An interesting demonstration (Kripke's argument? or Chisholm's??). I think you would do better with a little doubt. Read Sellars' EPM, maybe. You seem to think that "semantics" is given—but it is very like that nothing is given, except some very rudimentary "syntax" (or something like that). The process of acquiring "semantics" in human beings is mysterious and by no means a solved problem.
And while this does not imply that one must have concepts before one has them, it does imply that one can have the concept of green only by having a whole battery of concepts of which it is one element. It implies that while the process of acquiring the concept of green may — indeed does — involve a long history of acquiring piecemeal habits of response to various objects in various circumstances, there is an important sense in which one has no concept pertaining to the observable properties of physical objects in Space and Time unless one has them all — and, indeed, as we shall see, a great deal more besides. — Sellars, 19 [bold added]
The Church-Turing thesis showed that we can imagine noncomputable* problems. It did not show that there are any natural processes which are noncomputable. (Humans can't solve the general halting problem, either.)
$100 earbuds? Last time I was in an Apple store, they had the straight up iPod earbuds for $30, and the in-ear model for $40 (knock $10 off those for students). Maybe Australian dollars...?
You're right, 400-500 megs is about right for a 44 minute episode (I ripped my Arrested Development at 200megs/22 min. episode, which is just about perfect for h.264). But that's at full DVD resolution, 720x480. At 320x240, 700kbits is, as I said, excessive. To my eyes, 320x240 looks great on a TV, unless it's very large or you sit very close. But of course if you're really that obsessed with 'quality', you can always encode to 480x480 MPEG4 at 2.5 megabits, but that's getting just obscene for MPEG4.
But don't take my word for it, rip some DVDs and see for yourself. I suggest recent TV shows, they take only a little time (an hour at most for a 22 minute TV show to iPod resolution), and are higher-quality than older shows--a lot of the 'artifacting' I see in my Fawlty Towers rips, for example, is on the original DVD.) In particular do a couple of side-by-side MPEG4 vs. h.264 encodes at the same bitrate, it's really amazing the difference sometimes. If you've got a Mac, HandBrake is simple and pretty stellar.
Also, don't use Kazaa, silly. Find yourself a nice BT community and see what really good MPEG4 looks like. I've seen some awful 2CD rips, and I've seen some amazing 700meg ones. It's all about the little things -- denoise filters, subpixel quantizing, the motion vector algorithm used, the number of encoding passes, b-frames, etc. etc.
Anyway, I still stand by my statements that, for the iPod screen and (SD)TV-out, the resolutions and bitrates supported by the iPod are more than adequate.
I would suggest you try viewing a 320x240 h.264 clip at 700kbits on your SD TV, lest you continue in ignorance.
First, resolution. NTSC resolution is theoretically 480 lines, but they're interlaced, so 240 progressive lines are an acceptable resolution. Unless you're used to watching your 32" TV from S-video inputs and three feet away, you won't notice a drop in quality. (In addition, the iPod plays MPEG4 at 480x480--coincidentally, the exact same resolution that SD Tivos record at, and nearly DVD quality [DVDs are 720x480, crop that to 540x480 for 4:3 video and you're only losing 60 horizontal pixels of resolution [ignoring for a minute anamorphic DVDs]]. It will even look passable, I wager, on a 480p HDTV, though obviously not as good as true HD.) I found the definition of iPod-sized video, on a large SDTV, to be at least comparable to Tivo, with the edge going to the iPod for its superior audio and lack of artifacts. (Damn Tivo muddies up everything, even on best quality, and just murders the audio.)
As to the "smallness" of 200 megs/44 mins comment, this just displays your ignorance of MPEG4 encoding (and arithmetic--44 minutes * 700Kib/sec * 60sec/min * 1KiB/8Kib * 1KiB/1024MiB = 225MB, 22 minute shows are around 100MB). At 320x240, with any MPEG4 codec (not even the much higher-quality h.264), 768bit/s is just plain overkill, by about three times. Most pirated movies are twice that resolution (4x the pixels) at a bitrate closer to 600kbit/s. H.264 can get away with less than 200kbit/s at the iPod's resolution without a noticeable drop in quality, and can likely go a lot lower if you're not as picky as me (too bad it doesn't support B-frames or CABAC). A 22 minute TV show takes approximately 50-60MB on the iPod, if it's smartly done.
