My guess is there will be no lawsuits, because they have a registered trademark. If there are any lawsuits, it would be the likes of Intel bullying Psion out of their actively-used trademark, not the other way around.
I hate to say this because I realize how naive it is, but who cares about the quality of journals? Perhaps It's because I'm interested in a more applied field, but I judge papers by their results, generality, accuracy, clarity, and sometimes author - not what journal happened to publish them.
IMO most journals have been killing themselves off in the recent past. While running themselves as businesses may have worked when they served a useful purpose, all they do nowadays is impede openness and transparency. Want to read Professor A's conclusions? You better pay 100 dollars to some publisher owned by a huge conglomerate, because they own that paper (which was often written with a grant funded by tax-payer funds.) This is unacceptable in the internet age.
IMO, all self-respecting researchers should avoid submitting to journals that do not freely provide all content online.
Yeah, but a large part of the cost is the bluray player, which is useless in a supercomputer. I guess you could probably sell the drive/laser for 100 bucks to offset your costs.
I just tested it out on a laser printer, and I agree. I compared this font to Arial at the following fonts: 10, 11, and 12. While it doesn't look nearly as bad as it does on screen (the ink seems to spread out on the paper and mostly fill the holes), there is less ink and therefore the letters are less dark. It is similar to draft mode on my inkjet.
Still, I think it's a cool idea. If a printer doesn't have a draft mode, this really would save ink. It is perfectly legible, the holes are only noticeable if you already know about them, and the potential savings seem to be very real.
The enforcer in Unreal Tournament is a quick-fire weapon, so it's not comparable to a sniper rifle - in far Cry, if you spend 5 second lining up the perfect snipe and it misses because rand(t) = 0.5 instead of 0.1, I understand your frustration.
On the other hand, Unreal Tournament uses randomness to add a level of strategy to the game, rather than pointless realism. You can shoot the enforcer in "primary" mode, which is a semi-accurate but slower shot. Or, you can shoot in "secondary" mode, where you shoot twice as quickly, but half as accurately. Think of it as a dynamic shotgun, where the gun sprays all over the place. In this case, randomness was truly the best way to implement the spray.
The game would be boring if this gun (or any of the automatics, for that matter) always hit the target dead on - the opponent would die from 20 bullets in less than a second. Instead, the player has to plan out his distance from the opponent and his path so he has enough time to do some damage.
It sounds silly, but I see how this was a parody, and perhaps even some sort of statement. First off, anyone who installed this already knew how to install a bit torrent client, and probably knew how to go to piratebay and search for what they wanted. I think what the creators of this extension were commenting on is the ease of getting anything for free online; pretty much every mainstream downloadable product on Amazon is probably online somewhere.
Honestly, what serious extension has adds big "'Download 4 free,' 'Not Downloadable,' or 'Not Available'" buttons to your browser? Any way, there's no way to sue an extension out of existence - if people really want it, they'll get it. This extension is probably pretty useless, so I think Amazon should just let it die.
It's a big no-no to take a sample and then reveal statistics on a sub-population without first making sure that the sub-population size is big enough for its results to be statistically significant. The elected officials should have been polled separately to ensure there are enough of them in the sample.
2,500 people is more than enough, but I'm guessing that fewer than 1% of randomly-chosen people qualify as "elected officials." Far fewer. Even if the sample had 25 elected officials, I wouldn't give much weight to the results.
Windows XP is also. XP is actually a very lightweight and stable operating system if the OEM installer wants it to be (and netbook makers realize this).
With Microsoft practically giving away XP to netbook companies, I think they are successfully maintaining their monopoly.
True, but the solution is simple: 'IT is seen as a young man's game. My next applicant after you is straight out of a top 5 university CS program. What do you know that he doesn't?'
"May be people who don't socialize much and waste their time watching the idiots box are unhappy."
My guess is the correlation arises in several ways. People who don't have much to do tend to both watch more TV and be more depressed. Watching a lot of TV can leave one in a "blah" mood. When someone is not feeling in a great mood, he may distract himself with TV.
My research/education is in "artificial intelligence", and I completely agree that more computing power is what we need. I don't see the trend going that way, however. More and more people are buying weak laptops (netbooks), and less people are buying desktops. It's a very real trend, and it's going to make putting AI into our computers impossible in the near-term future.
My point had more to do with the future of AMD than with video games. I was talking about what 99% of users need from their computers, not what 0.000001% of people want (super computer architects). AMD acquired ATI because they thought that was the future of mainstream computing, not because they wanted to serve the niche supercomputer community.
