I gather (from other comments in this thread) that the O/S did some of the command/parameter parsing for you, so I'd be inclined to argue that it was part of the O/S.
Now that I think about it, I think you could register your programs with the help system, and help for your program would automatically get included if someone just typed "help".
Yup. The important inner nervy bits (technical term) weren't so much stretchy like elastic, more stretchy like a spring.
TFA - "What the whale has developed is a beautiful system to protect its nerves, to package it in a way, probably in a corkscrew or undulated way, surrounded by elastin fibres"
So we could avoid nerve damage by preemptively replacing our at-risk nerves with stretchy whale nerves, in much the same way we could avoid bone breakage by covering our skeleton with adamantium... or some non-fictional alternative.
I'm basing it on how the similar Cayla doll works. Doll -> Tablet/Phone -> House WiFi -> Internet. Also in TFA it says the parents enable it by "signing into an app". That's most likely something they need to do each time the doll's turned on. Most of the local processing power is likely to be in the App.
It also makes sense from a maintenance point of view. It's a pain to update the doll's firmware, but easy to update mobile apps and server-side software. I doubt if there's any processing going on in the doll at all.
As for security, it's as secure as any other Android app I allow on my phone with "full internet access".
Yes, the professional liars could be lying about "Its listening function is activated only when a button on Barbie's belt buckle is pressed." but battery life will suck if they do it any other way.
Mattel didn't call it the "world's first interactive doll", they called it the "very first fashion doll that has continuous learning". The key words here being "fashion doll", which allows them to differentiate themselves from competitors they don't consider fashionable, and "continuous learning", i.e. the server is keeping a log of previous conversations, and using them to have better conversations.
The Cayla doll for instance was brilliant at answering questions like "What is Polytetrafluoroethylene?", and rubbish at answering questions like "Do you like kittens?" Sadly, it was a rather dull toy for a 7yr old girl, despite looking initially exciting.
What it didn't do, and this Barbie won't be doing, is snooping on us. I'd expect it to use Bluetooth to communicate with an App, which will then be using WiFi to connect to the Mattel server. If you don't have the App turned on, and by the sounds of it, if you don't press the button on the doll, it won't be listening. So if a child is playing with it, don't discuss national secrets, and if a child is not playing with it, there's no snooping.
The online conversation history is interesting, but not worth getting worked up about. It's recording how you've played with it, like all sorts of other online games keep logs.
Sure, there's a potential for abuse - "Hey - you say you like ponies! Did you know Mattel make a Barbie pony that's only $9.99 from your local Wal-Mart?" but I think if they start doing that, the backlash of people not buying their products out of sheer disgust will stop them pretty quickly. I'd say the worst is probably more like "Hey - you say you like ponies! I've got a pony called Muffin" without mentioning that Muffin costs $9.99 from Wal-Mart (or might do if it existed).
It's not clear from the article how helpful this would be in the HRT example they give. The test can generally tell you which direction the causality runs in, but if there is no causation, will this be a clear enough test?
Can they say:
Does A cause B? Probably not.
Does B cause A? Probably not.
So there's probably a C causing A and B.
Blog-based sources, poor grammar, CG images, and dodgy science apart, one of the sources identifies this as a project from SADI - Samsung Art & Design Institute.
http://www.sadi.net/web/eng/home
There's no sign of it (or anything) on their website, but it would make sense.
In the UK I'm stuck with my HTC "Desire Z", AKA the G2. That's the last slider I've seen over here. I see others in the US, but retailers won't ship them to me.
Luckily my phone still works, and does everything I need it to, so I'm really hoping nothing happens to it.
To drift even more off-topic, I used to work on an "Expert System" where BOOLEAN variables had one of FOUR possible values:
YES
NO
DON'T KNOW
DON'T KNOW IF I KNOW OR NOT
It's not quite as daft as it sounds - It populated variables by asking users a question, to which they could answer yes/no/don't know. The fourth value was the case where it hadn't asked the user yet.
So okay, we've got this FTL warpship design, yeah?
We can send a spaceship to the far reaches of the universe...
But we lose Jupiter?
Maybe the environmental lobby will have something to say about that.
