Just some sobering thoughts for a sobering situation.
These days office space is in a glut. Who is going to fill those enormous towers (esp. given the state of our current economy, which isn't going to be improving any time soon in light of today's events)?
More to the point, who is going to *want* to work in those buildings after what happened today?
I agree that it's not necessarily a bad idea, especially as a way of bringing the country together, but these are one of a few realities that such a project would have to face.
As a sidenote, shouldn't there be a way for the ground control to override the controls of a hijacked plane?
A form was written into using a PERL script writing to a template. Consequently the data is lost if the user submits, then changes his/her mind and uses the back button. Javascript is used to parse the form fields and provide the error-checking before the form is submitted, circumventing this problem.
Would you like more cases where JavaScript is useful?
Dude, you have to be joking. In case you've been in the stone ages or something, a *lot* of site architecture these days relies on JavaScript, as buggy as it is. Whenever possible, I try to use server-side technologies, but there are quite a few things that is either very difficult or impossible to do any other way, yet are expected by clients. But yer probably browsing on lynx anyways:)...
The US and Russia have very different economies. You can't compare what it costs to do business in one country with what it costs in another. Chances are many of the subcontractors that NASA uses are paid 10x yearly what the Russian workers make. That adds up quickly.
There are lots of solaris users (i know someone who works in finance, for example) who could use a better desktop than CDE *who work for SUN*. If only for this is it a good idea.
However, with the Blade and other new machines, Sun is also courting the CAD and video markets, so there's another reason...
Just want to remind you that your $200 19" CRT probably won't even do 1600x1200, and if it does, it will end up costing you more in the long run in optometry bills from the eyestrain the low refresh rate would cause. God forbid you actually have to do any color matching either. I paid $500 for my 19" Mitsu flat CRT, and wouldn't even think of spending a penny less. My eyesight sucks enough already, thank you very much.
...but the poor, illiterate farmer's son or daughter might want one, and potentially benefit from one. I'm very glad my mom had the foresight to buy me a computer in 1984; for me it helped lead me towards a well paid high tech career.. How about you?
Aren't there some serious problems with leakage of these containers into the groundwater table? I seem to remember hearing something akin to that...
I'm obviously no physics guy (otherwise I most likely wouldn't be asking this question), but couldn't spend fuel be dumped in an active volcano where it would melt down in liquid-hot mag-ma (sorry, had to say it) and diffuse the radioactivity?
Looks like some moderator overrotated their scroll wheel. Interesting? Funny, perhaps, but not interesting.
Is there a "randomize" feature?
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Mood Home
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· Score: 2
I hope the colors aren't fixed to certain temperatures (80deg -- red, 100 deg -- blue). If the stuff catches on, it will be like a psychadelic housing tract. However, if it got popular enough cities would look a lot like a weather maps from the air:).
His name is Glenn. He was at UCL at the same time I was, and we were both mac geeks and americans, meaning basically we both hung out in the same mac labs at odd hours and between classes.
He said he started the site as a way to fuse his love of computers with his love of history (he was a history major) and that not many people had tried to chronicle tech history (this was four years ago). Looks like he kept with it...
I think the powerbook 1400 had just come out, apple was at $12 a share, and they were creating prototypes with the exponential chip. Glad those days are over:)
This is the ultimate proof-of-concept - if Linux is stable enough for a combat system where failure can have life-or-death consequences for the soldiers involved, what isn't it stable enough for?
Well, remember when that arleigh burke class missile cruiser running NT went down for a while... I guess some genius deemed it not stable enough for *that* application:)
Re:end of pay phones?!?
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Paper Phones
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· Score: 2
I think they expect you'll just buy one at the Kwik-E-Mart.
I can't say I'm a fan of disposability, but this is a huge boon for frequent travellers. God, to think of the amount of different country's calling cards I had to use while travelling through Europe to get in touch with friends and family -- to be able to buy a disposable cell would have been great.
