"Any semi-stable collection of elementary particles can be referred to as an 'atom'."
How do you define "semi-stable"? Because the last row of the Periodic Table of the Elements on Wikipedia is populated largely by things starting with "un" that have half-lives in the millisceonds, which I don't consider to be particularly stable. But then, maybe it the world of physics, that's a long time compared to the lifespans of some of the other particles they look for these days.
Yes, I know you're joking. But this is a reflective device, not emissive, so they can't make it any more dangerous to you than a mirror. Probably not any more dangerous than a sheet of paper.
Someone who follows this field please reply- how are they doing with using these things to run implantable medical devices? Are they on the market, in human testing, in animal testing, in design, still just a glint in a venture capitalist's eye?
I know they're planning to have all sorts of implantable blood-powered sensors that send radio signals out to monitors. So, for one example, a diabetic can have a continuous blood glucose meter implanted in their wrist, which is powered by something like this, and sends wireless signals to a wrist-watch that gives continuous readings of blood glucose, bypassing all the finger-pricking blood tests. And the watch could then store that data and send it to the computer, where they can track it, graph it, correlate it with diet and exercise, recognize trends in the disease, etc. I'm sure there are endless cool potential medical uses. But I've been hearing about this for many years now, and while I'm sure I could Google up how it's going with a few hours of reading, would some knowledgeable Slashdot reader like to just cut to the chase and tell us where things stand?
I've had a lot of arguments regarding when blind testing is necessary. It's sometimes hard to draw a line. But it's not at all clear that it's needed here to distinguish from a placebo effect, as you imply.
For an example, suppose you're looking for the best cookie recipe. You run two different trials to see which is preferred in each.
- In trial #1, you compare the Nestle Tollhouse recipe to the same recipe with 10% more butter.
- In trial #2, you compare the Nestle Tollhouse recipe to the same recipe with the quantities of baking soda and sugar switched.
Now in trial#1, I'd say that, to get a meaningful result, you had better do it blind. Maybe even literally blindfolded, putting pieces of cookies in people's mouths. But in trial #2, it just doesn't make any difference whether you use careful, blind methods, because the results will be so dramatic and unanimous that there will be no room for error introduced by subtle mechanisms.
I like to listen to my music on CD through a Wheatfield Audio HA-1 tube headphone amplifier driving a pair of Sennheiser HD-600 headphones. For those of you not familiar with audiophile stuff, this is low on the totem poll of high-end equipment, but we're still talking about a roughly $1000 investment just for a pair of headphones and an amp. And when I listen to the difference between audio that's highly compressed and the real, high dynamic-range thing, it's the difference between night and day. If we're standing outside and you ask me if it's night or day out, I don't feel that I need to find a hundred other people to survey in a double-blind clinical setting before I get back to you with an answer. The answer is usually perfectly clear.
I'd also like to note that sometimes, highly compressed audio is desirable. For example, in my car on the freeway, there's pretty much background noise, and if you maintain high dynamic range in a recording, you'll either have painfully loud loud parts, or inaudible quiet parts. You need to compress the hell out of the music to make it sound decent over background noise. That, or (inadvisably) wear noise-canceling headphones in your car.
Does this mean they should sell two versions of CD's, one for audiophiles, and one for car-listeners? No. Because it's a piece of cake for a filter to compress the dynamic range of audio, but it's much more difficult to accurately re-extend that dynamic range. So car stereos should just offer a high compression setting, and probably default to having it on. I'm surprised I haven't heard of car stereos with a microphone that determines the volume of background noise in the car and then compresses the dynamic range of the audio appropriately to keep the low volume bits audible, and just uses the volume setting to set the maximum volume of the highs. (within certain limitations ion the compression. For example, if the volume were turned down such that the highs are below the background noise, you probably don't want to let the stereo invert the wave form.)
That's my opinion of this. By excluding lossy compression, they're also excluding the likelihood of applicability to AI that is the point of the contest.
Humans achieve good compression on things like encyclopedia knowledge because we don't remember the words at all. We remember the idea, and we have our own dictionary in our heads, and we re-apply words to the idea to reconstruct the entry, rather than memorizing the data. That's why we get great compression; we throw out most of the data, and just remember the "gist" of it, the argument, the facts, in an internal structure of raw ideas stored independently of the words to explain them.
By restricting the contest to lossless compression, they eliminate the ability to use any AI-like compression techniques. The machine can not extract the ideas and then re-assign words, because it would have to be able to do so using the exact voice of each of thousands of different Wikipedia contributors. That's hopeless.
So the entrants are restricted to clever algorithms that do endless mathematical optimizations to compress the data, a method of compression that's entirely alien to the methods of our only known intelligence. We don't remember things by figuring out clever tricks to compress the data in our own memory. We don't say "Oscar Schindler saved Jews In WWII" and then say, OK, that data had 5 spaces in it, and 4 "S's," and if I remember the positions of the spaces and the S's, I could use less memory space to store this in my head, and then just think back through the algorithm I used to take the spaces and "s's" out and put them back in where they go, and I'll have the name again, and then sit there and carefully work out in our heads what the original data must have been after our compression methods. It doesn't work that way at all. To us it apparently "just comes to us." The compression probably comes from things like remembering sounds, and then reconstructing the name's exact spelling based upon known rules of grammer. We store the name Oscar Schindler in relation to various facts regarding Jews and WWII, but we store them as ideas, and then pull the words back out, and each time someone asks us about Schindler, we'd be likely to say something similar in meaning but different in expression. So this contest is restricted to the least interesting kind of compression for intelligence; the kind that can't use it.
