I remember reading in the consumerist that an AT&T consumer representative said "the phone is not offered to you because New York is not ready for the iPhone." They (temporarily) stopped selling one of the best selling phones in the country's biggest market! Isn't this already an admission that their service sucks? I guess it could be interpreted as AT&T blaming the iPhone and New Yorkers instead of their own network, but I think we all saw through the rep's thinly veiled admission.
I agree with you, but I'd like to point out that that is not proof at all. When making accusations that can damage the relations of the two largest economies in the World, we should be damn sure of what we are doing. Google seems to be, but they also have more information than the rest of us. We are speculating.
In this case, I am still troubled by the apparent incompetence of the Chinese Government. Why did they think they could do this and get away with it? Didn't they realize that it could damage important and profitable relations with American companies and the Government? It seems like they could gain very little from reading a few individual's e-mails.
We shouldn't rule out the remote possibility that China is essentially being framed by an entity that can benefit from the US and China fighting. More likely, I think the breaches came from China but were not approved at a very high level (in which case someone is in deep shit). Either way, the US should tread carefully without proof.
Of course texts come with their own share of problems. Plenty of people who would never answer their phones during a sit-down meal seem fine replying to texts.
The way I see it, unless you are a doctor, you should be able to sit down for an hour without *touching* your phone.
Except that mainstream ad blockers like Adblock Plus remove almost all ads with their default filter subscriptions. The people who work on these don't differentiate between benign text ads and flashing flash ads - they all get blocked. You'll find very little useful information in the noisy "what ads are being blocked" signal.
Careful with TrackMeNot - I used it for awhile, and Google started blocking my real searches, returning an error screen that indicated my searches may not be legitimate. They clearly know when you are using it (who sends in dozens of searches every hour of the day?), and may consider it a violation of their TOS. I don't know about you guys, but if they decided to shut down my account it would be pretty devastating - I backup a lot of information and important e-mails only on gmail.
On Slashdot, the moderation system keeps good comments at the top and bad comments hidden. This is why the quality seems so good: one only has to read the top of the comment page to get really good discussion. So, regardless of how many trolls there are, they remain out of view. This was Slashdot's greatest innovation, IMO.
Reddit deals with the same issues: plenty of smart users, so they need a good ranking to keep the good comments at the top. Reddit used to use Slashdot's approach to ranking, but the inherent moderation system is different so it didn't work. The average comment in an active story on Reddit can get dozens of mods VS less than 1 on Slashdot. Reddit's problem was Slashdot's system heavily biased in favor of comments with a lot of moderation (upvotes minus downvotes is scaled higher). Typically, the first few non-troll comments were fixed at the top. On Slashdot this isn't a problem because mod points are rare so people use them with more care; also, the maximum score is capped at 5.
Reddit recently started using a more statistically sound approach which rewards high upvote:downvote ratios, and the comment quality has drastically improved. It saved the site, IMO. Slashdot is still known for having better quality comments than Reddit, and I commend them for it.
If the histogram is wider (higher variance) than your image, than they can "stretch" your picture out by upping the contrast. If it is narrower (less variance), than the noise approach is probably the best solution.
If your image has a totally different shape (e.g. a few white patches on a black background), find a new image:P
Yeah, seriously. Recently I started downloading high definition TV shows, which take up 3x as much space as low-definition shows. Does this mean I consume 3 times as much TV now? On the other hand, perhaps that is the point of the metric. As computers get faster, networks wider, and storage cheaper, people will begin to expect more space-intensive media. Higher megapixel photographs, more media on websites; etc...
But I don't see how this is particularly insightful if everyone consumes higher quality media. More interesting to me was the informal study that showed kids today actually prefer MP3s to uncompressed music!
Nintendo isn't necessarily worried about the quality of third party games on their system; they make a profit off hardware sales either way. With the iPhone, Apple has proved that people can perceive hardware as high quality despite an overabundance of shitty software.
