I don't think it's elegant either, the way humans play chess. Basically our strategy is
1. Think about the position and a few positions that pop into our heads
2. ????? - our subconcious does some inexplicable stuff
3. Profit!
A grandmaster couldn't explain to somebody else how he does it. "Elegant" should mean something that was maybe hard to think of, but once it's explained to you it's so simple. Human chess-playing is anything but.
I asked a coworker of mine who works for Google part time about blogs. He says they regularly get complaints about blogs, and it's not hard for them to adjust things to respond to complaints, but the thing is the complaints about blogs are evenly split. Half of the people think Google rates blogs too highly, half thinks they rate blogs too low. They're thinking about a -noblogs command or something like that.
trip
Well, the Los Alamos labs do a whole lot more than just nuclear-weapons-related work. In fact, the vast majority of the scientists who work there do not do anything remotely related to nukes. It's just like the other DoE labs, it does government-sponsored research of all sorts.
KT
This is almost certainly garbage. I'm working in a transcranial magnetic stimulation lab right now, and I've never even heard of the guy doing this stuff. However, the people who criticize his work are basically the most respected people doing TMS right now. I get the sense that he's trying to infer a meaningful pattern from a small number of poorly designed tests.
The usual effect of TMS is just to slow you down by a couple seconds at whatever you're doing. For example, right now we're doing this experiment where we flash words on a screen and have the subject read them out loud. Then eventually we just put a * up on the screen, and they have to recall the last word they saw. By changing the device to send pulses into different parts of the brain, you can find out what is responsible for what. The subjects slow down a bit when you're hitting the right part of the brain.
I mean, this guy could be insanely revolutionary and in five years we'll all be using his machines on our heads to make us geniuses... but I don't think so.
a. 192 kbps is a better encoding than most of the files available on P2P networks right now.
b. Encoding in a lossy format, decoding, then recoding in a similar lossy format shouldn't be much worse than the original.
I'm not an audiophile here. I'm just saying, I would expect this to be better than a direct 160 kbps mp3 encoding. Plus you won't have the song cut off at the end.
Unlimited CD burning for personal use? In other words, it's pretty simple to turn an AAC into an mp3. At worst, you'll be able to burn to CD and then convert back from cda to mp3. Or ogg, or whatever your personal preference for non-DRM-restricted music is. Hopefully somebody can make a direct converter without the intermediate CD burning step.
This could be a huge boon for Gnutella. Just think, a check box that says "Go ahead, take this directory full of AAC files, transform them to mp3s, and share them." There would finally be a standardized high-quality mp3 version of any given song. No more downloading 5 different copies of a song and deleting the ones with hisses and clicks, or Madonna complaining about how evil I am.
I don't understand how DRM can coexist with the ability to burn music to a CD. To me, this is the reason that DRM will never be able to create a music-downloading service that everybody likes and that the big music companies make a lot of money off of. The only way for them to have a service that everybody uses is if it's so cheap it's not worth the extra hassle to do P2P.
When I first read this I thought "Wow, 46 percent of newspapers are going to die?" But there's a very important misrepresentation here. The article does not say "46 percent of all journalists" believe their publications will turn web-only. It actually refers to "46 percent of all trade title journalists." That's much less shocking.
Personally, I'm glad to see the rise of online news. I want to get to the 10-25% of all news that really interests me. That's much easier online than with a physical newspaper. Although television news is the worst of all; you have to wait through everything you're not interested in due to the inherently linear format.
If you don't let people post in the first 20-minute window, then the subscribers who see the post in that window probably aren't going to come back later to post. But these people are probably more likely to make quality posts overall. We wouldn't want the quality of posting to go down even further...
And I'm not a subscriber so don't go thinking I'm personally biased here.
Is it just coincidence that NASA is going to announce something cool that it's done right after so many critics are calling for the space program to be dismantled?
Slashdot Mirror
1. Think about the position and a few positions that pop into our heads
2. ????? - our subconcious does some inexplicable stuff
3. Profit! A grandmaster couldn't explain to somebody else how he does it. "Elegant" should mean something that was maybe hard to think of, but once it's explained to you it's so simple. Human chess-playing is anything but.
I asked a coworker of mine who works for Google part time about blogs. He says they regularly get complaints about blogs, and it's not hard for them to adjust things to respond to complaints, but the thing is the complaints about blogs are evenly split. Half of the people think Google rates blogs too highly, half thinks they rate blogs too low. They're thinking about a -noblogs command or something like that. trip
Well, the Los Alamos labs do a whole lot more than just nuclear-weapons-related work. In fact, the vast majority of the scientists who work there do not do anything remotely related to nukes. It's just like the other DoE labs, it does government-sponsored research of all sorts. KT
This is almost certainly garbage. I'm working in a transcranial magnetic stimulation lab right now, and I've never even heard of the guy doing this stuff. However, the people who criticize his work are basically the most respected people doing TMS right now. I get the sense that he's trying to infer a meaningful pattern from a small number of poorly designed tests.
The usual effect of TMS is just to slow you down by a couple seconds at whatever you're doing. For example, right now we're doing this experiment where we flash words on a screen and have the subject read them out loud. Then eventually we just put a * up on the screen, and they have to recall the last word they saw. By changing the device to send pulses into different parts of the brain, you can find out what is responsible for what. The subjects slow down a bit when you're hitting the right part of the brain.
I mean, this guy could be insanely revolutionary and in five years we'll all be using his machines on our heads to make us geniuses... but I don't think so.
btm
a. 192 kbps is a better encoding than most of the files available on P2P networks right now.
b. Encoding in a lossy format, decoding, then recoding in a similar lossy format shouldn't be much worse than the original.
I'm not an audiophile here. I'm just saying, I would expect this to be better than a direct 160 kbps mp3 encoding. Plus you won't have the song cut off at the end.
Unlimited CD burning for personal use? In other words, it's pretty simple to turn an AAC into an mp3. At worst, you'll be able to burn to CD and then convert back from cda to mp3. Or ogg, or whatever your personal preference for non-DRM-restricted music is. Hopefully somebody can make a direct converter without the intermediate CD burning step.
This could be a huge boon for Gnutella. Just think, a check box that says "Go ahead, take this directory full of AAC files, transform them to mp3s, and share them." There would finally be a standardized high-quality mp3 version of any given song. No more downloading 5 different copies of a song and deleting the ones with hisses and clicks, or Madonna complaining about how evil I am.
I don't understand how DRM can coexist with the ability to burn music to a CD. To me, this is the reason that DRM will never be able to create a music-downloading service that everybody likes and that the big music companies make a lot of money off of. The only way for them to have a service that everybody uses is if it's so cheap it's not worth the extra hassle to do P2P.
When I first read this I thought "Wow, 46 percent of newspapers are going to die?" But there's a very important misrepresentation here. The article does not say "46 percent of all journalists" believe their publications will turn web-only. It actually refers to "46 percent of all trade title journalists." That's much less shocking.
Personally, I'm glad to see the rise of online news. I want to get to the 10-25% of all news that really interests me. That's much easier online than with a physical newspaper. Although television news is the worst of all; you have to wait through everything you're not interested in due to the inherently linear format.
If you don't let people post in the first 20-minute window, then the subscribers who see the post in that window probably aren't going to come back later to post. But these people are probably more likely to make quality posts overall. We wouldn't want the quality of posting to go down even further... And I'm not a subscriber so don't go thinking I'm personally biased here.
Is it just coincidence that NASA is going to announce something cool that it's done right after so many critics are calling for the space program to be dismantled?