Score: 5 Informative? Informative means that there is some fact being given here that was not previously available. There are no facts here. Not even good guesses.
Palm has 70% of the PDA marketshare, and in the public mind, Palm == PDA. They are in no danger of being crushed by anyone for the time being, so long as their hardware division (or the licensees) keeps coming out with better handhelds, and the OS division keeps developing the awesome API, tools, and apps that have made Palm so popular.
The point of this article is that the water is warmed by volcanic activity underground, and so -120 to -20 degrees is not an issue. There have been countless articles on the subject of how there are many forms of life, on Earth and possibly elsewhere, that don't need to live on the surface. They live in hydrothermal vents or miles deep in rocks or oil deposits, all of which are seemingly just as inhospitable as those cold temperatures, but there nevertheless.
I'm pro-doing-anything-to-spur-pure-research. It doesn't really matter whether they are searching for intelligent life, microscopic life, or just seeing what the dirt looks like. NASA is one of the last government agencies doing the research and technological development that is keeping our future growth possible.
Besides, even if they do find intelligent life, how is that in itself going to be better than curing diseases? The intelligent life thing is a PR campaign because people liked the movie "E.T.".
Bottom line is, anything to learn about the universe around us is good. It might not cure cancer tomorrow, but it feeds our technological growth (someday we'll invent replicators like in Star Trek and solve *all* the problems with "serious human need").
You're right, the Earth does weigh 150lbs. on me, in physical terms. In English terms, that's an absurd image, as "weight" is generally assumed to be the property of a smaller object with reference to, say, a planet. So there I was debating English. But I still debate your contention that physical "weight" is bidirectional. It's just a measurement that can be taken from either side with the same result.:)
That really was my only point -- I guess I got a little bit carried away:)
My view is, if you think up the next great design for, say, a car engine that runs on toothpaste, and you aren't willing to build it, then you should not be allowed to stagnate other developers from doing the same thing. I could sit here and think up ideas all day long, patent them, sit on my ass, and then cripple new development of that hardware. What good does it do to patent something and not give it back to the world, other than hoping somebody will give in and buy the rights off of you?
The earth does not weight 150 lbs. on me, nor do the earth and I weigh 150 lbs. toward each other. I weigh 150 lbs. on earth.
I think you're debating English, not the nature of gravity. Who says that the Earth doesn't weight 150 lbs on you? I think the only reason why you weigh 150 lbs on Earth is because you are smaller than the Earth, and therefore it's easier for the human mind to imagine that image.
If you have a really big rock, it still weighs something "on" the Earth. OK, what if you have an even bigger rock, say the size (and mass) of the moon. Now who weighs what on what? It's totally arbitrary, and stems only from a human's view of the universe from our extremely low-altitude vantage point.
Weight is most certainly a measure of the attraction between two objects, relative to *each other*. Which one of the objects we pick to be the "base" for that comparison is determined entirely arbitrarily.
Re:Here I come to save the day!
on
Pain-free mice
·
· Score: 2
I think he's asking to be modded down, because that is so obviously un-funny:)
However, our pain system is severely broken in an number of aspects
I wouldn't call it "broken" -- it is still functioning perfectly to spec. Pain is supposed to signal our body that something is wrong. If you are burned, something is obviously wrong. If you have arthritis, then your cartelage is being basically eaten away, so something is also wrong. If you tear a ligament in your knee, even if the pain is excrutiating and constant, it is a reminder to stay off that knee until they pain goes away (which might be never, which I guess means to always be careful with that knee).
While it would certainly be nice for people who already *know* that something is wrong, who have a disease that will give them pain for the rest of their life, to have some "ultra" pain-killer, it is still overriding a basic functionality of the body. Perhaps when our body "invented" pain, it wasn't considering modern medicine that allows people with these types of chronic problems to stay alive in the first place:)
He's saying that whereas most people claim that 128kbps is "CD Quality", MP3s can be better than 128kbps. Obviously they will not be better than the original CD, but I think you missed his point. 128kbps might sound great to some people, and terrible to audiophiles. MP3 supports higher bitrates, even up to 512kbps IIRC, that are much tougher to differentiate from the original.