That said, the Lost season premiere I downloaded from iTunes displayed disappointingly noticeable artifacting in the ultra-dark jungle scenes. I couldn't see any artifacts on my computer's screen, but I guess the gamma was waaay up on the TV or something and the icky MPEG boxes were all over the place in the dark bits. (I wish someone would make a video codec that didn't go to shit when the screen went black.) The moral of the story is, rip your DVDs and use BitTorrent (which you'll have to do if you want more than Lost and DH anyway).
So in closing, yes, read the specs... but then, and more importantly, do some actual encoding work with ffmpeg or mencoder (or Quicktime, if you don't mind the ridiculously high bitrate). I think you'll discover that the iPod hits approximately the sweet-spot in terms of SD video quality (esp. if you care enough to encode at 480x480). But if you're looking for a dedicated portable video player, consider the Zen Vision, it has wider codec/bitrate support. I expect that most people, however, will be more than happy with the iPod, especially if they listen to music.
Wow, even for a joke graph, that's really awful. You should have done a scatter plot with a linear scale of pirates along the x-axis and temperature along the y-axis, and then a best-fit line to approximate the obvious connection between pirating and global environmental calamity. Either that, or time as the x-axis, and *two* lines showing the declining trend in pirates along with the constantly rising temperature. As it is it's just a wreck, trying to squeeze three dimensions of data into two (and not very well).
The problem is the color screens show scratches much more annoyingly than the B&W iPods. I think it's because of those three-color pixels, cause scratches on an iPod photo or nano show up as these awful rainbow lines, as opposed to the old B&W screens where they looked like, while, almost invisible scratches. Scratching the color screen doesn't quite affect usability, but it is damnably distracting.
Incidentally I don't think the nano is any more susceptible in this regard than any other color iPod (I don't own a nano). If you notice, in the Apple forums most of the people are complaining compared to their 3G iPods, or minis--both black and white models.
The moral of the story is use a damn screen protector (they're cheeeeap), don't put your $250 impossibly-engineered modern miracle into the same pocket as your keys/carabiner, and don't expect a shiny electronic gadget to look like a museum piece if you use it every day. But most of all use a screen protector, cause those scratches are damn annoying.
I would venture to say that you're a worse shot with a pistol than your mouse because the real-world pistol doesn't include a giant glowing crosshair that illuminates exactly where the bullet will go when you fire it. Not to mention that "moving" in a video game is really not moving at all.
Then add to this the fact that the Revolution's controller is not competing with computer mice but XBox analog sticks, and I think it's obvious that this'll slaughter (no pun) the competition as far as console controlling goes. Though it still won't have Halo...
RSS feeds are small, unless you're including a ridiculous amount of data along with them (Engadget's, with all their Google ads and story pics, can take a while). But reasonably-sized RSS feeds are generally < 10-20k (smaller if you gzip em, wish iTunes supported that...). iTunes by default only downloads its RSS feeds once a day, and the smallest interval you can set is an hour. RSS feeds shouldn't be a worry for most websites, as the feed is, in general, smaller than any page on their site (or even most site's CSS file).
The videos do use a fairly ridunculous amount of bandwidth (the vidcast linked by the Ars article is 150MB for the HQ version, yeesh). H.264 alleviates this slightly. Full SD (DVD quality) video takes approx. 9-10MB/min (approx 1000kb/s) in my experience, while at likely video iPod screen sizes (320x240? 480x320?) and a little bit more laxness as far as artifacting goes this shrinks to about 2-3MB/min (~250-400kb/s/s), or only a little larger than good-quality MP3s.
Quantum events taken in aggregate (not looking at just the [unpredictable] outcome of a single quantum event) still behave deterministically. In addition, even single quantum events are governed by probabilities, and the behavior of any probabilistic system may still be simulated by a deterministic Turing machine (or equivalent). So for all intents and purposes the universe is still deterministic, despite a little bit of quantum fiddling.
If you're looking for a computer to use with your iPod, I'd definitely recommend a Mac mini rather than a Windows PC. iPod integration in OSX is much more seamless and friendly than under Windows.
Example: I've been trying to help my friend get her Outlook address book exported to her iPod for a while, a process that's been complicated by the fact that Win Outlook can't export.vcfs, and then further complicated by my having given her a few.vcf files for people on her address book but with different information in them. All of this would have been a 5-second procedure on OSX + iSync (including merging the duplicate contact info).
