Oh, I don't know about that. I'm not sure that the "average joe" would really care too much whether the programming was cutting-edge science or stuff that was simply new to them. I think there are much bigger obstacles that a channel like this would face.
But would it work? Most of American knows nothing about science. They are far more likely to be entertained and interested in psychics, the paranormal, and well, science-esque stories that they can understand.
I think this is an important point. One of the things that keeps people from being interested in science is the "high barriers to entry". I'm not saying that the average person is too dumb to understand science -- not at all. The problem is that all too often science is described in scientific jargon. In order to explain what cutting-edge research is about, you usually have to "fill the viewer in" on backround material first. Consider Brian Greene's "The Elegant Universe" book. The first few chapters have nothing to do with string theory -- it's basically a primer on relativity and quantum mechanics. Given the popularity of that book, one could argue that people are, indeed, willing to struggle through introductory material to get "to the good stuff." However, I would argue that (a) people are much more tolerant of that type of slow beginning when reading a book than they are when watching the TV and (b) high book sales are no indication of how many of those book purchasers ACTUALLY FINISHED READING THE BOOK!
I'd love to see a cable science channel as is being discussed. However, unless you're going to stock this channel full of shows narrated by people like Richard Feynman, who could explain difficult concepts in everyday language, I think this would fall flat on its face. And there aren't too many Feynman-types around who would be willing to make the kind of commitment this channel would require.
Honestly, TV is often called the boob tube and I think that's for good reason. It's very difficult to go into any kind of very meaningful discussion about difficult topics in this media. That goes not only for science but for current events as well. A lot of the problem is due to commericals interrupting the flow of information and I realize that what's being proposed here is a non-commerical channel. However, I think after a hard day of work most people aren't going to want to struggle through science.
Still, what other game you know depicts Baron Harkonnen as a smiley face?
Yo, peep this: Evil Otto from Berzerk was nothing more than a smiley face and he was one bad ass dope motherfucker that had no problems going all Jet Li down on your punk human ass! You best be showing them smiley face dudes a little more respect, bro.
..."was to be an action/adventure style game similar to Atari's classic Adventure"...
Considering that the dragon looked an awful lot like a chicken in Adventure, I'd hate to think how those Dune worms would have ended up...
Many of the most successful technology companies were not the first in their markets, but successful followers which learned from the mistakes of earlier trailblazers.
To take the most obvious example, Microsoft was not the first software company, the first OS vendor, or the first productivity software vendor.
You get the idea. More often, the long-term winners are the companies with the willingness to adopt good ideas from other places, and the flexibility to learn from the mistakes of the pioneers. Making mistakes can be very expensive, and being able to avoid certain mistakes can be a competitive advantage.
So what you're saying is that Microsoft's prominence in the world today has nothing to do with their illegal business practices. Okay, got it. Thanks for setting me straight.
Man, you got a lotta guts coming here and saying that Microsoft is the model we all ought to be following...
Who's Camen? It was Steve Jobs who thought cities would be designed (not redesigned) for this thing.
Okay, okay. I guess I got Kamen's name wrong. Sorry. As for who made that statement, refer to my response to DaHat below. You all seem to enjoy nitpicking my comments to death, however, I'm the only one providing a reference link to the statement in question. Maybe you two can come up with references backing up your claims, I don't know. I don't think you and DaHat have the right to treat me like this. It's not like I'm saying something blatantly false.
Kamen never said cities would be designed around the Segway, that was Jeff Bezos, of Amazon.
Please get your facts straight.
You got to love this. Here, DaHat tells me that Bezos made that claim. In the comment directly above, autopr0n claims it was Steve Jobs. Tell you what, guys, since this archived article from the New York Times credits that statement to Kamen, I'm gonna go with them. DaHat, since you are the one who is making a big stink about getting "facts straight", how about if you do a little looking around on behalf of all three of us and figure out what the answer is?
Actually, I really don't give a flying fuck whether those words came out of Kamen's mouth or not. Honestly, who really cares? Directly or indirectly, Kaman is responsible for the great hype surrounding this toy. You guys took one little thing out of my post and tried to use it to discredit everything else I said.
