Mod parent up for a refreshingly different line of thinking from the typical responses. There's some insight here that was an eye-opener for me:
* Lots of people cheating the system, in everything from immigration to Japan Rail Passes. Anyone who's lived in Japan for a while knows the type. These people do it not to fight an "unjust" system, but simply out of laziness and a willingness to take advantage of Japan's customer-service oriented culture for their own advantage. If indeed the aim is to catch these people because the authorities are fed up with their antics, then I agree with that mission wholeheartedly.
* The parent shows an understanding for, and humility about LANGUAGE and respect for the ways of society. So many foreigners in Japan assume they deserve equal, or even better, treatment when they don't even speak proper Japanese (would the reverse apply to a Japanese person in the USA who didn't speak a word of English??). In this thread, there are lots of complaints about Japan's allegedly discriminatory society, but it's important to separate the ones that stem from things one can't control (such as race, birthplace) versus things that one CAN do something about, if one is willing (language, acceptance of society and culture, and, in the case of generational residents originally from Korea, citizenship). Sifting through the complaints like that lets us focus on the small number of truly unjust issues, like a few remaining incidents of blanket racial discrimination, that really deserve to be resolved.
That being said, I'm not sure I agree with the parent's conclusion that the fingerprinting is justified (on an ideological basis, mostly) -- but I think some very valid and interesting points were made.
Who else remembers when Panther came out and Apple promised a new Finder? Well, the same words are being used to described the "new finder" in Leopard. Shame on you, Apple.
The changes in Leopard do indicate that Apple has taken a renewed interest in improving the Finder, but motion is not the same thing as progress. For where I'm sitting, it looks like one step forward, two steps back.
Truer words have never been spoken. This guy deserves credit for inventing a vocabulary ("spatial"/"browser") so we can talk about the Finder issues clearly, and cutting through the haze of "new features" to see the underlying problems. How often do you see this level of insight from your typical schwag-drenched tech reviewer?
The problem with the Finder is that, even though most people agree that it's fundamentally broken, it's too mundane to get the high-level attention it needs. In particular, capital-S Steve probably figures most home users will be fine accessing their files through applications, otherwise it would have been fixed by now. But Steve! Remember you were the one who said that saving a few seconds of every user's day is like saving a few lives. Now, Mac OS has an installed base of over 20 million.
New features does not a new Finder make. It may seem like a mundane issue, but now is the time to raise a stink so we can move on from this already. F F T F.
Because this is not even a zero-sum game; adding more baggage prioritization is a negative-sum game. Instead of putting the baggage on the plane in the most efficient way (even if this just means almost randomly piling it in as it comes down the chute), now you've got more QoS overhead. So the priority bags come out faster, and the non-priority bags come out slower, but the overall time required to unload a plane's worth of baggage goes up. If the mission of an airline is to get you and your baggage to your destination as efficiently as possible, it's foolishness -- a word that, appropriately, means bling bling to an MBA.
It's like those supermarket club card "discounts" that really amount to a surcharge when you forget to bring your card or for casual users of the supermarket. (I always apply for a new card in those cases, but that's another story...)
True, Willcom has been around for some time, but they are an "upstart" (as opposed to "start-up") in the sense that they are finally starting to grow their market share as a niche player versus DoCoMo and the like...
Every now and then the same myths about the Japanese mobile market come up. Here's what we've seen on Slashdot today:
"Japanese live in small houses, have small fingers, and they just love small things." "The Japanese" are not some kind of lilliputian race. In fact, these days their phones are BIGGER than most current GSM models. There is indeed space for a PC in most homes, although it's true that the level of PC ownership is not as high as in the US.
"Japanese are all crowded together in the cities, so it's easier to build wireless networks."Urban population percentage: Japan - 65%, USA - 80%, Canada - 80%. In reality, the proportion of people living in the densest cities is more like Canada (the biggest wireless backwater in the world). Moreover, once you start getting REALLY dense, it becomes even harder to build mobile networks because you end up having to put base stations in weird places instead of just erecting a tower.
"Mobile phones are bling in Asia." Commonly uttered by those who don't understand that Japan is not Hong Kong. High-end "fashion phones" do not drive features in Japan. DoCoMo's flagship 900 series phones have all retailed around the $200 mark since forever. The bling that you sometimes see on the street is all aftermarket dress-up and doesn't have much to do with new features. In fact, these days, the hottest market is the creation of high usability, large-type phones for the senior market.
