and understand anime than they started with...
Slashdot Mirror
To which the man replies "da" (or "na")....sadly, you don't know if this means "yes" or "no". So, good try, but you're still missing something.
Sadly, I forget the actual answer =( I'll have to look it up tomorrow and post it.
Yes, this one does have a solution. I got it from my logic professor, one of Quine's students.
You, the budding cultural anthropologist, have found yourself in yet another sticky situation. You have come across a village by accident during your travels, and the natives have forced you into a situation. Before you are two doors. Between the doors stands a man, and a sign written in your native language. The sign tells you that one door leads to a kingly feast, the other to certain death. You are allowed to ask one and only one yes-or-no question of the man standing there. However, the man either always lies or always tells the truth. Moreover, the man only speaks his own native language (but understands yours!): you know that 'yes' and 'no' are rendered as 'da' and 'na'...but you don't know which is which.
So. How do you get the kingly feast and avoid certain death? What one question do you ask?
The fact that on a Mac, the menubar is attached to the top of the screen, whereas the spoof tries to create a fake menubar attached inside the window (ala Windows or X)...it a) doesn't quite work and b) even if it did, it would look highly suspicious to a Mac user. That said, I'm sure there's a way around it, it may only be a matter of time...so I won't say "invulnerable", just "not many people are going to code in that special condition to capture another small percentage". maybe.
RIAA Radar is how...
Oh, I did this at my wedding, and while about half the shots aren't particularly interesting, many of them were spectacular, enough to have made it worthwhile. Especially when the little kids got ahold of them...those were really surprising, in a good way.
You, my friend, have never owned a BMW. My family had (until trees crushed them) a couple of late 80's or early 90's BMW's that they picked up cheap used. Turns out they could only take them to one garage in the county to be worked on....over 20 miles away. You see, to do any sort of serious maintenance, you have to have a special key (like the ones for your car or house) that only authorized BMW service centers are allowed to own. Oh, sure, you could buy them from the backs of magazines or the Internet, but this was a pretty gray area, legally. In my parents case, that one guy was apparently a worthless jackass, as more often than not, they'd find themselves driving to the second closes authorized repair center in Birmingham, 2 hours away, for any sort of maintenance...do you really want to drive a broken car 2 hours, let alone 20 minutes? Or heaven forbid, tow it? Only to have to deal with the biggest jackass in the county who overcharges by a factor of 2 or more?
Point is, this sort of thing has been going on for over 15 years with cars already. And there are lots of downsides.
Well, it turns out you can't just duplicate frames (pairs of fields) wholesale, or else you get weird, jerky action. The solution is to do a little quasi-interpolation: by taking fields from different frames and interlacing them together to create a new composite frame, the action appears much smoother. It's not true interlacing, as it's only done on a few frames out of the 30 each second (rather than all of them), and the pattern is (for all intents and purposes) nearly random for deciding which frames to "interpolate" in this way...But in the end, you have 24 frames to work with, which means you have to somehow create 6 new ones using only those 24 available. Which means, since you can't just duplicate frames, there will be some small scale interlacing.
Support for your argument. Here in Mississippi, the problem seems to be the worst (just offering context). Recently, there was a case in which a woman with cancer had to have her uterus removed. The doctor, following standard procedure, removed the uterus and branded his initials into it. This practice serves two purposes: it identifies anterior and posterior, and who removed the uterus (as well as who it was removed from) for the lab guys. Nevertheless, the woman found out about this, and sued for maliciously and cravenly defiling her body. She won, might I add. Nevertheless, the doctor followed proper procedure, made no flaws, and the patient recovered quite nicely thanks to timely intervention. How's that for gratitude?
Why is this unfortunate? Why is it too much to expect a computer to just work? People have been told over and over again that they do, and so it should come as no surprise when people treat them as if they do just work (i.e., not patching them).
As an HCI guy with something like 12 years of professional programming experience (i.e., I know better), I am constantly appaled not by most end users reactions, which are rational and reasonably, but to the reactions of computer people who can't understand "stupid users" who "don't get it." Nay, it is us, the fucking engineers who struggle like Moses with exceedingly complex systems who try to impart some notion of at least determinism if not simplicity to these untamable beasts we call computers who have failed. Computers should be easy to use, they should "just work", but in fact not only do they not, but they are doomed to continue to not, if systems theory has any say in the matter. This is excruciatingly painful.
So, this leaves two options:
either
a) deal with people who expect computers to "just work" instead of complaining about them and bitching about how stupid they are or
b) removing the computer as a tool from the "unwashed masses", who have reasonable but impossible expectations of how computers should work.
Neither of these are really tenable, and I've resigned myself to this fact, more or less. Instead, I try to promote what sort of usablility can be imparted onto the infernal machines, and flame people like you who cannot seem to see things from somone else's point of view.
New Orleans: why? Coffee. Frankly, if you're the coffee-consuming sort of nerd, who could pass up the Cafe du Monde? Really? And beignets....yum.