Not to mention the practical difficulties of finding another spare Jupiter lying around for the second trip.
I don't see how it helps crack down on forgery at all. It only enables you to identify a piece of paper you have previously had access to in order to scan its fibres. Then, if you encounter the same physical piece of paper again, you can repeat the scan (which takes several passes using the otherwise conventional over-the-counter scanner).
It DOES enable you to identify a leaked document, if it comes back into your hands, but I don't see why you'd opt for paper fibre scanning over some other sort of hidden watermark technology, or even (gasp) printing a unique id on the document.
Anyone wanting to circumvent this technology could do so with a photocopier and a cigarette lighter.
We wanted to go with Richard Branson's outfit - www.virginhealthbank.com, which actually seems cheaper than the examples given in the article.
We've no odd family history, we just thought the potential uses of stem cells in the future might be worth having a stock of them guaranteed not to be rejected.
We had to arrange for an outside contractor to come in to the NHS hospital to collect the samples. The NHS staff wouldn't do it. That means that part way through labour you've got to decide it's a good time to phone the agency and have them send someone over in time for delivery.
Then when they do arrive, they're all businesslike, and trying to explain stuff. "Good morning, I'm from the agency." and of course they're met with "I don't care. I'm in the middle of f**king labour, just shut up and get on with it."
I don't think the phlebotomist had done it before, and in the end it failed. We left our baby attached for a while, because it seemed a good idea for other reasons. Sadly, that meant that by the time the phlebotomist tried to collect the blood, there wasn't really any left - the sample was too small/clogged/dried to be serviceable, so there was nothing for us to bank.
It's is a nice theory, but it not true. 80% of Amazon's sales come from just 20% of their inventory.
I think the point of the long tail is that because of the non-geographic wider reach of the Internet, the obscure titles are now worth stocking. A major retailer like Amazon is always going to make the big bucks on the obvious stuff - the wider audience means even more people buying "Sex and the City", but at least it's now worth them offering the oddities.
More importantly, a small "Mom and Pop" (as you yanks would say) outfit can suddenly become profitable by offering really weird stuff, because somewhere out there across the world are just enough like minded weirdos to make it work.
Many of the 9/11 bombers had travelled on fake passports.
Now I could be wrong, but I thought all the 9/11 bombers were legally allowed to be where they were, and were using valid documents?
I think what might have been the case is that they HAD used fake passpports in the past. The way this phrases it though suggests that a better implementation might have helped avoid 9/11, which is news to me.
I've spent the last few weeks battling with my WM6 smartphone, during which time it has repeatedly failed to send text messages (turn it off and on again a few times to succeed), a couple of times failed to make phone calls (off and on again to get it back), Once locked me out of most settings screens (hardware reset to get that one back) and asked me to turn it off and on again after installing software.
It's the full windows experience in a mobile phone!
Having come to WM6 after being used to old Psion PDAs I find the difference between a device designed from the ground up to be a PDA and one designed to mimic a desktop PC quite shocking.
The Psions came with full-featured applications installed that made them immediately productive as PDAs. The WM6 device comes with some lobotomised office applications that have made the transition very badly.
It looks as though I can purchase additional software to get me back up to the level of functionality I'm used to with my old Psion, but I really begrudge having to do so.
Also I find its usefulness as a phone very poor, with lots of unnecessarily convoluted button-pushing to do fairly normal day-to-day tasks.
Certainly by the time my contract expires, I'm hoping some other manufacturer will have come up with a decent alternative.
Now we have the oil-producing nations considering switching to the Euro for their transactions, rather than the dollar.
Interesting. I hadn't heard that.
I believe the last oil producing country to consider pricing in Euros rather than dollars was Iraq, who appear to have been thoroughly dissuaded now.
I'd always cynically assumed the real reason for the Iraq war was to avoid a run of oil suppliers switching to the Euro, and a subsequent dumping of dollars previously held onto the market, resulting in a fall in the value of the dollar.
Slashdot Mirror
I gather (from other comments in this thread) that the O/S did some of the command/parameter parsing for you, so I'd be inclined to argue that it was part of the O/S.
Now that I think about it, I think you could register your programs with the help system, and help for your program would automatically get included if someone just typed "help".
