At the 1996 AVIOS conference in San Jose, a woman tripped over a black network cable and sprained or broke her wrist. An ambulance was called, and had to take her to a hospital. She was in a huge amout of pain.
About half an hour later the Red Lion hotel staff showed up with about a hundred rubber conduit covers of various lengths and a bunch of throw-rugs and floor mats, presumably to avoid additional liability.
That can't be an isolated incident, and I'm sure Mariott, with 2,500+ hotels, has been sued more than once for injuries relate to avoidable wires. Since most people bring battery-powered laptops to hotel conferences, getting rid of the net cable cleans almost everything up.
A geiger counter and accompanying control hardware can be as small as a digital camera these days.
If they are still scrubbing coal dust in the vicinity then there should be no excessive sources of ionizing radiation other than the tiny source of alpha particles often found in fire alarms.
I thought the largest source of naturally occuring radiation was from the burning of coal, or maybe they scrub that. Someone please sound the alarm if they aren't scrubbing coal dust these days -- setting off radiation security sensors might be the only way to get the fossil fuel industry to continue scrubbing under a potential Bush II ii administration.
I have audio completely silenced on my email machine.
How about your voicemail machine?
How about your phone?
My phone is one of my email machines, and since it is a "phone" I would like it to play audio/amr attachments. Not against my will, of course, but through the earphone when I click on them, or the speakerphone if it happens to be on.
It is a truism that speech recognition models can very often be "run in reverse" to synthesize speech. This is more time-intensive than some other forms of synthesis. However, the quality of such synthesis, which is usually easy to correct by ear, corresponds directly to the quality of the recognition models.
Commercial time-critical speech recognition software authors usually try to avoid using the FPU for signal processing or heuristic search probability calculations, because most FPU numbers are far more precise (and therefore much larger) than the optimum precision necessary. Using FPU numbers eats memory bus bandwidth, which is usually in short supply during the execution of speech recognition programs. This is not to say that FPUs which can quickly operate on integers are not appreciated, but they are uncommon.
perception of voice dication as unreliable and resource intensive rather than any actual fact...
Well, the fact is that typical minimum word error rates don't often get much better than 95%, and even when they do get better, it just makes the errors all that hard to miss while proofreading.
Your 3rd grade teacher might have approved of your writing with one out of thirty words spelled wrong, but your clientel are less likely.
Interface and software system quality for automatic dictation on the PC-compatible platforms has actually gone down, with many people opting for the old, discrete dictation systems rather than the new, continious systems. Much of that has to do with the fact that operating system complexities have gone way up ever since Win32, but many if not most people can achieve superior word error rates using discrete systems with practice.
Also, many of the common handheld CPUs (e.g., ARM, Xscale) have around 0.4% of the amount of cache memory recommended for general-purpose, 32 MB RAM systems. That's a big part of the problem right there. But cache memory eats battery life when it's not eating silicon area.
So, those new Xscale processors that run at 400 MHz, but they have a 100 MHz memory bus, a tiny cache, and run about as fast overall as a Pentium II at 75 MHz. Even discrete automatic dictation on Pentium-class machines was not so great until they got to around 200 MHz or so, and by that time the vendors had already started making negative progress. Assuming that the same mistakes won't be made on the handheld platforms, based on Moore's law of performance doubling every 18 months, you should wait around a couple years.
Q Scott, earlier you said that there's still some issues that remain on the 9/11 commission. Several families -- several vocal families of some of the victims say that they had a deal, and that's what's happening right now is essentially a deal-breaker. But in particular, they go on to say that the White House right now is actively trying to recruit less vocal victims' families to support a watered-down version of a commission. Could I just get your comment, either one way or the other whether that is, in fact, true, that the White House is trying to reach out to some of the families at this point?
MR. MCCLELLAN: I disagree with the characterization or the premise of what you're saying. We have been working not only with members of Congress, as I pointed out, but we've been working closely with family members, as well, who want to see a strong bipartisan commission. It's important to look at a broad range of issues related to the September 11th attacks. And we will continue talking with members of Congress. We will continue talking with the families of victims, as well, so that we can move this forward. We want to get this going as quickly as possible. And the President remains firmly committed to a strong bipartisan commission.
Q Just to make sure I understand, so you're saying that the passage of the House bill yesterday is not tantamount to a deal-breaker, in your opinion?
MR. MCCLELLAN: The passage of the department of homeland security bill?
Q Exactly. The fact that the commission was stripped from it.
MR. MCCLELLAN: Well, we're continuing to work with members to get this done. There are other ways to get that commission up and running.
Q If I can follow up, because that brings up a very good point.
MR. MCCLELLAN: Last one.
Q Senators Lieberman and McCain have introduced an amendment in the Senate that would restore the 9/11 commission to the homeland security legislation. Does the White House support that?