Interesting compressions are things like JPEG and MP3, where they built the compression model on the human perceptual model, first saying "what about this exact data is less relevant to a human observer, that we can therefore throw away?" For JPEG's, it turns out that (among other things) we're much more sensitive to differences in color than to absolute colors, and among differences in color, we're much more perceptive in the color ranges closer to human skin tone. MIDI is actually probably closer to the compression used by human intelligence than any recorded music standard.
Along these lines, I'd say storing the HTML formatting data exactly borders on ridiculous. It's a hugely inefficient waste of space. For instance, if you just run the HTML through one of the free online utilities that strips irrelevant data, you get the identical presentation of the data, you've only thrown out entirely worthless data. But you've already violated the contest rules. You should be able to strip the HTML entirely, as long as your compression/decompression system ends up with conveniently readable formatting in the end. Reconstructing the actual HTML in a character-identical way is so non-intelligent when you're trying to save space, it seems hard to beleive it's going to lead to intelligence.
Regarding this contest: I'm curious what level of compression you can get if you just histogram the words and then, in order of frequency for anything with enough occurrences to save memory by using a look-up table, you assign sequential numeric values for the words in order of frequency of occurrence. Then start your data with a look-up
"Anyway, considering all the stuff in cigarettes, I don't think nicotine is the worst part"
That's right. News flash to Slashdot, nicotine != cigarettes. Every time nicotine comes up, people think it causes lung cancer or heart disease or other ridiculous things. No, smoking causes those. Nicotine doesn't. In fact, some benefits of nicotine have been known for a long time. Of course it's an effective stimulant and makes people feel good. It can make people work more productively. But more importantly, it's strongly protective against some terrible, high incidence neurodegenerative diseases, like Parkinson's Diseases and Alzheimer's. All that's already fairly well established.
So don't smoke, because inhaling smoke every day will kill you. The downside of nicotine is that it's addictive, but otherwise, it might be quite healthy.
Many smokers try to quit with the patch or the gum. They successfully get off cigarettes with their nicotine supplement, but then when they try to quit the supplement, they relapse into smoking. The clear solution here for protecting their health is this: don't try to quit the supplement. If you relapse when you quit the supplement, give up on ditching nicotine, it's not bad for you anyway, and may be pretty good for you. Ditch the cigarettes, stay on the nicotine supplement for the rest of your life.
"PPC build of Photoshop is much slower than a Universal build of the new Photoshop"
The old PPC builds of Photoshop are also much slower on PPC than the only universal version, CS3. They moved Photoshop from Codewarrior to Xcode between CS2 and CS3, and it's the most massive rewrite they've ever done. So you can't distinguish how much of the speed difference of CS3 over CS2 on Intel is due to it being Intel native, and how much is simply due to it being faster.
Yes, this is a nice idea. Scientists don't have egos, or personal investments in being right about things. Experiments showing negative results have equal chances of being published as papers showing positive results. Funding sources won't consider a scientist's past success record, their publication record, or how many new theories of theirs were proven versus disproven in determining funding. And even if they did, scientists are pure and don't care about money or funding or prestige for themselves or their labs or their institutions.
The graduate students I know aren't eager to come up with theories that they can back up with experiments showing positive results that will lead to getting published in a peer reviewed journal and them getting their PhD, because as a scientific principle, they know that negative results are just as important as positive results, because either one produces more scientific knowledge about whatever they're investigating.
Similarly, businesses don't care if they succeed or fail, because a failure is simply and act of market-place creative destruction, invalidating their business model, or the way they went about pursuing it, and thereby providing valuable information to the market place about the usefulness of that model, and helping to direct resources more productively in the future.
Don't read too much into my sarcasm. I don't for a second think that Fermilab intentionally sabotaged the parts they made for CERN. But I also don't think that all scientists follow a selfless, single-minded, wholly objective devotion to the pursuit of natural truth, with complete disregard for ego, self-promotion, their career, their reputation, or any consideration for their own well-being.
Look, I'm usually the type to be accused of being a Mac fanboy more often than a critic, but the reviewer is right about this. You can argue all you want that upgradeability isn't, or shouldn't be, important, but this guy's writing for HardOCP, and we all know perfectly well that this guy and most of his audience are probably among those who upgrade and swap components all the time. Clearly upgradablity is important to him. And he gives a great example of where this IS important right in his review- the Mac Mini comes with an unconscionably low amount of RAM for OSX, and it's a huge PITA to upgrade compared to nearly any similarly priced PC. Yes, the Mini is little and cute and built like a laptop, which would make it hard to give it 4 easily acessible RAM slots like many similarly priced PC's have, but the fact that it's a relative PITA to upgrade stands, regardless of there being good reasons behind it.
Yes, the Mac Pro towers are some of the most gorgeous, easily upgradeable computers available anywhere- he admits this, but they start at $2,500. What this guy's asking for is what Apple used to sell from the release of the Beige G3 tower in 1998 until the release of the G5 tower in June 2003- an easily user-upgradeable machine for something around $1000.
Some of us like computers and mess around with them and, as he said, like to pop in new components to relieve bottle necks with some frequency, rather than always replacing the whole thing at one go. I had one of those G3 towers, and I bought it as a 266 mhz G3 with 32 MB RAM and a 4 GB HD, and I sold it 6 years later as a 533 Mhz G4 with 768 MB memory and over 100GB of HD space. Along the way it stepped up from a CD-ROM to a CR-R, it gained USB 2 and firewire ports through a PCI-card, and it went from single monitor support to much faster 3 monitor support with a Radeon 7000 PCI card. That machine cost about $1,000 new, maybe $1,200. Now, while the price of PC's has fallen dramatically since 1998, the price of the cheapest upgradable Mac has doubled. I still think the Mac Pros are a great deal- if you price something similar at Dell, you'll pay $1,000+ more. But regardless of whether they're a good price for what you get, they cost an arm and a leg. Minis, and more particularly iMacs, are great machines, but they offer extremely limited ability to upgrade compared to PC competitors. Apple has abandoned the market segment for people who like the flexible tower form factor but don't want to pay an arm and a leg, a segment that's very well catered to by nearly every other PC manufacturer.