Type "Help", and get help! Comprehensive, hierarchical, actual help. Awesome.
Yup. The important inner nervy bits (technical term) weren't so much stretchy like elastic, more stretchy like a spring.
TFA - "What the whale has developed is a beautiful system to protect its nerves, to package it in a way, probably in a corkscrew or undulated way, surrounded by elastin fibres"
So we could avoid nerve damage by preemptively replacing our at-risk nerves with stretchy whale nerves, in much the same way we could avoid bone breakage by covering our skeleton with adamantium... or some non-fictional alternative.
I'm basing it on how the similar Cayla doll works. Doll -> Tablet/Phone -> House WiFi -> Internet. Also in TFA it says the parents enable it by "signing into an app". That's most likely something they need to do each time the doll's turned on. Most of the local processing power is likely to be in the App.
It also makes sense from a maintenance point of view. It's a pain to update the doll's firmware, but easy to update mobile apps and server-side software. I doubt if there's any processing going on in the doll at all.
As for security, it's as secure as any other Android app I allow on my phone with "full internet access".
Yes, the professional liars could be lying about "Its listening function is activated only when a button on Barbie's belt buckle is pressed." but battery life will suck if they do it any other way.
Mattel didn't call it the "world's first interactive doll", they called it the "very first fashion doll that has continuous learning". The key words here being "fashion doll", which allows them to differentiate themselves from competitors they don't consider fashionable, and "continuous learning", i.e. the server is keeping a log of previous conversations, and using them to have better conversations.
The Cayla doll for instance was brilliant at answering questions like "What is Polytetrafluoroethylene?", and rubbish at answering questions like "Do you like kittens?" Sadly, it was a rather dull toy for a 7yr old girl, despite looking initially exciting.
What it didn't do, and this Barbie won't be doing, is snooping on us. I'd expect it to use Bluetooth to communicate with an App, which will then be using WiFi to connect to the Mattel server. If you don't have the App turned on, and by the sounds of it, if you don't press the button on the doll, it won't be listening. So if a child is playing with it, don't discuss national secrets, and if a child is not playing with it, there's no snooping.
The online conversation history is interesting, but not worth getting worked up about. It's recording how you've played with it, like all sorts of other online games keep logs.
Sure, there's a potential for abuse - "Hey - you say you like ponies! Did you know Mattel make a Barbie pony that's only $9.99 from your local Wal-Mart?" but I think if they start doing that, the backlash of people not buying their products out of sheer disgust will stop them pretty quickly. I'd say the worst is probably more like "Hey - you say you like ponies! I've got a pony called Muffin" without mentioning that Muffin costs $9.99 from Wal-Mart (or might do if it existed).
Pics on p2 of article.
Can they say:
Does A cause B? Probably not.
Does B cause A? Probably not.
So there's probably a C causing A and B.
There's a lot of probablys in that.
Shania Twain - That Don't Impress Me Much
Found it. http://www.behance.net/Jeabyun
Blog-based sources, poor grammar, CG images, and dodgy science apart, one of the sources identifies this as a project from SADI - Samsung Art & Design Institute. http://www.sadi.net/web/eng/home There's no sign of it (or anything) on their website, but it would make sense.
In the UK I'm stuck with my HTC "Desire Z", AKA the G2. That's the last slider I've seen over here. I see others in the US, but retailers won't ship them to me. Luckily my phone still works, and does everything I need it to, so I'm really hoping nothing happens to it.
Presumably that's an Imperial Yonk, where 3 yonks = 1 donkey's year?
The story, and even the article are misleading.
You need to flash your phone (if one of the two supported) with WhisperCore, and then you get this "app".
So whilst it's a brilliant idea, it's only available to a very small number of users.
Wonder if DroidWall works on a Cyanogenmod G1....?
To drift even more off-topic, I used to work on an "Expert System" where BOOLEAN variables had one of FOUR possible values:
It's not quite as daft as it sounds - It populated variables by asking users a question, to which they could answer yes/no/don't know. The fourth value was the case where it hadn't asked the user yet.
So okay, we've got this FTL warpship design, yeah?
We can send a spaceship to the far reaches of the universe...