MR. MCCLELLAN: As I said, there are other ways to get it down.... we need to resolve these issues that will make sure that this is a truly bipartisan commission.
Re:(MIT) Journalist Helen Thomas Condemns Bush Adm
on
HomeSec In the News
·
· Score: 2
Helen Thomas has more integrity in her little finger than all the journalists kneeling before the pentagon information officers combined.
Journalist Helen Thomas condemns Bush administration
By Sarah H. Wright
MIT News Office
Veteran journalist Helen Thomas brought the grit and whir of a White House press conference to Bartos Theater on Monday evening, speaking with passion about the media's role in a democracy whose leaders seem eager for war.
Actually, the 82-year-old former United Press International reporter didn't just speak: she surged into her topic, giving everyone present an immediate sense of the grumpy wit and fierce precision that gave her reporting on American presidents Kennedy through Bush II such a competitive and lasting edge.
"I censored myself for 50 years when I was a reporter," said Thomas, who is now a columnist for Hearst News Service. "Now I wake up and ask myself, 'Who do I hate today?'" Her short list of answers seems not to vary from war, President Bush, timid office-holders, a muffled press and cowed citizens, pretty much in that order.
Angered by what she views as the Bush administration's "bullying drumbeat," Thomas referred early and often to her own hatred of war, quoting from poets and politicians to bear down on President Bush and his colleagues.
Winston Churchill, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Louis Brandeis, George Santayana, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and Martin Luther King Jr. all made appearances in Thomas' sweeping portrayal of what she sees as the administration's betrayal of both the character and will of the American people and the principles of democracy.
"I have never covered a president who actually wanted to go to war. Bush's policy of pre-emptive war is immoral - such a policy would legitimize Pearl Harbor. It's as if they learned none of the lessons from Vietnam," she said to enthusiastic applause.
Thomas ignored the clapping just as she once ignored the camera flashes and shouting matches of the Washington press corps.
"Where is the outrage?" she demanded. "Where is Congress? They're supine! Bush has held only six press conferences, the only forum in our society where a president can be questioned. I'm on the phone to [press secretary] Ari Fleischer every day, asking will he ever hold another one? The international world is wondering what happened to America's great heart and soul."
Like any star, Thomas, who resigned from UPI in 2000, appreciated her audience's thirst to get the insider's view of our national leaders, and she gave generously, in snapshots, though the Reagan and both Bush regimes were cast in darker hues.
"Great presidents have great goals for mankind. During my years of covering the White House, Kennedy was the most inspired; Johnson rammed through voting rights and public housing; Nixon will be remembered for his trip to China and for his resignation; Ford for helping us recover from Nixon; and Carter for making human rights the centerpiece of foreign policy," Thomas said in an even, respectful tone. She just sighed over Clinton, who "tarnished the Oval Office."
Thomas' mood became visibly more somber at the mention of Ronald Reagan's military buildup and at the name Bush. Again and again, Thomas warned the MIT audience, "It's bombs away for Iraq and on our civil liberties if Bush and his cronies get their way. Dissent is patriotic!"
After her talk, Thomas participated in a panel discussion with MacVicar Faculty Fellows David Thorburn, professor of literature, and Charles Stewart III, professor of political science. Philip S. Khoury, dean of the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, introduced the speakers.
"Helen Thomas offered a very powerful indictment of the current behavior of the Bush presidency in her comments on the incoherence and inconsistency of Bush's policies and the danger to civil liberties of Bush's rhetoric," said Thorburn.
He compared the lack of public awareness of an antiwar movement in 1965 and 1966 with the wide public debate about Iraq going on today. "An aroused citizenry can instruct the government," he said.
Stewart also focused on the current public debate about Iraq, declaring that it may be a "hopeful sign. The polls say Americans don't want to talk about Iraq - they want to talk about the economy, about education. But the press has continued to point out the important thing. Everyone knows there's been a dance between the President and Congress over Iraq."
Thomas didn't let the press off the hook, though. "Everybody learned the lessons of Vietnam, including the Pentagon. In Vietnam, correspondents could go anywhere - just hop on a helicopter and report on the war. Now we don't have that access. It's total secrecy. The media overlords should be complaining about this. I do not absolve the press. We've rolled over and played dead, too," she said.
Asked to advise young journalists, Thomas pounced. "Remind the politicians you interview that you pay them, that they are public servants. Remember every question is legitimate. And don't give up. There's always a leak. There's always someone who's trying to save the country," she said.
The talk was sponsored by the MIT Communications Forum.
The only important difference is that the 400 MHz CPU is coupled to a 100 MHz memory bus, instead of the previous 206/103 MHz. So all the assumptions about wait states change. Lots of loops with such assumptions get a lot slower when they are run on the 'faster' platform.