Sure, this technology may be one of the steps on the road to transporter technology. Perhaps it also brings us a step closer to immortality, or artificial intelligence, or revealing the true nature of "god" and the ultimate origin and purpose of the universe.
In fact, many of the new technologies invented every day are probably steps on the road to these sorts of things! How exciting! Let's post it to Slashdot next time someone improves the mousetrap, and call is a step towards achieving human symbiosis with an intergalactic hyper-intelligent hive mind.
In the iPhone Ad called "Calamari," the user has the area around Moscone Recreation Area up on the phone, and does a search for "Seafood." One of the hits, the closest one, is "Pacific Catch," around the corner of Fillmore St and Lombard St.
Here's the thing though; it you go to Google Maps and search for"Seafood" right in that area where it found Pacific Catch, it doesn't find Pacific Catch. It does find a bunch of other hits for "Seafood" that are much closer than the other ones the iPhone found, but doesn't find Pacific Catch. If you search Google Maps in a browser for "Pacific Catch," it finds it right there where the iPhone found it and gives you all the same info the iPhone did.
So why does the iPhone's version of Google Maps find Pacific Catch by searching for "Seafood," when the browser version doesn't. In fact, the whole results list has very little overlap when you put the same map area shown on the iPhone up in Google Maps in a browser and perform the same search.
In his interview with Bill Gates and Walt Mossberg last week at D5, Jobs said that the iPhone Maps software was written by Apple and Google was very impressed with it, but that it just interface with the usual Google Maps API's. So I'm surprised it gives such different results, especially categorizing a restaurant under "Seafood" that the browser version of Google Maps doesn't. How does it know?
Right, so they're about 50% sure that it's someone who's both male and aged 24-30, living in China. It should be easy to pick out the individual from there.
I'm generally not in favor of additional legislation making more things illegal, but perhaps it would be good to have a law making it illegal to reveal the identities of undercover law enforcement officers, or people known to be secretively aiding them, under certain circumstances, similar to the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, so that these people could get in trouble when they break it.
There was a documentary made of the U of C scavenger hunt a few years ago. You can buy it here. Or request that Netflix or your local library get a copy, so you can check it out.
* disclaimer- I know the people who made this film. I still liked it.
"sounds like you think conventional graphics pads/tablet PCs have squidgy pressure sensitive screens?"
No, I did not think that. As other people have posted before in this discussion (at +5), "conventional graphics pads/tablet PCs" have screens that are tough and scratch resistant and are designed to be pushed on all day with the tip of a stylus. This would destroy conventional LCD's. So, as I said in my post:
1. It doesn't appear that this device has any pressure sensitivity, and
2. If they wanted to add it, it would have to use really light strokes to not damage the LCD, which still isn't very valuable.
Maybe they can sell it with a thin polycarbonate screen protector or something, but I doubt that would fit in most notebooks and allow them to close. Perhaps it would be good for converting desktop LCD's to touch-screen though. Of course, they'd have to offer a huge variety of sizes and shapes of screen protectors. Or perhaps expect people to cut-to-size with a paper cutter or something. Anyway, I don't understand what there was in my post that made you think that I thought that the screens need to be sensitive to varying degrees of pressure; all I pointed out is that the stylus can't respond to firm pressure on conventional LCD's without damaging them.
Pressure sensitivity is key for most any artist, it's where the real value of the Wacom tablets lie, allowing you to control the quality of your brush strokes with pressure as you work. That's a bigger part of the tablet's advantage over the mouse than the actual "pen" method of input for many artists. This makes no mention of any kind of pressure sensitivity. Clearly, it can't make the screen pressure sensitive. Perhaps they could build a sensor into the pen that measures pressure and use the edge device for position, but that doesn't look like it's what they did, their pen looks like a "dumb" device, not a wireless pressure sensor. Even if it did have a pressure sensor in the tip, it's going to have to be so sensitive that it requires a really light touch, or else you're going to mar your screen, and that would greatly diminish its value.
As far as resolution is concerned: they say "sampling" is at "about" 400 DPI (whatever that means), but then it says "recognized resolution 0.2mm" which is about 125 dpi. The Wacom tablets artists work with recognize a resolution of about 5,000 lines per inch.
I'm sure you can draw a cartoony sketch with it just fine, but there's no way this device as it stands now is going to replace tablets for professional artists. That doesn't mean it's worthless. A lot of thing you want to do with touch sensitive displays isn't professional art. These could be a much cheaper alternative for touch-sensitive user interfaces and games and such. Maybe in future generations they will add some sort of pressure sensitivity through the pen and increase the resolution by an order of magnitude. Until then, the "borderline troll" is correct.
When I was in high school, my friends and I used to play Marathon in the Physics Lab with our physics/math teacher after school. When Marathon 2 came out with a level editor, my physics teacher made a Marathon map of the school, and he and my friends and I all ran around torching each other with flame throwers, blowing each other up with grenades, and gunning each other down with machine guns "inside our own school."
No one seemed the have a problem with this then ('94). I wonder how they'd treat a teacher who did that today?
I have NeoOffice 2.1 on my Dual 2.0 Ghz G5 with 1 GB RAM.
I just timed it with a stopwatch, with nothing else running.
On initial launch, it took 42 seconds to get a usable word processor up on the screen.
However, on repeat launches, it takes only 12 seconds.
