A movie which, simply by virtue of having the Vincent D'Onofrio character ask the question "if what you're telling me is that everything my senses have told me is real for my entire life up until this point is all a lie, then why should I believe anything that they're tell me right now?", smacks the Matrix "philosophy franchise" right out of the park.
('Course, simply by having Vincent D'Onofrio and not Keanu Reeves, they're off to a major head-start)
Sorry to disappoint you, but the mean average of "imperceptible" and "very annoying" is meaningless, regardless of whether you encode them as "imperceptible=5, very annoying=1" or "imperceptible=0, very annoying=100" or anything else.
And "if you can or cannot tell an encoded audio file from the original" is NOT an "objective thing you can say."
The blindness of the test doesn't excuse the fact that the collected data is subjective in nature, qualitative in kind, and that the conditions under which the "tests" are "performed" are not controlled.
If you're still having trouble understanding this, ask all your friends in which state they were born (or country), then average them all together. You'll have to choose how to assign numbers to the states and countries, but no matter what assignment you choose (and none of the options is inherently better than the others), the mean you get doesn't reflect any kind of "average state or country of birth" because the original data is not numerical in nature.
You can't make opinions into real numbers, grasshopper.
"We've done statistical operations on non-quantitative data."
...uh, I guess I could go on, but that fact alone kills this before it even starts. When are people gonna learn? When the hell are people gonna learn? It doesn't matter how you "encode" or "enumerate" it, quantitative operations done to non-quantitative data have NO MEANING.NONE.
@!#%$%#@ it. I suffered through three semesters of Stats in college, and the acid-reflux flare-up I get reading this kind of "test result" is the burden I bear for it.
Here's my general advice on selecting any kind of imaging equipment -- be it scanner, digital camera, or webcam -- don't do your research on "computer" web sites (and I would include/. in this camp). Do it on photography web sites.
Well, video web sites would probably be good too, I'm just a still image person, so I haven't spent much time looking into video.
You should be concerned with quality when it comes to imagining equipment, and the best judges of image quality are those people whose livlihood depends on it. You'll never see a discussion of a scanner's dynamic range on a computer hardware site.
And you get the beneficial side-effect that a review from non-"hardcore"-tech folks will actually reflect some casual usability, not some hardware junkie's first impressions. Let the end-user be the judge of usability, after all.
A while back I did my own searching around on this webcam question, and the best camera out there was the Kodak DVC325 -- and luckily it was cheap, too. (Actually, the BEST camera was the 3Com Homeconnect, but it had been discontinued).
Well, I for one have neither time nor a contract, but I'm so interested in bitrate peeling that I'm hereby willing to donate the name BitWhittler to the first program that gets off the ground and produces some working code.
I don't think that that name has been taken by anything else, so I think I made it up. In the Intellectual Property Era, that should be worth a serious tax deduction, too, right?
Naturally, I get all pumped about this idea, thinking who I know in my town to start asking about this, then low and behold I see the next-to-last section:
officials in Abilene, Texas, asked the Federal Communications Commission to let them wire their own broadband network despite a 1995 Texas law banning municipal telecoms.
But the FCC agreed with phone and cable companies... The agency declined to overrule Texas.
Which just happens to be where I live. Of course; an exciting new broadband prospect pops up, and I live in town center of the test case that prevents it.
The company's name is Semiconductor Energy Laboratory Ltd., and it's unlisted? Why, did they think investors would be put off from purchasing a stock whose ticker symbol was SELL?
...and that's just for a body, no lens. I can get a Nikon F100, the professional Nikon film camera, for half that.
Bah! Lenses? I shoot with my tried-and-true pinhole camera! Show me a digital OR a film SLR that can give you infinite depth of field, or stop down to f/232! Real men don't need lenses!
Pre-Night Court, Harry Anderson was a professional magician. Still is, I guess, but I bring it up to recommend his book Games You Can't Lose (B&N). He covers a lot, and with great style, including Blackjack strategy and winning legally at Craps, including the really good bets that they don't mark on the tables.