Xscale also has a bunch of hardware support for playing mpeg video, but I don't understand the details.
Here's a graph of atmospheric CO2 showing that the sigmoid (resource consumption) curve fits the data withR^2 > 0.98. That means all but about a percent of the variation can be explained by an equation in four variables. That does not bode well for anyone's ability to do anything about the problem.
HTML::Mason / Perl fit every criteria they had perfectly.
Take a look at the memory footprint for each insantiation of Mason and you will find it's perhaps eight to ten times the size of a PHP process's. Corallary: it takes a lot longer to instantiate, even with mod_perl. In short, Mason is a big slow hog and thus unacceptable for megasites.
Slashdot Mirror
It's been done already.
Outpost.com has a 15.1" 1024x768 TFT for $230 after rebate; 17" for $550, 19" for $900, 20" for $2000.
Okay, I see what you mean. Sheesh; from 19 to 20 inch diagonal is eleven hundred bucks?!?
At the 1996 AVIOS conference in San Jose, a woman tripped over a black network cable and sprained or broke her wrist. An ambulance was called, and had to take her to a hospital. She was in a huge amout of pain.
About half an hour later the Red Lion hotel staff showed up with about a hundred rubber conduit covers of various lengths and a bunch of throw-rugs and floor mats, presumably to avoid additional liability.
That can't be an isolated incident, and I'm sure Mariott, with 2,500+ hotels, has been sued more than once for injuries relate to avoidable wires. Since most people bring battery-powered laptops to hotel conferences, getting rid of the net cable cleans almost everything up.
Be careful what you make comparisons to ridicule.
Don't believe me? Try it yourself!
If I bring Wint-O-Green Lifesavers and a hammer, will I be strip searched?
If they are still scrubbing coal dust in the vicinity then there should be no excessive sources of ionizing radiation other than the tiny source of alpha particles often found in fire alarms.
I thought the largest source of naturally occuring radiation was from the burning of coal, or maybe they scrub that. Someone please sound the alarm if they aren't scrubbing coal dust these days -- setting off radiation security sensors might be the only way to get the fossil fuel industry to continue scrubbing under a potential Bush II ii administration.
Why would police have tritium on their guns?
How about your voicemail machine?
How about your phone?
My phone is one of my email machines, and since it is a "phone" I would like it to play audio/amr attachments. Not against my will, of course, but through the earphone when I click on them, or the speakerphone if it happens to be on.
I would like to send MMS audio and video clips, sure, but whose email client can play audio/amr yet?
Alex apparently doesn't publish his email address, and for some reason there is no email address on his web site. Whois dead-ends at pannet.pa.
However, he has a telephone. +507.278.4500. Ask for, "Director Presidente."
It is a truism that speech recognition models can very often be "run in reverse" to synthesize speech. This is more time-intensive than some other forms of synthesis. However, the quality of such synthesis, which is usually easy to correct by ear, corresponds directly to the quality of the recognition models.
Please see my reply to the grandparent post.
Well, the fact is that typical minimum word error rates don't often get much better than 95%, and even when they do get better, it just makes the errors all that hard to miss while proofreading.
Your 3rd grade teacher might have approved of your writing with one out of thirty words spelled wrong, but your clientel are less likely.
Interface and software system quality for automatic dictation on the PC-compatible platforms has actually gone down, with many people opting for the old, discrete dictation systems rather than the new, continious systems. Much of that has to do with the fact that operating system complexities have gone way up ever since Win32, but many if not most people can achieve superior word error rates using discrete systems with practice.
Also, many of the common handheld CPUs (e.g., ARM, Xscale) have around 0.4% of the amount of cache memory recommended for general-purpose, 32 MB RAM systems. That's a big part of the problem right there. But cache memory eats battery life when it's not eating silicon area.
So, those new Xscale processors that run at 400 MHz, but they have a 100 MHz memory bus, a tiny cache, and run about as fast overall as a Pentium II at 75 MHz. Even discrete automatic dictation on Pentium-class machines was not so great until they got to around 200 MHz or so, and by that time the vendors had already started making negative progress. Assuming that the same mistakes won't be made on the handheld platforms, based on Moore's law of performance doubling every 18 months, you should wait around a couple years.
text light: http://www.gnn.tv/after_math/index.html
from http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/11/20 021114-2.html
If you want to read a real joke, click here.
also: http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/11.15E.thomas.con
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2002
Journalist Helen Thomas condemns Bush administration
By Sarah H. Wright
MIT News Office
Veteran journalist Helen Thomas brought the grit and whir of a White House press conference to Bartos Theater on Monday evening, speaking with passion about the media's role in a democracy whose leaders seem eager for war.