I hope they have very clever filtering sw, because here's a potential problem. Let's say someone like the bands "Mira" and the singer/songwriter "Mirah", and that these groups are fine with having their music traded on Napster, but that the amazingly oftenly mispelled (as "mirah") Mariah Carey doesn't want her stuff on Napster. If they're not careful and keep they're filters pretty narrow, they could end up blocking more than they mean to. However, I suppose it would be hard to prove that something *isn't* there when you don't know if it should be, and the only people who knows what should be there is Napster. Guess I answered my own question -- damn me.
Analysis is not the be-all of solving problems in this world, even in "rational" fields like science. Experience, too, plays a key role, and here memory is key. Many are those "eureka" moments when your brain, for some reason, connects two things together and you leap forward. Te more "stuff" you remember, the more your brain can draw on here. Without that library of experience, it's like you're solving a new problem every time from scratch.
This is a good counterpoint. Why did you post it as an AC where nobody will read it?
I'm not arguing wholesale one way or the other -- the shift i'm describing is imagined as a subtle one. Short and long term memory is always needed, I just think that analytical skills have become equally important (not necessarily more), and that is being recognized as we are overblown with information.
Without the library of experience, you're solving a new problem every time from scratch, but without the research skills to search through that library and pull in data from outside it (and your library of experience is pretty small compared to the collective one), all your experience won't help you. Only "the experience in the world" will.
Perhaps this is a sign of a greater shift in importance from pure memory to analytical skills. The teaching world seems by and large to have followed that.
I'm taking a math class right now and having a hard time because the prof seems to have put such a high emphasis on memorization. However, working as a programmer in lots of different environments and rapidly changing technologies, i've found that my capacity for research has helped me far more than my memory.
Too much info == not enough time to process it. The younger you are, the more info is thrown at you, and the better you get at processing it, but the less time you have to spend memorizing any of it. Information is commoditizing, and consequently becoming less valuable intrinsically as consituent parts. Those who can make sense of it in a larger view do well, and those who hang onto it will find themselves with that info and not much else when that info is no longer valid.
My colleague tells me that the original source for the idea of memes (in a cultural context) comes from Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist best known for the book "The Selfish Gene".
The race analogy only holds true if you *remember* the directory paths. Luckily the auto-completion makes that easier, but for the most part you'd better have few directories or a great memory. Especially in dealing with files you haven't touched in a while. I sure find myself typing 'ls' a lot...
FWIW, the "folder view" (for lack of a better description) on MacOS and Win usually makes for a lot fewer "messy" windows and a much faster file manipulation.
The reason a semi-natural-language interpreter hasn't been done (AFAIK) is probably due to the difficulty and varied results of natural language parsing w/regards to language meaning (see article on wearable translator).
It's a great idea, but natural language capabilities are to computer scientists what Pluto is to NASA -- you can see it there but it's still pretty much unattainable.
I used to study linguistics. It is very interesting, but also makes you feel very humble. Human language has far more subtleties than most people credit it with. It is true that if you're a Chomskian, you will tend to see languages as more similar than different (the opposite of most non-academic views). However, even if you do believe in Universal Grammar and all that the idea entails, it has to be said that there are some fundamental difficulties in machine translation. As I'm not in the field, I don't know if they've been solved yet, but I imagine they haven't reconciled the:
1) Differences in language syntactic structure. How do you reconcile a VSO language with an OSV language and still maintain real-time processing? More specifically, if, in, say, language 1 one would form a sentence like "John buys milk" (Subject-Verb-Object, like English) but in lanuguge two you would say "buys milk John", how do you begin to immediately translate, word for word, when the words are not in the same order? Answer is, you don't. The longer and more clausal the sentence gets, the more or a problem this becomes. This assumes the translator is going to have to decide where to pause so it can rearrange the sentence, parse and translate it. This is fine, except that:
2) Natural speech doesn't necessarily follow the same rules as written language. So the speaker many not speak in nice, neat, parseable chunks. So the translation machine has to start making some decisions. For the benefit of the doubt, let's say that we're going to pause nicely after each complete sentence to let the translator do its work. You still have the problem of:
3) Context. A.k.a. the "frame" problem (to some degree, though not exactly). Computers have no context w/ regards to language (they have no actual experiential knowledge of meaning), and thus have no concept of relevance (if you believe in Relevance theory pragmatics). They have no basis upon which to "guess" at word meaning or pull meaning out of inferential utterances -- no basis which to understand sarcasm, humor, hyberbole, or anything your lit professor taught about -- and here's the kicker folks, all of that plays a role in figuring out meaning, which is usually the tiebreaker in any case of:
4) Ambiguity. Wonder why Babelfish only works half the time? Because idiomatic expressions exist. Because words are ambiguous -- one word can have multiple meanings and multiple words can mean the same thing. One word can have different meanings to different people. (BTW, if you want to explode your head, just *begin* to study semantics).