Plus, for all those hotshots out there who think it's cool to get tossed out of a casino, Anderson was banned from playing cards anywhere in the state of Nevada. Tells the story in the book....
Well, alright, the last couple I didn't find at the library sale, but I was caught up in that UL. Anyway, there is some heavy stuff and some light stuff in there, some stuff I've been wanting to read for a while, and some stuff that just lept off the table at me. But the point I wanted to bring up is what a great place a library sale is to pick up an ecclectic stack of reading material. I paid like five bucks for everything I got, and what the hey, the library benefits.
The big deal? The big deal is extortion.
on
Debian And WineX
·
· Score: 2
I for one rarely if ever give a crap about playing Windows games under Linux, but this is a big deal to me because the CEO is making a [public, no less] threat to try and control what someone else (Debian) does. And what they legally have every right to do.
What inexcusable about this behavior is that it's a strongarm play. You don't have to use any flavor of WINE to see that, and you don't have to contribute any code for it to affect you.
Extortion is wrong, period, regardless of the context and regardless of one's Favorite Approved Licenses.
You know, I for one would just be happy if you guys would release an update to the Gaming Edition to 8.2. It's getting pretty long in the tooth in terms of everything non-Sims that you get for the sticker price.
Our favorite long-distance carrier Sprint started out as Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Network Telecommunications -- stringing the lines that ran next to SP rails; which soon became a major source of revenue as other companies wanted to rent them out since the infrastructure was so good.
If only people actually used the comments system on Freshmeat, probably half of the Ask Slashdot's wouldn't be necessary....
You can almost get by with the vitality ratings and such, but even those can be misleading.
So many of the SourceForge projects are stillborn or abandonware that a single "is this project still alive" post to the forums will push the vitality up to 38%.
I don't know why the comments system on Freshmeat is so inactive... perhaps it's the site membership requirement? Perhaps it's the lack of a "# Comments" notice on the main page? At least you know when you see a FM announcement that something is happening with a project, but the user-real-life-experience stories are invaluable; that's why this kind of Ask Slashdot question is so popular.
Sorry for being more than a little off topic, but I really do think the community's missing out in this area.... There's an FM/AskSD disconnect here, and I just wanted to brainstorm on it for a second.
This reminds me of something cool you get for free with Common Lisp: arbitrary precision integers. Very nice treat for discrete or algebraic problems.
A couple of years ago at the ACM collegiate programming contest, one of the problems was to write a program which would return the ones-place digit of n! for any n between, like 1 and 10,000 (or something huge like that). One of our guys came up with a solution, but afterwards our professor reminded us that we could have just generated the list with a simple CL program, slapped it into a lookup table, and had a constant-time solution to the problem. That would have impressed the judges....
What's expensive? You ought to have a half-dozen industrial-strength RDBMS's shipped for free with your linux distribution. Or do you mean time? Even entering the data by hand into a RDBMS is better than doing it with flat files; at worst you'd spend the same amount of time, but gain all the benefits of the database searching and subselecting for you.
Besides, the guy said he takes a dozen pictures a day, which even for a few keys is well out of hand over the course of a year. Even one key each is 4380 pictures.
And it seemed to me like the whole essence of his question was how to move up from the quick-and-dirty to something nicer like the Mac (iPhoto) and Windows (iMatch or whatever he mentioned) users have available to them.
Nate
PS - Oh crud, I just realized I forgot to list one option in my other post about real programs: Photodex, Inc. makes a commercial image-management program called Compupic. You can check it out at www.photodex.com.
A couple of distributions do include the free version on their "supplemental" CD's, but I heard about it because we use it where I work (where last week I spent fifteen hours cataloging and searching photo databases that stretch back 25 years and have dozens of keys per image, which is why I'm so bitter about this issue today....).
I'd be a little wary of the free Linux version; it's clearly the red-headed-stepchild of their prodcut family, and the supported Windows version I have to use is a pain enough.
