one of the key drawbacks is that there is no passthrough; the iMac has to be powered on fully for it to work (ie, you can't just power the screen alone).
Hmm, it'd be nice if there was some sort of low-power mode that turned off everything but the screen. I wonder if there's an easy way to do it through EFI. Maybe I'll dig through the documentation and see what can be done.
Re:Voice recognition has been around since years!
on
Talking To Computers?
·
· Score: 1
I typically just made an alias or a script and used the voice command to run that instead of drilling down through the folder hierarchy.
For the time it was pretty decent but there's no doubt that there were a lot of improvements needed to be made.
Sure, the screen is built in so you have to replace it when you replace the machine
Actually for quite a bit now the iMac display port is both video out and video in. When the computer is too old to use you can just use it as a display for your new computer, maybe even as a second display if you buy another iMac.
The nice thing with Launchpad is being able to reorganize your apps without actually changing the location of the application bundles themselves. For whatever reason, Bad Things can happen if you do this yourself in your Applications directory.
The only really bad thing is that when you do an update and you've moved one of the Apple-supplied apps. I haven't done it in a while but I know that it was a little messy. Nothing destroyed on the system or anything, but annoying nonetheless.
However you can move them if you replace them with a symlink to the moved bundle. I'd say the best practice is to create an "Applications (Installed)" directory to put non-system applications. I also create folders of aliases to programs arranged how I like them, then throw those folders on the Dock for easy access.
Launchpad is going to bring these ideas to the masses and make them easier to accomplish. It looks like a nice interface and will be a welcome addition to Mac OS X.
How will you play music in a machine, which is responding to voice?
Active filtering, the computer knows what's being output so just invert the waveform and apply to the input. It could use an inaudible marker to determine the proper audio to closely match the amplitude and timing. Even if it isn't exact it will still be good enough to reduce the feedback problems.
Anyways, the easier way to solve some of the problems is to require a keyword before a command. Make it something easy to say, recognizable, socially acceptable, and easily distinguishable and you're golden.
Re:Voice recognition has been around since years!
on
Talking To Computers?
·
· Score: 2
Every mac OS since 10.0 has had speech recognition
They had it far before that too, back in the MacOS 8 days I believe. It actually worked pretty well, although it was a bit iffy with certain types of background noise.
These days it's a lot more tolerant of background noise, especially if you combine it with a decent noise-canceling microphone.
I get the sense that you don't know much about the nuclear energy market.
Well, I am currently a chemist and I was in school to be a nuclear physicist before I switched majors. I know quite a bit about nuclear fission and the nuclear energy market.
What has killed the nuclear energy market in the USA are several factors
the 1977 executive order by Jimmy Carter banning the reprocessing of nuclear fuel
the EPA forcing every designed nuclear power plant to be designed from the ground up with multiple revisions during the planning and construction process
the fearmongering by environmental activists which results in a NIMBY attitude and so much ill will toward nuclear plants that companies have a hard time justifying building them, even if they are favorable
My solar power system should pay itself back in 10 - 12 years, though admittedly that does take government sponsored incentives into account.
Then it's not really paying itself back, is it? All it's doing is stealing from your neighbors in order to get a free ride.
Yes, subsidizing a technology to foster innovation can be a good idea but that should be long gone for solar energy. I mean, it's been subsidized for what, 30 years now? Lets face it, the technology hasn't been anywhere close to being mainstream for a long time and it still isn't there. Right solar cells still create more harm to the environment when they are manufactured than they save over their whole life.
Give the scientists more time to research solar. In the meantime drop the subsidies and go with what's tried and true: nuclear
we'd be much farther along with alternatives to oil (including nuclear)
We'd be much further with nuclear if the environmentalists had gotten their heads out of their asses decades ago and stopped getting in the way of nuclear research and nuclear power development. Only now that the situation is starting to get desperate are they saying "oops, my bad". They still won't admit they were needlessly fear-mongering for years.
The comparison here is how much of anything it takes to make $1160. That's the unit, everything else is variable. If the reader doesn't understand that, I don't think that counts as psychological games, just ignorance
Part of the unit is what the thing is. Since an album consists of tracks the right thing to do is normalize everything on either tracks or albums, using a value of average tracks per album to convert between the two. I can make some amounts look much bigger in comparison to other amounts simply by using a different unit of measurement.
For example, suppose I say that you need to sell 2,000 jelly beans or 5 pounds of jelly beans. Those two numbers reflect approximately the same amount of jelly beans but it creates the possibility of one measurement sounding much larger than the other. In order for you to figure out a proper relationship you have to go out of your way to do the conversion yourself, something that is a barrier to the reader for quick and easy comprehension.