But we lose Jupiter?
Maybe the environmental lobby will have something to say about that.
Not to mention the practical difficulties of finding another spare Jupiter lying around for the second trip.
There were headlines last year along the lines of "caesarean birth increases chance of asthma by 80%".
The science behind the headlines is here: http://www.nhs.uk/news/2008/12December/Pages/Caesereansandasthma.aspx
This research too is potentially flawed, but it suggests there are definitely factors other than TV to blame.
I don't see how it helps crack down on forgery at all. It only enables you to identify a piece of paper you have previously had access to in order to scan its fibres. Then, if you encounter the same physical piece of paper again, you can repeat the scan (which takes several passes using the otherwise conventional over-the-counter scanner).
It DOES enable you to identify a leaked document, if it comes back into your hands, but I don't see why you'd opt for paper fibre scanning over some other sort of hidden watermark technology, or even (gasp) printing a unique id on the document.
Anyone wanting to circumvent this technology could do so with a photocopier and a cigarette lighter.
Proof that you should read the comments before the article!
We've no odd family history, we just thought the potential uses of stem cells in the future might be worth having a stock of them guaranteed not to be rejected.
We had to arrange for an outside contractor to come in to the NHS hospital to collect the samples. The NHS staff wouldn't do it. That means that part way through labour you've got to decide it's a good time to phone the agency and have them send someone over in time for delivery.
Then when they do arrive, they're all businesslike, and trying to explain stuff. "Good morning, I'm from the agency." and of course they're met with "I don't care. I'm in the middle of f**king labour, just shut up and get on with it."
I don't think the phlebotomist had done it before, and in the end it failed. We left our baby attached for a while, because it seemed a good idea for other reasons. Sadly, that meant that by the time the phlebotomist tried to collect the blood, there wasn't really any left - the sample was too small/clogged/dried to be serviceable, so there was nothing for us to bank.
I really hope I don't end up regretting that.
I think the point of the long tail is that because of the non-geographic wider reach of the Internet, the obscure titles are now worth stocking. A major retailer like Amazon is always going to make the big bucks on the obvious stuff - the wider audience means even more people buying "Sex and the City", but at least it's now worth them offering the oddities.
More importantly, a small "Mom and Pop" (as you yanks would say) outfit can suddenly become profitable by offering really weird stuff, because somewhere out there across the world are just enough like minded weirdos to make it work.
As in "you couldn't hit a barn with that thing"?
Is this physicist humour?
That's 72 women for whom you're the best sex they've ever had.
Now I could be wrong, but I thought all the 9/11 bombers were legally allowed to be where they were, and were using valid documents?
I think what might have been the case is that they HAD used fake passpports in the past. The way this phrases it though suggests that a better implementation might have helped avoid 9/11, which is news to me.
I've spent the last few weeks battling with my WM6 smartphone, during which time it has repeatedly failed to send text messages (turn it off and on again a few times to succeed), a couple of times failed to make phone calls (off and on again to get it back), Once locked me out of most settings screens (hardware reset to get that one back) and asked me to turn it off and on again after installing software.
It's the full windows experience in a mobile phone!
Having come to WM6 after being used to old Psion PDAs I find the difference between a device designed from the ground up to be a PDA and one designed to mimic a desktop PC quite shocking.
The Psions came with full-featured applications installed that made them immediately productive as PDAs. The WM6 device comes with some lobotomised office applications that have made the transition very badly.
It looks as though I can purchase additional software to get me back up to the level of functionality I'm used to with my old Psion, but I really begrudge having to do so.
Also I find its usefulness as a phone very poor, with lots of unnecessarily convoluted button-pushing to do fairly normal day-to-day tasks.
Certainly by the time my contract expires, I'm hoping some other manufacturer will have come up with a decent alternative.
Interesting. I hadn't heard that.
I believe the last oil producing country to consider pricing in Euros rather than dollars was Iraq, who appear to have been thoroughly dissuaded now.
I'd always cynically assumed the real reason for the Iraq war was to avoid a run of oil suppliers switching to the Euro, and a subsequent dumping of dollars previously held onto the market, resulting in a fall in the value of the dollar.
Way to go on that one guys.