Photoshop takes 14 seconds. MS Word takes 6 seconds. 42 is embarrassing, (although at least it's the answer to the ultimate question of Life, The Universe, and Everything, so it gets some credit there.) 12 seconds isn't so bad. This machine isn't exactly brand-spanking new, but Apple's had a lot of huge speed increases lately. You jump back to G4 machines that aren't all that old, like my Mom's eMac and my girlfriend's G4 iBook, and I wouldn't even want to install NeoOffice, the speed must just be painful.
Also, while the UI is largely a direct copy of Office, some of the places where it deviates constitute the most inane violations of UI design I've ever seen.
All that said, most of the painful slowness is in startup; I've found word processing and spreadsheet to be reasonably snappy once they're open, and the thing is feature competitive with MS Office, with a Cocoa interface, for FREE. All in all it's an amazing bargain and I'm very happy it's around. Still, I wouldn't complain about a Sun developed native build with more snappy, either.
I notice that someone has already registered www.09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0.com, and did so at least long enough ago that it's propagated across DNS servers, but if there was a site there, it appears to have been taken down already.
It looks like it was just registered on April 29th, though, and the registrant's kept his identity hidden.
Evaluating security products effectively can be very difficult and expensive. I have no problem with them doing this by sponsorship. But they shouldn't just hand over technical security to whoever happens to be the biggest advertising sponsor, even if it's McDonalds or Microsoft or someone else who doesn't know anything about it. They should solicit bids for a security sponsor. That is, companies place bids separately to run the security services for the Olympics. These bids could be positive (they pay the Olympics) or negative (how much the Olympics has to pay them), along with a proposal explaining what they will do to keep things secure and their experience in the field, etc. They also get a certain amount of advertising on things, "Olympic IT Security Provided by Whoever." If the ads say "Olympic Security Provided by Symantec," and the headlines are "Olympic Security in Shambles; website defaced, credit card numbers stolen, official Olympic records changed," this isn't so good for the company. Realizing this potential ahead of time, in placing bids, security companies will have a very strong incentive to submit competent proposals.
Visa isn't tied in so much in this way, because their bijillion ads won't specify that they're handling security. Also, if they got this by favoritism based on advertising sponsorship, and not based on competitive bids, then the Olympics is probably paying them too much for what they're getting.
"Some people blame the high-fructose corn syrup that beekeepers feed the bees in the large-scale operations."
The US is the only country in the world that uses significant quantities of high fructose corn syrup, because the US Government bans sugar imports.
The epidemic has moved to Europe.
Therefore, it is not caused by feeding the bees high fructose corn syrup.
Also, while the problem of total hive die-offs in the case of CCD may be concentrated in huge commercial bee operations, the small scale rural local bee keeper we know, who's bees mostly stay on his own organic farm, and who's been doing this for a long time, told us that his yields have been down more and more over the last several years and that that's been standard for the industry, even for small operations like his. Even without total hive death, there's been an unusually large number of bees dying off, and surviving hives have been having trouble maintaining population.
I agree that the cell phone explanation isn't any good, but I don't buy the HFCS or traveling bee explanations either.
I also think that we should embark on a crash course of research funding in this area, because in case the bees don't start getting better on their own, the long term prospects for humanity don't look so good. With scientific "doomsday scenarios," the populous seems to already be divided into two camps- environmentalists who say every little thing is going to destroy the world in the next fifteen minutes, and conservatives who think that all doomsday scenarios are ludicrous. But every now and then, there's something where the science behind it is just scary enough that we should probably do some serious looking into it, just in case. Since no one's really disputing that
1. Bees in much of the world have been experiencing a significant unexplained population decline for years and
2. The food supply for humanity is overwhelmingly dependent on bees
that we should at least make a serious effort to ramp up research on this problem.
"You make some good points, but I think your assertion that cameras can't be shoe-horned into a phone may be a bit off. For example, Canon has some amazingly compact little consumer market cameras that surely could be grafted onto a cellphone. If you glue an ELPH onto, say, a RAZR, you'll get something about as bulky as a standard old style Nokia."
An ELPH is OK, but still is incredibly grainy at high ISO's, has a crappy maximum aperture around f3.2, a crappy minimum aperture of f4.5 (because the lens is so tiny anything smaller puts you way over the diffraction limit), a crappy 2-3 x optical zoom, and a terribly flash. Not good enough for many casual photographers I know. And with all that, it's still bigger than an iPhone. One of the smallest Elphs I could find is 3.78" x 1.78" x 0.94", or 6.3 in^3, and weighs 3.70 oz without a card or battery. The iPhone's 4.5" x 2.4" x 0.46", or 5 in^3, and weighs 4.8 oz with the battery and memory. So to pack an already low-quality ELPH into a modern cellphone, the ELPH would have to be an order of magnitude smaller than it already is. It doesn't sound like it's going to work out anytime soon.
Yes, if people would just go back to a mid 90's sized cellphone, that's the same size as a crappy camera plus a cellphone. And if they'd just go back to a late 80's sized cellphone, they could put a full SLR with three lenses and a toaster in it. People aren't going back to inconveniently large cellphones just to get one with a decent camera shoehorned into it. I'll bet you no product like that even comes to market- that is, a cell-phone where more than half of the product's volume is dedicated to camera functionality. People will just deal with crappy camera phones, or use real cameras. I wish they could pack the equivalent of a Hasselblad H3D-31 into my wristwatch, or heck, why not a Dalsa Origen, but I'm not holding my breath.
Slashdot Mirror
"Any semi-stable collection of elementary particles can be referred to as an 'atom'."
