Being able to commandeer and board somebody else's spaceship will be a tremendous feat of engineering. If a little rape and pillaging is the motivation someone needs to solve that problem, I think I might actually be okay with that.:)
Pretty much. We recently switched cell providers, and my wife opted to get an iPhone. Here is one of her conversations with Siri (details paraphrased/redacted):
W: Find me a mexican restaurant in __city name__. S: I found 23 places near you W: (looking at list) Where is __first restaurant in list__. S: I can't help you with that. W: Habla Espanol? S: I don't want to argue with you.
That was more or less the gist of every conversation she attempted w/ Siri. Never any really useful information. She frequently got "I can't help you with that" or something similar. The only value seems to be the entertainment when you stumble across one of the easter egg phrases. It's like playing around with the old Alice AI bots. It can be fun for a bit, but the novelty wears off quickly, at which point, it's useless.
Absolutely. I'm old now. I don't have the patience to make nice with a bunch of teenagers calling everyone f@gs and saying they took an arrow in the knee. But I would like to play with friends. Especially if we can do it without a monthly fee. Something more like SC2 on Battle.net rather than WoW. They can monetize with downloadable content for new quests and such. Monthly fees will kill it for people like me who can burn a bunch of time on one weekend, but then can't play for another 6 weeks.
I heard he's consulting with Abercrombie & Fitch on aesthetics and design. As I understand it, the hull will be pre-distressed and cost twice what a typical cruise ship costs.
I think this is the case. I remember the transition to HDTV. When shows started airing in HD, I remember everything looking unnaturally crisp. It looked fake compared to the "real" 480i I was used to. By the time most shows went HD that effect went away for me, and the SD stuff started looking fake and crappy. I have roughly the same reaction watching SD shows now as I did watching the handful of B&W shows that were still airing when I was a kid. Yeah, it still works, but it definitely feels inferior and old fashioned.
My guess is 48fps movies will be about the same, unless they induce epileptic seizures or something...
Absolutely. My wife is a 5th grade teacher. I'm a physicist by training, engineer by trade, so she'll often bring home some of their testing materials to have me take a look. There have been quite a few "That's not right. That's not even wrong" moments where the question and answers were clearly written by somebody who did not fully understand the material. A lot of it appeared to be misguided attempts to put something from a textbook into their own words. Confusion on similar terms like meteor, meteorite, comet, asteroid, etc.
It's the kind of mistakes I would never fault an individual for making (5th grader or not). It's easily corrected, and not harmful in and of itself. However, when teaching this problem is amplified. You end up with students who are even more confused, and the one person who is supposed to alleviate that confusion can not. You end up reinforcing the "science is hard" mantra and have a disengaged class as a result.
I disagree. I was 10 when I started programming, and when I did it was in C. There are some advantages in being close to the hardware like you are with C, as opposed to the higher level languages like Java, Perl, Python, etc. Just like how everyone learns arithmetic by hand to start, but once that's mastered most people just use a calculator for anything they can't do in their heads. Without learning the manual process first, you wouldn't understand the guts of how arithmetic works. The calculator would just become a magic box that spits numbers out at you.
Just like with math I MUCH prefer to spend my time in a high level language like Perl or Python, but I'm much better at using them because of my early experiences with C. An example:
One of the early C programs I wrote was an implementation of Conway's Game of Life. It's a fairly simple program, conceptually, but it hits a lot of major gotchas in programming. At by "it", I mean me:) - array bounds checking - data integrity (you have to have a buffer array to create the next generation or you'll get very screwy results) - array copying (pointers are both powerful and dangerous) - static vs. dynamic memory allocation (free your pointers, kids)
All of these things can cause issues in most programming languages, but the bugs they cause can be a lot more subtle in some of the higher level languages. Consider a one-dimensional array C-style int a[3] = {1,2,3}; int b[3]; b = a; a[1] = 5; *** b is now {1,5,3}
Perl style @a = (1,2,3) @b = @a; $a[1] = 5; *** b is still (1,2,3)
For this, Perl seems better since it matches what the user likely wanted to do. However, now look at 2d: C-style int a[3][3] = {{1,2,3},{4,5,6},{7,8,9}}; int b[3][3]; b = a a[1][1] = 10; *** b[1][1] is also 10
Perl-style @a = ([1,2,3],[4,5,6],[7,8,9]); @b = @a $a[1][1] = 10 *** $b[1][1] is ALSO 10
Why the difference? Array assignment in perl only copies the top level structure, which happens to consist of array refs in the second case. So after the assignment both $a[1] and $b[1] point to the same array ref. If you're already familiar and comfortable with C pointers, this kind of bug is a lot easier to find and fix. You're less likely to make this mistake anyway, though, because you have that intuition that array copying is a hard thing to implement and that different languages will do so differently. So if you need to copy some kind of complex data structure, you better look into how that particular language does it.