Basically a server-side XML processing engine -- you have the ability to set up all sorts of XML data pipes and to translate the output with XSL(T) and such. I dunno if it is the next Killer App, but it is very useful to anyone doing web development primarily with XML, especially if you don't want to rely on Internet Explorer's crappy XSLT engine. While I am currently in love with Servlets/JSP (my girlfriend is pissed...) I've never actually used Cocoon, so somebody correct me if I'm wrong.
VoiceXML would be a great add-on to this... but VoiceXML is mostly designed to work with telephone systems, and, like you said, many common tasks are not easy to emulate with voice (especially using VoiceXML, which is essentially limited to the "ask a question, get an answer" model). While it's theoretically possible, VoiceXML doesn't support continuous recognition (you have to program grammars with for all intents and purposes a fixed number of phrases). You will never be able to say "Computer, transfer all of the files that John sent me last week to my home computer". Not to mention that this computer's CPU is only 266Mhz, which is just on this side of barely adequate, and that there isn't currently a good VoiceXML interpreter designed to be embedded in a PC platform like this (most require multi-thousand dollar telephony cards).
There are voice technologies out there that could support such a model, but there are additional problems when you consider the limited power available and that you're inside a moving vehicle (road noise).
I've been involved in VoiceXML for the past two years, and I wish it nothing but the best. But I think people should put energy into telephone systems, where VoiceXML shines.
Damn the M[SC]E acronym!:) I always think it should be "MicroSoft Certified Engineer", which, of course, is incorrect. Thanks for pointing out my error. Eitherway, even if you really are a "Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer", if I hire you and you call support to fix some stoopid Windows problem, you'd damn well better start running.
(Unfortunately,) given the current job market, I'm thinking about becoming one myself. At least it would look good on a resume, since management generally is unaware of the (lack of) quality of many MCSEs.
Who calls tech support? They never know anything. Only decent tech support I've ever used was Symantec, Tripplite, and Lonetar. Everyone else barely knows the name of their product, let alone what is wrong with it.
I'm not saying that Tech Support is all bad -- I've seen some very competent sysadmins call Cisco (which has very very helpful support, if you pay the price). But for problems other than (a) uncommon/undocumented/unreported bugs in the vendor's software or (b) extreme use cases for which absolutely no documentation exists, there is really no excuse for having to resort to tech support, especially if you are supposed to be smarter than the tech support (like if you are an MCSE).
Why? If the population increases to more than the environment can handle, then the "leftovers" will simply die off. You are correct that the Earth can only sustain a limited number of people, and that in order to keep growing at our current rate, we will have to find new homes. If you had actually read the population predictions, you would see that the population will stabalize and then decrease by the end of the next century. What do you expect will happen?
Maybe your morals are just too great to allow those innocent people to die (or really, to never be born) because of lack of resources and space. Before we focus on building the massive spaceships you request, let's take notice that the population *already* exceeds the resources in many parts of the world.
Funny how the MSCE in his story has to call tech support and it takes 2 days. Dammit, anyone can call tech support. Do they need a degree too? And why should they get paid for that?
This was on the local TV news here -- funny story. The newscaster said: "Japanese researchers have created artificial eyeballs for tadpoles... from the embryos of *frogs*!' As if she thought that tadpoles and frogs were separate species. TV newscastors never cease to amaze me...
If you have alpha, as the previous reply said, you have to have something to be transparant and something to show up behind it. So this is only really useful for image editing programs, where you would most likely use 24 bits or, even more commonly, 32 bits, which gives 8 bits for each of RGBA.
I remember reading an article in a recent Discover magazine about a woman infected with a form of Herpes that attacked her nervous system. When she recovered, she could not recognize faces. She recognized that a face was a face, but couldn't tell who it was. Apparantly this is actually not uncommon with this disease. If it also affected her ability to recognize abstract pictures, then there is a large population that would be *incapable* of using this system.
And Linux doesn't have the same problem, but worse?
You want to copy some text. After selecting the text, do you:
* Rely on the stupid bug in QT 2.x to copy it by only selecting it
* Right click and select copy
* Use Ctrl-C
* Drag and Drop (unlikely)
* After you do one of those, figure out which of the 15 different X clipboards it actually ended up in and retry once you realize that the app you want to paste into doesn't support the same one
Copy a file to a floppy:
* Mount the floppy:
@ Double-click the icon on the Gnome or KDE desktop
@ Right click the icon and select mount
@ Mount manually from a command line:
+ type into XTerm, another virtual terminal, Konsole, Gnome Terminal, etc.?
