In my experience Apple gear is no more nor less likely to break than other good-quality stuff. Most of the internal components are the same after all. But the recent stuff is harder to repair of course; significantly more so than Lenovo for instance. Have to love a company that actually puts disassembly and repair manuals for their products on the web for anybody to view.
I think the main observation to take is that very rapid, unpredictable changes (a floor polisher, say) also tends to introduce only very _local_ changes. The effects stretch for decimeters, rather than meters, and for seconds or so when the machine is close. A larger, fixed machine that is either on or off, on the other hand, would essentially introduce two alternate local maps, both of which could be estimated and learned.
Remember that these sensors are fairly insensitive to small changes; they have to happen really close for it to have any effect.
"how could you confirm the validity of the introduced changes to the magnetic field map? In computer vision we do this with training that requires user interaction."
To be fair, there's plenty of systems that do estimate validity of changes autonomously. Remember that vision poses a rather different set of issues such as rapid and radical lighting changes that are absent here.
"[...] but claim sub-meter accuracy in an active location seems hyped"
I think the sub-meter accuracy is completely achievable. But don't expect to, say, drop a robot in a spot and it will know where it is immediately or anything. I would assume it would take several minutes of moving about and sampling a largish area before you could identify the approcimate position, separate out local, transient changes from the underlying signal and get a good fix. The move variable the loval environment, the larger a total area would you need to sample to become sufficiently confident you are looking at the right place.
Buildings and other large structures rarely change much. The magnetic field in any particular spot may change due to objects moving about, but that acts as spatial high-frequency noise over a much more stable lower-frequency signal.
The simily is imperfect, but when you compare the map with reality you ignore the small stuff like parked cars, curbside junk, temporary road-works structures and so on and focus on the stable larger-scale structures in the environment. In the same way, this would loook at the larger-scale structures and pinpoint you within that. A corollary is that while the fix may be quite good, you won't actually get a fix until you've moved about a fair bit. so the device can sample the signal across a larger spatial area.
Then you have the SLAM aspect as well: as you move about, the incidental changes get tentatively incorporated into the updated map. Those changes that prove stable over time become a permanent part of the map. For fairly busy areas you would have quite high accuracy at all times, even if people did try to actively sabotage it.
The whole point is that the magnetic field is locally disturbed by buildings and other structures. The variation in a small area is what identifies the place.
This is like saying maps are useless because there's buildings placed in the terrain.
I type a lot and need a good keyboard as well. I can tell you that the new Lenovo chicklet keyboard is fine; just as comfortable and precise as the previous keyboard. I loved my Model M, but it's too noisy to use at work nowadays.
Imagine spending much of the day every day talking to your computer. My voice could not handle it.
Imagine writing a research paper using voice. Dictating math expressions, making the recognition software understand rare - or entirely novel - scientific terms. Or imagine working in linguistics, or as a translator and try to dictate in two languages, or in a rare, badly supported language.
And now imagine the sounds of an office with thirty people all talking to their computers at once.
My four-year old desktop is still more than twice as fast as my just-bought Thinkpad. A current-generation desktop at the same proice point would be several times faster (and yes, I'm basically waiting until October to get one for internal budget reasons). I can, and do, use every available CPU cycle I can get.
I love the idea of "computer in my phone" as inspired by, for instance, the recent Ubuntu Phone demo. But no, while adding a keyboard and a screen enables some tasks, it does nothing at all for others. Desktops are becoming more niche, but no, they're not disappearing. And neither are full-featured laptops, whether you want to call them a PC or not.
Hmm, there is going to be a continuing and significnt need for a device that has a real keyboard for all the people who write a lot of text every day; substantial local CPU power and storage for people that do stuff like development, modeling and simulations; good screens and specialized input devices for people that do graphical design CAD and the like.
Now, that device might not be an X86 box that runs Windows, so in that sense it may well be "Post PC". But to all intents and purposes it will look and act very much like the laptop and desktop machines i have today.