I know that hindsight is 20-20 but in light of the recent recall a lot of the opinions here seem pretty silly in retrospect.
Despite being able to build my own, I'm still impressed with the Segway(TM) and with the courage it takes to bring such a product to market. Like with cars, it's pretty easy to put together a motor and wheels and make it go. But building a safe, comfortable vehicle requires a huge amount of R&D, and it's very hard to be certain that such a thing is as safe as it can possibly be.
I'm more impressed with the arrogance of Camen, suggesting that entire cities are going to be redesigned because of his yuppie toy, than I am impressed with his courage. And considering that dangers have already been uncovered with batteries are low, I sincerely question how much R&D was sacrificed in order to get this product to market on time. It seems like testing it under low-battery conditions would be one of the first things you oughta test for a vehicle boasting automatic stabilization features.
And when you're the only company doing it, and when the product is cool enough to make good news fodder, you're guaranteed to get massive negative coverage and lawsuits when there are accidents.
Massive negative coverage, huh? If I hadn't been reading slashdot on Friday I would have never heard of this recall. And as far as the product being "cool enough to make good new fodder", let's not kid ourselves. The reason the media went so ape shit about this is because it's easier to report on new trinkets like this than on the growing national debt, even though the latter will likely have a much larger impact on our lives than the former.
This guy oughta edit his page and remove those comments since they look pretty silly nowdays.
haw-haw-haw! Classic that one! Gee did you think up the sheep jokes all by yourself? Let me guess, you are from Australia right? It's obvious...
I've never stepped foot on the asian continent. I happen to have a good friend who's a kiwi and he never seems to go ape-shit over the sheep jokes. Just relax. So you guys have a lot of sheep. So what? We've got Ashcroft. Every country has got to have something that the rest of the world can laugh at.
Man, think of the possibilities. You've seen Neo fight 100 Agent Smiths simultaneously now watch him do battle against 50 billion sheep! Burly brawl, make way for Wooly brawl!
I pity the fool who would have to digitially add sunglasses to each one of those little dudes...
I've always wondered whethere there is any evidence that the various methodologies bandied about as the greatest thing (such as Taguchi, QFM, TRIZ and the like) really do work. Does anyone have any links that point to an objective analysis of these approaches and what, if any, measurable benefit they can provide?
Thanks for any help. I have an intro book on TRIZ and while it sounds kind of interesting, I'd like more evidence that these new-age approaches really are an improvement over standard brainstorming before taking the plunge.
Does KaZaA really have the financial resources to launch a successful legal attack on the RIAA? I mean, the media conglomerates are rolling in dough. I've never really understood KaZaA's business model and find it hard to believe that they stand a chance. Regardless of merit, the RIAA have got to have some killer lawyers.
Much as I'd like to see KaZaA fight back, I just don't see this being a fair fight. I suspect KaZaA will withdraw their legal challenge pretty soon.
Maybe I'm hanging out with the wrong crowd but I've never heard anyone proclaim "Old people play video games", "Games will revolutionize education", or "Games are a social activity". In fact I've typically heard people say the exact opposite ("videogames are for kids", "games are mindless entertainment that get in the way of education", and "games are for social misfit loners").
I grew up in a fairly progressive midwestern city and they tried something similar. They wanted to encourage people to use public transportation to go down to the center of town. That's where the state capital was and also the university (which had a student population of 35K-40K). To "encourage" everyone to take the bus downtown, they severely limited parking and made State Street a no-car street (buses, bikes and cops were the only things that could go down it).
Anyhow, even with these measures, people never learned to ride the bus. They refused to carpool. They continued to drive downtown. Parking was a nightmare. Eventually the city had to cave in and build parking structures down there because things were getting out of hand. Of course, since the downtown had originally been designed to avoid parking structures, adding them in after the fact was difficult, time consuming and expensive. But the voters demanded it.
I don't mean to rag on you Parsec, but I think your ideas of encouraging transportation habits by engineering are naive.