How do you define "semi-stable"? Because the last row of the Periodic Table of the Elements on Wikipedia is populated largely by things starting with "un" that have half-lives in the millisceonds, which I don't consider to be particularly stable. But then, maybe it the world of physics, that's a long time compared to the lifespans of some of the other particles they look for these days.
Yes, I know you're joking. But this is a reflective device, not emissive, so they can't make it any more dangerous to you than a mirror. Probably not any more dangerous than a sheet of paper.
Someone who follows this field please reply- how are they doing with using these things to run implantable medical devices? Are they on the market, in human testing, in animal testing, in design, still just a glint in a venture capitalist's eye?
I know they're planning to have all sorts of implantable blood-powered sensors that send radio signals out to monitors. So, for one example, a diabetic can have a continuous blood glucose meter implanted in their wrist, which is powered by something like this, and sends wireless signals to a wrist-watch that gives continuous readings of blood glucose, bypassing all the finger-pricking blood tests. And the watch could then store that data and send it to the computer, where they can track it, graph it, correlate it with diet and exercise, recognize trends in the disease, etc. I'm sure there are endless cool potential medical uses. But I've been hearing about this for many years now, and while I'm sure I could Google up how it's going with a few hours of reading, would some knowledgeable Slashdot reader like to just cut to the chase and tell us where things stand?
Yes, "loudness" on car stereos and some home stereos and boom-boxes should be audio compression, not volume adjustment.
I've had a lot of arguments regarding when blind testing is necessary. It's sometimes hard to draw a line. But it's not at all clear that it's needed here to distinguish from a placebo effect, as you imply.
For an example, suppose you're looking for the best cookie recipe. You run two different trials to see which is preferred in each.
- In trial #1, you compare the Nestle Tollhouse recipe to the same recipe with 10% more butter.
- In trial #2, you compare the Nestle Tollhouse recipe to the same recipe with the quantities of baking soda and sugar switched.
Now in trial#1, I'd say that, to get a meaningful result, you had better do it blind. Maybe even literally blindfolded, putting pieces of cookies in people's mouths. But in trial #2, it just doesn't make any difference whether you use careful, blind methods, because the results will be so dramatic and unanimous that there will be no room for error introduced by subtle mechanisms.
I like to listen to my music on CD through a Wheatfield Audio HA-1 tube headphone amplifier driving a pair of Sennheiser HD-600 headphones. For those of you not familiar with audiophile stuff, this is low on the totem poll of high-end equipment, but we're still talking about a roughly $1000 investment just for a pair of headphones and an amp. And when I listen to the difference between audio that's highly compressed and the real, high dynamic-range thing, it's the difference between night and day. If we're standing outside and you ask me if it's night or day out, I don't feel that I need to find a hundred other people to survey in a double-blind clinical setting before I get back to you with an answer. The answer is usually perfectly clear.
I'd also like to note that sometimes, highly compressed audio is desirable. For example, in my car on the freeway, there's pretty much background noise, and if you maintain high dynamic range in a recording, you'll either have painfully loud loud parts, or inaudible quiet parts. You need to compress the hell out of the music to make it sound decent over background noise. That, or (inadvisably) wear noise-canceling headphones in your car.
Does this mean they should sell two versions of CD's, one for audiophiles, and one for car-listeners? No. Because it's a piece of cake for a filter to compress the dynamic range of audio, but it's much more difficult to accurately re-extend that dynamic range. So car stereos should just offer a high compression setting, and probably default to having it on. I'm surprised I haven't heard of car stereos with a microphone that determines the volume of background noise in the car and then compresses the dynamic range of the audio appropriately to keep the low volume bits audible, and just uses the volume setting to set the maximum volume of the highs. (within certain limitations ion the compression. For example, if the volume were turned down such that the highs are below the background noise, you probably don't want to let the stereo invert the wave form.)
That's my opinion of this. By excluding lossy compression, they're also excluding the likelihood of applicability to AI that is the point of the contest.
Humans achieve good compression on things like encyclopedia knowledge because we don't remember the words at all. We remember the idea, and we have our own dictionary in our heads, and we re-apply words to the idea to reconstruct the entry, rather than memorizing the data. That's why we get great compression; we throw out most of the data, and just remember the "gist" of it, the argument, the facts, in an internal structure of raw ideas stored independently of the words to explain them.
By restricting the contest to lossless compression, they eliminate the ability to use any AI-like compression techniques. The machine can not extract the ideas and then re-assign words, because it would have to be able to do so using the exact voice of each of thousands of different Wikipedia contributors. That's hopeless.
So the entrants are restricted to clever algorithms that do endless mathematical optimizations to compress the data, a method of compression that's entirely alien to the methods of our only known intelligence. We don't remember things by figuring out clever tricks to compress the data in our own memory. We don't say "Oscar Schindler saved Jews In WWII" and then say, OK, that data had 5 spaces in it, and 4 "S's," and if I remember the positions of the spaces and the S's, I could use less memory space to store this in my head, and then just think back through the algorithm I used to take the spaces and "s's" out and put them back in where they go, and I'll have the name again, and then sit there and carefully work out in our heads what the original data must have been after our compression methods. It doesn't work that way at all. To us it apparently "just comes to us." The compression probably comes from things like remembering sounds, and then reconstructing the name's exact spelling based upon known rules of grammer. We store the name Oscar Schindler in relation to various facts regarding Jews and WWII, but we store them as ideas, and then pull the words back out, and each time someone asks us about Schindler, we'd be likely to say something similar in meaning but different in expression. So this contest is restricted to the least interesting kind of compression for intelligence; the kind that can't use it.