Actually, the 82-year-old former United Press International reporter didn't just speak: she surged into her topic, giving everyone present an immediate sense of the grumpy wit and fierce precision that gave her reporting on American presidents Kennedy through Bush II such a competitive and lasting edge.
"I censored myself for 50 years when I was a reporter," said Thomas, who is now a columnist for Hearst News Service. "Now I wake up and ask myself, 'Who do I hate today?'" Her short list of answers seems not to vary from war, President Bush, timid office-holders, a muffled press and cowed citizens, pretty much in that order.
Angered by what she views as the Bush administration's "bullying drumbeat," Thomas referred early and often to her own hatred of war, quoting from poets and politicians to bear down on President Bush and his colleagues.
Winston Churchill, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Louis Brandeis, George Santayana, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and Martin Luther King Jr. all made appearances in Thomas' sweeping portrayal of what she sees as the administration's betrayal of both the character and will of the American people and the principles of democracy.
"I have never covered a president who actually wanted to go to war. Bush's policy of pre-emptive war is immoral - such a policy would legitimize Pearl Harbor. It's as if they learned none of the lessons from Vietnam," she said to enthusiastic applause.
Thomas ignored the clapping just as she once ignored the camera flashes and shouting matches of the Washington press corps.
"Where is the outrage?" she demanded. "Where is Congress? They're supine! Bush has held only six press conferences, the only forum in our society where a president can be questioned. I'm on the phone to [press secretary] Ari Fleischer every day, asking will he ever hold another one? The international world is wondering what happened to America's great heart and soul."
Like any star, Thomas, who resigned from UPI in 2000, appreciated her audience's thirst to get the insider's view of our national leaders, and she gave generously, in snapshots, though the Reagan and both Bush regimes were cast in darker hues.
"Great presidents have great goals for mankind. During my years of covering the White House, Kennedy was the most inspired; Johnson rammed through voting rights and public housing; Nixon will be remembered for his trip to China and for his resignation; Ford for helping us recover from Nixon; and Carter for making human rights the centerpiece of foreign policy," Thomas said in an even, respectful tone. She just sighed over Clinton, who "tarnished the Oval Office."
Thomas' mood became visibly more somber at the mention of Ronald Reagan's military buildup and at the name Bush. Again and again, Thomas warned the MIT audience, "It's bombs away for Iraq and on our civil liberties if Bush and his cronies get their way. Dissent is patriotic!"
After her talk, Thomas participated in a panel discussion with MacVicar Faculty Fellows David Thorburn, professor of literature, and Charles Stewart III, professor of political science. Philip S. Khoury, dean of the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, introduced the speakers.
"Helen Thomas offered a very powerful indictment of the current behavior of the Bush presidency in her comments on the incoherence and inconsistency of Bush's policies and the danger to civil liberties of Bush's rhetoric," said Thorburn.
He compared the lack of public awareness of an antiwar movement in 1965 and 1966 with the wide public debate about Iraq going on today. "An aroused citizenry can instruct the government," he said.
Stewart also focused on the current public debate about Iraq, declaring that it may be a "hopeful sign. The polls say Americans don't want to talk about Iraq - they want to talk about the economy, about education. But the press has continued to point out the important thing. Everyone knows there's been a dance between the President and Congress over Iraq."
Thomas didn't let the press off the hook, though. "Everybody learned the lessons of Vietnam, including the Pentagon. In Vietnam, correspondents could go anywhere - just hop on a helicopter and report on the war. Now we don't have that access. It's total secrecy. The media overlords should be complaining about this. I do not absolve the press. We've rolled over and played dead, too," she said.
Asked to advise young journalists, Thomas pounced. "Remind the politicians you interview that you pay them, that they are public servants. Remember every question is legitimate. And don't give up. There's always a leak. There's always someone who's trying to save the country," she said.
The talk was sponsored by the MIT Communications Forum.
I wonder what went wrong with the write-back cache, other than being 1/256th the reasonable size for a general purpose computer with 32 MB RAM?!?
Xscale also has a bunch of hardware support for playing mpeg video, but I don't understand the details.
Here's a graph of atmospheric CO2 showing that the sigmoid (resource consumption) curve fits the data withR^2 > 0.98. That means all but about a percent of the variation can be explained by an equation in four variables. That does not bode well for anyone's ability to do anything about the problem.
Wrong.
A loaded Mason server is pounding its virtual memory a lot harder than a PHP server with the same load. fork() takes time when it has to swap.
Take a look at the memory footprint for each insantiation of Mason and you will find it's perhaps eight to ten times the size of a PHP process's. Corallary: it takes a lot longer to instantiate, even with mod_perl. In short, Mason is a big slow hog and thus unacceptable for megasites.
A huge fraction of technical (and high-spending) PC users who might switch know exactly what Slashdot is.
It would be awesome: "... I'm Rob Malda, and I run Slashdot.org"