Changing the units in a comparison is a common trick to confuse the reader. Yes, everyone should be savvy enough to see through that trick but even highly-intelligent people often fail to catch on to it. Perhaps the author didn't intend to deceive but the fact remains that any good comparison uses the same units for all of the examples in order to be as clear as possible.
TFA says one advantage of this laser is that, because the wavelength is adjustable, you could theoretically compensate for the atmosphere by picking a wavelength to which the atmosphere is mostly trasnparent.
Well, it certainly helps but (speaking as an instrumental chemist here) no matter what wavelength you choose there will always be some absorption and scattering in the atmosphere . There's also beam spread which can be improved through better optics but can't be completely eliminated. All of those factors are dependent on distance and will serve to reduce laser illuminance.
Greater distances also affect the aim of the beam since what you really control is the angle of the beam. Simple trigonometry will show you that more distance means less control and thus the likelihood increases that you won't be able to get the beam concentrated on a critical spot for a decent amount of time.
So, you generally want to have a beam energy far above what it would take to make a kill under optimal conditions. You can always build the beam to reduce the length of the bursts or to output a lower energy level if you don't need the extra energy.
If you are shooting to make minimum wage and you have to sell 147/month (or more since you say they make less), you might want to press more than 100 at a time
Right, if you click through to the original article that has the data for that chart you'll see that they are basing that on making 1,000 at a time for nearly $2,000. This is something that is highly unlikely for a newer artist since that's a huge initial investment, especially after you add in all the other costs involved in producing an album. A lot of the artists that I know truly fall into the "starving artist" category! My point is that the great profits they list for producing, making, and selling your own CDs are really a best-case scenario, not something you should base a business on. You almost always want to base a business on a worst-case scenario, anything past that is gravy.
Secondly, they put single track sales on the same chart as whole album sales. This is comparing apples to oranges. In order to convert the two you'd have to at least multiply the track price by the average tracks per album. On iTunes, at least, the assumption is that there will be at least 10 tracks per album - if you look at the chart this means that the track download approximately matches the album download.
I don't really see what you are saying here. The chart says you have to sell a certain number of whole albums (with any number of tracks), or you have to sell a certain number of individual tracks.
By listing both in the same chart it can create the illusion that album sales are so much better than track sales. In any comparison you should make all the compared items have the same base units so that you aren't playing psychological games with the reader. Either make it all album sales or all track sales, then the comparisons are easier to see.
Who needs to burn through 20 feet of steel? Or even 2 feet of steel?
Remember that laser illuminance falls off quite rapidly with distance, especially in humid or dusty conditions. Having the power to burn through 20 feet of steel in perfect conditions at a relatively close range means you'll probably be able to still knock down that missile that's miles away in bad conditions.
There's also the factor of being able to keep the laser in one spot long enough to do damage. 1 second is a very long time to keep a beam in one spot so you need enough power that even a fraction of a second can do considerable damage.
That link really misrepresents the state of the industry.
First of all, most artists who create their own CDs don't make anywhere near $8 per CD. Having a CD produced varies greatly but the less you produce the more it costs per CD. Many artists go for short runs when they are starting out but they still have to shell out a couple of hundred bucks for 100 CDs. There are also the studio, production, and marketing costs which may or may not be present depending on the individual artist and the desired quality of the final product.
Now, if they sell a good chunk of those CDs they'll make decent money but many of them struggle to sell even a couple of dozen when they are starting out and they often sell them at far less than $9.99 because their goal is getting their music heard, not making money. So saying they make $8 on a $9.99 sale just does not reflect reality.
Secondly, they put single track sales on the same chart as whole album sales. This is comparing apples to oranges. In order to convert the two you'd have to at least multiply the track price by the average tracks per album. On iTunes, at least, the assumption is that there will be at least 10 tracks per album - if you look at the chart this means that the track download approximately matches the album download.
Lastly, the figures for album download and track download represent what might be a typical deal for an artist with a major label but the fact is there are a lot of independent labels out there that are little more than a group of artists who formed a label for the purpose of selling songs in marketplaces like iTunes. These independent labels take little, if anything from the artist so the artist ends up making close to 30% from a sale.
This means that on a $9.99 album the artist would make close to $3. If you look on the chart that would place selling an album through iTunes well above the $1.00 they would get from selling a retail album CD (high end royalty deal). At those rates they would have to sell approximately 390 albums a month through iTunes in order to make minimum wage, far better than most of the other methods in the article.