Oh, I'm not arguing against; I just ordered a Lenovo myself with 16Gb RAM, an 128Gb SSD and a secondary 500Gb drive. When you stay within what the machine can do, a good laptop is really amazing - we've become too blase about how far weÃve gotten.
With "large dataset" I was thinking about datasets too large to actually work with using just an SSD of about this size. Sets in the tens to hundreds of Gb. After all, if your data all fits on the SSD there's no particular reason to look at a hybrid drive. I do occasionally deal with data of that size, but I would not do it on a laptop. I'd work with it on my desktop or remotely using a cluster (depends to some degree where the data is; transfer time becomes non-trivial).
True - mostly. A hybrid drive of some sort would make a lot of sense on a small laptop. Although you are less likely to need large amounts of storage on a small laptop - it doesn't really have the power or memory to deal well with large datasets, and the screen is not really good for image editing and stuff like that. Perhaps most users are satisfied with the price-performance os pure SSD drives on such machines.
ALso, I don't know how common mSATA support is yet, but small laptops with a supported PCI Express port could actually add, say, an 40-80Gb SSD as a boot and system drive, givign you two drives if you want.
Although that of course depends on app writers actually bothering to build special versions for a small number of phone models. Not sure how likely that is, especially when those phones can still run the ARM version.
What about on a laptop, where you can only have one or the other.
Even the smaller Thinkpads take two drives if you want - three if you add an mSATA SSD. I just ordered a 14" model with an SSD as primary and a largish HD as a secondary drive for exactly this setup.
"people are pushing the ever loving crap out of these devices[...]"
Well... are we, though? I use my cellphone (a Galaxy Nexus) all the time and I'm a heavy computer user otherwise, but I don't have a single phone app that actually pushes the CPU. Every single thing I use now ran on my previous, now almost three year old, Android phone before, with no visible difference in performance. The differences I do see are all attributable to having more memory and better OS support for accellerated graphics in the UI.
There is games, though; some Android game engines are written in part in native code for the speed boost, and I can't imagine that an Intel phone will shine when forced to emulate an ARM CPU on the fly for those occasions.
And for most applications, the CPU really does not matter. They'll run nicely on anything able to host the Dalvik VM. At best, an Intel phone will be no different than a ARM one, and at worst it will just add an extra bit of frustration.
I sit by the workstation. On the desk I have a small podium* for my laptop, so I stand to use that one - of course "standing" really means moving about, figdeting and shifting my weight around; I'm not standing still. Also, I have a long-standing habit of taking tiny breaks where I wank down the hall and back, go get a sip of water, go to a separate room for phone calls and so on.
I stand or walk for about 70% of my time a typical workday. That seems to be a good ratio for me. I no longer have any back pain, and no RSI (I keep using different keyboards and pointing devices in different ways). Works for me.
This is why i use openDNS on my kids computer. You do realize children are not capable of making their own decisions 100% of the time right? You do realize that some things should be censored from kids so that they can have a childhood right?
I agree. And that is your responsibility as a parent. But I do not agree that the world at large should be barred from certain subject matters simply because your child should not see it.
On my older 2.2-based phone, Firefox was completely unuseable. Really - clicking something would take more than a second to respond in some cases.
Same version of the browser on my new Android 4-based phone and it's a joy. It flies. Lately I've used the Aurora nightlies as my default browser for some time to try the new interface and it's really, really good. I abandoned Dolphin completely for Firefox once the new UI appeared. I basically only miss text reflow when zooming; other than that it is already everything I want.
So takeaway message: it really, really depens on your phone whether your experience will be good or not.
Publishing in a small, local journal that gives you few readers and few citations will not be good for your impact. Good exposure is of course important for your ideas to spread.
And truth is, promotion boards and funding agencies put a great deal of weight on where you publish as a proxy for how important your work is for the community, and if you don't publish in "good" places you will eventually be out of grant money, and out of a job. Which is kind of important if you want to live indoors, eat regularly and get a pension and health care.