Because they are built for people who care about fuel efficiency, performance and the environment. Not those fuckin' yuppies who use their car as a status symbol and want something pretty to show off to their neighbors, coworkers, and friends.
My guess is that they're using the new MPEG-7 standard, which includes metatags to describe what's in the image, movie, or audio clip. These are user-entered metatags, so your quality of search may vary.
Oh great. Anyone who has used KaZaA can vouche for the wonderful accuracy of user-supplied keywords.
I suspect you're correct that the new search will parse some content description fields of images but how does that help someone search for the billions of JPEG, PNG and GIF images out there that don't have these descriptors? This so-called "news article" makes it sound like Microsoft is creating some magically search engine that will enable users to sort through the enormous number of imagery out there.
"If you have to struggle through looking for things in hundreds of different places, it's just going to be intolerable," said Susan Dumais, a Microsoft senior researcher...
Yeah, that's just terrible to expect people to go to some kind of effort to find information. Hey Einstein: that's why it's called "research". If you want to find information, you're always going to have to do some work.
The new version of Microsoft's MSN Internet service, available this winter, will include a tool for retrieving digital photos based on images in the pictures. For example, users can ask their computers to retrieve all pictures that include a specific person's face or background.
I'm guessing that the article author really screwed up something here. I can't imagine any kind of software that is going to automagically determine the identity of people in the background of a picture. Does anyone know what the hell this search engine really does?
Slashdot should be more responsible than to post links to personal sites with low bandwidth quotas.
This is the dumbest thing I've heard here in awhile. Typically, the sites that have high bandwidth quotas are the already-popular, mainstream crap that I am inundated with from every other source. One of the reasons I come here to slashdot is to discover some little-known, alternative-viewpoint material on the web. They typically do not have large bandwidth quotas because, let's face it, they languish in obscurity. Calling for slashdot to only post links to high-bandwidth-capable sites is pretty much the same as calling for slashdot to only post links to mainstream, popular crap. What kind of geek are you? If the site is down for now, just check back in a few days. Hell, check back tonight. It's not like most of us are going to be doing anything else on a Friday night anyhow!
Engineers from the Union of Concerned Scientists have unveiled blueprints for a "safer, more fuel efficient" SUV using "off-the-shelf technology".
I didn't RTFA but I'm going to take a wild guess here that "safer" refers to improving the protection to the driver and not minimizing the damage/destruction/injury/death done to the poor, hapless soul who gets rammed by one of these overpowered vehicles when driven by a soccer-mom or yuppie chattering away on their cell phone.
But it's not because the GNU flavor does not implement the de-facto standard DEC extensions to the language that give it dynamic memory allocation, pointers, and data structures. Without these Fortran 77 is indeed barbaric, but with them it is quite pleasant to work with.
You can mock Fortran 77 all you want but the "barbaric" striped-down version can be highly optimized. And for a lot of the legacy scientific code out there, you just don't need dynamic memory allocations, etc. If you really do need all these fancy, modern features, why the hell are you using Fortran 77? Fortran 77 is a simple yet highly effective, stripped-down language that is appropriate for a limited number of applications. But it does those applications really damn well. Don't blame Fortran 77 if you're trying to use the wrong tool for the job.
Pet Peeve #843287: SUV drivers that whine about the price of gas. You bought that overpriced penis extension, learn to live with the consequences.
It should be noted that many SUV drivers are women. In that case it becomes a clit extension. I know that concept seems alien to many. I direct your attention to the clitdik series of videos on this page for a demonstration of this phenomenonm.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I don't know about that. I'm not sure that the "average joe" would really care too much whether the programming was cutting-edge science or stuff that was simply new to them. I think there are much bigger obstacles that a channel like this would face.
Just my two cents
GMD
But would it work? Most of American knows nothing about science. They are far more likely to be entertained and interested in psychics, the paranormal, and well, science-esque stories that they can understand.
