Anyone who looks in my comment history will realise that I'm a big defender of Wikipedia, but this is just ludicrous. Even if he's innocent of the charge, the man should've realised by now that he's got to stop editing in the damn project if Wikipedia's to avoid these sorts of accusations.
I should say, it's more of a reference design than a commercial product. I appreciate that VIA seem to want to release their own some time, although it doesn't exist yet.
That's my point exactly! The Nanobook is a reference design, not a commercial product, and the Easynote XS and Cloudbook are just two of the more conservative of the variations upon it. The article implied that all three are rebrandings of the original Cloudbook machine. That there are Nanobook variants with removable screen-side modules, touchpads in different places, and whatnot didn't seem worthy of a mention.
It doesn't actually qualify as a comparison, come to think of it. They list the different devices without ever actually comparing any of them to eachother.
The article is, basically, a few specs and pictures from press releases lifted out and spread over 7 ad-filled pages. The same information could've been provided in a small table with some pictures next to it. No insight, no investigation, nothing that isn't public knowledge. They didn't even (as an example) do a google search for the phrase "Elonex One" which would've told them that it's a variation on a rather old unit which has been on sale in other markets for a while, so there are lots of hands-on reports (that way they could've commented on the need for a kickstand on that machine, and other useful tidbits). Heck, they reckon that the "VIA Nanobook" and "Easynote XS" are rebrandings of the "Cloudbook", without the vaguest notion of the real relationship between the machines. Just another bit of "news" accomplished by rewriting the press releases with as little thought as possible.
Sure, there's a lot of stuff which would have to go because people read it or heard it offline and can't be bothered to find a dead-tree citation for the article, but if you want an encyclopedia to be authoritative, "citation or it didn't happen" is the way to go.
Wikipedia's policies on notability and verifiability are rather elaborate and subjective, but there's a gem on the verifiability page:
If no reliable, third-party sources can be found for an article topic, Wikipedia should not have an article on it.
Isn't that amazingly elegant? If actually enforced, and used as the sole criterion for notability, it would kill off most of Wikipedia's fancruft and original research ramblings at a stroke.
A fictional character biography on Will Riker? If the only citations are the show itself, that's not thirdparty, so it's gone. Random Keenspot comic nobody's ever written anything about? *ping*, out of existence. On the other hand, if somebody's published a book on the symbolism in The Matrix, then wham, that article can be made legit. Chex nightmare? No end of good webcomics media coverage there. Deletion-proof! Focussing on other sources' views (rather than the current scenario of editor opinion, but backed up by others if challenged), would greatly improve the quality of articles and reduce the frequency of edit wars too. So the rule does away with the subjective concept of notability, and replaces it with the simple idea of "can we make actually a good, verifiable article out of this?".
It's not really the Trinitron brand itself which is the big deal, it's the concept of an aperture grill CRT in general. It's a big deal technologically, and luckily for all involved Sony's patent expired in the 1990s.
Atomic force microscopy (AFM) uses the weak Van der Waals-type interactions between the atoms in a probe, and the surface itself, to measure the locations of atoms. They also developed a qualitative way of identifying the atoms, by measuring the variation of the strength of interaction with probe height. It's not as neat as being able to read real-life energy level information out of atoms, mind you.
Anyone who's sat down and looked at their ISP's Fair Use policy will realise that they just aren't set up to provide the speeds they advertise at anything like a decent capacity. Talk of downloads replacing movies is hilarious when your ISP throws a strop when you download more than 5GB (less than one SD DVD!) in a single evening. Seriously, all the bluster about amazing high-speed ADSL networks is completely overstated by the ISPs. They can perhaps provide the advertised speeds of 2Mbps as a peak for a small amount of their customer base at a given time, but the mean network traffic probably only equates to about 128kbps per customer.
One has to wonder why they call it "common controls" in the first place. Seeing Vista and Office consolidate their interfaces internally but not between eachother was a bewildering moment for me. And then there's Media Player, which is a bit of both...
It's one of many incorrect definitions of pi incidental to the legislature's main purpose, which is to enshrine a crank's incorrect way of squaring the circle in legislature. Certainly a novel way of getting your ideas out there, although it's more commonplace lately (intelligent design, for example).
We've got broadband companies right now selling connections fast enough to stream or download SD video, and we're reaching the stage where HD over IP is looking plausable, but the absurd usage caps mean that it's of absolutely no use to anyone. Brick-and-mortal movie and game stores have absolutely nothing to fear from digital distribution when the average joe's monthly usage cap barely covers a dual-layer DVD. At the rate things are changing (BT's mainstream ADSL package has gone up from about 2GB/month to 5GB/month in about three years) we won't be downloading HD films for a couple of decades.