You could always try the app yourself then give it an honest review. If you genuinely like it, it's not astroturfing. If you don't like it, you could consider feeding that back to the developers as that may reveal more fundamentally why it's not selling well.
I recently took a trip to SF and booked a hotel from a particular chain. I found it via a google map search by searching for "hotel" in the vicinity of the event I was attending. The bubble that popped up had a reasonable price and a link to their site so I clicked it and booked a room. Ever since then, I see nothing but ads for this particular hotel chain on every website I visit. If there are spots for, say, 3 different ads on a website, all three of them will be advertising this same chain.
Thanks for including that in there. Most of us were going to do that anyway, but now we won't have any of those "Hey Idiot, this is in Brazil, not America. The Constitution doesn't apply there" comments and the brain-dead road that goes down. Huzzah!
My scathing critique: What about people without fingerprints? Are burn victims disenfranchised? Mobsters will just cut off people's fingers and use them to vote. Mythbusters proved that fingerprints are easy to fake.
In addition to what others have pointed out, the part of the article that had the words in it mentioned that it is accurate enough to jump through a window two stories up.
Slashdot Mirror
That was a real sin(b)/tan(b) joke...
I don't see the Queen denying it. Do you? If she isn't an accomplice, why doesn't she just come out and say so???
Being able to commandeer and board somebody else's spaceship will be a tremendous feat of engineering. If a little rape and pillaging is the motivation someone needs to solve that problem, I think I might actually be okay with that. :)
Pretty much. We recently switched cell providers, and my wife opted to get an iPhone. Here is one of her conversations with Siri (details paraphrased/redacted):
W: Find me a mexican restaurant in __city name__.
S: I found 23 places near you
W: (looking at list) Where is __first restaurant in list__.
S: I can't help you with that.
W: Habla Espanol?
S: I don't want to argue with you.
That was more or less the gist of every conversation she attempted w/ Siri. Never any really useful information. She frequently got "I can't help you with that" or something similar. The only value seems to be the entertainment when you stumble across one of the easter egg phrases. It's like playing around with the old Alice AI bots. It can be fun for a bit, but the novelty wears off quickly, at which point, it's useless.
Somebody has been spending too much time on TopCoder...
but it's still a plan in motion
Just a plan? How about doing more research, dammit? Without research in motion, they have no hope of success.
Absolutely. I'm old now. I don't have the patience to make nice with a bunch of teenagers calling everyone f@gs and saying they took an arrow in the knee. But I would like to play with friends. Especially if we can do it without a monthly fee. Something more like SC2 on Battle.net rather than WoW. They can monetize with downloadable content for new quests and such. Monthly fees will kill it for people like me who can burn a bunch of time on one weekend, but then can't play for another 6 weeks.
I heard he's consulting with Abercrombie & Fitch on aesthetics and design. As I understand it, the hull will be pre-distressed and cost twice what a typical cruise ship costs.
I believe this perfectly captures what people mean by "externalities" when discussing business regulation.
That makes two things entropy has in common with my ex. (The first: both are always increasing)
I think this is the case. I remember the transition to HDTV. When shows started airing in HD, I remember everything looking unnaturally crisp. It looked fake compared to the "real" 480i I was used to. By the time most shows went HD that effect went away for me, and the SD stuff started looking fake and crappy. I have roughly the same reaction watching SD shows now as I did watching the handful of B&W shows that were still airing when I was a kid. Yeah, it still works, but it definitely feels inferior and old fashioned.
My guess is 48fps movies will be about the same, unless they induce epileptic seizures or something...
You mean "bullshit artist" right?
Note to self: mod capnchicken Troll every time he posts for outing our ruse!
***Extra note to self: don't post "notes to self" on a public form***
I was gonna say...
Is this Cloud to Cloud, or Cloud to ground traffic?