The main problem to Nintendo is flashcarts make it ridiculously easy to pirate games. Almost too easy - it's far easier to lug around a tiny flashcart than 10 game cartridges. The loss in game sales affects their quality in the long run, and hence the system's chances of success.
I hope they aren't using the statistics on this stuff for anything important - talk about a vastly biased sampled. The majority of people don't know what DNS is, let alone how to change the DNS server.
I'm not sure what you think thermodynamics means, but it is not what you appear to be saying. Meat is not the same thing as energy, and calories are not the same thing as meat (plants can create calories from air, water, and light). There is no law that says calories must be conserved in a closed system - the laws of thermodynamics only say this about energy. Maybe the scientists are heating the broth, or shining a light on it.
And they never mention a "meat broth" - that phrase does not belong in quotes. The article talks about a "broth of other animal products", which could mean a lot of things, like: skin cells, blood, or milk. As a vegan I would never consume the resulting meat, but a vegetarian should be fine with eating meat converted from milk.
I'm looking at an archived copy of that article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Virdi/CyanogenMod); it failed a *very* basic notability requirement - it never showed that it got significant coverage from a reliable source. The project's webpage doesn't count, nor do forums.
You aren't understanding tmk's argument - he is saying statistically it is highly unlikely that a bunch of people would simultaneously lose interest in the same article. The "watch article" feature makes it easy to keep track of an article, so why would everyone lose interest at once while fighting earlier?
I don't believe tom's story, and I'm not surprised to see that he never linked to his example despite several requests for one.
Most of the people who attack Wikipedia for being deletionist don't understand its purpose: Wikipedia seeks to be a reliable source of information before it seeks to be a complete source of information. Wikipedia has gotten better over the years; not because it has grown (which it has), but because it has increased in average quality. Just five years ago Wikipedia was considered somewhat a joke because it contained so much misinformation and unreliable information.
You have a pretty strong opinion on all this, as do a lot of other Slashdotters. I present this challenge to everyone: provide an example of an article that you think deserves to be on Wikipedia but was deleted despite having reliable sources. My guess is you will be hard-pressed to find examples.
Wikipedia is not a Democracy, so a delete request would never be "accepted by a narrow margin". (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Wikipedia_is_not_a_democracy)
Besides, if an article was up for deletion 3 times and ultimately was deleted, it had some serious issues. In all those months that passed, a single reliable source would have been enough to squash any deletion nominations right away. Why didn't you just add one?
I'm calling your bluff - please link to your old account or the article in question.
Whatever their stated goal, their actual goal became profit when they went public. If they sacrifice profit for the sake of squirreling away knowledge, their shareholders and board will reign them back in. The current stock price reflects shareholder belief that Google will continue to grow their profits, and if this doesn't occur the price will plummet in a very visible way.
For example, in the remote chance that Google doesn't make a cent off their book scanning after a few years, they will stop scanning books.
OK, this is kind of dumb. As others point out, most of these questions have reasonable explanations. But I think this (http://i.imgur.com/EYY9.png) is actually interesting.
The way someone words his question appears to be correlated to how educated the question actually is.
The system doesn't assume "everyone" does anything. Statistically, only a small sample is necessary. FTFA: "People who don't want to do it or don't care can completely ignore it," Chaum said. "We only need 3 to 5 percent of people to verify their votes [to make it effective], depending on how close the contest is. If it becomes close, then you need a larger percentage to get the same level of confidence."
I would make the fairly obvious argument that the number of scientists is largely irrelevant compared to the amount of work they produce. A single Einstein is worth an infinite number of mediocre physicists who never end up producing any work in their careers. This is important, because (at least in my experience in academia), 95% of academic scientists and maybe 80% of engineers produce nothing useful in their lifetimes.
While there may be a glut of scientists, there is no glut of *good* scientists; we always need those. Let's not kid ourselves - the number of possible problems scientists and engineers can solve has not gone down over time. If anything, it has gone way up.