I think this is an important point. One of the things that keeps people from being interested in science is the "high barriers to entry". I'm not saying that the average person is too dumb to understand science -- not at all. The problem is that all too often science is described in scientific jargon. In order to explain what cutting-edge research is about, you usually have to "fill the viewer in" on backround material first. Consider Brian Greene's "The Elegant Universe" book. The first few chapters have nothing to do with string theory -- it's basically a primer on relativity and quantum mechanics. Given the popularity of that book, one could argue that people are, indeed, willing to struggle through introductory material to get "to the good stuff." However, I would argue that (a) people are much more tolerant of that type of slow beginning when reading a book than they are when watching the TV and (b) high book sales are no indication of how many of those book purchasers ACTUALLY FINISHED READING THE BOOK!
I'd love to see a cable science channel as is being discussed. However, unless you're going to stock this channel full of shows narrated by people like Richard Feynman, who could explain difficult concepts in everyday language, I think this would fall flat on its face. And there aren't too many Feynman-types around who would be willing to make the kind of commitment this channel would require.
Honestly, TV is often called the boob tube and I think that's for good reason. It's very difficult to go into any kind of very meaningful discussion about difficult topics in this media. That goes not only for science but for current events as well. A lot of the problem is due to commericals interrupting the flow of information and I realize that what's being proposed here is a non-commerical channel. However, I think after a hard day of work most people aren't going to want to struggle through science.
GMD
Does anyone know why the protein was named after Sonic? The linked article doesn't really give any indication why that name was picked.
GMD
Still, what other game you know depicts Baron Harkonnen as a smiley face?
Yo, peep this: Evil Otto from Berzerk was nothing more than a smiley face and he was one bad ass dope motherfucker that had no problems going all Jet Li down on your punk human ass! You best be showing them smiley face dudes a little more respect, bro.
Considering that the dragon looked an awful lot like a chicken in Adventure, I'd hate to think how those Dune worms would have ended up...
GMD
Many of the most successful technology companies were not the first in their markets, but successful followers which learned from the mistakes of earlier trailblazers.
To take the most obvious example, Microsoft was not the first software company, the first OS vendor, or the first productivity software vendor.
You get the idea. More often, the long-term winners are the companies with the willingness to adopt good ideas from other places, and the flexibility to learn from the mistakes of the pioneers. Making mistakes can be very expensive, and being able to avoid certain mistakes can be a competitive advantage.
So what you're saying is that Microsoft's prominence in the world today has nothing to do with their illegal business practices. Okay, got it. Thanks for setting me straight.
Man, you got a lotta guts coming here and saying that Microsoft is the model we all ought to be following...
GMD
Who's Camen? It was Steve Jobs who thought cities would be designed (not redesigned) for this thing.
Okay, okay. I guess I got Kamen's name wrong. Sorry. As for who made that statement, refer to my response to DaHat below. You all seem to enjoy nitpicking my comments to death, however, I'm the only one providing a reference link to the statement in question. Maybe you two can come up with references backing up your claims, I don't know. I don't think you and DaHat have the right to treat me like this. It's not like I'm saying something blatantly false.
GMD
Kamen never said cities would be designed around the Segway, that was Jeff Bezos, of Amazon.
Please get your facts straight.
You got to love this. Here, DaHat tells me that Bezos made that claim. In the comment directly above, autopr0n claims it was Steve Jobs. Tell you what, guys, since this archived article from the New York Times credits that statement to Kamen, I'm gonna go with them. DaHat, since you are the one who is making a big stink about getting "facts straight", how about if you do a little looking around on behalf of all three of us and figure out what the answer is?
Actually, I really don't give a flying fuck whether those words came out of Kamen's mouth or not. Honestly, who really cares? Directly or indirectly, Kaman is responsible for the great hype surrounding this toy. You guys took one little thing out of my post and tried to use it to discredit everything else I said.
GMD
I know that hindsight is 20-20 but in light of the recent recall a lot of the opinions here seem pretty silly in retrospect.
Despite being able to build my own, I'm still impressed with the Segway(TM) and with the courage it takes to bring such a product to market. Like with cars, it's pretty easy to put together a motor and wheels and make it go. But building a safe, comfortable vehicle requires a huge amount of R&D, and it's very hard to be certain that such a thing is as safe as it can possibly be.