+ mount -t vfat/dev/fd0/mnt/floppy
+ add entry to/etc/fstab and mount/mnt/floppy
* drag and drop
@ Midnight Commander
@ Konqueror
@ one of a dozen other file managers that don't work
* command line
@ again, figure out which terminal to use
@ cp file/mnt/floppy
So you see, your argument is completely lost. Windows has a long way to go in order to please the true idiots out there, but Linux has far, FAR farther.
IMO, Voice "Web" and "Portals" will never take off the way the article says. Portals have already been proven to suck in the normal web.
Where voice shines (and where Tellme is going) is in replacing the crappy IVR (touch tone) phone systems in which we are all so familiar. Imagine, instead of "Press 1 for this, press 2 for that,..., press 9 for the other thing", you have, "Please say what you want, or help for a list of choices."
I've been designing voice systems like that for 2 years, and let me tell you that, although "dictation" recognition has a long way to go, recognition with a fixed set of a few phrases already works very well, even over the phone. Well designed grammars with even 100 or 200 possible phrases get very good recognition, no training required.
It's just a voice-response system, basically, with their own customized back end.
It is not designed to be anything more. It seems to me that everyone hopes that we'll all be able to surf the web with our voice, but the truth is it is really not practical. If you really want it, go buy a screen reader like JAWS (which is designed for the blind). VUI (Voice User Interface) and web site/GUI design are incapable of converging completely, simply because web sites are designed to use things like color and layout to ease navigation, and VUI's have to use a very linear interface. Technologies like SALT hope to combine the two, but it will never magically convert the web to voice without having some kind of backend conversion.
Maybe, but we will never be able to claim that the HD manufacturers are *incorrect*, because they aren't. If everyone were to start using GiB's and the HD people started selling 40GiB drives that were really only 37GiB's, then we'd have a complaint. But they aren't (and probably won't).
That's the whole point of this article -- the terminology has become ambiguous, but one side of it is more correct than the other. So we need to start being correct on both sides.
Slashdot Mirror
Score: 5 Informative? Informative means that there is some fact being given here that was not previously available. There are no facts here. Not even good guesses.
Palm has 70% of the PDA marketshare, and in the public mind, Palm == PDA. They are in no danger of being crushed by anyone for the time being, so long as their hardware division (or the licensees) keeps coming out with better handhelds, and the OS division keeps developing the awesome API, tools, and apps that have made Palm so popular.
The point of this article is that the water is warmed by volcanic activity underground, and so -120 to -20 degrees is not an issue. There have been countless articles on the subject of how there are many forms of life, on Earth and possibly elsewhere, that don't need to live on the surface. They live in hydrothermal vents or miles deep in rocks or oil deposits, all of which are seemingly just as inhospitable as those cold temperatures, but there nevertheless.
I'm pro-doing-anything-to-spur-pure-research. It doesn't really matter whether they are searching for intelligent life, microscopic life, or just seeing what the dirt looks like. NASA is one of the last government agencies doing the research and technological development that is keeping our future growth possible.
Besides, even if they do find intelligent life, how is that in itself going to be better than curing diseases? The intelligent life thing is a PR campaign because people liked the movie "E.T.".
Bottom line is, anything to learn about the universe around us is good. It might not cure cancer tomorrow, but it feeds our technological growth (someday we'll invent replicators like in Star Trek and solve *all* the problems with "serious human need").
You're right, the Earth does weigh 150lbs. on me, in physical terms. In English terms, that's an absurd image, as "weight" is generally assumed to be the property of a smaller object with reference to, say, a planet. So there I was debating English. But I still debate your contention that physical "weight" is bidirectional. It's just a measurement that can be taken from either side with the same result. :)
:)
That really was my only point -- I guess I got a little bit carried away
My view is, if you think up the next great design for, say, a car engine that runs on toothpaste, and you aren't willing to build it, then you should not be allowed to stagnate other developers from doing the same thing. I could sit here and think up ideas all day long, patent them, sit on my ass, and then cripple new development of that hardware. What good does it do to patent something and not give it back to the world, other than hoping somebody will give in and buy the rights off of you?
The earth does not weight 150 lbs. on me, nor do the earth and I weigh 150 lbs. toward each other. I weigh 150 lbs. on earth.