Interesting compressions are things like JPEG and MP3, where they built the compression model on the human perceptual model, first saying "what about this exact data is less relevant to a human observer, that we can therefore throw away?" For JPEG's, it turns out that (among other things) we're much more sensitive to differences in color than to absolute colors, and among differences in color, we're much more perceptive in the color ranges closer to human skin tone. MIDI is actually probably closer to the compression used by human intelligence than any recorded music standard.
Along these lines, I'd say storing the HTML formatting data exactly borders on ridiculous. It's a hugely inefficient waste of space. For instance, if you just run the HTML through one of the free online utilities that strips irrelevant data, you get the identical presentation of the data, you've only thrown out entirely worthless data. But you've already violated the contest rules. You should be able to strip the HTML entirely, as long as your compression/decompression system ends up with conveniently readable formatting in the end. Reconstructing the actual HTML in a character-identical way is so non-intelligent when you're trying to save space, it seems hard to beleive it's going to lead to intelligence.
Regarding this contest: I'm curious what level of compression you can get if you just histogram the words and then, in order of frequency for anything with enough occurrences to save memory by using a look-up table, you assign sequential numeric values for the words in order of frequency of occurrence. Then start your data with a look-up
"Anyway, considering all the stuff in cigarettes, I don't think nicotine is the worst part"
That's right. News flash to Slashdot, nicotine != cigarettes. Every time nicotine comes up, people think it causes lung cancer or heart disease or other ridiculous things. No, smoking causes those. Nicotine doesn't. In fact, some benefits of nicotine have been known for a long time. Of course it's an effective stimulant and makes people feel good. It can make people work more productively. But more importantly, it's strongly protective against some terrible, high incidence neurodegenerative diseases, like Parkinson's Diseases and Alzheimer's. All that's already fairly well established.
So don't smoke, because inhaling smoke every day will kill you. The downside of nicotine is that it's addictive, but otherwise, it might be quite healthy.
Many smokers try to quit with the patch or the gum. They successfully get off cigarettes with their nicotine supplement, but then when they try to quit the supplement, they relapse into smoking. The clear solution here for protecting their health is this: don't try to quit the supplement. If you relapse when you quit the supplement, give up on ditching nicotine, it's not bad for you anyway, and may be pretty good for you. Ditch the cigarettes, stay on the nicotine supplement for the rest of your life.
"PPC build of Photoshop is much slower than a Universal build of the new Photoshop"
The old PPC builds of Photoshop are also much slower on PPC than the only universal version, CS3. They moved Photoshop from Codewarrior to Xcode between CS2 and CS3, and it's the most massive rewrite they've ever done. So you can't distinguish how much of the speed difference of CS3 over CS2 on Intel is due to it being Intel native, and how much is simply due to it being faster.
Yes, this is a nice idea. Scientists don't have egos, or personal investments in being right about things. Experiments showing negative results have equal chances of being published as papers showing positive results. Funding sources won't consider a scientist's past success record, their publication record, or how many new theories of theirs were proven versus disproven in determining funding. And even if they did, scientists are pure and don't care about money or funding or prestige for themselves or their labs or their institutions.
The graduate students I know aren't eager to come up with theories that they can back up with experiments showing positive results that will lead to getting published in a peer reviewed journal and them getting their PhD, because as a scientific principle, they know that negative results are just as important as positive results, because either one produces more scientific knowledge about whatever they're investigating.
Similarly, businesses don't care if they succeed or fail, because a failure is simply and act of market-place creative destruction, invalidating their business model, or the way they went about pursuing it, and thereby providing valuable information to the market place about the usefulness of that model, and helping to direct resources more productively in the future.
Don't read too much into my sarcasm. I don't for a second think that Fermilab intentionally sabotaged the parts they made for CERN. But I also don't think that all scientists follow a selfless, single-minded, wholly objective devotion to the pursuit of natural truth, with complete disregard for ego, self-promotion, their career, their reputation, or any consideration for their own well-being.
Look, I'm usually the type to be accused of being a Mac fanboy more often than a critic, but the reviewer is right about this. You can argue all you want that upgradeability isn't, or shouldn't be, important, but this guy's writing for HardOCP, and we all know perfectly well that this guy and most of his audience are probably among those who upgrade and swap components all the time. Clearly upgradablity is important to him. And he gives a great example of where this IS important right in his review- the Mac Mini comes with an unconscionably low amount of RAM for OSX, and it's a huge PITA to upgrade compared to nearly any similarly priced PC. Yes, the Mini is little and cute and built like a laptop, which would make it hard to give it 4 easily acessible RAM slots like many similarly priced PC's have, but the fact that it's a relative PITA to upgrade stands, regardless of there being good reasons behind it.
Yes, the Mac Pro towers are some of the most gorgeous, easily upgradeable computers available anywhere- he admits this, but they start at $2,500. What this guy's asking for is what Apple used to sell from the release of the Beige G3 tower in 1998 until the release of the G5 tower in June 2003- an easily user-upgradeable machine for something around $1000.
Some of us like computers and mess around with them and, as he said, like to pop in new components to relieve bottle necks with some frequency, rather than always replacing the whole thing at one go. I had one of those G3 towers, and I bought it as a 266 mhz G3 with 32 MB RAM and a 4 GB HD, and I sold it 6 years later as a 533 Mhz G4 with 768 MB memory and over 100GB of HD space. Along the way it stepped up from a CD-ROM to a CR-R, it gained USB 2 and firewire ports through a PCI-card, and it went from single monitor support to much faster 3 monitor support with a Radeon 7000 PCI card. That machine cost about $1,000 new, maybe $1,200. Now, while the price of PC's has fallen dramatically since 1998, the price of the cheapest upgradable Mac has doubled. I still think the Mac Pros are a great deal- if you price something similar at Dell, you'll pay $1,000+ more. But regardless of whether they're a good price for what you get, they cost an arm and a leg. Minis, and more particularly iMacs, are great machines, but they offer extremely limited ability to upgrade compared to PC competitors. Apple has abandoned the market segment for people who like the flexible tower form factor but don't want to pay an arm and a leg, a segment that's very well catered to by nearly every other PC manufacturer.