I'm more impressed with the arrogance of Camen, suggesting that entire cities are going to be redesigned because of his yuppie toy, than I am impressed with his courage. And considering that dangers have already been uncovered with batteries are low, I sincerely question how much R&D was sacrificed in order to get this product to market on time. It seems like testing it under low-battery conditions would be one of the first things you oughta test for a vehicle boasting automatic stabilization features.
And when you're the only company doing it, and when the product is cool enough to make good news fodder, you're guaranteed to get massive negative coverage and lawsuits when there are accidents.
Massive negative coverage, huh? If I hadn't been reading slashdot on Friday I would have never heard of this recall. And as far as the product being "cool enough to make good new fodder", let's not kid ourselves. The reason the media went so ape shit about this is because it's easier to report on new trinkets like this than on the growing national debt, even though the latter will likely have a much larger impact on our lives than the former.
This guy oughta edit his page and remove those comments since they look pretty silly nowdays.
GMD
haw-haw-haw! Classic that one! Gee did you think up the sheep jokes all by yourself? Let me guess, you are from Australia right? It's obvious...
I've never stepped foot on the asian continent. I happen to have a good friend who's a kiwi and he never seems to go ape-shit over the sheep jokes. Just relax. So you guys have a lot of sheep. So what? We've got Ashcroft. Every country has got to have something that the rest of the world can laugh at.
GMD
Also, aren't they infringing on WB's copyright?
I dunno but when I first saw the big Plutoian Shore Productions logo come up I screamed in terror because I thought it said "Pauly Shore Productions"!
Now that would have sucked, my friends.
GMD
Man, think of the possibilities. You've seen Neo fight 100 Agent Smiths simultaneously now watch him do battle against 50 billion sheep! Burly brawl, make way for Wooly brawl!
I pity the fool who would have to digitially add sunglasses to each one of those little dudes...
GMD
I've also managed to watch Enterprise about 6 hours before it airs- and I can skip the #$@!ing annoying theme song.
Not to mention all those boring non-T'Pol scenes! :)
GMD
I've always wondered whethere there is any evidence that the various methodologies bandied about as the greatest thing (such as Taguchi, QFM, TRIZ and the like) really do work. Does anyone have any links that point to an objective analysis of these approaches and what, if any, measurable benefit they can provide?
Thanks for any help. I have an intro book on TRIZ and while it sounds kind of interesting, I'd like more evidence that these new-age approaches really are an improvement over standard brainstorming before taking the plunge.
GMD
Does KaZaA really have the financial resources to launch a successful legal attack on the RIAA? I mean, the media conglomerates are rolling in dough. I've never really understood KaZaA's business model and find it hard to believe that they stand a chance. Regardless of merit, the RIAA have got to have some killer lawyers.
Much as I'd like to see KaZaA fight back, I just don't see this being a fair fight. I suspect KaZaA will withdraw their legal challenge pretty soon.
GMD
Maybe I'm hanging out with the wrong crowd but I've never heard anyone proclaim "Old people play video games", "Games will revolutionize education", or "Games are a social activity". In fact I've typically heard people say the exact opposite ("videogames are for kids", "games are mindless entertainment that get in the way of education", and "games are for social misfit loners").
GMD
You are correct, Sir. I was indeed talking about Madison, Wisconsin.
I grew up in a fairly progressive midwestern city and they tried something similar. They wanted to encourage people to use public transportation to go down to the center of town. That's where the state capital was and also the university (which had a student population of 35K-40K). To "encourage" everyone to take the bus downtown, they severely limited parking and made State Street a no-car street (buses, bikes and cops were the only things that could go down it).
Anyhow, even with these measures, people never learned to ride the bus. They refused to carpool. They continued to drive downtown. Parking was a nightmare. Eventually the city had to cave in and build parking structures down there because things were getting out of hand. Of course, since the downtown had originally been designed to avoid parking structures, adding them in after the fact was difficult, time consuming and expensive. But the voters demanded it.
I don't mean to rag on you Parsec, but I think your ideas of encouraging transportation habits by engineering are naive.