Absolutely. My wife is a 5th grade teacher. I'm a physicist by training, engineer by trade, so she'll often bring home some of their testing materials to have me take a look. There have been quite a few "That's not right. That's not even wrong" moments where the question and answers were clearly written by somebody who did not fully understand the material. A lot of it appeared to be misguided attempts to put something from a textbook into their own words. Confusion on similar terms like meteor, meteorite, comet, asteroid, etc.
It's the kind of mistakes I would never fault an individual for making (5th grader or not). It's easily corrected, and not harmful in and of itself. However, when teaching this problem is amplified. You end up with students who are even more confused, and the one person who is supposed to alleviate that confusion can not. You end up reinforcing the "science is hard" mantra and have a disengaged class as a result.
I disagree. I was 10 when I started programming, and when I did it was in C. There are some advantages in being close to the hardware like you are with C, as opposed to the higher level languages like Java, Perl, Python, etc. Just like how everyone learns arithmetic by hand to start, but once that's mastered most people just use a calculator for anything they can't do in their heads. Without learning the manual process first, you wouldn't understand the guts of how arithmetic works. The calculator would just become a magic box that spits numbers out at you.
Just like with math I MUCH prefer to spend my time in a high level language like Perl or Python, but I'm much better at using them because of my early experiences with C. An example:
One of the early C programs I wrote was an implementation of Conway's Game of Life. It's a fairly simple program, conceptually, but it hits a lot of major gotchas in programming. At by "it", I mean me :)
- array bounds checking
- data integrity (you have to have a buffer array to create the next generation or you'll get very screwy results)
- array copying (pointers are both powerful and dangerous)
- static vs. dynamic memory allocation (free your pointers, kids)
All of these things can cause issues in most programming languages, but the bugs they cause can be a lot more subtle in some of the higher level languages.
Consider a one-dimensional array
C-style
int a[3] = {1,2,3};
int b[3];
b = a;
a[1] = 5;
*** b is now {1,5,3}
Perl style
@a = (1,2,3)
@b = @a;
$a[1] = 5;
*** b is still (1,2,3)
For this, Perl seems better since it matches what the user likely wanted to do.
However, now look at 2d:
C-style
int a[3][3] = {{1,2,3},{4,5,6},{7,8,9}};
int b[3][3];
b = a
a[1][1] = 10;
*** b[1][1] is also 10
Perl-style
@a = ([1,2,3],[4,5,6],[7,8,9]);
@b = @a
$a[1][1] = 10
*** $b[1][1] is ALSO 10
Why the difference? Array assignment in perl only copies the top level structure, which happens to consist of array refs in the second case. So after the assignment both $a[1] and $b[1] point to the same array ref. If you're already familiar and comfortable with C pointers, this kind of bug is a lot easier to find and fix. You're less likely to make this mistake anyway, though, because you have that intuition that array copying is a hard thing to implement and that different languages will do so differently. So if you need to copy some kind of complex data structure, you better look into how that particular language does it.
You could always try the app yourself then give it an honest review. If you genuinely like it, it's not astroturfing.
If you don't like it, you could consider feeding that back to the developers as that may reveal more fundamentally why it's not selling well.
It's quite the achievement turning an April Fool's joke into an actual product.
I'm in full blown creepy-land too.
I recently took a trip to SF and booked a hotel from a particular chain. I found it via a google map search by searching for "hotel" in the vicinity of the event I was attending. The bubble that popped up had a reasonable price and a link to their site so I clicked it and booked a room. Ever since then, I see nothing but ads for this particular hotel chain on every website I visit. If there are spots for, say, 3 different ads on a website, all three of them will be advertising this same chain.
Seriously disturbing stuff...
No, just fat.
Thanks for including that in there. Most of us were going to do that anyway, but now we won't have any of those "Hey Idiot, this is in Brazil, not America. The Constitution doesn't apply there" comments and the brain-dead road that goes down. Huzzah!
My scathing critique:
What about people without fingerprints?
Are burn victims disenfranchised?
Mobsters will just cut off people's fingers and use them to vote.
Mythbusters proved that fingerprints are easy to fake.
Bam.
Busted.
In addition to what others have pointed out, the part of the article that had the words in it mentioned that it is accurate enough to jump through a window two stories up.
Applied to the average IT guy, the audience will WISH their eyes glazed over...
This just in--Slashdot helps load test web servers.
These things are expensive. The 50-years-ago golden age (1950s-1970s) had the top income tax bracket between 70 and 90%.
http://ntu.org/tax-basics/history-of-federal-individual-1.html
Something to think about...