It would've been nice if there was an option in that dialog to "use these values as default".
There is, for all tools at once. In the settings you can ask to save all current settings as default. You can set up all the tools you use the way you want them, then go to settings and save it all as your normal set-up.
Cheating and fraud is not rampant, and has never been. The vast majority of scientists never go close to any unethical line. Most cheating is likely found out too, sooner or later, and sooner the more flagrant and potentially important it is. Your career will not be affected in any way by the existence of fraud in the field.
What is a concern, however, is the sheer amount of young researchers and the relative lack of positions for them. Academia is an up-or-out kind of system, and at every step of the career ladder you are competing with dozens or hundreds of other qualified people. To put it bluntly, do go into science as a career if that where your hearts desire lies, but also make sure you have some idea of what to do instead if it doesn't work out.
...and I like it; surprisingly so. Scheme is off-putting at first (and Andy Wingos blog posts aimed at long-time seasoned users don't help) but once I sat down and really wrote something in it it turns out to be very expressive and readable.
What Guile needs, I think, is better packaging. Make a full-featured package set for the most popular platforms with the libraries you need to do real, fun stuff. Things like the Cairo and SDL library bindings for instance, and UI bindings.
The libraries you want already exist and work well, but installing them by hand is a pain, especially when your aim is to learn the language, not deal with installation issues.
Then add a set of docs to get things rolling. Docs for the libraries (the Cairo bindings have none; you basically use the C version docs.) A few Hello World-ish tutorials to get going with UI, graphics, communication, language bindings and so on, together with a general introduction to Scheme and Guile. Again, I think most of it is out there already, just not assembled and packaed in an accessible way.
It's a really good system; shame to see it so underused.
Slashdot Mirror
In my experience Apple gear is no more nor less likely to break than other good-quality stuff. Most of the internal components are the same after all. But the recent stuff is harder to repair of course; significantly more so than Lenovo for instance. Have to love a company that actually puts disassembly and repair manuals for their products on the web for anybody to view.
Good points.
I think the main observation to take is that very rapid, unpredictable changes (a floor polisher, say) also tends to introduce only very _local_ changes. The effects stretch for decimeters, rather than meters, and for seconds or so when the machine is close. A larger, fixed machine that is either on or off, on the other hand, would essentially introduce two alternate local maps, both of which could be estimated and learned.
Remember that these sensors are fairly insensitive to small changes; they have to happen really close for it to have any effect.
"how could you confirm the validity of the introduced changes to the magnetic field map? In computer vision we do this with training that requires user interaction."
To be fair, there's plenty of systems that do estimate validity of changes autonomously. Remember that vision poses a rather different set of issues such as rapid and radical lighting changes that are absent here.
"[...] but claim sub-meter accuracy in an active location seems hyped"
I think the sub-meter accuracy is completely achievable. But don't expect to, say, drop a robot in a spot and it will know where it is immediately or anything. I would assume it would take several minutes of moving about and sampling a largish area before you could identify the approcimate position, separate out local, transient changes from the underlying signal and get a good fix. The move variable the loval environment, the larger a total area would you need to sample to become sufficiently confident you are looking at the right place.
re: blog - thanks! Though I mostly post smaller stuff on Google+ nowadays: https://plus.google.com/105059362788808645801
Buildings and other large structures rarely change much. The magnetic field in any particular spot may change due to objects moving about, but that acts as spatial high-frequency noise over a much more stable lower-frequency signal.
The simily is imperfect, but when you compare the map with reality you ignore the small stuff like parked cars, curbside junk, temporary road-works structures and so on and focus on the stable larger-scale structures in the environment. In the same way, this would loook at the larger-scale structures and pinpoint you within that. A corollary is that while the fix may be quite good, you won't actually get a fix until you've moved about a fair bit. so the device can sample the signal across a larger spatial area.