I've also found iPhoto to be far more intelligent than iTunes alone when it comes to loading up your photo iPod, if you've got one of those. And in general, iPodding is just more pleasant on the Mac. Compare "Claire's iPod" on the desktop to drilling through Start > My Computer > E:\ CLAIRES_IP (Removable Storage). It's the little things. I understand if you're a Windows household, but just know that you're making things just a leeeetle bit harder on yourselves.:)
Try this hint, maybe? The comments make me unsure whether it'll even do anything, but hey, who doesn't like mucking around in plists. Not sure how well it'd even work with just 32MB of VRAM, but it's worth a shot. Since I read this thread I've been trying it on my last-year PB1.5 with 128MB VRAM (whoo!), and graphics stuff (genie, safari tab animation, expose) does seem slightly smoother. Who knows?
You can use the Quartz Debug application in the Xcode Tools for 10.4 to enable Quartz 2D Extreme. Sems to make a small speed difference for me, but there is a little weirdness too. You can also try turning off beam synchronization, makes Exposé a lot smoother. I think you have to force-quit Quartz Debug for the changes to stick, it resets to the default if you quit it normally.
You're kidding, I know, but think about how cool a video-capable shuffle would actually be. It would be like having a little DVD remote that you could carry around anywhere, plug into any TV, and watch all your movies/TV shows/iMovies/music videos/vidcasts etc. Oh, and it also plays MP3s. Brilliant!
Interestingly (I wouldn't go so far as to say 'ironically'), grandparent worked for Wolfram research, while much of Wolfram's research has been directed against the programmatic view of complexity/randomness grandparent assumed and parent described. For instance, the Random[] function in Mathematica is an implementation of the Rule 30 cellular automaton, whose program is one of the simplest imaginable (defined by eight bits, and really if you take out the inverse programs it's just 7 bits). Many people would say that this means that none of its output is truly random, while Wolfram wants to say that the unanalyzability of the output is as random as anyone needs.
As pointed out elsewhere, this is a little like saying the electromagnetic field was discovered by medieval alchemists fiddling with static-charged amber rods and bits of lint.
The Princess Bride is an interesting case because the movie, smartly, leaves out a lot of the substance of the book (the interstitiary postmodern interjections by Goldman), and just takes the swashbuckling and smart humor and runs with it. Goldman knows what works for films and what works for books, and (importantly) where they happily coincide. Hopefully the HHGG turns out to be a similar serendipity.
Slashdot Mirror
The Church-Turing thesis showed that we can imagine noncomputable* problems. It did not show that there are any natural processes which are noncomputable. (Humans can't solve the general halting problem, either.)
* [non-Turing-computable, that is]
Any justification for that last sentence? Or are you just trying to sound all Age of Aquarius?
$100 earbuds? Last time I was in an Apple store, they had the straight up iPod earbuds for $30, and the in-ear model for $40 (knock $10 off those for students). Maybe Australian dollars...?
Fox's Arrested Development is probably the greatest television sitcom ever... but no one watches that either.
.foo { display: table-cell; vertical-align: center; }
Not sure about IE compatibility. But I'd call that IE's fault.
You're right, 400-500 megs is about right for a 44 minute episode (I ripped my Arrested Development at 200megs/22 min. episode, which is just about perfect for h.264). But that's at full DVD resolution, 720x480. At 320x240, 700kbits is, as I said, excessive. To my eyes, 320x240 looks great on a TV, unless it's very large or you sit very close. But of course if you're really that obsessed with 'quality', you can always encode to 480x480 MPEG4 at 2.5 megabits, but that's getting just obscene for MPEG4.
But don't take my word for it, rip some DVDs and see for yourself. I suggest recent TV shows, they take only a little time (an hour at most for a 22 minute TV show to iPod resolution), and are higher-quality than older shows--a lot of the 'artifacting' I see in my Fawlty Towers rips, for example, is on the original DVD.) In particular do a couple of side-by-side MPEG4 vs. h.264 encodes at the same bitrate, it's really amazing the difference sometimes. If you've got a Mac, HandBrake is simple and pretty stellar.
Also, don't use Kazaa, silly. Find yourself a nice BT community and see what really good MPEG4 looks like. I've seen some awful 2CD rips, and I've seen some amazing 700meg ones. It's all about the little things -- denoise filters, subpixel quantizing, the motion vector algorithm used, the number of encoding passes, b-frames, etc. etc.
Anyway, I still stand by my statements that, for the iPod screen and (SD)TV-out, the resolutions and bitrates supported by the iPod are more than adequate.
I would suggest you try viewing a 320x240 h.264 clip at 700kbits on your SD TV, lest you continue in ignorance.