And hell, if you find yourself in Rural MS (read: Starkville) and need a place to stay, drop me a line. As if. Starkville: A town full of engineering geeks with nothing to do.
I had this next door neighbor once, who liked to come over to my apartment for two reasons: the first was to hit on cute girls, the second was to play our copy of "Punch-Out" on our vintage Nintendo. sometimes he would combine the two.
Invariably, he'd come over, sit himself down, and start playing Punch-Out. No one would really pay attention, because there was always someone playing the nintendo: it was something we were used to.
Eventually he would make it to Mike Tyson. This is where people would start paying attention; a murmur would rise up: "hey, he's about to beat the game again! let's watch!". And he'd beat Mike Tyson. Then whoever hadn't been to my apartment before would be informed that the player was totally blind, and he would either play the game again just to annoy the person, or hit on her if she was cute (how would he know, you ask? well, that's a different story. let's just say my friend was pretty damn smooth...)
Turns out Punch-Out provides lots of audio cues; since he wasn't distracted by the images on the screen, he was actually much better than most. He hated that most games' use of sound was of no use to the blind...
I was refering to the post itself, but the article wasn't easily decipherable to anyone not famliar with .AU phone systems...
But thanks, your summary clarified a lot for me.
Anyone out there who could translate this into English for me?
Mine came with my parents' long dead IBM PS/2 model 30 (a 80286-10, for those who can remember that far back). Incept date: 1987. Still working perfectly after 16 years of daily constant use, happily attached to my desktop.
Beat that =)
I've got a Mini-ITX board with that Cyrix CPU on it...I love it to death, it's small, requires only the faintest amount of power, and runs really really cool...but it's not what I'd call a speed daemon. hardly. It weighs in, performancewise, at about the same as a 500MHz PIII. But...it's a) ideal for notbooks for all the above reasons and b) it's dirt freaking cheap. Cheap.
No, his analogy is more like knocking at the door. You knock at my door (GET request), stating that you'd like entry to collect my TV. Now, normally, I don't have a problem with my neighbors coming in and taking my TV, so normally I just haul it to the door and hand it over. Sometimes, though, some stranger wears a mask that makes him look like my neighbors, and so gets my TV that way, but most of the time I really don't care anyway 'cause most people will watch the ads on the TV anyway (which is my source of income).
I would also like to point out that I got my copy of _Man After Man_ nearly a decade ago...talk about stale news!
One: there's no detail in this review. It sounds like the author is suggesting behaviourism (cf. Skinner) as a theory of cognition, an idea that was discarded before I was born. Someone give me some details and prove me wrong.
Two: What is being said here that Simon hasn't already said in his essays on complexity of behaviour well before this book was published? In otherwords, even in 1986, is this really new?
Although it is interesting that he describes a neural network here: it is clear to me that the reason the description is so shrouded is because prior to 1989, ANN's were taboo in the literature (Minsky having ripped perceptrons to peices back in the 60s).
The OS X 10.1 was NOT available over the Software Update service. My iBook shipped with 10.0.3, and believe me, it needed 10.1 to work. One could either a) during October of last year pack their bags and head to the big city to collect a complimentary CD at a participating Apple Store or Authorised Apple dealer or b) send in one of their upgrade coupons and some cash and have it mailed to them. I live in bumfuck Mississippi, so I got to send in one of my rather scarce upgrade coupons and $20 because it was cheaper than taking a couple days off from work, taking the bus to Jackson, trying to find one of the few cabs that exist there and convincing them to help me find an Apple dealer =)
/never/ available over Software Update
But no, 10.1 was
Now Wait for Last Year
I believe the words you are looking for are: "Medial Forebrain Bundle" There are others, but my exam on this material was last week, so it's leaving me already...
before those two software packages came out, people had been doing this by hand anyway. Those two developers just took an idea more or less in the public domain and wrote software to make it easier. Apple simply added in the functionality people had been hacking into the iPod on their own to begin with...
Man, S.E. Lain would so go over the heads of Joe Moviegoer without a lot of preparation...Hell, I watch way too much anime, and Lain just clips the top of my hair. What I'm saying is that it makes an awful awful introduction to anime. Without an understanding of the fundamentals of what makes good anime, it would leave the first-time viewer alone, confused, and with a nasty, bitter taste in thier mouths.
Cowboy Bebop, on the other hand, is immediatly accessible, while still demonstrating all that makes anime good. I've managed to suck all nearly all my friends into Cowboy Bebop.
Oddly, Neon Genesis Evangelion has proved to be a good anime for first time viewers around where I live, too. Though its complex and hard to follow, and more than a little disturbing, it draws you in bit by bit until you can't let go. It's a shocking introduction, but it doesn't seem to turn people off. Lain, though...no, that would just leave people with less of a desire to watch and understand anime than they started with...
it's big, it's heavy, it's wood!
It's Lo-og, It's Lo-og!
It's better than bad, it's good!
I haven't seen that show in years, and the lyrics come right back...