Re:Not that bold, ask a creationist!
on
Mapping the Mind
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· Score: 1
That is a pronouncement of your faith in science, not an account of something that has already happened. Reductionism hasn't gotten very far into the mind at all. If it had, we could implment minds in software, when in fact we're not even in the ballpark. Psychology is a big bag of interesting observations. That is not reductionism.
That's an interesting value judgement, because it moves Free Speech from near the top of freedoms to the bottom. In a contest between your free speech and my freedom to "whatever," the winner is "whatever."
...and send McVoy and his company down the same creek as SCO, Microsoft and anyone else they think is evil.
Would you like to have a calm, rational discussion about whether SCO is evil? Because it is. If Tridge were SCO, he would be suing Bitkeeper for millions of dollars, sending $500 invoices to all Bitkeeper users, and dumping stock in Tridge, inc. by now.
True. But I thought doing it legally required a "clean room" process, whereby one group scrutinizes the existing product and writes detailed specs, while another group writes software to the spec.
IIRC this was how Compaq PC BIOS was reverse engineered. But I don't Tridge did it that way.
Our audience is deciding what they want. MTV's median age is exactly when a majority of young American adults begin to form life-long brand loyalties. Young adults 15-17 are excited consumers and extremely impressionable. Now is the time to influence their choices. 12-34 year olds have higher brand recall and more recognition than 35-49 year olds. In fact 69% make their purchasing decisions based on brand name, not price.
In short, they're looking to build lifelong loyalties, and hitting up the demographic with the highest cash-to-brains ratio.
Apparently , it's a bit more than the simple case where "Computer A contacts Computer B to make a phone call." If both A and B are firewalled or NAT'ted, unsuspecting Skyper's Computer C volunteers to relay the call between them. This is a lot like freenet, which uses intermediaries to enhance secrecy, except in this case it's done to cope with firewalling.
Of course, B must also have some way to know it has an incoming call, even if it is firewalled, which must mean it establishes a persistent bidirectional connection to a server of some sort (again, probably just an unfirewalled Skype host).
Clever, but if too many Skype users decide not to donate resources to the network (by running behind NAT), Skype will either have to pony up those resources, or allow the service to collapse.
Speaking of which, have you seen "The Office"? (A sitcom.) I enjoy it.
My wife heard somebody on public radio say the original British version was better than the US version. We were intrigued enough that I downloaded the first season of the British version.
It was very interesting because much of the plot, and some of the dialog for the first US episode was lifted straight from the British one. Other lines, of course, had changed. Some of it just didn't translate, like a comment about Camilla Parker Boles. But besides that, the overall feel of the British version is more subdued (in fact there's literally quite a bit of mumbling). The characters are funny, but it's a little harder to put your finger on why.
The US version, I daresay, is a little more cartoonish, even in subtle ways. The US version doesn't just have a stapler molded into a bowl of "jelly" (Jell-O), instead it's a somewhat oversized bowl with the stapler somehow not touching any of the edges, so the stapler is suspended perfectly. Like a prop artist did it, instead of a paper salesman.
Perhaps I should be ashamed to admit it in the context of this thread, but I enjoy the US version a bit more. The "bad office mate" played by Rainn Wilson may be over the top, but he sure cracks me up.
Reproducing audible speech from text is one thing; text doesn't contain the intonations, pace, or cadence of actual speech, and computers can't even make a good guess about replacing that lost information without knowing the intent of what was said.
But producing speech directly from subvocalization should work better, because the speaker is supplying all the inputs of normal speech (except the air). Add to that a few parameters for a vocal tract model (from prerecorded samples), and you might get something pretty decent.
The other big advantage of avoiding automated speech recognition is you allow the listener to disambiguate synonyms, mispronounciations, and accents, and people can do this much better than computers.
Mind you, I've been disappointed in nearly every hire in the last decade.
I've been disappointed with every girl willing to date me in the last 10 years. They're all so lazy and ugly, and have no life.
I guess there aren't any good women these days.
Or could it be me? Nahhh!
Re:swap the words in the blurb..
on
Dell Might do AMD
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I suppose you're right. However, compared to Linux vs Windows, there is a difference - from the end-user standpoint, Intel and AMD CPUs are practically indistinguishable, so it's an awfully easy switch.
That said, I don't care too much. Even without Dell, AMD already has enough market pull to deflate Intel's once-ridiculous profit margins by about all they can. AMD processors aren't all that much cheaper than equivalent Intel anymore.
I'm not sure what's behind the stagnation in CPU and RAM offerings and prices the last couple years. Maybe the weak dollar?
I mean just think if you could buy one drive that has 50gb of space from Maxtor, or you could pay something like 10% to 15% more and get a 500gb from Hitachi.
IMHO this never happens. Economics combined with patents almost guarantees there are never sudden leaps in price/performance. Even if the new tech is much cheaper to make, why price it below what is necessary to beat the competition?
I believe drive performance is dominated by seek time, not transfer rate.
Well, that depends entirely on whether you're doing lots of little random access (server load, or booting up) or sustained read/writes (like video processing).
They're billing the initial market as microdrives, where access time shouldn't matter at all. For downloading lots of songs fast, or saving or uploading photos, what you need is high sustained speed. Seeking is infrequent, because media files are relatively big.
Then you wouldn't mind giving me a shell login on your box, with administrative rights? Unless you're a kook and think I'm part of some "vast conspiracy," that is.
Example: Paying for movie tickets, and product placement, and advertisements at start, what next?
How about paying fandango.com, plus watching their banner ads, for the privelige of paying for the movie tickets?