According to this media journalist (http://gizmodo.com/5388745/how-a-paid-hulu-would-work):
"Hulu, the joint venture between News Corp.'s Fox, GE's NBC Universal and Disney's ABC, doesn't plan on charging people to watch the stuff it's currently airing on the site-a mix of first-run shows from broadcast TV, a limited number of cable TV shows and a smattering of movies. But Hulu is trying to figure out how to create some kind of premium offering where you'll pay for stuff that isn't on the site right now."
If true, I think that is completely OK. A mix of free ad-supported content with premium high-quality content people are willing to pay for. Not sure how that would work currently, but HBO has proven people are happy to pay for *quality* programming.
This is largely the point; phone companies gather 100s of patents that cover every aspect of their phones. These patents are often so broad that courts will not uphold them or will force them to be narrowed.
Still, the lawyers use these patents as a sort of negotiation tool. In this and many other industries, patent lawyers aren't lawyers as much as strategists; for all we know, Nokia is doing this as a defensive method because they know they are infringing on some Apple IP. Or, perhaps, they want some cool multitouch features in their next phone.
I would have agreed with you until I got a Kindle as a present. I have started reading a lot more because of it. Its e-ink screen is much better than an iPhone (I don't want a flashlight shining directly into my eyes when I read at night). When I travel, its size is great (fits in my bag much more easily than a paperback).
Also, I find downloading e-books more convenient than acquiring physical copies of books.
You are right, this just indicates that youth are starting to get used to the artifacts of digital compression and are starting to prefer it.
A professor at Stanford ran some informal experiments on this (http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?newsid=25288) where he shows that each year young people prefer the sound of MP3 over lossless more.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember reading in the consumerist that an AT&T consumer representative said "the phone is not offered to you because New York is not ready for the iPhone." They (temporarily) stopped selling one of the best selling phones in the country's biggest market! Isn't this already an admission that their service sucks? I guess it could be interpreted as AT&T blaming the iPhone and New Yorkers instead of their own network, but I think we all saw through the rep's thinly veiled admission.
http://consumerist.com/2009/12/att-customer-service-new-york-city-is-not-ready-for-the-iphone.html
I agree with you, but I'd like to point out that that is not proof at all. When making accusations that can damage the relations of the two largest economies in the World, we should be damn sure of what we are doing. Google seems to be, but they also have more information than the rest of us. We are speculating.
In this case, I am still troubled by the apparent incompetence of the Chinese Government. Why did they think they could do this and get away with it? Didn't they realize that it could damage important and profitable relations with American companies and the Government? It seems like they could gain very little from reading a few individual's e-mails.
We shouldn't rule out the remote possibility that China is essentially being framed by an entity that can benefit from the US and China fighting. More likely, I think the breaches came from China but were not approved at a very high level (in which case someone is in deep shit). Either way, the US should tread carefully without proof.
Of course texts come with their own share of problems. Plenty of people who would never answer their phones during a sit-down meal seem fine replying to texts.
The way I see it, unless you are a doctor, you should be able to sit down for an hour without *touching* your phone.
Except that mainstream ad blockers like Adblock Plus remove almost all ads with their default filter subscriptions. The people who work on these don't differentiate between benign text ads and flashing flash ads - they all get blocked. You'll find very little useful information in the noisy "what ads are being blocked" signal.
Yeah, but then you have an automatic page turner you can sell on ebay.
Careful with TrackMeNot - I used it for awhile, and Google started blocking my real searches, returning an error screen that indicated my searches may not be legitimate. They clearly know when you are using it (who sends in dozens of searches every hour of the day?), and may consider it a violation of their TOS. I don't know about you guys, but if they decided to shut down my account it would be pretty devastating - I backup a lot of information and important e-mails only on gmail.
On Slashdot, the moderation system keeps good comments at the top and bad comments hidden. This is why the quality seems so good: one only has to read the top of the comment page to get really good discussion. So, regardless of how many trolls there are, they remain out of view. This was Slashdot's greatest innovation, IMO.
