"And while shoppers like it because it helps avoid an interminable wait at the cashier...."
Shoppers will spend more time scanning their items than they would waiting at the cashier. It will only seem like they are saving time because the psychological perception of small amounts of time is different than that of one large chunk of time. In the meantime, the store saves money by getting the shopper to do their work for free.
I actually avoid stores that routinely make you wait at the cashier (Fry's in my town in Arizona) versus those that don't (Safeway).
LOL. Great point. The dude has two choices: (1) Get his guy to perform a miracle so that there is more clean water, or (2) Get his _other_ guy to stop banning birth control.
One thing that might be helpful (at least from the point of view of Prof. Taylor) would be to eliminate the bullshit Ph.D.s in fields such as political science, poetry, philosophy, English literature, and so on. Seriously. I talk to these types several times a week a bar near the Arizona State University campus and it is amazing how obscure their research topics are. Indeed, I get the feeling that there are extra points awarded (in some sense) for the more bizarre and irrelevant your topic is. And you can just feel the inner sneer as they watch you try to process the title of their dissertation.
Some of these people understand that they are shouting in an echo chamber of one, and in their circle of nominal peers, that's freaking cool.
There are a few other comments regarding Watson's buzzer technique, so here's my take.
Watson was required to press a mechanical button, just as the human players were—you could see the apparatus in plain view. Good move.
However, what is not clear from any of the comments here or anything else that I have have read and heard, is whether Watson was forced to have a deliberate latency which models a good human button-pusher. Judging from the frustrated reactions of Jennings, it seemed clear that he felt he expected to have buzzed first in many situations but was beaten by the machine simply at buzzing technique.
Unless the computer was forced to have a human-like latency, it was just too rigged in Watson's favor. Many Jeopardy players have commented on the importance of buzzer technique and Watson may have had unfair advantage.
Others have commented that Watson was apparently fed the text directly and did not have to parse the answer—possibly another unfair advantage to the computer.
Maybe there should be a re-match with these problems fixed, or IBM should clarify what happened. The buzzer issue is just a giant pink elephant in the room.
HOWEVER, let's not overlook the obvious: This was a stunning performance by a computer and THE ENGINEERS WON!
OK, this is going to a bit of a rant. As an electrical engineer, I object to the use of "near-field" to describe this nascent technology. To an antenna engineer, near-field means something very specific, relating to the size of the antenna and the wavelength of the waves with which it operates, and generally describing other aspects of the situation as amount of wavefront curvature and the phase relationships between certain fields.
But I will concede the argument because I have lost every other attempt to avoid the subversion of technical terms by non-technical people.
Any communication engineer knows the difference between bandwidth, channel capacity, and data rate and their relationship to signal-to-noise ratio. Yet the "technical" press has conflated these concepts into one, or rather, use "bandwidth" to mean usually either channel capacity or instantaneous data rate. I once attempted to repair the Wikipedia page on Bandwidth by allowing that there are two definitions, one of which is the "new-age" version and one of which recognizes the work of Claude Shannon; my edits were quickly reversed to include only the "new-age" definition, or, as the other editors called it, the "computer science" version.
In the early 1980s, I wrote a letter to each of the three popular audio magazines of the day begging them to stop using "software" to refer to the information stored on Compact Discs which is properly called "data" or "information" or the like. I included dictionary definitions to bolster my argument. I received a polite reply from two of the three editors saying that they agreed with me but that it was too late--that train had already sailed. Oddly, nowadays that particular misuse has partially been corrected as people have come to realize that software is the stuff that makes their computers operate, while the stuff on CDs (and other media) is frequently referred to as "content."
For cars that have an electric propulsion component that is charged off-line (i.e., not by the on-board hydrocarbon engine), calculations of miles/gallon or km/l are highly suspect as they assume a certain pattern of driving. Figures such as 313 miles per gallon can be considered accurate only the the likes of governments (e.g., the United States) who can fiddle with accounting in the most obscene ways. Hell, why not just round up to infinite miles/gallon since that is what a person who drives only short distances between charges will get.
Fundamental problem: Close images far to one side
on
The Joke Known As 3D TV
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
One of the fundamental problems with 3D movies and TV is this: Close-to-the-viewer images that appear far to one side of the screen. The problem? You go blind in one eye. To create the appropriate binocular disparity, the "other" image would need to appear in a direction for which there is no screen, thus, no image is presented to one eye. The result is jarring and upsetting.