"Using the phone as a modem is expensive in Japan." As of 2007, also not true anymore. I posted a thread before realizing there were more myths to bust. Flat rate data for laptops is also coming from the Big Three carriers within the next month or so.
I could go on, but when it comes to Japan, be careful whose information you trust. Lots of people who claim to know about Japan don't speak even speak the language, which continues to contribute to a lot of misinformation.
Myths aside, I think the real reasons Japan is so far ahead have a little bit to do with culture and language, a little more to do with urban density causing carriers to push low-bandwith services (i.e., text messaging) coupled with public transport and portability factors, and a lot more to do with insanely poor telecom regulation in other areas of the world (here's looking at you, Canada).
There are no really good reasons why we can't have the same quality of mobile services as Japan -- if only we demanded it (in large masses) from our governments, telecom carriers, and handset manufacturers. Thankfully, in the wake of iPhone and the unlocking debate it started, we might see some positive change. When we're on par with Japan, I'm going to laugh at all the pundits who claimed there was something unique about Japanese people, society, or culture that makes them so mobile-centric.
> And as for using the mobile as a modem - to link to the internet - that's very expensive in Japan
Actually that's not true at all. You can get flat rate mobile data (with no device restrictions) on a 3.5G cellular network for around US $45 a month. And we're not talking some kind of crappy EDGE service, this is for >1.5MBps in the real world (3.6MBps down theoretical) with latency low enough to use VOIP apps. It's just that the Big Three mobile carriers aren't that interested in supporting heavy bandwidth laptop users since they can make a lot more from lots of low-bandwidth handset users. The smaller upstart carriers, Willcom and E-Mobile, however, are specializing in data services including laptops.
E-Mobile is a particularly interesting case because here's a carrier that actually doesn't seem to mind being just a no-nonsense "pipe" -- at least for the time being. They launched earlier this year with flat-rate $45 data plans across the board and it will be interesting to see where they go.
All in all, this is a rather poorly researched and very gushy article. Maybe it would have been interesting in 2003. Still, though, it's good to bring attention to the ways decent wireless could improve our lives. A revolt for decent wireless telecom regulation, anyone?
A month ago we had a thread on this topic, and I mentioned the potential applicability of the Magnuson-Moss Act. I'm surprised it didn't get any replies and continued to languish at a +1 mod score. Anyway, there might be some interesting stuff in that thread about whether Apple can deny software updates for unlocked iPhones...
Apple probably have the rights to refuse to firmware-upgrade any unlocked phones.
That's how the game is played in the Windows world, but, consider this:
In the auto world, under the Magnuson-Moss Act, an auto maker can't deny you service on your car just because you modified it. They can deny you service only if it can be proven that the modification was the cause. In other words they can't refuse to service your engine just because you changed your wheels, unless you tried to drive on square wheels or something.
Shouldn't the same principle apply to computers? A SIM-unlock mod won't (normally) affect Safari, so any attempt by Apple to deny Safari updates to unlocked phones should be prohibited.
Granted, the computer industry has been smart enough not to use the word "warranty" when it comes to software updates, but the principle smells the same to me. Some smart lawyer really ought to take this up....
> no response to their email inquiry about payment
My bet is it's caught in RIAA's spam filter. An email from a bunch of attorneys probably sounds like "payment of $68,685.23 (sixty eight thousand six hundred eighty five U.S. dollars)". It would be even better if they named some trustee in Barbados or something.
Wow. Thank you for sharing this information. The FAQ/comparison data on the JungleDisk site managed to address pretty much all my requirements in one swoop. At the risk of sounding like an advertisement for them (I don't have any relationship with them or S3 or whatnot, I'm just excited about finding something that *finally* works)...
* No tiered overselling BS - using S3 I'm never going to have to worry about managing my "plan" level. * Reasonable software licensing terms (buy once, run many) * Minimal worries about lock-in -- WebDAV is standard, works with rsync, no continuing licence fees, cross-platform, and they've even open-sourced the guts of the only proprietary component, the JungleDisk sw itself. * Minimal worries about amazon going away, losing data, having brownouts, or changing pricing drastically any time soon. Most likely reliable, reasonably secure, fast connection to the data centre. * Reasonable fees, both for S3 and the client sw.