I think you're debating English, not the nature of gravity. Who says that the Earth doesn't weight 150 lbs on you? I think the only reason why you weigh 150 lbs on Earth is because you are smaller than the Earth, and therefore it's easier for the human mind to imagine that image.
If you have a really big rock, it still weighs something "on" the Earth. OK, what if you have an even bigger rock, say the size (and mass) of the moon. Now who weighs what on what? It's totally arbitrary, and stems only from a human's view of the universe from our extremely low-altitude vantage point.
Weight is most certainly a measure of the attraction between two objects, relative to *each other*. Which one of the objects we pick to be the "base" for that comparison is determined entirely arbitrarily.
I think he's asking to be modded down, because that is so obviously un-funny :)
However, our pain system is severely broken in an number of aspects
:)
I wouldn't call it "broken" -- it is still functioning perfectly to spec. Pain is supposed to signal our body that something is wrong. If you are burned, something is obviously wrong. If you have arthritis, then your cartelage is being basically eaten away, so something is also wrong. If you tear a ligament in your knee, even if the pain is excrutiating and constant, it is a reminder to stay off that knee until they pain goes away (which might be never, which I guess means to always be careful with that knee).
While it would certainly be nice for people who already *know* that something is wrong, who have a disease that will give them pain for the rest of their life, to have some "ultra" pain-killer, it is still overriding a basic functionality of the body. Perhaps when our body "invented" pain, it wasn't considering modern medicine that allows people with these types of chronic problems to stay alive in the first place
He's saying that whereas most people claim that 128kbps is "CD Quality", MP3s can be better than 128kbps. Obviously they will not be better than the original CD, but I think you missed his point. 128kbps might sound great to some people, and terrible to audiophiles. MP3 supports higher bitrates, even up to 512kbps IIRC, that are much tougher to differentiate from the original.
Basically a server-side XML processing engine -- you have the ability to set up all sorts of XML data pipes and to translate the output with XSL(T) and such. I dunno if it is the next Killer App, but it is very useful to anyone doing web development primarily with XML, especially if you don't want to rely on Internet Explorer's crappy XSLT engine. While I am currently in love with Servlets/JSP (my girlfriend is pissed...) I've never actually used Cocoon, so somebody correct me if I'm wrong.
VoiceXML would be a great add-on to this... but VoiceXML is mostly designed to work with telephone systems, and, like you said, many common tasks are not easy to emulate with voice (especially using VoiceXML, which is essentially limited to the "ask a question, get an answer" model). While it's theoretically possible, VoiceXML doesn't support continuous recognition (you have to program grammars with for all intents and purposes a fixed number of phrases). You will never be able to say "Computer, transfer all of the files that John sent me last week to my home computer". Not to mention that this computer's CPU is only 266Mhz, which is just on this side of barely adequate, and that there isn't currently a good VoiceXML interpreter designed to be embedded in a PC platform like this (most require multi-thousand dollar telephony cards).
There are voice technologies out there that could support such a model, but there are additional problems when you consider the limited power available and that you're inside a moving vehicle (road noise).
I've been involved in VoiceXML for the past two years, and I wish it nothing but the best. But I think people should put energy into telephone systems, where VoiceXML shines.
Damn the M[SC]E acronym! :) I always think it should be "MicroSoft Certified Engineer", which, of course, is incorrect. Thanks for pointing out my error. Eitherway, even if you really are a "Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer", if I hire you and you call support to fix some stoopid Windows problem, you'd damn well better start running.
(Unfortunately,) given the current job market, I'm thinking about becoming one myself. At least it would look good on a resume, since management generally is unaware of the (lack of) quality of many MCSEs.
Who calls tech support? They never know anything. Only decent tech support I've ever used was Symantec, Tripplite, and Lonetar. Everyone else barely knows the name of their product, let alone what is wrong with it.
I'm not saying that Tech Support is all bad -- I've seen some very competent sysadmins call Cisco (which has very very helpful support, if you pay the price). But for problems other than (a) uncommon/undocumented/unreported bugs in the vendor's software or (b) extreme use cases for which absolutely no documentation exists, there is really no excuse for having to resort to tech support, especially if you are supposed to be smarter than the tech support (like if you are an MCSE).
