Slashdot is one big bias breeding ground:
Left vs Right
OSS vs Mac vs Windows
Pro-American (US) vs Anti-American (rest of the world)
Basically it's what I expect here As with any media outlet you have to take everything with a grain of salt. There is a difference in slashdot bias and news bias though. News bias is shown in the form of "slants" on topics. Slashdot bias consists of mostly ill-informed or knowingly false propeganda.
What are the mods supposed to do here? Place a disclaimer saying that all posts must be "fair and ballanced"? No personal opinions allowed? No AC posts? All posts must be backed up by valid sources. And finally, Anyone who does not abide by these rules will be have their user name and ip banned forever.
I don't believe having truely unbiased media coverage is possible. Everyone has their opinions and they will subtly slip across. I do however think that it should make an honest attempt to be unbiased.
I do that all the time on OS X. It's just that under the current "desktop", I get to see bits of all the other "desktops". And there's this handy bar full of these various desktops that I can switch between, one per app. It's called the "Dock".
You have to admit that there is a prevailent bias against XP on slashdot by most users. I rarely hear a complaint against XP that is not exaggerated or completely false.
Yeah, at least they replied. I don't know anything about Claria. Perhaps they are small enough to not have an automated reply for emails or maybe they are just shooting for the customer service. Anyway, it was nice that they replied.
The way they are doing it now, they are making money without actually selling any software. If this model works for them why should they write non-ad-ware software that people have to put forth the effort to buy?
Even if what they are doing isn't ethical, it is legal and it is making them money.
Apart from the NDA, it comes down to a general lack of trust. This individual photographed these products to prove that Microsoft made this transaction with Apple. This is no different from scanning an the invoice and blotting out the dollar amounts and account information then posting it on the web. Doing that will get you fired almost anywhere.
You have to consider that a lot of people have no use for wma with DRM. I run both XP and linux and have an iPod. WMA with DRM is useless in linux and will not work with my iPod. Why should I try it?
The problem with every software that I have used that tries to decipher human language (like Zork or the game included with emacs for X) is that you have to know what words the software understands and in what context.
I have seen the same problems with automated phone systems that are supposed to recognize a generic voice and I can see the same thing happening here.
The main difference here though, is that when entering text, you know exactly what you input before pressing enter. With voice recognition software, how do you know that the software "hears" exactly what you say? If you say somethign like "What are my appointments for the thirteenth?" and it hears, "What are my appointments for the thirtieth?" you would be receiving the wrong information.
I hope this is a success but I don't have my hopes up.
In that last part about deciding what's removed, I was just illusrating how going into machines and removing worms can escallate to removing other bits of data.
I would think and hope that it is not. It is still an intrusive attack on another machine and an invasion of privacy.
Even if this eventually is used (and I hope to God it's not) there would have to be all kinds of of legislation defining "good" worm and "bad" worms.
Can you imagine the government sitting aournd trying to do this?
Also, who decides what is removed? What's to keep someone from saying, "downloading mp3s is illegal, we are going to write a "good" worm to remove mp3s without drm?" Sure that is a bit extreme but this would cause more problems then it's worth.
It is like a form letter. Fill in the OS, and you're all ready to go.
Except that it is just a cut and past. I have seen this exact post at least in one other thread last week. It just seems people would have better things to do with their time.
I agree with this too. I don't really understand why this was never the case. With the financial troubles most states are having, I think it would be very beneficial.
I am not one of those people who go around professing the evilness of Microsoft. I did, however, come across this logo on news.com.com that does look pretty evil. I doubt that it is official or anything
I am interested to see how the insurance companies react if that Toyota that parks itself ever makes it to the US. The first wreck involving one of these will probably set the prescident for wrecks involving fully autonomous cars.
Now that I think about it though, with something as simple as parking, insurance companies will probably send out something saying that you are not insured for any accidents resulting from using this feature.
You would also have to have some way of verifying whether or not the feature was in use at the time of the accident.
Interesting... I can see how that would giev better encoding. This stuff makes sense after I see it but there's now way I could have come up with these schemes.
Wow, thats more complicated then I expected. Am I understanding you that there is not a constant quantizer for audio compression? If this is the case, how is decompression handled?
Your example does not convert over to audio compression. First of all, you are repeating the compression with the same technology. Second of all, that technology does not even remotely compare to audio/image compression.
The loss in any kind of lossy compression occurs in the step function (I forget the exact term, step quantization I believe.) If you encode with one function, decode, and encode with a differenct step function, you will have two levels of loss. The compression is very complicated and has multiple steps. I know image compression uses transforms as well and I would assume audio compression woudl do something similar but I am not certain here.
You gave a compression example, consider mine:
compression scheme a: step quantifier of 7
compression scheme b: step quantifier of 15
encode 137 with method a: 137/7 = 19
decode 19 with method a: 19*7 = 133
encode 133 with method b: 133/15 = 8
decode 8 with method b = 8*15 = 120
120 != 137
That is an oversimplification on how the quality is lossed in jpeg compression. The larger the quantifier, the greater the compression/quality loss. The same idea goes for audio.
(Please forgive me if I used some incorrect terminology; it's been a while.)
That makes so much more sense now. I have been looking at powerbooks and comparing the size of the 12" to the 15" so my mind was stuck on the actual size of the screen.
I appreciate you not being an ass in your response.
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot is one big bias breeding ground:
Left vs Right
OSS vs Mac vs Windows
Pro-American (US) vs Anti-American (rest of the world)
Basically it's what I expect here As with any media outlet you have to take everything with a grain of salt. There is a difference in slashdot bias and news bias though. News bias is shown in the form of "slants" on topics. Slashdot bias consists of mostly ill-informed or knowingly false propeganda.