Reddit deals with the same issues: plenty of smart users, so they need a good ranking to keep the good comments at the top. Reddit used to use Slashdot's approach to ranking, but the inherent moderation system is different so it didn't work. The average comment in an active story on Reddit can get dozens of mods VS less than 1 on Slashdot. Reddit's problem was Slashdot's system heavily biased in favor of comments with a lot of moderation (upvotes minus downvotes is scaled higher). Typically, the first few non-troll comments were fixed at the top. On Slashdot this isn't a problem because mod points are rare so people use them with more care; also, the maximum score is capped at 5.
Reddit recently started using a more statistically sound approach which rewards high upvote:downvote ratios, and the comment quality has drastically improved. It saved the site, IMO. Slashdot is still known for having better quality comments than Reddit, and I commend them for it.
See http://blog.reddit.com/2009/10/reddits-new-comment-sorting-system.html for more information on reddit's new system.
If the histogram is wider (higher variance) than your image, than they can "stretch" your picture out by upping the contrast. If it is narrower (less variance), than the noise approach is probably the best solution.
If your image has a totally different shape (e.g. a few white patches on a black background), find a new image :P
Yeah, seriously. Recently I started downloading high definition TV shows, which take up 3x as much space as low-definition shows. Does this mean I consume 3 times as much TV now? On the other hand, perhaps that is the point of the metric. As computers get faster, networks wider, and storage cheaper, people will begin to expect more space-intensive media. Higher megapixel photographs, more media on websites; etc...
But I don't see how this is particularly insightful if everyone consumes higher quality media. More interesting to me was the informal study that showed kids today actually prefer MP3s to uncompressed music!
I wouldn't call them competitors, iTunes targets people who want to hear a song more than once.
Also, Google still has plenty of music and music videos on YouTube.
Nintendo isn't necessarily worried about the quality of third party games on their system; they make a profit off hardware sales either way. With the iPhone, Apple has proved that people can perceive hardware as high quality despite an overabundance of shitty software.
The main problem to Nintendo is flashcarts make it ridiculously easy to pirate games. Almost too easy - it's far easier to lug around a tiny flashcart than 10 game cartridges. The loss in game sales affects their quality in the long run, and hence the system's chances of success.
I hope they aren't using the statistics on this stuff for anything important - talk about a vastly biased sampled. The majority of people don't know what DNS is, let alone how to change the DNS server.
I'm not sure what you think thermodynamics means, but it is not what you appear to be saying. Meat is not the same thing as energy, and calories are not the same thing as meat (plants can create calories from air, water, and light). There is no law that says calories must be conserved in a closed system - the laws of thermodynamics only say this about energy. Maybe the scientists are heating the broth, or shining a light on it.
And they never mention a "meat broth" - that phrase does not belong in quotes. The article talks about a "broth of other animal products", which could mean a lot of things, like: skin cells, blood, or milk. As a vegan I would never consume the resulting meat, but a vegetarian should be fine with eating meat converted from milk.
I'm looking at an archived copy of that article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Virdi/CyanogenMod); it failed a *very* basic notability requirement - it never showed that it got significant coverage from a reliable source. The project's webpage doesn't count, nor do forums.
You aren't understanding tmk's argument - he is saying statistically it is highly unlikely that a bunch of people would simultaneously lose interest in the same article. The "watch article" feature makes it easy to keep track of an article, so why would everyone lose interest at once while fighting earlier?
I don't believe tom's story, and I'm not surprised to see that he never linked to his example despite several requests for one.
Most of the people who attack Wikipedia for being deletionist don't understand its purpose: Wikipedia seeks to be a reliable source of information before it seeks to be a complete source of information. Wikipedia has gotten better over the years; not because it has grown (which it has), but because it has increased in average quality. Just five years ago Wikipedia was considered somewhat a joke because it contained so much misinformation and unreliable information.