Sure, this technology may be one of the steps on the road to transporter technology. Perhaps it also brings us a step closer to immortality, or artificial intelligence, or revealing the true nature of "god" and the ultimate origin and purpose of the universe.
In fact, many of the new technologies invented every day are probably steps on the road to these sorts of things! How exciting! Let's post it to Slashdot next time someone improves the mousetrap, and call is a step towards achieving human symbiosis with an intergalactic hyper-intelligent hive mind.
In the iPhone Ad called "Calamari," the user has the area around Moscone Recreation Area up on the phone, and does a search for "Seafood." One of the hits, the closest one, is "Pacific Catch," around the corner of Fillmore St and Lombard St.
Here's the thing though; it you go to Google Maps and search for"Seafood" right in that area where it found Pacific Catch, it doesn't find Pacific Catch. It does find a bunch of other hits for "Seafood" that are much closer than the other ones the iPhone found, but doesn't find Pacific Catch. If you search Google Maps in a browser for "Pacific Catch," it finds it right there where the iPhone found it and gives you all the same info the iPhone did.
So why does the iPhone's version of Google Maps find Pacific Catch by searching for "Seafood," when the browser version doesn't. In fact, the whole results list has very little overlap when you put the same map area shown on the iPhone up in Google Maps in a browser and perform the same search.
In his interview with Bill Gates and Walt Mossberg last week at D5, Jobs said that the iPhone Maps software was written by Apple and Google was very impressed with it, but that it just interface with the usual Google Maps API's. So I'm surprised it gives such different results, especially categorizing a restaurant under "Seafood" that the browser version of Google Maps doesn't. How does it know?
Right, so they're about 50% sure that it's someone who's both male and aged 24-30, living in China. It should be easy to pick out the individual from there.
"[blah blah blah] has observers considering both sides of the issue"
In my experience, usually not so much.
Or in other words, "You must be new around here."
I'm generally not in favor of additional legislation making more things illegal, but perhaps it would be good to have a law making it illegal to reveal the identities of undercover law enforcement officers, or people known to be secretively aiding them, under certain circumstances, similar to the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, so that these people could get in trouble when they break it.
Helicopter, you say? So they'll need both an RPG and an IED.
.50 BMG and an IED.
Or a
There was a documentary made of the U of C scavenger hunt a few years ago. You can buy it here. Or request that Netflix or your local library get a copy, so you can check it out.
* disclaimer- I know the people who made this film. I still liked it.
"sounds like you think conventional graphics pads/tablet PCs have squidgy pressure sensitive screens?"
No, I did not think that. As other people have posted before in this discussion (at +5), "conventional graphics pads/tablet PCs" have screens that are tough and scratch resistant and are designed to be pushed on all day with the tip of a stylus. This would destroy conventional LCD's. So, as I said in my post:
1. It doesn't appear that this device has any pressure sensitivity, and
2. If they wanted to add it, it would have to use really light strokes to not damage the LCD, which still isn't very valuable.
Maybe they can sell it with a thin polycarbonate screen protector or something, but I doubt that would fit in most notebooks and allow them to close. Perhaps it would be good for converting desktop LCD's to touch-screen though. Of course, they'd have to offer a huge variety of sizes and shapes of screen protectors. Or perhaps expect people to cut-to-size with a paper cutter or something. Anyway, I don't understand what there was in my post that made you think that I thought that the screens need to be sensitive to varying degrees of pressure; all I pointed out is that the stylus can't respond to firm pressure on conventional LCD's without damaging them.
His "borderline troll" is undoubtedly accurate.
Pressure sensitivity is key for most any artist, it's where the real value of the Wacom tablets lie, allowing you to control the quality of your brush strokes with pressure as you work. That's a bigger part of the tablet's advantage over the mouse than the actual "pen" method of input for many artists. This makes no mention of any kind of pressure sensitivity. Clearly, it can't make the screen pressure sensitive. Perhaps they could build a sensor into the pen that measures pressure and use the edge device for position, but that doesn't look like it's what they did, their pen looks like a "dumb" device, not a wireless pressure sensor. Even if it did have a pressure sensor in the tip, it's going to have to be so sensitive that it requires a really light touch, or else you're going to mar your screen, and that would greatly diminish its value.
As far as resolution is concerned: they say "sampling" is at "about" 400 DPI (whatever that means), but then it says "recognized resolution 0.2mm" which is about 125 dpi. The Wacom tablets artists work with recognize a resolution of about 5,000 lines per inch.
I'm sure you can draw a cartoony sketch with it just fine, but there's no way this device as it stands now is going to replace tablets for professional artists. That doesn't mean it's worthless. A lot of thing you want to do with touch sensitive displays isn't professional art. These could be a much cheaper alternative for touch-sensitive user interfaces and games and such. Maybe in future generations they will add some sort of pressure sensitivity through the pen and increase the resolution by an order of magnitude. Until then, the "borderline troll" is correct.
When I was in high school, my friends and I used to play Marathon in the Physics Lab with our physics/math teacher after school. When Marathon 2 came out with a level editor, my physics teacher made a Marathon map of the school, and he and my friends and I all ran around torching each other with flame throwers, blowing each other up with grenades, and gunning each other down with machine guns "inside our own school."
No one seemed the have a problem with this then ('94). I wonder how they'd treat a teacher who did that today?
I have NeoOffice 2.1 on my Dual 2.0 Ghz G5 with 1 GB RAM.