Basically that article follows the old saying, "There are lies, damn lies, and statistics." Yes, streaming music does make an artist less per unit than other sales and, yes, if you do everything yourself you can get a larger cut. What it ignores are the gains you get from taking a smaller cut but joining a larger distribution model that gets your music out there and listened to.
if they get ahold of my Laptop, I fully expect the thief to be able to get a windows login, and even a admin account up, but he isn't going to get my web/banking passwords from mozilla.
And that's exactly what is happening here. The only thing that they can get is stuff like network credentials which need to be active in order for the phone to get data while it is locked by the user. User data, including most of the application data associated with the user and the user's own personal keychain, is still secure.
Click through the article to the actual description of the method and you'll see exactly what kind of data is exposed.
Is it a security hole? Yes, it is but not in the way that many people think. It's more of a hazard to corporate users where someone might be able to use this kind of information to get on an internal network. There are ways to harden networks against these sort of threats and most big corporations have these kinds of protections in place.
Nettalk adds Apple's network file sharing protocol to your iPhone, making it much easier to transfer files to/from the phone instead of having to rely on iTunes. It effectively turns your iPhone into a large thumb drive.
There's apps in the app store that do this, it's not prohibited. For example, try Air Sharing.
There are no off the shelf solutions for that on the ipad. Were you talking about hiring interns to do that manually, by hand?
How do they do it before the iPad came around? They either had interns do it manually or they had a program that does it for them, then they printed the result and handed out the copies. Now with the iPad they generate a document and hand it out to people to display on the iPad. It's about the same really.
"secure the data" seems a wee bit optimistic. What, does it use the front facing camera that doesn't exist to do image analysis to blank the screen when the ipad cam that doesn't exist sees what looks like a camera lens taking pics of the screen?
The data is as secure as paper in that aspect. Even more secure, actually, since the iPad can be locked and erased remotely when stolen, unlike paper...
I doubt it would be the money but the sunlight readable display is probably the most important feature they seem to be glossing over.
Actually they are very concerned with people using binoculars and other means of viewing the playbooks remotely so they often use some form of cover to shade it from prying eyes. This would also work to shade from the sun, making a sunlight-readable display less of a concern.
Slashdot Mirror
one of the key drawbacks is that there is no passthrough; the iMac has to be powered on fully for it to work (ie, you can't just power the screen alone).
Hmm, it'd be nice if there was some sort of low-power mode that turned off everything but the screen. I wonder if there's an easy way to do it through EFI. Maybe I'll dig through the documentation and see what can be done.
I typically just made an alias or a script and used the voice command to run that instead of drilling down through the folder hierarchy.
For the time it was pretty decent but there's no doubt that there were a lot of improvements needed to be made.
That's what the iMac is for.
Sure, the screen is built in so you have to replace it when you replace the machine
Actually for quite a bit now the iMac display port is both video out and video in. When the computer is too old to use you can just use it as a display for your new computer, maybe even as a second display if you buy another iMac.
The nice thing with Launchpad is being able to reorganize your apps without actually changing the location of the application bundles themselves. For whatever reason, Bad Things can happen if you do this yourself in your Applications directory.
The only really bad thing is that when you do an update and you've moved one of the Apple-supplied apps. I haven't done it in a while but I know that it was a little messy. Nothing destroyed on the system or anything, but annoying nonetheless.
However you can move them if you replace them with a symlink to the moved bundle. I'd say the best practice is to create an "Applications (Installed)" directory to put non-system applications. I also create folders of aliases to programs arranged how I like them, then throw those folders on the Dock for easy access.
Launchpad is going to bring these ideas to the masses and make them easier to accomplish. It looks like a nice interface and will be a welcome addition to Mac OS X.
How will you play music in a machine, which is responding to voice?
Active filtering, the computer knows what's being output so just invert the waveform and apply to the input. It could use an inaudible marker to determine the proper audio to closely match the amplitude and timing. Even if it isn't exact it will still be good enough to reduce the feedback problems.
Anyways, the easier way to solve some of the problems is to require a keyword before a command. Make it something easy to say, recognizable, socially acceptable, and easily distinguishable and you're golden.
Every mac OS since 10.0 has had speech recognition
They had it far before that too, back in the MacOS 8 days I believe. It actually worked pretty well, although it was a bit iffy with certain types of background noise.
These days it's a lot more tolerant of background noise, especially if you combine it with a decent noise-canceling microphone.
I get the sense that you don't know much about the nuclear energy market.
Well, I am currently a chemist and I was in school to be a nuclear physicist before I switched majors. I know quite a bit about nuclear fission and the nuclear energy market.
What has killed the nuclear energy market in the USA are several factors
My solar power system should pay itself back in 10 - 12 years, though admittedly that does take government sponsored incentives into account.