This will probably be another "nobody will ever need more than 16k of RAM" quote, but I think we'll have a hell of a time getting machine translation up to human standards until the machine is thinking for itself. Not that i'm arguing it can't be done, it's just not as straightforward as L&H, or IBM, or the Office of Naval Research would have you believe.
I run my 17" monitor at 1280x1024; the 15.2" screen on the Powerbook is actually bigger than my screen (because desktop monitor sizes count the edges and LCD sizes don't), and likely crisper too. Moreover, one tends to sit closer to a laptop screen than a desktop monitor. But the Powerbook doesn't offer the option of more than 768 lines of vertical resolution. I'm quite sure I would miss it, personally; of course this doesn't speak for everyone but I'd guess it does speak for many.
Yes, but the PB monitor is only close the same size in viewable area, not in aspect ratio. It is a very wide monitor -- probably the equivalent of a 17" monitor (usually the viewable area of a desktop is at most 1.2" smaller than the advertised size, which would make the viewable on your 17" around 15.8") -- but also a very shallow monitor (more like a 15" desktop, which I'd normally run at 1024x768). It's because of this lack of vertical size that the vertical resolution lacks, why I wouldn't begrudge them too much, and why i'd say that the resolution they give it is just fine.
Slashdot Mirror
With all that money that was just given back in the tax rebate?
One of my colleagues is a devout Muslim from Iran. He also happens to be one of the nicest, kindest people you would ever hope to meet.
In light of recent events, I don't envy his next few weeks.
These days office space is in a glut. Who is going to fill those enormous towers (esp. given the state of our current economy, which isn't going to be improving any time soon in light of today's events)?
More to the point, who is going to *want* to work in those buildings after what happened today?
I agree that it's not necessarily a bad idea, especially as a way of bringing the country together, but these are one of a few realities that such a project would have to face.
As a sidenote, shouldn't there be a way for the ground control to override the controls of a hijacked plane?
Ok, here's a very simple recent case.
A form was written into using a PERL script writing to a template. Consequently the data is lost if the user submits, then changes his/her mind and uses the back button. Javascript is used to parse the form fields and provide the error-checking before the form is submitted, circumventing this problem.
Would you like more cases where JavaScript is useful?
Dude, you have to be joking. In case you've been in the stone ages or something, a *lot* of site architecture these days relies on JavaScript, as buggy as it is. Whenever possible, I try to use server-side technologies, but there are quite a few things that is either very difficult or impossible to do any other way, yet are expected by clients. But yer probably browsing on lynx anyways :)...
The US and Russia have very different economies. You can't compare what it costs to do business in one country with what it costs in another. Chances are many of the subcontractors that NASA uses are paid 10x yearly what the Russian workers make. That adds up quickly.
There are lots of solaris users (i know someone who works in finance, for example) who could use a better desktop than CDE *who work for SUN*. If only for this is it a good idea.
However, with the Blade and other new machines, Sun is also courting the CAD and video markets, so there's another reason...