I'm asserting that AMD made a huge mistake buying ATI. I am the audience they meant to target, and they miserably failed. Now, the best they can do is serve a small market at a huge cost; that makes me sad, because I used to be a faithful fan of their brand (and an investor in their company.)
"So by your logic, those people would be happy with a computer that was 1% as fast as what it is now?"
Well, no, and I think you answered your own question. But, to make it clear, that's why I said 99% of the time and not 100% of the time. Regardless, my point wasn't that we need less power, it's that the power we have now is adequate for most people. We don't need to jump through hoops to eeke out more raw computing power.
Low cost, low power CPUs. Already, 99% of people don't use 99% of the power of their CPUs 99% of the time. Why then, is AMD banking on people wanting massive power on specialized hardware that will require fancy compilers?
I consider myself in the ever-dwindling group of "PC gamers," and even I am looking forward to the death of GPUs in my computer. I'm tired of building expensive and power-sucking desktops that go obsolete in 18 months. Instead of building a 1000 dollar desktop next year, I'm getting a laptop and an Xbox 360. My 350 dollar EEE PC will be able to load PDF files and power-points without a 350-watt, 400 dollar video card, thank you very much.
More importantly, how was your buying experience with them? It takes me about 10 seconds to opt out of an e-mail list (and I would trust them to actually remove me if I asked), but speed of delivery, price, and quality of service actually make a difference to me.
When we fall back from DST to standard time, I notice a lot of people seem more visibly depressed, or "blah." I think there is something about the day ending at 4:30 pm that feels unnatural. Not only are the days getting shorter in the Fall, but then people have to deal with the sun setting an hour earlier.
This indicates to me that people actually enjoy DST. If anything, I would support a year-round DST.
Maryland shouldn't be that covered. I used to live there and know a huge chunk of the state is not within 100 miles of the ocean. I think this map is incorrectly including bays (Delaware and Chesapeake Bays in this case) in their calculations. That big bulge near MD/DE is not accurate.
I would also point out the same thing with the Great Lakes. For example, lake Michigan is US property, so the beach on the US side is not considered an international border.
"Something like this stunt, while great from a PR perspective, just simply makes it possible for insurance companies to deny them coverage in the future..."
Insurance companies have better things to do than to mess around with the premiums of test subjects by trying to guess that a 1 instead of a 0 in the 18238940th bit of a subject's DNA sequence means they statistically have a 50% greater chance of getting a disease that will kill them five years sooner.
They have rendered my homepage almost entirely useless in one fell swoop, to the point that I am actively looking for something new (meanwhile I have to use the UK site: www.google.co.uk)
The worst part? They are doing this with developers in mind more than users. Some Google article I was reading discussed advertising and developer freedom instead of user experience, with a couple of vague mentions of "happier users." I don't want to sound like Marx or anything, but this switch was to make the powerful minority happy instead of the masses. I would be pissed if they snuck ads onto my widgets - I already click on plenty of search and text ads!
The ironic thing is this is one of their only truly "beta" products, and it's one of the few not labeled so.
Yes, and it's a very common argument against the psychology field in general. Just because sloppy science is the norm does not justify drawing conclusions from sloppy experiments.
My problem is highly visible news stories drawing controversial conclusions from controversial experiments. Studies have shown (http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12376658) that most published science research ends up being wrong - especially headline grabbing studies like this one.
Slashdot has an intelligent, critical readership, so you are bound to see experiments dissected carefully. I consider that a strength of these forums, not a weakness. While there may be no perfect experiment (especially in a complicated, ill-defined field like psychology), there can still be "good" and "bad" ones. The results are indeed interesting, but are they correct?
"The study, out ot Dundee University, used a small number of subjects under 25 or over 55 and the results suggest that"
It sounds like they didn't properly control this experiment. By having two groups with such drastically different ages, there are now two variables: what kind of TV someone grew up watching, and age. Maybe older people are more likely to honestly admit they dream in black and white, or maybe they lose the ability to dream in color as they age. I think most people can't remember the minute visual details of their dreams, so experiments like this can easily introduce a bias in how one describes his dreams.
Slashdot Mirror
My guess is there will be no lawsuits, because they have a registered trademark. If there are any lawsuits, it would be the likes of Intel bullying Psion out of their actively-used trademark, not the other way around.
I hate to say this because I realize how naive it is, but who cares about the quality of journals? Perhaps It's because I'm interested in a more applied field, but I judge papers by their results, generality, accuracy, clarity, and sometimes author - not what journal happened to publish them.