Then it's not really paying itself back, is it? All it's doing is stealing from your neighbors in order to get a free ride.
Yes, subsidizing a technology to foster innovation can be a good idea but that should be long gone for solar energy. I mean, it's been subsidized for what, 30 years now? Lets face it, the technology hasn't been anywhere close to being mainstream for a long time and it still isn't there. Right solar cells still create more harm to the environment when they are manufactured than they save over their whole life.
Give the scientists more time to research solar. In the meantime drop the subsidies and go with what's tried and true: nuclear
we'd be much farther along with alternatives to oil (including nuclear)
We'd be much further with nuclear if the environmentalists had gotten their heads out of their asses decades ago and stopped getting in the way of nuclear research and nuclear power development. Only now that the situation is starting to get desperate are they saying "oops, my bad". They still won't admit they were needlessly fear-mongering for years.
The comparison here is how much of anything it takes to make $1160. That's the unit, everything else is variable. If the reader doesn't understand that, I don't think that counts as psychological games, just ignorance
Part of the unit is what the thing is. Since an album consists of tracks the right thing to do is normalize everything on either tracks or albums, using a value of average tracks per album to convert between the two. I can make some amounts look much bigger in comparison to other amounts simply by using a different unit of measurement.
For example, suppose I say that you need to sell 2,000 jelly beans or 5 pounds of jelly beans. Those two numbers reflect approximately the same amount of jelly beans but it creates the possibility of one measurement sounding much larger than the other. In order for you to figure out a proper relationship you have to go out of your way to do the conversion yourself, something that is a barrier to the reader for quick and easy comprehension.
Changing the units in a comparison is a common trick to confuse the reader. Yes, everyone should be savvy enough to see through that trick but even highly-intelligent people often fail to catch on to it. Perhaps the author didn't intend to deceive but the fact remains that any good comparison uses the same units for all of the examples in order to be as clear as possible.
I thought the plot was about being true to yourself.
Same thing as I said, really! ;-)
TFA says one advantage of this laser is that, because the wavelength is adjustable, you could theoretically compensate for the atmosphere by picking a wavelength to which the atmosphere is mostly trasnparent.
Well, it certainly helps but (speaking as an instrumental chemist here) no matter what wavelength you choose there will always be some absorption and scattering in the atmosphere . There's also beam spread which can be improved through better optics but can't be completely eliminated. All of those factors are dependent on distance and will serve to reduce laser illuminance.
Greater distances also affect the aim of the beam since what you really control is the angle of the beam. Simple trigonometry will show you that more distance means less control and thus the likelihood increases that you won't be able to get the beam concentrated on a critical spot for a decent amount of time.
So, you generally want to have a beam energy far above what it would take to make a kill under optimal conditions. You can always build the beam to reduce the length of the bursts or to output a lower energy level if you don't need the extra energy.
If you are shooting to make minimum wage and you have to sell 147/month (or more since you say they make less), you might want to press more than 100 at a time
Right, if you click through to the original article that has the data for that chart you'll see that they are basing that on making 1,000 at a time for nearly $2,000. This is something that is highly unlikely for a newer artist since that's a huge initial investment, especially after you add in all the other costs involved in producing an album. A lot of the artists that I know truly fall into the "starving artist" category! My point is that the great profits they list for producing, making, and selling your own CDs are really a best-case scenario, not something you should base a business on. You almost always want to base a business on a worst-case scenario, anything past that is gravy.
Secondly, they put single track sales on the same chart as whole album sales. This is comparing apples to oranges. In order to convert the two you'd have to at least multiply the track price by the average tracks per album. On iTunes, at least, the assumption is that there will be at least 10 tracks per album - if you look at the chart this means that the track download approximately matches the album download.
I don't really see what you are saying here. The chart says you have to sell a certain number of whole albums (with any number of tracks), or you have to sell a certain number of individual tracks.
By listing both in the same chart it can create the illusion that album sales are so much better than track sales. In any comparison you should make all the compared items have the same base units so that you aren't playing psychological games with the reader. Either make it all album sales or all track sales, then the comparisons are easier to see.
Over 20 comments before someone mentions Real Genius? This was like the plot of the movie itself.
I thought the plot was about nerds getting laid! The laser part was just a way to move the plot along...
Naval artillery and missiles can shoot over the horizon. Lasers have to be in line of sight.
True, which is why you make them orbital lasers.
Even better is if you make them orbital mind-control lasers!
Who needs to burn through 20 feet of steel? Or even 2 feet of steel?