First, resolution. NTSC resolution is theoretically 480 lines, but they're interlaced, so 240 progressive lines are an acceptable resolution. Unless you're used to watching your 32" TV from S-video inputs and three feet away, you won't notice a drop in quality. (In addition, the iPod plays MPEG4 at 480x480--coincidentally, the exact same resolution that SD Tivos record at, and nearly DVD quality [DVDs are 720x480, crop that to 540x480 for 4:3 video and you're only losing 60 horizontal pixels of resolution [ignoring for a minute anamorphic DVDs]]. It will even look passable, I wager, on a 480p HDTV, though obviously not as good as true HD.) I found the definition of iPod-sized video, on a large SDTV, to be at least comparable to Tivo, with the edge going to the iPod for its superior audio and lack of artifacts. (Damn Tivo muddies up everything, even on best quality, and just murders the audio.)
As to the "smallness" of 200 megs/44 mins comment, this just displays your ignorance of MPEG4 encoding (and arithmetic--44 minutes * 700Kib/sec * 60sec/min * 1KiB/8Kib * 1KiB/1024MiB = 225MB, 22 minute shows are around 100MB). At 320x240, with any MPEG4 codec (not even the much higher-quality h.264), 768bit/s is just plain overkill, by about three times. Most pirated movies are twice that resolution (4x the pixels) at a bitrate closer to 600kbit/s. H.264 can get away with less than 200kbit/s at the iPod's resolution without a noticeable drop in quality, and can likely go a lot lower if you're not as picky as me (too bad it doesn't support B-frames or CABAC). A 22 minute TV show takes approximately 50-60MB on the iPod, if it's smartly done.
That said, the Lost season premiere I downloaded from iTunes displayed disappointingly noticeable artifacting in the ultra-dark jungle scenes. I couldn't see any artifacts on my computer's screen, but I guess the gamma was waaay up on the TV or something and the icky MPEG boxes were all over the place in the dark bits. (I wish someone would make a video codec that didn't go to shit when the screen went black.) The moral of the story is, rip your DVDs and use BitTorrent (which you'll have to do if you want more than Lost and DH anyway).
So in closing, yes, read the specs... but then, and more importantly, do some actual encoding work with ffmpeg or mencoder (or Quicktime, if you don't mind the ridiculously high bitrate). I think you'll discover that the iPod hits approximately the sweet-spot in terms of SD video quality (esp. if you care enough to encode at 480x480). But if you're looking for a dedicated portable video player, consider the Zen Vision, it has wider codec/bitrate support. I expect that most people, however, will be more than happy with the iPod, especially if they listen to music.
Wow, even for a joke graph, that's really awful. You should have done a scatter plot with a linear scale of pirates along the x-axis and temperature along the y-axis, and then a best-fit line to approximate the obvious connection between pirating and global environmental calamity. Either that, or time as the x-axis, and *two* lines showing the declining trend in pirates along with the constantly rising temperature. As it is it's just a wreck, trying to squeeze three dimensions of data into two (and not very well).
</pedant>
So, what, "Gatesgate"?
The problem is the color screens show scratches much more annoyingly than the B&W iPods. I think it's because of those three-color pixels, cause scratches on an iPod photo or nano show up as these awful rainbow lines, as opposed to the old B&W screens where they looked like, while, almost invisible scratches. Scratching the color screen doesn't quite affect usability, but it is damnably distracting.
Incidentally I don't think the nano is any more susceptible in this regard than any other color iPod (I don't own a nano). If you notice, in the Apple forums most of the people are complaining compared to their 3G iPods, or minis--both black and white models.
The moral of the story is use a damn screen protector (they're cheeeeap), don't put your $250 impossibly-engineered modern miracle into the same pocket as your keys/carabiner, and don't expect a shiny electronic gadget to look like a museum piece if you use it every day. But most of all use a screen protector, cause those scratches are damn annoying.
Correct! But I would say:
and the vast majority should be much less.
I'm spending my wish for 2005 on someone making a Frequency clone for the Revolution. I'd wish for a straight-up port, but I think it's a Sony game.
I would venture to say that you're a worse shot with a pistol than your mouse because the real-world pistol doesn't include a giant glowing crosshair that illuminates exactly where the bullet will go when you fire it. Not to mention that "moving" in a video game is really not moving at all.
Then add to this the fact that the Revolution's controller is not competing with computer mice but XBox analog sticks, and I think it's obvious that this'll slaughter (no pun) the competition as far as console controlling goes. Though it still won't have Halo...
I want one.