IMO most journals have been killing themselves off in the recent past. While running themselves as businesses may have worked when they served a useful purpose, all they do nowadays is impede openness and transparency. Want to read Professor A's conclusions? You better pay 100 dollars to some publisher owned by a huge conglomerate, because they own that paper (which was often written with a grant funded by tax-payer funds.) This is unacceptable in the internet age.
IMO, all self-respecting researchers should avoid submitting to journals that do not freely provide all content online.
Ah touche, I apparently don't know much about printers :)
In that case, the holes are too small for me to see. Either way, the effect comes off well.
Yeah, but a large part of the cost is the bluray player, which is useless in a supercomputer. I guess you could probably sell the drive/laser for 100 bucks to offset your costs.
I just tested it out on a laser printer, and I agree. I compared this font to Arial at the following fonts: 10, 11, and 12. While it doesn't look nearly as bad as it does on screen (the ink seems to spread out on the paper and mostly fill the holes), there is less ink and therefore the letters are less dark. It is similar to draft mode on my inkjet.
Still, I think it's a cool idea. If a printer doesn't have a draft mode, this really would save ink. It is perfectly legible, the holes are only noticeable if you already know about them, and the potential savings seem to be very real.
The enforcer in Unreal Tournament is a quick-fire weapon, so it's not comparable to a sniper rifle - in far Cry, if you spend 5 second lining up the perfect snipe and it misses because rand(t) = 0.5 instead of 0.1, I understand your frustration.
On the other hand, Unreal Tournament uses randomness to add a level of strategy to the game, rather than pointless realism. You can shoot the enforcer in "primary" mode, which is a semi-accurate but slower shot. Or, you can shoot in "secondary" mode, where you shoot twice as quickly, but half as accurately. Think of it as a dynamic shotgun, where the gun sprays all over the place. In this case, randomness was truly the best way to implement the spray.
The game would be boring if this gun (or any of the automatics, for that matter) always hit the target dead on - the opponent would die from 20 bullets in less than a second. Instead, the player has to plan out his distance from the opponent and his path so he has enough time to do some damage.
Classic example of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
It sounds silly, but I see how this was a parody, and perhaps even some sort of statement. First off, anyone who installed this already knew how to install a bit torrent client, and probably knew how to go to piratebay and search for what they wanted. I think what the creators of this extension were commenting on is the ease of getting anything for free online; pretty much every mainstream downloadable product on Amazon is probably online somewhere.
Honestly, what serious extension has adds big "'Download 4 free,' 'Not Downloadable,' or 'Not Available'" buttons to your browser? Any way, there's no way to sue an extension out of existence - if people really want it, they'll get it. This extension is probably pretty useless, so I think Amazon should just let it die.
iTunes and Quicktime are horrendous on Windows; they noticeably slow my computer down after installation - even when they aren't running!
There are much leaner and quicker alternatives to both, so I refuse to install them on my Windows computers.
It's a big no-no to take a sample and then reveal statistics on a sub-population without first making sure that the sub-population size is big enough for its results to be statistically significant. The elected officials should have been polled separately to ensure there are enough of them in the sample.
2,500 people is more than enough, but I'm guessing that fewer than 1% of randomly-chosen people qualify as "elected officials." Far fewer. Even if the sample had 25 elected officials, I wouldn't give much weight to the results.
Haha, whoops - forgot to take that part out.
Windows XP is also. XP is actually a very lightweight and stable operating system if the OEM installer wants it to be (and netbook makers realize this).
With Microsoft practically giving away XP to netbook companies, I think they are successfully maintaining their monopoly.
True, but the solution is simple:
'IT is seen as a young man's game. My next applicant after you is straight out of a top 5 university CS program. What do you know that he doesn't?'
"May be people who don't socialize much and waste their time watching the idiots box are unhappy."
My guess is the correlation arises in several ways. People who don't have much to do tend to both watch more TV and be more depressed. Watching a lot of TV can leave one in a "blah" mood. When someone is not feeling in a great mood, he may distract himself with TV.
My research/education is in "artificial intelligence", and I completely agree that more computing power is what we need. I don't see the trend going that way, however. More and more people are buying weak laptops (netbooks), and less people are buying desktops. It's a very real trend, and it's going to make putting AI into our computers impossible in the near-term future.