As far as I'm concerned that's a home run set of features.
The parent's post is probably the most balanced view in this discussion. A trade-off exists between human development and the dolphin, and there wasn't a practical way to save the dolphin without serious consequences for human development. There's your first question answered.
Between your rhetoric about "eternal shame of The Chinese" you belie your ignorance. "so china can exert great effort to build a damn[SIC], but not the tiniest of effort to save a dolphin?" The reason you are even hearing about this issue today is because of the existence of conservation efforts, some of them -- shocker -- even run by The Chinese.
Now, back to passing the buck, you ask the original poster to explain what China practically could have done better, but that's really your responsibility as the critic here. If you can't offer anything constructive, you're just another hypocritical armchair activist.
> according to Marks, who spoke with Xconomy at length Monday night.
So, TFA was written on the basis of a lengthy evening tirade by a disgruntled former employee. To their credit, they also interviewed the current CEO, who presented the alternate point of view -- that there was a gradual reorg in pursuit of a better ROI for the parent company.
I fail to see how this equates to "Mitsubishi breaks up MERL." MERL continues to exist. In fact it's a disservice to the newly hired researchers to assume that the "new" MERL can only be a shadow of its former self. Sometimes new people and fresh ideas are a good thing.
There is also a snide element of bias in the article against the "Japanese-style management" -- assumed to be something so horrible that researchers need to be "shielded" from it. While frustrating for some folks who can't bridge the cultural gap, this maligned "Japanese management style" is the same one that brought us innovations we take for granted today, in areas like automotive quality, 3G/4G cellular, the Wii user interface, CCDs and LCDs, and of course hentai anime.
In any case the news itself is interesting, but I'm not sure there is any need to portray it as the end of the world or something...
Agreed. The article belies a typically American-headed point of view by pitting cell phone development against internet development:
Government officials say the company has spent more time marketing and signing up cellphone customers than on expanding Internet service.
Well, of course, the article author fails to realize that a modern cell network is essentially an IP pipe on the backend anyway. Gee, maybe there's some logic to the situation, that the last mile hassles just aren't worth it, especially in an environment like Africa?
Install HSDPA/HSUPA and call it a day.
The cell phone form factor is probably a way better fit for data services for the average citizen in Africa anyway. Consider:
PCs need reliable power and lots of it. A phone can be practically operated on solar or dynamo power.
OS. Given a PC, most people are going to want Windows. That expense can be spared with mobile phones, where there isn't yet an entrenched OS tax.
Maintaining last mile reliability in often less-than-stable environment. PC: one wire to worry about per household/business. Phone: one wire per thousands of subscribers.
Equipment cost. Almost identical now, but the simple fact that a smaller form factor uses less material means it will be basically more cost effective.
Theft/security issues. If needed, your investment can travel with you instead of having to leave it vulnerable to thieves at home/office.
Those who need and can afford a PC can use an HSDPA modem and still get way better performance than current ISDN/ADSL offerings. For everyone else, their handheld terminal serves as their internet access device.
Given that this picture seems a lot more practical than wiring the whole country, I think it's quite *right* for the telecoms to focus on building up the cell network before trying to re-create some American vision of wired broadband and a PC in every house.
the disk was corrupted so I couldn't just open the file). I popped it in my parents' now deceased iMac and the only program I found that opened it was Word,
Huh? iMacs don't have internal disk drives! Microsoft shill!
thousands of them would end up washed into the Arctic ice near Alaska, and then move at a mile a day, frozen in the pack ice, around their very own North-West Passage to the Atlantic.
Huh?? Being that Canada isn't 15 miles across, at that rate it should take thousands of years for the ducks to reach the Atlantic, no?
Another thing: The illustration shows the ducks passing down (north to south) the East Coast of North America before reversing and heading towards England across the middle of the Atlantic. Isn't that the exact opposite of the gulf stream ?
I'm no oceanography expert, but something smells fishy about the geographic fact-checking in this article. Can anyone confirm?
NEC's mobile phones in Japan have built-in OCR (they call it "Access Reader") and Japanese English dictionaries. Combined, you can snap a picture of some English or Japanese and translate it. And the phone itself costs $0-$200 at carrier subsidized prices.