What are the mods supposed to do here? Place a disclaimer saying that all posts must be "fair and ballanced"? No personal opinions allowed? No AC posts? All posts must be backed up by valid sources. And finally, Anyone who does not abide by these rules will be have their user name and ip banned forever.
I don't believe having truely unbiased media coverage is possible. Everyone has their opinions and they will subtly slip across. I do however think that it should make an honest attempt to be unbiased.
I do that all the time on OS X. It's just that under the current "desktop", I get to see bits of all the other "desktops". And there's this handy bar full of these various desktops that I can switch between, one per app. It's called the "Dock".
I think that's stretching it a bit...
You have to admit that there is a prevailent bias against XP on slashdot by most users. I rarely hear a complaint against XP that is not exaggerated or completely false.
Yeah, at least they replied. I don't know anything about Claria. Perhaps they are small enough to not have an automated reply for emails or maybe they are just shooting for the customer service. Anyway, it was nice that they replied.
The way they are doing it now, they are making money without actually selling any software. If this model works for them why should they write non-ad-ware software that people have to put forth the effort to buy?
Even if what they are doing isn't ethical, it is legal and it is making them money.
What kind of response did you get?
I doubt that many news outlets will even consider this.
Yeah and why should they consider it news? A no-name temp got fired from microsoft for breaking company policy. He was justifiably terminated.
Apart from the NDA, it comes down to a general lack of trust. This individual photographed these products to prove that Microsoft made this transaction with Apple. This is no different from scanning an the invoice and blotting out the dollar amounts and account information then posting it on the web. Doing that will get you fired almost anywhere.
You have to consider that a lot of people have no use for wma with DRM. I run both XP and linux and have an iPod. WMA with DRM is useless in linux and will not work with my iPod. Why should I try it?
I gurantee you you'll have a bunch of new linux/mac users then.
The problem with every software that I have used that tries to decipher human language (like Zork or the game included with emacs for X) is that you have to know what words the software understands and in what context.
I have seen the same problems with automated phone systems that are supposed to recognize a generic voice and I can see the same thing happening here.
The main difference here though, is that when entering text, you know exactly what you input before pressing enter. With voice recognition software, how do you know that the software "hears" exactly what you say? If you say somethign like "What are my appointments for the thirteenth?" and it hears, "What are my appointments for the thirtieth?" you would be receiving the wrong information.
I hope this is a success but I don't have my hopes up.
In that last part about deciding what's removed, I was just illusrating how going into machines and removing worms can escallate to removing other bits of data.
I would think and hope that it is not. It is still an intrusive attack on another machine and an invasion of privacy.
Even if this eventually is used (and I hope to God it's not) there would have to be all kinds of of legislation defining "good" worm and "bad" worms.
Can you imagine the government sitting aournd trying to do this?
Also, who decides what is removed? What's to keep someone from saying, "downloading mp3s is illegal, we are going to write a "good" worm to remove mp3s without drm?" Sure that is a bit extreme but this would cause more problems then it's worth.
Speaking of spyware and weather programs, every weather program I have ever seen installs spyware. You might want to doublecheck yours.
It is like a form letter. Fill in the OS, and you're all ready to go.
Except that it is just a cut and past. I have seen this exact post at least in one other thread last week. It just seems people would have better things to do with their time.
I agree with this too. I don't really understand why this was never the case. With the financial troubles most states are having, I think it would be very beneficial.
I am not one of those people who go around professing the evilness of Microsoft. I did, however, come across this logo on news.com.com that does look pretty evil. I doubt that it is official or anything
Evil Logo
I am interested to see how the insurance companies react if that Toyota that parks itself ever makes it to the US. The first wreck involving one of these will probably set the prescident for wrecks involving fully autonomous cars.
Now that I think about it though, with something as simple as parking, insurance companies will probably send out something saying that you are not insured for any accidents resulting from using this feature.
You would also have to have some way of verifying whether or not the feature was in use at the time of the accident.
Interesting... I can see how that would giev better encoding. This stuff makes sense after I see it but there's now way I could have come up with these schemes.
Wow, thats more complicated then I expected. Am I understanding you that there is not a constant quantizer for audio compression? If this is the case, how is decompression handled?
Your example does not convert over to audio compression. First of all, you are repeating the compression with the same technology. Second of all, that technology does not even remotely compare to audio/image compression.
The loss in any kind of lossy compression occurs in the step function (I forget the exact term, step quantization I believe.) If you encode with one function, decode, and encode with a differenct step function, you will have two levels of loss. The compression is very complicated and has multiple steps. I know image compression uses transforms as well and I would assume audio compression woudl do something similar but I am not certain here.
You gave a compression example, consider mine:
compression scheme a: step quantifier of 7
compression scheme b: step quantifier of 15
encode 137 with method a: 137/7 = 19
decode 19 with method a: 19*7 = 133
encode 133 with method b: 133/15 = 8
decode 8 with method b = 8*15 = 120
120 != 137
That is an oversimplification on how the quality is lossed in jpeg compression. The larger the quantifier, the greater the compression/quality loss. The same idea goes for audio.
(Please forgive me if I used some incorrect terminology; it's been a while.)
That makes so much more sense now. I have been looking at powerbooks and comparing the size of the 12" to the 15" so my mind was stuck on the actual size of the screen. I appreciate you not being an ass in your response.
I am having trouble seeing how an 8x5 can have a 20 inch diagonal...
Maybe he thinks that people otherwise wouldn't have known the term unless they read it in the book?
That would be my guess. He read the book and didn't realize that is a standard term used in mathematical proofs.