I don't think we'll ever get milticast working across the Internet at large. What's more likely to work IMHO is caching proxies.
Get Comcast to do this in a few major cities and you've made a serious dent in the problem. Comcast would save big money by decreasing traffic on their backbones, and NASA would obviously save a lot too. Now the only question is how to make streaming media proxy-cache friendly.
Hmm, apparently it has been done. I wonder if the big ISPs do this?
...2% failure rate is a very impressive... it's *dangerous*... eager-to-react chemicals... thin, flimsy... millions of components... vibrational loads and G forces... tens of thousands of rpms... snap like twigs... constantly bombarded... radiation... it's amazing that these craft ever survive.
This will certainly happen - but what if the revenge against fat cats isn't so sweet after all? Sure it's ridiculous that Nike buys Chinese shoes for $12 and sells them for $120, but will we really be better off buying those same shoes rebranded for $30 at WalMart, if $25 of that $30 shoots straight out of the country?
Until Linux device drivers are insulated from each other the way programs are thanks to the help of the MMU, this sort of thing will continue to happen with binary drivers, and other poorly written drivers.
Trying to isolate drivers from each other is no solution. If your video or network driver crashes, it's reboot time whether or not the system is still up.
Come on now. Getting NDISWrapper to work is only easy if you are lucky. There are pages and pages of listings of particular kernel, driver, and wrapper versions and their interactions. When you see something like that you know you are in for some fun.
The Linux community would address the driver crisis...if it were legal to do so or the hardware specs were available! Blame your freakin' manufacturer.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. If you are against a law, pray for its enforcement against the rich & powerful. That is the quickest way it will be changed.
You don't need to stand up for "Joe Sixpack." He doesn't care, because he's not here.
Plagiarist.
That is a pronouncement of your faith in science, not an account of something that has already happened. Reductionism hasn't gotten very far into the mind at all. If it had, we could implment minds in software, when in fact we're not even in the ballpark. Psychology is a big bag of interesting observations. That is not reductionism.
That's an interesting value judgement, because it moves Free Speech from near the top of freedoms to the bottom. In a contest between your free speech and my freedom to "whatever," the winner is "whatever."
IIRC this was how Compaq PC BIOS was reverse engineered. But I don't Tridge did it that way.
This is not from some media critic, or academic, but from the "Cable TV Ad Beaureau":
In short, they're looking to build lifelong loyalties, and hitting up the demographic with the highest cash-to-brains ratio.Of course, B must also have some way to know it has an incoming call, even if it is firewalled, which must mean it establishes a persistent bidirectional connection to a server of some sort (again, probably just an unfirewalled Skype host).
Clever, but if too many Skype users decide not to donate resources to the network (by running behind NAT), Skype will either have to pony up those resources, or allow the service to collapse.
My wife heard somebody on public radio say the original British version was better than the US version. We were intrigued enough that I downloaded the first season of the British version.
It was very interesting because much of the plot, and some of the dialog for the first US episode was lifted straight from the British one. Other lines, of course, had changed. Some of it just didn't translate, like a comment about Camilla Parker Boles. But besides that, the overall feel of the British version is more subdued (in fact there's literally quite a bit of mumbling). The characters are funny, but it's a little harder to put your finger on why.
The US version, I daresay, is a little more cartoonish, even in subtle ways. The US version doesn't just have a stapler molded into a bowl of "jelly" (Jell-O), instead it's a somewhat oversized bowl with the stapler somehow not touching any of the edges, so the stapler is suspended perfectly. Like a prop artist did it, instead of a paper salesman.
Perhaps I should be ashamed to admit it in the context of this thread, but I enjoy the US version a bit more. The "bad office mate" played by Rainn Wilson may be over the top, but he sure cracks me up.
But producing speech directly from subvocalization should work better, because the speaker is supplying all the inputs of normal speech (except the air). Add to that a few parameters for a vocal tract model (from prerecorded samples), and you might get something pretty decent.
The other big advantage of avoiding automated speech recognition is you allow the listener to disambiguate synonyms, mispronounciations, and accents, and people can do this much better than computers.
I guess there aren't any good women these days.
Or could it be me? Nahhh!
That said, I don't care too much. Even without Dell, AMD already has enough market pull to deflate Intel's once-ridiculous profit margins by about all they can. AMD processors aren't all that much cheaper than equivalent Intel anymore.
I'm not sure what's behind the stagnation in CPU and RAM offerings and prices the last couple years. Maybe the weak dollar?
I don't see why you would need a heat shield.
They're billing the initial market as microdrives, where access time shouldn't matter at all. For downloading lots of songs fast, or saving or uploading photos, what you need is high sustained speed. Seeking is infrequent, because media files are relatively big.
Then you wouldn't mind giving me a shell login on your box, with administrative rights? Unless you're a kook and think I'm part of some "vast conspiracy," that is.
Example: Paying for movie tickets, and product placement, and advertisements at start, what next? How about paying fandango.com, plus watching their banner ads, for the privelige of paying for the movie tickets?
Get Comcast to do this in a few major cities and you've made a serious dent in the problem. Comcast would save big money by decreasing traffic on their backbones, and NASA would obviously save a lot too. Now the only question is how to make streaming media proxy-cache friendly.
Hmm, apparently it has been done. I wonder if the big ISPs do this?
This will certainly happen - but what if the revenge against fat cats isn't so sweet after all? Sure it's ridiculous that Nike buys Chinese shoes for $12 and sells them for $120, but will we really be better off buying those same shoes rebranded for $30 at WalMart, if $25 of that $30 shoots straight out of the country?
Now what?