In actual use, it's kind of clunky, but it's conceptually what you are asking for. Not to mention, a clever Java MIDP/BREW programmer could go in and access the camera APIs and write a more streamlined solution.
Incidentally, good OCR is especially important for Japanese and Chinese because it is one of only 3 ways (the others are handwriting recognition, and tedious stroke-based lookup) for looking up a Chinese character whose reading is unknown.
Exactly, it doesn't make sense to automatically "trust" a user's entire response based on one correct word.
Why not show the same image to multiple users, and assume the response is correct only if two or more of them concur? This has the effect of doubling (or tripling) the effort required to solve, but gives you at least some verifiability. Sort of like using google as a spell-checker.
Of course, you'd still have to fall-back on the "one correct word" idea for verification when the user makes the entry, but in terms of adding text to the database, some statistical verification would be a good thing...
From TFCFP (call for participation):
Filters will be evaluated based on a weighted combination of the percentage of spam blocked and its false positive percentage.
From a theoretical standpoint, a low false positive average over an entire set (like <1%) might seem okay, but that doesn't take into account what's important to users.
Take, for example, a message from a long-lost friend, whose current address isn't yet in your whitelist, and who would have no other way of contacting you should the message get spamboxed. Here's an example of a message that's important to a user but gets lost among the everyday messages when simply talking about the percentage of false positives.
There's lots of other examples, too -- if you run your own domain, your messages are likely to be spamboxed, etc. Furthermore, the lower the false-positive rate, the less likely a user is to actually *check* their spambox, thus making a single false-positive even worse.
Microsoft's own Hotmail, of course, is notorious for spamboxing messages like that. And yet the conference is being held at Microsoft, and Microsoft's own spam researchers proudly touted their system in the February 2007 Communications of the ACM.
Something tells me the leaders in the field are sort of missing the point. Simply bringing down the aggregate false positive rate is *not* enough. The measure needs to take into account how often the user actually misses information that's important to them.
Inflight wifi has been around for a while, for example the Connexion by Boeing service which was killed last August. Why was it discontinued? "The market for this service has not materialized as had been expected"...
Why are we so fixated on voice? VoIP? Cell phone conversations? Seems like most Americans still believe the mobile phone is just a voice tool. Take Japan, for instance, where *phone calls* have been banned on public transit since forever, but you can make good use of mobile data services like text messaging.
I find it surprising that in America, the possibility of non-obtrusive mobile data use is a minor consideration, while the whole debate about annoying cell phone / VoIP conversations takes center stage.
Slashdot Mirror
Mod parent up for a refreshingly different line of thinking from the typical responses. There's some insight here that was an eye-opener for me:
* Lots of people cheating the system, in everything from immigration to Japan Rail Passes. Anyone who's lived in Japan for a while knows the type. These people do it not to fight an "unjust" system, but simply out of laziness and a willingness to take advantage of Japan's customer-service oriented culture for their own advantage. If indeed the aim is to catch these people because the authorities are fed up with their antics, then I agree with that mission wholeheartedly.
* The parent shows an understanding for, and humility about LANGUAGE and respect for the ways of society. So many foreigners in Japan assume they deserve equal, or even better, treatment when they don't even speak proper Japanese (would the reverse apply to a Japanese person in the USA who didn't speak a word of English??). In this thread, there are lots of complaints about Japan's allegedly discriminatory society, but it's important to separate the ones that stem from things one can't control (such as race, birthplace) versus things that one CAN do something about, if one is willing (language, acceptance of society and culture, and, in the case of generational residents originally from Korea, citizenship). Sifting through the complaints like that lets us focus on the small number of truly unjust issues, like a few remaining incidents of blanket racial discrimination, that really deserve to be resolved.
That being said, I'm not sure I agree with the parent's conclusion that the fingerprinting is justified (on an ideological basis, mostly) -- but I think some very valid and interesting points were made.
I can't believe you forgot the Beowulf Cluster!
Who else remembers when Panther came out and Apple promised a new Finder? Well, the same words are being used to described the "new finder" in Leopard. Shame on you, Apple.
From TFA:
The changes in Leopard do indicate that Apple has taken a renewed interest in improving the Finder, but motion is not the same thing as progress. For where I'm sitting, it looks like one step forward, two steps back.