Then you have the SLAM aspect as well: as you move about, the incidental changes get tentatively incorporated into the updated map. Those changes that prove stable over time become a permanent part of the map. For fairly busy areas you would have quite high accuracy at all times, even if people did try to actively sabotage it.
The whole point is that the magnetic field is locally disturbed by buildings and other structures. The variation in a small area is what identifies the place.
This is like saying maps are useless because there's buildings placed in the terrain.
"android users are 4% of the browser marketshare at wikipedia."
Does that count app users as well, though, or only those who use their browser directly?
"That was that you had to blend the local beliefs with christianity to get anywhere. "
Sounds rather difficult to reconcile Evangelicals with Christianity though.
I type a lot and need a good keyboard as well. I can tell you that the new Lenovo chicklet keyboard is fine; just as comfortable and precise as the previous keyboard. I loved my Model M, but it's too noisy to use at work nowadays.
Imagine spending much of the day every day talking to your computer. My voice could not handle it.
Imagine writing a research paper using voice. Dictating math expressions, making the recognition software understand rare - or entirely novel - scientific terms. Or imagine working in linguistics, or as a translator and try to dictate in two languages, or in a rare, badly supported language.
And now imagine the sounds of an office with thirty people all talking to their computers at once.
My four-year old desktop is still more than twice as fast as my just-bought Thinkpad. A current-generation desktop at the same proice point would be several times faster (and yes, I'm basically waiting until October to get one for internal budget reasons). I can, and do, use every available CPU cycle I can get.
I love the idea of "computer in my phone" as inspired by, for instance, the recent Ubuntu Phone demo. But no, while adding a keyboard and a screen enables some tasks, it does nothing at all for others. Desktops are becoming more niche, but no, they're not disappearing. And neither are full-featured laptops, whether you want to call them a PC or not.
Hmm, there is going to be a continuing and significnt need for a device that has a real keyboard for all the people who write a lot of text every day; substantial local CPU power and storage for people that do stuff like development, modeling and simulations; good screens and specialized input devices for people that do graphical design CAD and the like.
Now, that device might not be an X86 box that runs Windows, so in that sense it may well be "Post PC". But to all intents and purposes it will look and act very much like the laptop and desktop machines i have today.
Oh, I'm not arguing against; I just ordered a Lenovo myself with 16Gb RAM, an 128Gb SSD and a secondary 500Gb drive. When you stay within what the machine can do, a good laptop is really amazing - we've become too blase about how far weÃve gotten.
With "large dataset" I was thinking about datasets too large to actually work with using just an SSD of about this size. Sets in the tens to hundreds of Gb. After all, if your data all fits on the SSD there's no particular reason to look at a hybrid drive. I do occasionally deal with data of that size, but I would not do it on a laptop. I'd work with it on my desktop or remotely using a cluster (depends to some degree where the data is; transfer time becomes non-trivial).
True - mostly. A hybrid drive of some sort would make a lot of sense on a small laptop. Although you are less likely to need large amounts of storage on a small laptop - it doesn't really have the power or memory to deal well with large datasets, and the screen is not really good for image editing and stuff like that. Perhaps most users are satisfied with the price-performance os pure SSD drives on such machines.
ALso, I don't know how common mSATA support is yet, but small laptops with a supported PCI Express port could actually add, say, an 40-80Gb SSD as a boot and system drive, givign you two drives if you want.
Although that of course depends on app writers actually bothering to build special versions for a small number of phone models. Not sure how likely that is, especially when those phones can still run the ARM version.
What about on a laptop, where you can only have one or the other.
Even the smaller Thinkpads take two drives if you want - three if you add an mSATA SSD. I just ordered a 14" model with an SSD as primary and a largish HD as a secondary drive for exactly this setup.
"people are pushing the ever loving crap out of these devices[...]"
Well... are we, though? I use my cellphone (a Galaxy Nexus) all the time and I'm a heavy computer user otherwise, but I don't have a single phone app that actually pushes the CPU. Every single thing I use now ran on my previous, now almost three year old, Android phone before, with no visible difference in performance. The differences I do see are all attributable to having more memory and better OS support for accellerated graphics in the UI.