You have a pretty strong opinion on all this, as do a lot of other Slashdotters. I present this challenge to everyone: provide an example of an article that you think deserves to be on Wikipedia but was deleted despite having reliable sources. My guess is you will be hard-pressed to find examples.
Wikipedia is not a Democracy, so a delete request would never be "accepted by a narrow margin". (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Wikipedia_is_not_a_democracy)
Besides, if an article was up for deletion 3 times and ultimately was deleted, it had some serious issues. In all those months that passed, a single reliable source would have been enough to squash any deletion nominations right away. Why didn't you just add one?
I'm calling your bluff - please link to your old account or the article in question.
Whatever their stated goal, their actual goal became profit when they went public. If they sacrifice profit for the sake of squirreling away knowledge, their shareholders and board will reign them back in. The current stock price reflects shareholder belief that Google will continue to grow their profits, and if this doesn't occur the price will plummet in a very visible way.
For example, in the remote chance that Google doesn't make a cent off their book scanning after a few years, they will stop scanning books.
OK, this is kind of dumb. As others point out, most of these questions have reasonable explanations. But I think this (http://i.imgur.com/EYY9.png) is actually interesting.
The way someone words his question appears to be correlated to how educated the question actually is.
The system doesn't assume "everyone" does anything. Statistically, only a small sample is necessary.
FTFA: "People who don't want to do it or don't care can completely ignore it," Chaum said. "We only need 3 to 5 percent of people to verify their votes [to make it effective], depending on how close the contest is. If it becomes close, then you need a larger percentage to get the same level of confidence."
I would make the fairly obvious argument that the number of scientists is largely irrelevant compared to the amount of work they produce. A single Einstein is worth an infinite number of mediocre physicists who never end up producing any work in their careers. This is important, because (at least in my experience in academia), 95% of academic scientists and maybe 80% of engineers produce nothing useful in their lifetimes.
While there may be a glut of scientists, there is no glut of *good* scientists; we always need those. Let's not kid ourselves - the number of possible problems scientists and engineers can solve has not gone down over time. If anything, it has gone way up.
According to this media journalist (http://gizmodo.com/5388745/how-a-paid-hulu-would-work):
"Hulu, the joint venture between News Corp.'s Fox, GE's NBC Universal and Disney's ABC, doesn't plan on charging people to watch the stuff it's currently airing on the site-a mix of first-run shows from broadcast TV, a limited number of cable TV shows and a smattering of movies. But Hulu is trying to figure out how to create some kind of premium offering where you'll pay for stuff that isn't on the site right now."
If true, I think that is completely OK. A mix of free ad-supported content with premium high-quality content people are willing to pay for. Not sure how that would work currently, but HBO has proven people are happy to pay for *quality* programming.
This is largely the point; phone companies gather 100s of patents that cover every aspect of their phones. These patents are often so broad that courts will not uphold them or will force them to be narrowed.
Still, the lawyers use these patents as a sort of negotiation tool. In this and many other industries, patent lawyers aren't lawyers as much as strategists; for all we know, Nokia is doing this as a defensive method because they know they are infringing on some Apple IP. Or, perhaps, they want some cool multitouch features in their next phone.
See this article for a fascinating analysis of Apple and Palm's patent war:
http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/28/apple-vs-palm-the-in-depth-analysis/
I would have agreed with you until I got a Kindle as a present. I have started reading a lot more because of it. Its e-ink screen is much better than an iPhone (I don't want a flashlight shining directly into my eyes when I read at night). When I travel, its size is great (fits in my bag much more easily than a paperback).
Also, I find downloading e-books more convenient than acquiring physical copies of books.
You are right, this just indicates that youth are starting to get used to the artifacts of digital compression and are starting to prefer it.
A professor at Stanford ran some informal experiments on this (http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?newsid=25288) where he shows that each year young people prefer the sound of MP3 over lossless more.