Truer words have never been spoken. This guy deserves credit for inventing a vocabulary ("spatial"/"browser") so we can talk about the Finder issues clearly, and cutting through the haze of "new features" to see the underlying problems. How often do you see this level of insight from your typical schwag-drenched tech reviewer?
The problem with the Finder is that, even though most people agree that it's fundamentally broken, it's too mundane to get the high-level attention it needs. In particular, capital-S Steve probably figures most home users will be fine accessing their files through applications, otherwise it would have been fixed by now. But Steve! Remember you were the one who said that saving a few seconds of every user's day is like saving a few lives. Now, Mac OS has an installed base of over 20 million.
New features does not a new Finder make. It may seem like a mundane issue, but now is the time to raise a stink so we can move on from this already. F F T F .
Umm, no....
Because this is not even a zero-sum game; adding more baggage prioritization is a negative-sum game. Instead of putting the baggage on the plane in the most efficient way (even if this just means almost randomly piling it in as it comes down the chute), now you've got more QoS overhead. So the priority bags come out faster, and the non-priority bags come out slower, but the overall time required to unload a plane's worth of baggage goes up. If the mission of an airline is to get you and your baggage to your destination as efficiently as possible, it's foolishness -- a word that, appropriately, means bling bling to an MBA.
It's like those supermarket club card "discounts" that really amount to a surcharge when you forget to bring your card or for casual users of the supermarket. (I always apply for a new card in those cases, but that's another story...)
True, Willcom has been around for some time, but they are an "upstart" (as opposed to "start-up") in the sense that they are finally starting to grow their market share as a niche player versus DoCoMo and the like...
Every now and then the same myths about the Japanese mobile market come up. Here's what we've seen on Slashdot today:
I could go on, but when it comes to Japan, be careful whose information you trust. Lots of people who claim to know about Japan don't speak even speak the language, which continues to contribute to a lot of misinformation.
Myths aside, I think the real reasons Japan is so far ahead have a little bit to do with culture and language, a little more to do with urban density causing carriers to push low-bandwith services (i.e., text messaging) coupled with public transport and portability factors, and a lot more to do with insanely poor telecom regulation in other areas of the world (here's looking at you, Canada).
There are no really good reasons why we can't have the same quality of mobile services as Japan -- if only we demanded it (in large masses) from our governments, telecom carriers, and handset manufacturers. Thankfully, in the wake of iPhone and the unlocking debate it started, we might see some positive change. When we're on par with Japan, I'm going to laugh at all the pundits who claimed there was something unique about Japanese people, society, or culture that makes them so mobile-centric.
> And as for using the mobile as a modem - to link to the internet - that's very expensive in Japan
Actually that's not true at all. You can get flat rate mobile data (with no device restrictions) on a 3.5G cellular network for around US $45 a month. And we're not talking some kind of crappy EDGE service, this is for >1.5MBps in the real world (3.6MBps down theoretical) with latency low enough to use VOIP apps. It's just that the Big Three mobile carriers aren't that interested in supporting heavy bandwidth laptop users since they can make a lot more from lots of low-bandwidth handset users. The smaller upstart carriers, Willcom and E-Mobile, however, are specializing in data services including laptops.
E-Mobile is a particularly interesting case because here's a carrier that actually doesn't seem to mind being just a no-nonsense "pipe" -- at least for the time being. They launched earlier this year with flat-rate $45 data plans across the board and it will be interesting to see where they go.
All in all, this is a rather poorly researched and very gushy article. Maybe it would have been interesting in 2003. Still, though, it's good to bring attention to the ways decent wireless could improve our lives. A revolt for decent wireless telecom regulation, anyone?
A month ago we had a thread on this topic, and I mentioned the potential applicability of the Magnuson-Moss Act. I'm surprised it didn't get any replies and continued to languish at a +1 mod score. Anyway, there might be some interesting stuff in that thread about whether Apple can deny software updates for unlocked iPhones...
Apple probably have the rights to refuse to firmware-upgrade any unlocked phones.
That's how the game is played in the Windows world, but, consider this:
In the auto world, under the Magnuson-Moss Act, an auto maker can't deny you service on your car just because you modified it. They can deny you service only if it can be proven that the modification was the cause. In other words they can't refuse to service your engine just because you changed your wheels, unless you tried to drive on square wheels or something.