As the comment title states. The acceleration due to gravity from the Earth allows it to track which way is down, too, avoiding the need for little spinning gyroscopes. What did submitter think the Wii used to track movement when the remote wasn't pointed at the IR sensor bar? Psychic powers?
I think the point is that a trivial, back-of-the-envelope calculation would've told them that an idealised tiger could've jumped the fence. If you build a fence which can hold an idealised tiger, it's more than enough for the real thing. I'm sure our engineers, physicists and chemists will agree that a bit of head-scratching and guesstimation is advisable before you do something that could blow up in your face.
On-board graphics cards and CPU slots are becoming increasingly standardised, and memory and hard drives are thankfully pretty much all the same these days. A few of the bigger laptop manufacturers are collaborating on a standard for the rest of the components ("common backplane" or something), including the LCD panels and keyboards which often make laptop overhauls a nightmare. As an example I have a 6-year-old Toshiba at home, and main thing I'm worried about is the death of the LCD backlight, which I can't replace. Hopefully it'll take off.
"Google thinks it's a newspaper"? No, the article's discussing how the courts giving Google similar protections to newspapers would influence first amendment law in general, and its use on the internet in particular. It also discusses how if the courts oblige Google to divulge personal information in the same way as credit agencies, that will also affect them. It's a very interesting article, and it does suggest that Google has a world of legal tangles ahead of them, but surely somebody could've come up with a better summary than this?
It's strange, because the original Xbox was shockingly reliable. I recall the interviews pre-launch explaining how they had ruggedised the hard drive and gone with reasonably off-the-shelf components for reliability. Perhaps the desire to begin making a profit this generation was too strong?
I imagine that many people thought the same about the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, until Voyager started sending back pictures of Europa and Io. You never know where the next big insight is going to come from, and Mercury's had little enough attention for it to be worth a look. Mars is pretty substantially covered. That said, in the current funding climate (NASA's had to cancel projects left, right, and centre due to cuts to its thin post-Iraq budget), nobody would approve a mission to a rock like Mercury.
Certainly it has its benefits, but I'm not sure that the increased efficiency in material resources justifies the problems that come with more efficient use of human resources. Of course this is a difficult thing to call.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone who looks in my comment history will realise that I'm a big defender of Wikipedia, but this is just ludicrous. Even if he's innocent of the charge, the man should've realised by now that he's got to stop editing in the damn project if Wikipedia's to avoid these sorts of accusations.
I should say, it's more of a reference design than a commercial product. I appreciate that VIA seem to want to release their own some time, although it doesn't exist yet.
That's my point exactly! The Nanobook is a reference design, not a commercial product, and the Easynote XS and Cloudbook are just two of the more conservative of the variations upon it. The article implied that all three are rebrandings of the original Cloudbook machine. That there are Nanobook variants with removable screen-side modules, touchpads in different places, and whatnot didn't seem worthy of a mention.
It doesn't actually qualify as a comparison, come to think of it. They list the different devices without ever actually comparing any of them to eachother.
The article is, basically, a few specs and pictures from press releases lifted out and spread over 7 ad-filled pages. The same information could've been provided in a small table with some pictures next to it. No insight, no investigation, nothing that isn't public knowledge. They didn't even (as an example) do a google search for the phrase "Elonex One" which would've told them that it's a variation on a rather old unit which has been on sale in other markets for a while, so there are lots of hands-on reports (that way they could've commented on the need for a kickstand on that machine, and other useful tidbits). Heck, they reckon that the "VIA Nanobook" and "Easynote XS" are rebrandings of the "Cloudbook", without the vaguest notion of the real relationship between the machines. Just another bit of "news" accomplished by rewriting the press releases with as little thought as possible.
Sure, there's a lot of stuff which would have to go because people read it or heard it offline and can't be bothered to find a dead-tree citation for the article, but if you want an encyclopedia to be authoritative, "citation or it didn't happen" is the way to go.
Wikipedia's policies on notability and verifiability are rather elaborate and subjective, but there's a gem on the verifiability page:
If no reliable, third-party sources can be found for an article topic, Wikipedia should not have an article on it.
Isn't that amazingly elegant? If actually enforced, and used as the sole criterion for notability, it would kill off most of Wikipedia's fancruft and original research ramblings at a stroke.
A fictional character biography on Will Riker? If the only citations are the show itself, that's not thirdparty, so it's gone. Random Keenspot comic nobody's ever written anything about? *ping*, out of existence. On the other hand, if somebody's published a book on the symbolism in The Matrix, then wham, that article can be made legit. Chex nightmare? No end of good webcomics media coverage there. Deletion-proof! Focussing on other sources' views (rather than the current scenario of editor opinion, but backed up by others if challenged), would greatly improve the quality of articles and reduce the frequency of edit wars too. So the rule does away with the subjective concept of notability, and replaces it with the simple idea of "can we make actually a good, verifiable article out of this?".