Why? If the population increases to more than the environment can handle, then the "leftovers" will simply die off. You are correct that the Earth can only sustain a limited number of people, and that in order to keep growing at our current rate, we will have to find new homes. If you had actually read the population predictions, you would see that the population will stabalize and then decrease by the end of the next century. What do you expect will happen?
while(true) {
grow(people);
while(count(people) > count(food))
kill(people);
}
Maybe your morals are just too great to allow those innocent people to die (or really, to never be born) because of lack of resources and space. Before we focus on building the massive spaceships you request, let's take notice that the population *already* exceeds the resources in many parts of the world.
Funny how the MSCE in his story has to call tech support and it takes 2 days. Dammit, anyone can call tech support. Do they need a degree too? And why should they get paid for that?
This was on the local TV news here -- funny story. The newscaster said: "Japanese researchers have created artificial eyeballs for tadpoles... from the embryos of *frogs*!' As if she thought that tadpoles and frogs were separate species. TV newscastors never cease to amaze me...
And someone expected *that* to withstand
</redundant-and-obvious>
If you have alpha, as the previous reply said, you have to have something to be transparant and something to show up behind it. So this is only really useful for image editing programs, where you would most likely use 24 bits or, even more commonly, 32 bits, which gives 8 bits for each of RGBA.
I guess I got carried away while typing "far"...
Maybe that's what caused the page to HARD LOCK all the browsers I tried -- Konqueror, Mozilla, AND Netscape 4.7. I can't even view the page!
I remember reading an article in a recent Discover magazine about a woman infected with a form of Herpes that attacked her nervous system. When she recovered, she could not recognize faces. She recognized that a face was a face, but couldn't tell who it was. Apparantly this is actually not uncommon with this disease. If it also affected her ability to recognize abstract pictures, then there is a large population that would be *incapable* of using this system.
And Linux doesn't have the same problem, but worse?
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy
/etc/fstab and mount /mnt/floppy
/mnt/floppy
You want to copy some text. After selecting the text, do you:
* Rely on the stupid bug in QT 2.x to copy it by only selecting it
* Right click and select copy
* Use Ctrl-C
* Drag and Drop (unlikely)
* After you do one of those, figure out which of the 15 different X clipboards it actually ended up in and retry once you realize that the app you want to paste into doesn't support the same one
Copy a file to a floppy:
* Mount the floppy:
@ Double-click the icon on the Gnome or KDE desktop
@ Right click the icon and select mount
@ Mount manually from a command line:
+ type into XTerm, another virtual terminal, Konsole, Gnome Terminal, etc.?
+ mount -t vfat
+ add entry to
* drag and drop
@ Midnight Commander
@ Konqueror
@ one of a dozen other file managers that don't work
* command line
@ again, figure out which terminal to use
@ cp file
So you see, your argument is completely lost. Windows has a long way to go in order to please the true idiots out there, but Linux has far, FAR farther.
Maybe it's that stupid Gateway monitor they used to have that only worked at 640x480? LOL!
IMO, Voice "Web" and "Portals" will never take off the way the article says. Portals have already been proven to suck in the normal web.
..., press 9 for the other thing", you have, "Please say what you want, or help for a list of choices."
Where voice shines (and where Tellme is going) is in replacing the crappy IVR (touch tone) phone systems in which we are all so familiar. Imagine, instead of "Press 1 for this, press 2 for that,
I've been designing voice systems like that for 2 years, and let me tell you that, although "dictation" recognition has a long way to go, recognition with a fixed set of a few phrases already works very well, even over the phone. Well designed grammars with even 100 or 200 possible phrases get very good recognition, no training required.
It's just a voice-response system, basically, with their own customized back end.
It is not designed to be anything more. It seems to me that everyone hopes that we'll all be able to surf the web with our voice, but the truth is it is really not practical. If you really want it, go buy a screen reader like JAWS (which is designed for the blind). VUI (Voice User Interface) and web site/GUI design are incapable of converging completely, simply because web sites are designed to use things like color and layout to ease navigation, and VUI's have to use a very linear interface. Technologies like SALT hope to combine the two, but it will never magically convert the web to voice without having some kind of backend conversion.
Correctness has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Maybe, but we will never be able to claim that the HD manufacturers are *incorrect*, because they aren't. If everyone were to start using GiB's and the HD people started selling 40GiB drives that were really only 37GiB's, then we'd have a complaint. But they aren't (and probably won't).
That's the whole point of this article -- the terminology has become ambiguous, but one side of it is more correct than the other. So we need to start being correct on both sides.