Shouldn't the same principle apply to computers? A SIM-unlock mod won't (normally) affect Safari, so any attempt by Apple to deny Safari updates to unlocked phones should be prohibited.
Granted, the computer industry has been smart enough not to use the word "warranty" when it comes to software updates, but the principle smells the same to me. Some smart lawyer really ought to take this up....
> no response to their email inquiry about payment
My bet is it's caught in RIAA's spam filter. An email from a bunch of attorneys probably sounds like "payment of $68,685.23 (sixty eight thousand six hundred eighty five U.S. dollars)". It would be even better if they named some trustee in Barbados or something.
companies in asia simply throw people to solve problems rather than automating
(sarcasm)Umm, right, that's why American manufacturing is so competitive, eh?... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jidoka"
Wow. Thank you for sharing this information. The FAQ/comparison data on the JungleDisk site managed to address pretty much all my requirements in one swoop. At the risk of sounding like an advertisement for them (I don't have any relationship with them or S3 or whatnot, I'm just excited about finding something that *finally* works)...
* No tiered overselling BS - using S3 I'm never going to have to worry about managing my "plan" level.
* Reasonable software licensing terms (buy once, run many)
* Minimal worries about lock-in -- WebDAV is standard, works with rsync, no continuing licence fees, cross-platform, and they've even open-sourced the guts of the only proprietary component, the JungleDisk sw itself.
* Minimal worries about amazon going away, losing data, having brownouts, or changing pricing drastically any time soon. Most likely reliable, reasonably secure, fast connection to the data centre.
* Reasonable fees, both for S3 and the client sw.
As far as I'm concerned that's a home run set of features.
Can't wait to get home and try it out tonight...
Passing the buck.
The parent's post is probably the most balanced view in this discussion. A trade-off exists between human development and the dolphin, and there wasn't a practical way to save the dolphin without serious consequences for human development. There's your first question answered.
Between your rhetoric about "eternal shame of The Chinese" you belie your ignorance. "so china can exert great effort to build a damn[SIC], but not the tiniest of effort to save a dolphin?" The reason you are even hearing about this issue today is because of the existence of conservation efforts, some of them -- shocker -- even run by The Chinese.
Now, back to passing the buck, you ask the original poster to explain what China practically could have done better, but that's really your responsibility as the critic here. If you can't offer anything constructive, you're just another hypocritical armchair activist.
> according to Marks, who spoke with Xconomy at length Monday night.
So, TFA was written on the basis of a lengthy evening tirade by a disgruntled former employee. To their credit, they also interviewed the current CEO, who presented the alternate point of view -- that there was a gradual reorg in pursuit of a better ROI for the parent company.
I fail to see how this equates to "Mitsubishi breaks up MERL." MERL continues to exist. In fact it's a disservice to the newly hired researchers to assume that the "new" MERL can only be a shadow of its former self. Sometimes new people and fresh ideas are a good thing.
There is also a snide element of bias in the article against the "Japanese-style management" -- assumed to be something so horrible that researchers need to be "shielded" from it. While frustrating for some folks who can't bridge the cultural gap, this maligned "Japanese management style" is the same one that brought us innovations we take for granted today, in areas like automotive quality, 3G/4G cellular, the Wii user interface, CCDs and LCDs, and of course hentai anime.
In any case the news itself is interesting, but I'm not sure there is any need to portray it as the end of the world or something...
> no dealers
Question: where do you get it serviced?
Agreed. The article belies a typically American-headed point of view by pitting cell phone development against internet development:
Government officials say the company has spent more time marketing and signing up cellphone customers than on expanding Internet service.
Well, of course, the article author fails to realize that a modern cell network is essentially an IP pipe on the backend anyway. Gee, maybe there's some logic to the situation, that the last mile hassles just aren't worth it, especially in an environment like Africa?
Install HSDPA/HSUPA and call it a day.
The cell phone form factor is probably a way better fit for data services for the average citizen in Africa anyway. Consider:
Those who need and can afford a PC can use an HSDPA modem and still get way better performance than current ISDN/ADSL offerings. For everyone else, their handheld terminal serves as their internet access device.