Just want to remind you that your $200 19" CRT probably won't even do 1600x1200, and if it does, it will end up costing you more in the long run in optometry bills from the eyestrain the low refresh rate would cause. God forbid you actually have to do any color matching either. I paid $500 for my 19" Mitsu flat CRT, and wouldn't even think of spending a penny less. My eyesight sucks enough already, thank you very much.
...but the poor, illiterate farmer's son or daughter might want one, and potentially benefit from one. I'm very glad my mom had the foresight to buy me a computer in 1984; for me it helped lead me towards a well paid high tech career.. How about you?
Wow, (probably staged) evangelism for the new age.
Now they'll ask you why you didn't see that critical hardware failure coming :)
Aren't there some serious problems with leakage of these containers into the groundwater table? I seem to remember hearing something akin to that...
I'm obviously no physics guy (otherwise I most likely wouldn't be asking this question), but couldn't spend fuel be dumped in an active volcano where it would melt down in liquid-hot mag-ma (sorry, had to say it) and diffuse the radioactivity?
Looks like some moderator overrotated their scroll wheel. Interesting? Funny, perhaps, but not interesting.
I hope the colors aren't fixed to certain temperatures (80deg -- red, 100 deg -- blue). If the stuff catches on, it will be like a psychadelic housing tract. However, if it got popular enough cities would look a lot like a weather maps from the air :).
His name is Glenn. He was at UCL at the same time I was, and we were both mac geeks and americans, meaning basically we both hung out in the same mac labs at odd hours and between classes.
:)
He said he started the site as a way to fuse his love of computers with his love of history (he was a history major) and that not many people had tried to chronicle tech history (this was four years ago). Looks like he kept with it...
I think the powerbook 1400 had just come out, apple was at $12 a share, and they were creating prototypes with the exponential chip. Glad those days are over
Well, remember when that arleigh burke class missile cruiser running NT went down for a while ... I guess some genius deemed it not stable enough for *that* application :)
I think they expect you'll just buy one at the Kwik-E-Mart.
I can't say I'm a fan of disposability, but this is a huge boon for frequent travellers. God, to think of the amount of different country's calling cards I had to use while travelling through Europe to get in touch with friends and family -- to be able to buy a disposable cell would have been great.
I hope they have very clever filtering sw, because here's a potential problem. Let's say someone like the bands "Mira" and the singer/songwriter "Mirah", and that these groups are fine with having their music traded on Napster, but that the amazingly oftenly mispelled (as "mirah") Mariah Carey doesn't want her stuff on Napster. If they're not careful and keep they're filters pretty narrow, they could end up blocking more than they mean to. However, I suppose it would be hard to prove that something *isn't* there when you don't know if it should be, and the only people who knows what should be there is Napster. Guess I answered my own question -- damn me.
Analysis is not the be-all of solving problems in this world, even in "rational" fields like science. Experience, too, plays a key role, and here memory is key. Many are those "eureka" moments when your brain, for some reason, connects two things together and you leap forward. Te more "stuff" you remember, the more your brain can draw on here. Without that library of experience, it's like you're solving a new problem every time from scratch. This is a good counterpoint. Why did you post it as an AC where nobody will read it? I'm not arguing wholesale one way or the other -- the shift i'm describing is imagined as a subtle one. Short and long term memory is always needed, I just think that analytical skills have become equally important (not necessarily more), and that is being recognized as we are overblown with information. Without the library of experience, you're solving a new problem every time from scratch, but without the research skills to search through that library and pull in data from outside it (and your library of experience is pretty small compared to the collective one), all your experience won't help you. Only "the experience in the world" will.
Perhaps this is a sign of a greater shift in importance from pure memory to analytical skills. The teaching world seems by and large to have followed that.
I'm taking a math class right now and having a hard time because the prof seems to have put such a high emphasis on memorization. However, working as a programmer in lots of different environments and rapidly changing technologies, i've found that my capacity for research has helped me far more than my memory.