Remember that laser illuminance falls off quite rapidly with distance, especially in humid or dusty conditions. Having the power to burn through 20 feet of steel in perfect conditions at a relatively close range means you'll probably be able to still knock down that missile that's miles away in bad conditions.
There's also the factor of being able to keep the laser in one spot long enough to do damage. 1 second is a very long time to keep a beam in one spot so you need enough power that even a fraction of a second can do considerable damage.
Or even sensitive. Lol, I don't know why I even bother to preview when I miss simple stuff like that...
"stop the nonsensitive" eh?
I disagree, I think we have to stop the overly-sensative!
that's what artists say subscription services are doing to the music industry
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music-artists-earn-online/
That link really misrepresents the state of the industry.
First of all, most artists who create their own CDs don't make anywhere near $8 per CD. Having a CD produced varies greatly but the less you produce the more it costs per CD. Many artists go for short runs when they are starting out but they still have to shell out a couple of hundred bucks for 100 CDs. There are also the studio, production, and marketing costs which may or may not be present depending on the individual artist and the desired quality of the final product.
Now, if they sell a good chunk of those CDs they'll make decent money but many of them struggle to sell even a couple of dozen when they are starting out and they often sell them at far less than $9.99 because their goal is getting their music heard, not making money. So saying they make $8 on a $9.99 sale just does not reflect reality.
Secondly, they put single track sales on the same chart as whole album sales. This is comparing apples to oranges. In order to convert the two you'd have to at least multiply the track price by the average tracks per album. On iTunes, at least, the assumption is that there will be at least 10 tracks per album - if you look at the chart this means that the track download approximately matches the album download.
Lastly, the figures for album download and track download represent what might be a typical deal for an artist with a major label but the fact is there are a lot of independent labels out there that are little more than a group of artists who formed a label for the purpose of selling songs in marketplaces like iTunes. These independent labels take little, if anything from the artist so the artist ends up making close to 30% from a sale.
This means that on a $9.99 album the artist would make close to $3. If you look on the chart that would place selling an album through iTunes well above the $1.00 they would get from selling a retail album CD (high end royalty deal). At those rates they would have to sell approximately 390 albums a month through iTunes in order to make minimum wage, far better than most of the other methods in the article.
Basically that article follows the old saying, "There are lies, damn lies, and statistics." Yes, streaming music does make an artist less per unit than other sales and, yes, if you do everything yourself you can get a larger cut. What it ignores are the gains you get from taking a smaller cut but joining a larger distribution model that gets your music out there and listened to.
if they get ahold of my Laptop, I fully expect the thief to be able to get a windows login, and even a admin account up, but he isn't going to get my web/banking passwords from mozilla.
And that's exactly what is happening here. The only thing that they can get is stuff like network credentials which need to be active in order for the phone to get data while it is locked by the user. User data, including most of the application data associated with the user and the user's own personal keychain, is still secure.
Click through the article to the actual description of the method and you'll see exactly what kind of data is exposed.
Is it a security hole? Yes, it is but not in the way that many people think. It's more of a hazard to corporate users where someone might be able to use this kind of information to get on an internal network. There are ways to harden networks against these sort of threats and most big corporations have these kinds of protections in place.
Nettalk adds Apple's network file sharing protocol to your iPhone, making it much easier to transfer files to/from the phone instead of having to rely on iTunes. It effectively turns your iPhone into a large thumb drive.
There's apps in the app store that do this, it's not prohibited. For example, try Air Sharing.
There are no off the shelf solutions for that on the ipad. Were you talking about hiring interns to do that manually, by hand?
How do they do it before the iPad came around? They either had interns do it manually or they had a program that does it for them, then they printed the result and handed out the copies. Now with the iPad they generate a document and hand it out to people to display on the iPad. It's about the same really.
"secure the data" seems a wee bit optimistic. What, does it use the front facing camera that doesn't exist to do image analysis to blank the screen when the ipad cam that doesn't exist sees what looks like a camera lens taking pics of the screen?
The data is as secure as paper in that aspect. Even more secure, actually, since the iPad can be locked and erased remotely when stolen, unlike paper...
Assuming you can view PowerPoint on an iPad.
There's at least one iOS app that can view PowerPoint:
Keynote
This article reminded me of the classic 1970s Xerox ad. But what would they do in weather like that?
Obligatory:
iPad waterproof cases.
I doubt it would be the money but the sunlight readable display is probably the most important feature they seem to be glossing over.
Actually they are very concerned with people using binoculars and other means of viewing the playbooks remotely so they often use some form of cover to shade it from prying eyes. This would also work to shade from the sun, making a sunlight-readable display less of a concern.