Slashdot Mirror
Amen, brothers. And/or The Thirteenth Floor.
A movie which, simply by virtue of having the Vincent D'Onofrio character ask the question "if what you're telling me is that everything my senses have told me is real for my entire life up until this point is all a lie, then why should I believe anything that they're tell me right now?", smacks the Matrix "philosophy franchise" right out of the park.
('Course, simply by having Vincent D'Onofrio and not Keanu Reeves, they're off to a major head-start)
Sorry to disappoint you, but the mean average of "imperceptible" and "very annoying" is meaningless, regardless of whether you encode them as "imperceptible=5, very annoying=1" or "imperceptible=0, very annoying=100" or anything else.
And "if you can or cannot tell an encoded audio file from the original" is NOT an "objective thing you can say."
The blindness of the test doesn't excuse the fact that the collected data is subjective in nature, qualitative in kind, and that the conditions under which the "tests" are "performed" are not controlled.
If you're still having trouble understanding this, ask all your friends in which state they were born (or country), then average them all together. You'll have to choose how to assign numbers to the states and countries, but no matter what assignment you choose (and none of the options is inherently better than the others), the mean you get doesn't reflect any kind of "average state or country of birth" because the original data is not numerical in nature.
You can't make opinions into real numbers, grasshopper.
@!#%$%#@ it. I suffered through three semesters of Stats in college, and the acid-reflux flare-up I get reading this kind of "test result" is the burden I bear for it.
Here's my general advice on selecting any kind of imaging equipment -- be it scanner, digital camera, or webcam -- don't do your research on "computer" web sites (and I would include /. in this camp). Do it on photography web sites.
Well, video web sites would probably be good too, I'm just a still image person, so I haven't spent much time looking into video.
You should be concerned with quality when it comes to imagining equipment, and the best judges of image quality are those people whose livlihood depends on it. You'll never see a discussion of a scanner's dynamic range on a computer hardware site.
And you get the beneficial side-effect that a review from non-"hardcore"-tech folks will actually reflect some casual usability, not some hardware junkie's first impressions. Let the end-user be the judge of usability, after all.
A while back I did my own searching around on this webcam question, and the best camera out there was the Kodak DVC325 -- and luckily it was cheap, too. (Actually, the BEST camera was the 3Com Homeconnect, but it had been discontinued).
$0.02,
N
All that remains to be done in physics is the working out of a few physical constants, kids, go study something else with a better long-term outlook.
Well, I for one have neither time nor a contract, but I'm so interested in bitrate peeling that I'm hereby willing to donate the name BitWhittler to the first program that gets off the ground and produces some working code.
I don't think that that name has been taken by anything else, so I think I made it up. In the Intellectual Property Era, that should be worth a serious tax deduction, too, right?
N
Why do I suspect that if the "Cast" listing for this one is correct, then the "Writer" listing is as well....
Which just happens to be where I live. Of course; an exciting new broadband prospect pops up, and I live in town center of the test case that prevents it.
Just my luck.
Maybe if they restructure and come out of bankruptcy they can afford to add a fourth color to their distro artwork.
Nah... what am I saying? Dark purple, light purple and yellow should be enough for anybody.
Overhyped? No way. This new form factor is totally going to replace The Cube.
The company's name is Semiconductor Energy Laboratory Ltd., and it's unlisted? Why, did they think investors would be put off from purchasing a stock whose ticker symbol was SELL?
Bah! Lenses? I shoot with my tried-and-true pinhole camera! Show me a digital OR a film SLR that can give you infinite depth of field, or stop down to f/232! Real men don't need lenses!
N
The new "idiot cameras" are called APS cameras (or Advantix if you're Kodak).
Before them were the "disc cameras" of the... when was it, 80's?
Pre-Night Court, Harry Anderson was a professional magician. Still is, I guess, but I bring it up to recommend his book Games You Can't Lose (B&N). He covers a lot, and with great style, including Blackjack strategy and winning legally at Craps, including the really good bets that they don't mark on the tables.