GMD
Why are electric cars always so damned ugly?
Because they are built for people who care about fuel efficiency, performance and the environment. Not those fuckin' yuppies who use their car as a status symbol and want something pretty to show off to their neighbors, coworkers, and friends.
My guess is that they're using the new MPEG-7 standard, which includes metatags to describe what's in the image, movie, or audio clip. These are user-entered metatags, so your quality of search may vary.
Oh great. Anyone who has used KaZaA can vouche for the wonderful accuracy of user-supplied keywords.
I suspect you're correct that the new search will parse some content description fields of images but how does that help someone search for the billions of JPEG, PNG and GIF images out there that don't have these descriptors? This so-called "news article" makes it sound like Microsoft is creating some magically search engine that will enable users to sort through the enormous number of imagery out there.
GMD
"If you have to struggle through looking for things in hundreds of different places, it's just going to be intolerable," said Susan Dumais, a Microsoft senior researcher ...
Yeah, that's just terrible to expect people to go to some kind of effort to find information. Hey Einstein: that's why it's called "research". If you want to find information, you're always going to have to do some work.
The new version of Microsoft's MSN Internet service, available this winter, will include a tool for retrieving digital photos based on images in the pictures. For example, users can ask their computers to retrieve all pictures that include a specific person's face or background.
I'm guessing that the article author really screwed up something here. I can't imagine any kind of software that is going to automagically determine the identity of people in the background of a picture. Does anyone know what the hell this search engine really does?
GMD
On the molten, volcanic world of Sigma Vulcanus, Anakin Skywalker, a handsome, swarthy man with a dignified stature, makes an important discovery.
Wow. What a picture-perfect description of Hayden Christenson...
Now if the script described Anakin as a punk-ass little pretty-boy shithead with a dippy smile, I'd be more inclined to believe this "script" :)
GMD
Slashdot should be more responsible than to post links to personal sites with low bandwidth quotas.
This is the dumbest thing I've heard here in awhile. Typically, the sites that have high bandwidth quotas are the already-popular, mainstream crap that I am inundated with from every other source. One of the reasons I come here to slashdot is to discover some little-known, alternative-viewpoint material on the web. They typically do not have large bandwidth quotas because, let's face it, they languish in obscurity. Calling for slashdot to only post links to high-bandwidth-capable sites is pretty much the same as calling for slashdot to only post links to mainstream, popular crap. What kind of geek are you? If the site is down for now, just check back in a few days. Hell, check back tonight. It's not like most of us are going to be doing anything else on a Friday night anyhow!
Now I see why I you are already on my Foes list.
GMD
Engineers from the Union of Concerned Scientists have unveiled blueprints for a "safer, more fuel efficient" SUV using "off-the-shelf technology".
I didn't RTFA but I'm going to take a wild guess here that "safer" refers to improving the protection to the driver and not minimizing the damage/destruction/injury/death done to the poor, hapless soul who gets rammed by one of these overpowered vehicles when driven by a soccer-mom or yuppie chattering away on their cell phone.
GMD
But it's not because the GNU flavor does not implement the de-facto standard DEC extensions to the language that give it dynamic memory allocation, pointers, and data structures. Without these Fortran 77 is indeed barbaric, but with them it is quite pleasant to work with.
You can mock Fortran 77 all you want but the "barbaric" striped-down version can be highly optimized. And for a lot of the legacy scientific code out there, you just don't need dynamic memory allocations, etc. If you really do need all these fancy, modern features, why the hell are you using Fortran 77? Fortran 77 is a simple yet highly effective, stripped-down language that is appropriate for a limited number of applications. But it does those applications really damn well. Don't blame Fortran 77 if you're trying to use the wrong tool for the job.
GMD
Pet Peeve #843287: SUV drivers that whine about the price of gas. You bought that overpriced penis extension, learn to live with the consequences.
It should be noted that many SUV drivers are women. In that case it becomes a clit extension. I know that concept seems alien to many. I direct your attention to the clitdik series of videos on this page for a demonstration of this phenomenonm.
GMD