Given that this picture seems a lot more practical than wiring the whole country, I think it's quite *right* for the telecoms to focus on building up the cell network before trying to re-create some American vision of wired broadband and a PC in every house.
the disk was corrupted so I couldn't just open the file). I popped it in my parents' now deceased iMac and the only program I found that opened it was Word,
Huh? iMacs don't have internal disk drives! Microsoft shill!
From TFA:
thousands of them would end up washed into the Arctic ice near Alaska, and then move at a mile a day, frozen in the pack ice, around their very own North-West Passage to the Atlantic.
Huh?? Being that Canada isn't 15 miles across, at that rate it should take thousands of years for the ducks to reach the Atlantic, no?
Another thing: The illustration shows the ducks passing down (north to south) the East Coast of North America before reversing and heading towards England across the middle of the Atlantic. Isn't that the exact opposite of the gulf stream ?
I'm no oceanography expert, but something smells fishy about the geographic fact-checking in this article. Can anyone confirm?
NEC's mobile phones in Japan have built-in OCR (they call it "Access Reader") and Japanese English dictionaries. Combined, you can snap a picture of some English or Japanese and translate it. And the phone itself costs $0-$200 at carrier subsidized prices.
In actual use, it's kind of clunky, but it's conceptually what you are asking for. Not to mention, a clever Java MIDP/BREW programmer could go in and access the camera APIs and write a more streamlined solution.
Incidentally, good OCR is especially important for Japanese and Chinese because it is one of only 3 ways (the others are handwriting recognition, and tedious stroke-based lookup) for looking up a Chinese character whose reading is unknown.
Baaahahahahaha, best post ever!
That is all.
Exactly, it doesn't make sense to automatically "trust" a user's entire response based on one correct word.
Why not show the same image to multiple users, and assume the response is correct only if two or more of them concur? This has the effect of doubling (or tripling) the effort required to solve, but gives you at least some verifiability. Sort of like using google as a spell-checker.
Of course, you'd still have to fall-back on the "one correct word" idea for verification when the user makes the entry, but in terms of adding text to the database, some statistical verification would be a good thing...
Been done already, way back in 2004 actually...h tml
http://www.nec.com/global/features/index18/index.
NEC sells an enterprise mobile phone solution that uses wifi in the office and UMTS outside.
People.
Dvorak isn't an acronym, it's the guy's name.
Just like Mac (the computer, as opposed to Ethernet address) is not an acronym.
From TFCFP (call for participation):
Filters will be evaluated based on a weighted combination of the percentage of spam blocked and its false positive percentage.
From a theoretical standpoint, a low false positive average over an entire set (like <1%) might seem okay, but that doesn't take into account what's important to users.
Take, for example, a message from a long-lost friend, whose current address isn't yet in your whitelist, and who would have no other way of contacting you should the message get spamboxed. Here's an example of a message that's important to a user but gets lost among the everyday messages when simply talking about the percentage of false positives.
There's lots of other examples, too -- if you run your own domain, your messages are likely to be spamboxed, etc. Furthermore, the lower the false-positive rate, the less likely a user is to actually *check* their spambox, thus making a single false-positive even worse.
Microsoft's own Hotmail, of course, is notorious for spamboxing messages like that. And yet the conference is being held at Microsoft, and Microsoft's own spam researchers proudly touted their system in the February 2007 Communications of the ACM.
Something tells me the leaders in the field are sort of missing the point. Simply bringing down the aggregate false positive rate is *not* enough. The measure needs to take into account how often the user actually misses information that's important to them.
Inflight wifi has been around for a while, for example the Connexion by Boeing service which was killed last August. Why was it discontinued? "The market for this service has not materialized as had been expected"...
The cell phone digression is now largely irrelevant now that the FCC has announced that it will continue to ban cell phones inflight.
Why are we so fixated on voice? VoIP? Cell phone conversations? Seems like most Americans still believe the mobile phone is just a voice tool. Take Japan, for instance, where *phone calls* have been banned on public transit since forever, but you can make good use of mobile data services like text messaging.
I find it surprising that in America, the possibility of non-obtrusive mobile data use is a minor consideration, while the whole debate about annoying cell phone / VoIP conversations takes center stage.
Shouldn't it be the other way around?