Plus, for all those hotshots out there who think it's cool to get tossed out of a casino, Anderson was banned from playing cards anywhere in the state of Nevada. Tells the story in the book....
N
Well, alright, the last couple I didn't find at the library sale, but I was caught up in that UL. Anyway, there is some heavy stuff and some light stuff in there, some stuff I've been wanting to read for a while, and some stuff that just lept off the table at me. But the point I wanted to bring up is what a great place a library sale is to pick up an ecclectic stack of reading material. I paid like five bucks for everything I got, and what the hey, the library benefits.
I for one rarely if ever give a crap about playing Windows games under Linux, but this is a big deal to me because the CEO is making a [public, no less] threat to try and control what someone else (Debian) does. And what they legally have every right to do.
What inexcusable about this behavior is that it's a strongarm play. You don't have to use any flavor of WINE to see that, and you don't have to contribute any code for it to affect you.
Extortion is wrong, period, regardless of the context and regardless of one's Favorite Approved Licenses.
You know, I for one would just be happy if you guys would release an update to the Gaming Edition to 8.2. It's getting pretty long in the tooth in terms of everything non-Sims that you get for the sticker price.
Well, that's interesting and all, but when I saw the link copy I must admit I was expecting something more like this: http://www5b.biglobe.ne.jp/~mbsf/sworde.htm
Though I would still dearly love to see a stop-motion recreation rather than stills. You gotta love that smiling Darth Maul figure....
Our favorite long-distance carrier Sprint started out as Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Network Telecommunications -- stringing the lines that ran next to SP rails; which soon became a major source of revenue as other companies wanted to rent them out since the infrastructure was so good.
Pretty odd....
What are your favorite unsung GNOME applications; in particular which ones strike you as clever, original or just plain well-done?
and I just got done accessorizing to the old Universe's dark, mudddy teal.
N
You can almost get by with the vitality ratings and such, but even those can be misleading.
So many of the SourceForge projects are stillborn or abandonware that a single "is this project still alive" post to the forums will push the vitality up to 38%.
I don't know why the comments system on Freshmeat is so inactive... perhaps it's the site membership requirement? Perhaps it's the lack of a "# Comments" notice on the main page? At least you know when you see a FM announcement that something is happening with a project, but the user-real-life-experience stories are invaluable; that's why this kind of Ask Slashdot question is so popular.
Sorry for being more than a little off topic, but I really do think the community's missing out in this area.... There's an FM/AskSD disconnect here, and I just wanted to brainstorm on it for a second.
Yeah yeah, I guess what I meant was "least significant digit" or something like that. I forget how it was actually expressed.
A couple of years ago at the ACM collegiate programming contest, one of the problems was to write a program which would return the ones-place digit of n! for any n between, like 1 and 10,000 (or something huge like that). One of our guys came up with a solution, but afterwards our professor reminded us that we could have just generated the list with a simple CL program, slapped it into a lookup table, and had a constant-time solution to the problem. That would have impressed the judges....
Nate
Besides, the guy said he takes a dozen pictures a day, which even for a few keys is well out of hand over the course of a year. Even one key each is 4380 pictures.
And it seemed to me like the whole essence of his question was how to move up from the quick-and-dirty to something nicer like the Mac (iPhoto) and Windows (iMatch or whatever he mentioned) users have available to them.
Nate
PS - Oh crud, I just realized I forgot to list one option in my other post about real programs: Photodex, Inc. makes a commercial image-management program called Compupic. You can check it out at www.photodex.com.
A couple of distributions do include the free version on their "supplemental" CD's, but I heard about it because we use it where I work (where last week I spent fifteen hours cataloging and searching photo databases that stretch back 25 years and have dozens of keys per image, which is why I'm so bitter about this issue today....).
I'd be a little wary of the free Linux version; it's clearly the red-headed-stepchild of their prodcut family, and the supported Windows version I have to use is a pain enough.