There is games, though; some Android game engines are written in part in native code for the speed boost, and I can't imagine that an Intel phone will shine when forced to emulate an ARM CPU on the fly for those occasions.
And for most applications, the CPU really does not matter. They'll run nicely on anything able to host the Dalvik VM. At best, an Intel phone will be no different than a ARM one, and at worst it will just add an extra bit of frustration.
"Is it necessary the vien come from a dead human?"
Well, not necessary, but a live human is hard to hold down when you try to cut away a piece of their major blood vessels.
I sit by the workstation. On the desk I have a small podium* for my laptop, so I stand to use that one - of course "standing" really means moving about, figdeting and shifting my weight around; I'm not standing still. Also, I have a long-standing habit of taking tiny breaks where I wank down the hall and back, go get a sip of water, go to a separate room for phone calls and so on.
I stand or walk for about 70% of my time a typical workday. That seems to be a good ratio for me. I no longer have any back pain, and no RSI (I keep using different keyboards and pointing devices in different ways). Works for me.
* a couple of cement bricks.
I agree. And that is your responsibility as a parent. But I do not agree that the world at large should be barred from certain subject matters simply because your child should not see it.
On my older 2.2-based phone, Firefox was completely unuseable. Really - clicking something would take more than a second to respond in some cases.
Same version of the browser on my new Android 4-based phone and it's a joy. It flies. Lately I've used the Aurora nightlies as my default browser for some time to try the new interface and it's really, really good. I abandoned Dolphin completely for Firefox once the new UI appeared. I basically only miss text reflow when zooming; other than that it is already everything I want.
So takeaway message: it really, really depens on your phone whether your experience will be good or not.
Publishing in a small, local journal that gives you few readers and few citations will not be good for your impact. Good exposure is of course important for your ideas to spread.
And truth is, promotion boards and funding agencies put a great deal of weight on where you publish as a proxy for how important your work is for the community, and if you don't publish in "good" places you will eventually be out of grant money, and out of a job. Which is kind of important if you want to live indoors, eat regularly and get a pension and health care.
Open journals don't allow republication either.
It would've been nice if there was an option in that dialog to "use these values as default".
There is, for all tools at once. In the settings you can ask to save all current settings as default. You can set up all the tools you use the way you want them, then go to settings and save it all as your normal set-up.
Cheating and fraud is not rampant, and has never been. The vast majority of scientists never go close to any unethical line. Most cheating is likely found out too, sooner or later, and sooner the more flagrant and potentially important it is. Your career will not be affected in any way by the existence of fraud in the field.
What is a concern, however, is the sheer amount of young researchers and the relative lack of positions for them. Academia is an up-or-out kind of system, and at every step of the career ladder you are competing with dozens or hundreds of other qualified people. To put it bluntly, do go into science as a career if that where your hearts desire lies, but also make sure you have some idea of what to do instead if it doesn't work out.
...and I like it; surprisingly so. Scheme is off-putting at first (and Andy Wingos blog posts aimed at long-time seasoned users don't help) but once I sat down and really wrote something in it it turns out to be very expressive and readable.
What Guile needs, I think, is better packaging. Make a full-featured package set for the most popular platforms with the libraries you need to do real, fun stuff. Things like the Cairo and SDL library bindings for instance, and UI bindings.
The libraries you want already exist and work well, but installing them by hand is a pain, especially when your aim is to learn the language, not deal with installation issues.
Then add a set of docs to get things rolling. Docs for the libraries (the Cairo bindings have none; you basically use the C version docs.) A few Hello World-ish tutorials to get going with UI, graphics, communication, language bindings and so on, together with a general introduction to Scheme and Guile. Again, I think most of it is out there already, just not assembled and packaed in an accessible way.
It's a really good system; shame to see it so underused.