It's not really the Trinitron brand itself which is the big deal, it's the concept of an aperture grill CRT in general. It's a big deal technologically, and luckily for all involved Sony's patent expired in the 1990s.
According to his end-notes, it was inspired by some theoretical paper, so at least somebody thought it was likely.
Atomic force microscopy (AFM) uses the weak Van der Waals-type interactions between the atoms in a probe, and the surface itself, to measure the locations of atoms. They also developed a qualitative way of identifying the atoms, by measuring the variation of the strength of interaction with probe height. It's not as neat as being able to read real-life energy level information out of atoms, mind you.
Anyone who's sat down and looked at their ISP's Fair Use policy will realise that they just aren't set up to provide the speeds they advertise at anything like a decent capacity. Talk of downloads replacing movies is hilarious when your ISP throws a strop when you download more than 5GB (less than one SD DVD!) in a single evening. Seriously, all the bluster about amazing high-speed ADSL networks is completely overstated by the ISPs. They can perhaps provide the advertised speeds of 2Mbps as a peak for a small amount of their customer base at a given time, but the mean network traffic probably only equates to about 128kbps per customer.
One has to wonder why they call it "common controls" in the first place. Seeing Vista and Office consolidate their interfaces internally but not between eachother was a bewildering moment for me. And then there's Media Player, which is a bit of both...
Kevin Warwick, self-professed cyborg and self-evident uber-geek.
It's one of many incorrect definitions of pi incidental to the legislature's main purpose, which is to enshrine a crank's incorrect way of squaring the circle in legislature. Certainly a novel way of getting your ideas out there, although it's more commonplace lately (intelligent design, for example).
We've got broadband companies right now selling connections fast enough to stream or download SD video, and we're reaching the stage where HD over IP is looking plausable, but the absurd usage caps mean that it's of absolutely no use to anyone. Brick-and-mortal movie and game stores have absolutely nothing to fear from digital distribution when the average joe's monthly usage cap barely covers a dual-layer DVD. At the rate things are changing (BT's mainstream ADSL package has gone up from about 2GB/month to 5GB/month in about three years) we won't be downloading HD films for a couple of decades.
As the comment title states. The acceleration due to gravity from the Earth allows it to track which way is down, too, avoiding the need for little spinning gyroscopes. What did submitter think the Wii used to track movement when the remote wasn't pointed at the IR sensor bar? Psychic powers?
Those are all good questions but I was trying to clarify the purpose of the mathematical exercise, not get into a debate about who was to blame.
I think the point is that a trivial, back-of-the-envelope calculation would've told them that an idealised tiger could've jumped the fence. If you build a fence which can hold an idealised tiger, it's more than enough for the real thing. I'm sure our engineers, physicists and chemists will agree that a bit of head-scratching and guesstimation is advisable before you do something that could blow up in your face.
On-board graphics cards and CPU slots are becoming increasingly standardised, and memory and hard drives are thankfully pretty much all the same these days. A few of the bigger laptop manufacturers are collaborating on a standard for the rest of the components ("common backplane" or something), including the LCD panels and keyboards which often make laptop overhauls a nightmare. As an example I have a 6-year-old Toshiba at home, and main thing I'm worried about is the death of the LCD backlight, which I can't replace. Hopefully it'll take off.
"Google thinks it's a newspaper"? No, the article's discussing how the courts giving Google similar protections to newspapers would influence first amendment law in general, and its use on the internet in particular. It also discusses how if the courts oblige Google to divulge personal information in the same way as credit agencies, that will also affect them. It's a very interesting article, and it does suggest that Google has a world of legal tangles ahead of them, but surely somebody could've come up with a better summary than this?
That's all you need to know, right there. As far as credible science reporting goes, they're up there with the Weekly World News.
It's strange, because the original Xbox was shockingly reliable. I recall the interviews pre-launch explaining how they had ruggedised the hard drive and gone with reasonably off-the-shelf components for reliability. Perhaps the desire to begin making a profit this generation was too strong?
Actually, whales are mammals. Wales is a rugged, Klingon-speaking country in the United Kingdom.
I imagine that many people thought the same about the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, until Voyager started sending back pictures of Europa and Io. You never know where the next big insight is going to come from, and Mercury's had little enough attention for it to be worth a look. Mars is pretty substantially covered. That said, in the current funding climate (NASA's had to cancel projects left, right, and centre due to cuts to its thin post-Iraq budget), nobody would approve a mission to a rock like Mercury.
Certainly it has its benefits, but I'm not sure that the increased efficiency in material resources justifies the problems that come with more efficient use of human resources. Of course this is a difficult thing to call.