My point had more to do with the future of AMD than with video games. I was talking about what 99% of users need from their computers, not what 0.000001% of people want (super computer architects). AMD acquired ATI because they thought that was the future of mainstream computing, not because they wanted to serve the niche supercomputer community.
I'm asserting that AMD made a huge mistake buying ATI. I am the audience they meant to target, and they miserably failed. Now, the best they can do is serve a small market at a huge cost; that makes me sad, because I used to be a faithful fan of their brand (and an investor in their company.)
"So by your logic, those people would be happy with a computer that was 1% as fast as what it is now?"
Well, no, and I think you answered your own question. But, to make it clear, that's why I said 99% of the time and not 100% of the time. Regardless, my point wasn't that we need less power, it's that the power we have now is adequate for most people. We don't need to jump through hoops to eeke out more raw computing power.
Low cost, low power CPUs. Already, 99% of people don't use 99% of the power of their CPUs 99% of the time. Why then, is AMD banking on people wanting massive power on specialized hardware that will require fancy compilers?
I consider myself in the ever-dwindling group of "PC gamers," and even I am looking forward to the death of GPUs in my computer. I'm tired of building expensive and power-sucking desktops that go obsolete in 18 months. Instead of building a 1000 dollar desktop next year, I'm getting a laptop and an Xbox 360. My 350 dollar EEE PC will be able to load PDF files and power-points without a 350-watt, 400 dollar video card, thank you very much.
More importantly, how was your buying experience with them? It takes me about 10 seconds to opt out of an e-mail list (and I would trust them to actually remove me if I asked), but speed of delivery, price, and quality of service actually make a difference to me.
They have a pretty average rating here: http://www.resellerratings.com/store/ThinkGeek
When we fall back from DST to standard time, I notice a lot of people seem more visibly depressed, or "blah." I think there is something about the day ending at 4:30 pm that feels unnatural. Not only are the days getting shorter in the Fall, but then people have to deal with the sun setting an hour earlier.
This indicates to me that people actually enjoy DST. If anything, I would support a year-round DST.
Maryland shouldn't be that covered. I used to live there and know a huge chunk of the state is not within 100 miles of the ocean. I think this map is incorrectly including bays (Delaware and Chesapeake Bays in this case) in their calculations. That big bulge near MD/DE is not accurate.
I would also point out the same thing with the Great Lakes. For example, lake Michigan is US property, so the beach on the US side is not considered an international border.
"Something like this stunt, while great from a PR perspective, just simply makes it possible for insurance companies to deny them coverage in the future..."
Insurance companies have better things to do than to mess around with the premiums of test subjects by trying to guess that a 1 instead of a 0 in the 18238940th bit of a subject's DNA sequence means they statistically have a 50% greater chance of getting a disease that will kill them five years sooner.
Anyway, what you're talking about is illegal in the USA, even if the insurance companies wanted to go through the trouble:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_Information_Nondiscrimination_Act
They have rendered my homepage almost entirely useless in one fell swoop, to the point that I am actively looking for something new (meanwhile I have to use the UK site: www.google.co.uk)
The worst part? They are doing this with developers in mind more than users. Some Google article I was reading discussed advertising and developer freedom instead of user experience, with a couple of vague mentions of "happier users." I don't want to sound like Marx or anything, but this switch was to make the powerful minority happy instead of the masses. I would be pissed if they snuck ads onto my widgets - I already click on plenty of search and text ads!
The ironic thing is this is one of their only truly "beta" products, and it's one of the few not labeled so.
Yes, and it's a very common argument against the psychology field in general. Just because sloppy science is the norm does not justify drawing conclusions from sloppy experiments.
My problem is highly visible news stories drawing controversial conclusions from controversial experiments. Studies have shown (http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12376658) that most published science research ends up being wrong - especially headline grabbing studies like this one.
Slashdot has an intelligent, critical readership, so you are bound to see experiments dissected carefully. I consider that a strength of these forums, not a weakness. While there may be no perfect experiment (especially in a complicated, ill-defined field like psychology), there can still be "good" and "bad" ones. The results are indeed interesting, but are they correct?
"The study, out ot Dundee University, used a small number of subjects under 25 or over 55 and the results suggest that"
It sounds like they didn't properly control this experiment. By having two groups with such drastically different ages, there are now two variables: what kind of TV someone grew up watching, and age. Maybe older people are more likely to honestly admit they dream in black and white, or maybe they lose the ability to dream in color as they age. I think most people can't remember the minute visual details of their dreams, so experiments like this can easily introduce a bias in how one describes his dreams.