I just timed it with a stopwatch, with nothing else running.
On initial launch, it took 42 seconds to get a usable word processor up on the screen.
However, on repeat launches, it takes only 12 seconds.
Photoshop takes 14 seconds. MS Word takes 6 seconds. 42 is embarrassing, (although at least it's the answer to the ultimate question of Life, The Universe, and Everything, so it gets some credit there.) 12 seconds isn't so bad. This machine isn't exactly brand-spanking new, but Apple's had a lot of huge speed increases lately. You jump back to G4 machines that aren't all that old, like my Mom's eMac and my girlfriend's G4 iBook, and I wouldn't even want to install NeoOffice, the speed must just be painful.
Also, while the UI is largely a direct copy of Office, some of the places where it deviates constitute the most inane violations of UI design I've ever seen.
All that said, most of the painful slowness is in startup; I've found word processing and spreadsheet to be reasonably snappy once they're open, and the thing is feature competitive with MS Office, with a Cocoa interface, for FREE. All in all it's an amazing bargain and I'm very happy it's around. Still, I wouldn't complain about a Sun developed native build with more snappy, either.
I notice that someone has already registered www.09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0.com, and did so at least long enough ago that it's propagated across DNS servers, but if there was a site there, it appears to have been taken down already.
It looks like it was just registered on April 29th, though, and the registrant's kept his identity hidden.
Evaluating security products effectively can be very difficult and expensive. I have no problem with them doing this by sponsorship. But they shouldn't just hand over technical security to whoever happens to be the biggest advertising sponsor, even if it's McDonalds or Microsoft or someone else who doesn't know anything about it. They should solicit bids for a security sponsor. That is, companies place bids separately to run the security services for the Olympics. These bids could be positive (they pay the Olympics) or negative (how much the Olympics has to pay them), along with a proposal explaining what they will do to keep things secure and their experience in the field, etc. They also get a certain amount of advertising on things, "Olympic IT Security Provided by Whoever." If the ads say "Olympic Security Provided by Symantec," and the headlines are "Olympic Security in Shambles; website defaced, credit card numbers stolen, official Olympic records changed," this isn't so good for the company. Realizing this potential ahead of time, in placing bids, security companies will have a very strong incentive to submit competent proposals.
Visa isn't tied in so much in this way, because their bijillion ads won't specify that they're handling security. Also, if they got this by favoritism based on advertising sponsorship, and not based on competitive bids, then the Olympics is probably paying them too much for what they're getting.
"Some people blame the high-fructose corn syrup that beekeepers feed the bees in the large-scale operations."
The US is the only country in the world that uses significant quantities of high fructose corn syrup, because the US Government bans sugar imports.
The epidemic has moved to Europe.
Therefore, it is not caused by feeding the bees high fructose corn syrup.
Also, while the problem of total hive die-offs in the case of CCD may be concentrated in huge commercial bee operations, the small scale rural local bee keeper we know, who's bees mostly stay on his own organic farm, and who's been doing this for a long time, told us that his yields have been down more and more over the last several years and that that's been standard for the industry, even for small operations like his. Even without total hive death, there's been an unusually large number of bees dying off, and surviving hives have been having trouble maintaining population.
I agree that the cell phone explanation isn't any good, but I don't buy the HFCS or traveling bee explanations either.
I also think that we should embark on a crash course of research funding in this area, because in case the bees don't start getting better on their own, the long term prospects for humanity don't look so good. With scientific "doomsday scenarios," the populous seems to already be divided into two camps- environmentalists who say every little thing is going to destroy the world in the next fifteen minutes, and conservatives who think that all doomsday scenarios are ludicrous. But every now and then, there's something where the science behind it is just scary enough that we should probably do some serious looking into it, just in case. Since no one's really disputing that
1. Bees in much of the world have been experiencing a significant unexplained population decline for years and
2. The food supply for humanity is overwhelmingly dependent on bees
that we should at least make a serious effort to ramp up research on this problem.
"You make some good points, but I think your assertion that cameras can't be shoe-horned into a phone may be a bit off. For example, Canon has some amazingly compact little consumer market cameras that surely could be grafted onto a cellphone. If you glue an ELPH onto, say, a RAZR, you'll get something about as bulky as a standard old style Nokia."
An ELPH is OK, but still is incredibly grainy at high ISO's, has a crappy maximum aperture around f3.2, a crappy minimum aperture of f4.5 (because the lens is so tiny anything smaller puts you way over the diffraction limit), a crappy 2-3 x optical zoom, and a terribly flash. Not good enough for many casual photographers I know. And with all that, it's still bigger than an iPhone. One of the smallest Elphs I could find is 3.78" x 1.78" x 0.94", or 6.3 in^3, and weighs 3.70 oz without a card or battery. The iPhone's 4.5" x 2.4" x 0.46", or 5 in^3, and weighs 4.8 oz with the battery and memory. So to pack an already low-quality ELPH into a modern cellphone, the ELPH would have to be an order of magnitude smaller than it already is. It doesn't sound like it's going to work out anytime soon.
Yes, if people would just go back to a mid 90's sized cellphone, that's the same size as a crappy camera plus a cellphone. And if they'd just go back to a late 80's sized cellphone, they could put a full SLR with three lenses and a toaster in it. People aren't going back to inconveniently large cellphones just to get one with a decent camera shoehorned into it. I'll bet you no product like that even comes to market- that is, a cell-phone where more than half of the product's volume is dedicated to camera functionality. People will just deal with crappy camera phones, or use real cameras. I wish they could pack the equivalent of a Hasselblad H3D-31 into my wristwatch, or heck, why not a Dalsa Origen, but I'm not holding my breath.