James Cameron seems to have figured this out in Avatar and avoided doing it for the most part.
How else to avoid the problem? Use a really big screen (in terms of angle subtended at the viewer's position) such as Imax. What does this portend for 3D TV? Nothing good, since TVs almost universally, even with "large" screens, do not subtend an adequate angle.
I should have also mentioned CocoaDialog, http://cocoadialog.sourceforge.net/. My apologies. I haven't used it myself but I think that it could be combined to good effect with Pashua. My recollection is that there is some overlap but some differences. And the main approaches are probably different as well.
Oh, where to start. Comparing Aqua to Cocoa is like comparing bananas to cars. Aqua is the name for the GUI components http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_(user_interface) and Cocoa is the preferred API http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoa_(API). Aqua has not been deprecated, not now and not "for years." You can write OS X apps in Aqua using Carbon which _has_ been deprecated for years but is still fully supported. Many popular (and older) OS X programs still run in Carbon such as Quicken, Igor Pro, and at least until recently, Microsoft Office.
On OS X, I use Pashua, http://www.bluem.net/en/mac/pashua/. This is a brilliantly simple thing to use. I also use it for other (non-script) languages for making a quick-and-dirty GUI that still looks nice and is a real Cocoa program.
I haven't seen Opera Mini but notwithstanding that the best alternative browser for iPhone and iPod Touch is iCab. This is from a longtime developer of an excellent OS X browser, and I'm sure it uses Webkit.
Slashdot Mirror
"And while shoppers like it because it helps avoid an interminable wait at the cashier...."
Shoppers will spend more time scanning their items than they would waiting at the cashier. It will only seem like they are saving time because the psychological perception of small amounts of time is different than that of one large chunk of time. In the meantime, the store saves money by getting the shopper to do their work for free.
I actually avoid stores that routinely make you wait at the cashier (Fry's in my town in Arizona) versus those that don't (Safeway).
Glad you noticed. ;-) Sorry to hear about your computer.
LOL. Great point. The dude has two choices: (1) Get his guy to perform a miracle so that there is more clean water, or (2) Get his _other_ guy to stop banning birth control.
One thing that might be helpful (at least from the point of view of Prof. Taylor) would be to eliminate the bullshit Ph.D.s in fields such as political science, poetry, philosophy, English literature, and so on. Seriously. I talk to these types several times a week a bar near the Arizona State University campus and it is amazing how obscure their research topics are. Indeed, I get the feeling that there are extra points awarded (in some sense) for the more bizarre and irrelevant your topic is. And you can just feel the inner sneer as they watch you try to process the title of their dissertation.
Some of these people understand that they are shouting in an echo chamber of one, and in their circle of nominal peers, that's freaking cool.
There are a few other comments regarding Watson's buzzer technique, so here's my take.
Watson was required to press a mechanical button, just as the human players were—you could see the apparatus in plain view. Good move.
However, what is not clear from any of the comments here or anything else that I have have read and heard, is whether Watson was forced to have a deliberate latency which models a good human button-pusher. Judging from the frustrated reactions of Jennings, it seemed clear that he felt he expected to have buzzed first in many situations but was beaten by the machine simply at buzzing technique.
Unless the computer was forced to have a human-like latency, it was just too rigged in Watson's favor. Many Jeopardy players have commented on the importance of buzzer technique and Watson may have had unfair advantage.
Others have commented that Watson was apparently fed the text directly and did not have to parse the answer—possibly another unfair advantage to the computer.
Maybe there should be a re-match with these problems fixed, or IBM should clarify what happened. The buzzer issue is just a giant pink elephant in the room.
HOWEVER, let's not overlook the obvious: This was a stunning performance by a computer and THE ENGINEERS WON!
OK, this is going to a bit of a rant. As an electrical engineer, I object to the use of "near-field" to describe this nascent technology. To an antenna engineer, near-field means something very specific, relating to the size of the antenna and the wavelength of the waves with which it operates, and generally describing other aspects of the situation as amount of wavefront curvature and the phase relationships between certain fields.
But I will concede the argument because I have lost every other attempt to avoid the subversion of technical terms by non-technical people.