Too much info == not enough time to process it. The younger you are, the more info is thrown at you, and the better you get at processing it, but the less time you have to spend memorizing any of it. Information is commoditizing, and consequently becoming less valuable intrinsically as consituent parts. Those who can make sense of it in a larger view do well, and those who hang onto it will find themselves with that info and not much else when that info is no longer valid.
My colleague tells me that the original source for the idea of memes (in a cultural context) comes from Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist best known for the book "The Selfish Gene".
The race analogy only holds true if you *remember* the directory paths. Luckily the auto-completion makes that easier, but for the most part you'd better have few directories or a great memory. Especially in dealing with files you haven't touched in a while. I sure find myself typing 'ls' a lot...
FWIW, the "folder view" (for lack of a better description) on MacOS and Win usually makes for a lot fewer "messy" windows and a much faster file manipulation.
The reason a semi-natural-language interpreter hasn't been done (AFAIK) is probably due to the difficulty and varied results of natural language parsing w/regards to language meaning (see article on wearable translator).
It's a great idea, but natural language capabilities are to computer scientists what Pluto is to NASA -- you can see it there but it's still pretty much unattainable.
I used to study linguistics. It is very interesting, but also makes you feel very humble. Human language has far more subtleties than most people credit it with. It is true that if you're a Chomskian, you will tend to see languages as more similar than different (the opposite of most non-academic views). However, even if you do believe in Universal Grammar and all that the idea entails, it has to be said that there are some fundamental difficulties in machine translation. As I'm not in the field, I don't know if they've been solved yet, but I imagine they haven't reconciled the:
1) Differences in language syntactic structure. How do you reconcile a VSO language with an OSV language and still maintain real-time processing? More specifically, if, in, say, language 1 one would form a sentence like "John buys milk" (Subject-Verb-Object, like English) but in lanuguge two you would say "buys milk John", how do you begin to immediately translate, word for word, when the words are not in the same order? Answer is, you don't. The longer and more clausal the sentence gets, the more or a problem this becomes. This assumes the translator is going to have to decide where to pause so it can rearrange the sentence, parse and translate it. This is fine, except that:
2) Natural speech doesn't necessarily follow the same rules as written language. So the speaker many not speak in nice, neat, parseable chunks. So the translation machine has to start making some decisions. For the benefit of the doubt, let's say that we're going to pause nicely after each complete sentence to let the translator do its work. You still have the problem of:
3) Context. A.k.a. the "frame" problem (to some degree, though not exactly). Computers have no context w/ regards to language (they have no actual experiential knowledge of meaning), and thus have no concept of relevance (if you believe in Relevance theory pragmatics). They have no basis upon which to "guess" at word meaning or pull meaning out of inferential utterances -- no basis which to understand sarcasm, humor, hyberbole, or anything your lit professor taught about -- and here's the kicker folks, all of that plays a role in figuring out meaning, which is usually the tiebreaker in any case of:
4) Ambiguity. Wonder why Babelfish only works half the time? Because idiomatic expressions exist. Because words are ambiguous -- one word can have multiple meanings and multiple words can mean the same thing. One word can have different meanings to different people. (BTW, if you want to explode your head, just *begin* to study semantics).
This will probably be another "nobody will ever need more than 16k of RAM" quote, but I think we'll have a hell of a time getting machine translation up to human standards until the machine is thinking for itself. Not that i'm arguing it can't be done, it's just not as straightforward as L&H, or IBM, or the Office of Naval Research would have you believe.
Yes, but the PB monitor is only close the same size in viewable area, not in aspect ratio. It is a very wide monitor -- probably the equivalent of a 17" monitor (usually the viewable area of a desktop is at most 1.2" smaller than the advertised size, which would make the viewable on your 17" around 15.8") -- but also a very shallow monitor (more like a 15" desktop, which I'd normally run at 1024x768). It's because of this lack of vertical size that the vertical resolution lacks, why I wouldn't begrudge them too much, and why i'd say that the resolution they give it is just fine.