RSS feeds are small, unless you're including a ridiculous amount of data along with them (Engadget's, with all their Google ads and story pics, can take a while). But reasonably-sized RSS feeds are generally < 10-20k (smaller if you gzip em, wish iTunes supported that...). iTunes by default only downloads its RSS feeds once a day, and the smallest interval you can set is an hour. RSS feeds shouldn't be a worry for most websites, as the feed is, in general, smaller than any page on their site (or even most site's CSS file).
The videos do use a fairly ridunculous amount of bandwidth (the vidcast linked by the Ars article is 150MB for the HQ version, yeesh). H.264 alleviates this slightly. Full SD (DVD quality) video takes approx. 9-10MB/min (approx 1000kb/s) in my experience, while at likely video iPod screen sizes (320x240? 480x320?) and a little bit more laxness as far as artifacting goes this shrinks to about 2-3MB/min (~250-400kb/s/s), or only a little larger than good-quality MP3s.
Actually, I think Doki Doki Panic had different music from Mario 2. That and the sprites were pretty much the only changes. Doki Doki Panic music, more Doki Doki Panic music.
Quantum events taken in aggregate (not looking at just the [unpredictable] outcome of a single quantum event) still behave deterministically. In addition, even single quantum events are governed by probabilities, and the behavior of any probabilistic system may still be simulated by a deterministic Turing machine (or equivalent). So for all intents and purposes the universe is still deterministic, despite a little bit of quantum fiddling.
If you're looking for a computer to use with your iPod, I'd definitely recommend a Mac mini rather than a Windows PC. iPod integration in OSX is much more seamless and friendly than under Windows.
.vcfs, and then further complicated by my having given her a few .vcf files for people on her address book but with different information in them. All of this would have been a 5-second procedure on OSX + iSync (including merging the duplicate contact info).
:)
Example: I've been trying to help my friend get her Outlook address book exported to her iPod for a while, a process that's been complicated by the fact that Win Outlook can't export
I've also found iPhoto to be far more intelligent than iTunes alone when it comes to loading up your photo iPod, if you've got one of those. And in general, iPodding is just more pleasant on the Mac. Compare "Claire's iPod" on the desktop to drilling through Start > My Computer > E:\ CLAIRES_IP (Removable Storage). It's the little things. I understand if you're a Windows household, but just know that you're making things just a leeeetle bit harder on yourselves.
Ohhh I'm a genius. That link was supposed to be to *this* hint, not to your post. (Use the Preview Button! Check those URLs!)
Try this hint, maybe? The comments make me unsure whether it'll even do anything, but hey, who doesn't like mucking around in plists. Not sure how well it'd even work with just 32MB of VRAM, but it's worth a shot. Since I read this thread I've been trying it on my last-year PB1.5 with 128MB VRAM (whoo!), and graphics stuff (genie, safari tab animation, expose) does seem slightly smoother. Who knows?
You can use the Quartz Debug application in the Xcode Tools for 10.4 to enable Quartz 2D Extreme. Sems to make a small speed difference for me, but there is a little weirdness too. You can also try turning off beam synchronization, makes Exposé a lot smoother. I think you have to force-quit Quartz Debug for the changes to stick, it resets to the default if you quit it normally.
You're kidding, I know, but think about how cool a video-capable shuffle would actually be. It would be like having a little DVD remote that you could carry around anywhere, plug into any TV, and watch all your movies/TV shows/iMovies/music videos/vidcasts etc. Oh, and it also plays MP3s. Brilliant!
Interestingly (I wouldn't go so far as to say 'ironically'), grandparent worked for Wolfram research, while much of Wolfram's research has been directed against the programmatic view of complexity/randomness grandparent assumed and parent described. For instance, the Random[] function in Mathematica is an implementation of the Rule 30 cellular automaton, whose program is one of the simplest imaginable (defined by eight bits, and really if you take out the inverse programs it's just 7 bits). Many people would say that this means that none of its output is truly random, while Wolfram wants to say that the unanalyzability of the output is as random as anyone needs.
As pointed out elsewhere, this is a little like saying the electromagnetic field was discovered by medieval alchemists fiddling with static-charged amber rods and bits of lint.
The Princess Bride is an interesting case because the movie, smartly, leaves out a lot of the substance of the book (the interstitiary postmodern interjections by Goldman), and just takes the swashbuckling and smart humor and runs with it. Goldman knows what works for films and what works for books, and (importantly) where they happily coincide. Hopefully the HHGG turns out to be a similar serendipity.