Any communication engineer knows the difference between bandwidth, channel capacity, and data rate and their relationship to signal-to-noise ratio. Yet the "technical" press has conflated these concepts into one, or rather, use "bandwidth" to mean usually either channel capacity or instantaneous data rate. I once attempted to repair the Wikipedia page on Bandwidth by allowing that there are two definitions, one of which is the "new-age" version and one of which recognizes the work of Claude Shannon; my edits were quickly reversed to include only the "new-age" definition, or, as the other editors called it, the "computer science" version.
In the early 1980s, I wrote a letter to each of the three popular audio magazines of the day begging them to stop using "software" to refer to the information stored on Compact Discs which is properly called "data" or "information" or the like. I included dictionary definitions to bolster my argument. I received a polite reply from two of the three editors saying that they agreed with me but that it was too late--that train had already sailed. Oddly, nowadays that particular misuse has partially been corrected as people have come to realize that software is the stuff that makes their computers operate, while the stuff on CDs (and other media) is frequently referred to as "content."
For cars that have an electric propulsion component that is charged off-line (i.e., not by the on-board hydrocarbon engine), calculations of miles/gallon or km/l are highly suspect as they assume a certain pattern of driving. Figures such as 313 miles per gallon can be considered accurate only the the likes of governments (e.g., the United States) who can fiddle with accounting in the most obscene ways. Hell, why not just round up to infinite miles/gallon since that is what a person who drives only short distances between charges will get.
Don't cut out my eyeball, bro!
One of the fundamental problems with 3D movies and TV is this: Close-to-the-viewer images that appear far to one side of the screen. The problem? You go blind in one eye. To create the appropriate binocular disparity, the "other" image would need to appear in a direction for which there is no screen, thus, no image is presented to one eye. The result is jarring and upsetting.
James Cameron seems to have figured this out in Avatar and avoided doing it for the most part.
How else to avoid the problem? Use a really big screen (in terms of angle subtended at the viewer's position) such as Imax. What does this portend for 3D TV? Nothing good, since TVs almost universally, even with "large" screens, do not subtend an adequate angle.
Welcome to the 20th century, Microsoft.
"Mute the video." LOL. Way to to, Einstein.
The excerpt from TFA three times confuses bandwidth with latency. I'm guessing, with that lack of rigor, that the test results are meaningless.
"...what about strip clubs or porn shops? Those are unethical..."
He confuses ethics with morality. Dude--write a 1500 word essay on the differences between morals and ethics.
I should have also mentioned CocoaDialog, http://cocoadialog.sourceforge.net/. My apologies. I haven't used it myself but I think that it could be combined to good effect with Pashua. My recollection is that there is some overlap but some differences. And the main approaches are probably different as well.
Oh, where to start. Comparing Aqua to Cocoa is like comparing bananas to cars. Aqua is the name for the GUI components http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_(user_interface) and Cocoa is the preferred API http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoa_(API). Aqua has not been deprecated, not now and not "for years." You can write OS X apps in Aqua using Carbon which _has_ been deprecated for years but is still fully supported. Many popular (and older) OS X programs still run in Carbon such as Quicken, Igor Pro, and at least until recently, Microsoft Office.
If you would get your facts straight there would be no need to flame.
OS X has been UNIX 03 (SuSv3) registered and POSIX compliant since 2007.
FYI, no version of Linux is registered Unix.
Read these and learn:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_03
http://images.apple.com/macosx/technology/docs/L416017A_UNIX_TB_FF.pdf
http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/technology/unix.html
On OS X, I use Pashua, http://www.bluem.net/en/mac/pashua/. This is a brilliantly simple thing to use. I also use it for other (non-script) languages for making a quick-and-dirty GUI that still looks nice and is a real Cocoa program.
I don't know much about Opera mini but the best alternative browser for iPod/iPhone is iCab. Check it out.
"The house-sized battery can hold four megawatts of power for up to eight hours."
"Power" is not "held." Power is delivered. Energy is held. The unit of energy is joule.
I haven't seen Opera Mini but notwithstanding that the best alternative browser for iPhone and iPod Touch is iCab. This is from a longtime developer of an excellent OS X browser, and I'm sure it uses Webkit.
Russians? 1968? ASCII? Really??
...and I thought it was just me.
Geez, don't Windows browsers have the ability to block pop-ups?
Visually aggressive color schemes are fatiguing. Why doesn't anyone besides Apple get this?
Microsoft = Yellow Green Blue Red
Ubuntu = Purple Orange Brown
C'mon--somebody mod this up to "funny."