I use Hugin Panorama Tools. I think it works really well, though I don't have a lot of experience with other stitchers. It can do panorama stitching, and also correct for barrel distortion and such.
Bad science is done with poor or no evidence, explains even less than the current theory, and is usually presented to the general public without peer review.
Haven't some very important scientific discoveries been released to the general public without peer review? Granted I'm going from a vague memory of 9th grade science, but I remember my teacher teling us that Galileo had his works published in Italian rather than Latin so his discoveries would be accessible to the general public rather than being censored by the "scientific" community of the time. I think your description of bad science is meant for today's time frame, and the academic world of Galileo's time was rather different than today's, but I think there are cases where releasing directly to the public is the mark of a good scientist. The other aspects of bad science I would say are pretty much universal, regardless of the time period. It takes a certain amount of maturity to be able to concede when observations contradict your theory, and similarly it takes a decent amount of maturity to not make stronger claims that your data warrant.
it's crazy that they are trying to put sex on the internet before something useful.
In the Road Ahead, Bill Gates made pretty much this same observation. He said that historically when a new medium comes around, pretty much the first thing people put on it is sex. Apparently some of the first uses of paper were erotic drawings.
The problem I have is this: if IE7 reverses the spread of Firefox, what's to stop Microsoft from repeating history and ceasing all serious development again?
Then Firefox (or another new browser) will come along and reverse the spread of IE again with its new features, the same way Firefox did the first time.
They say it "has" to be just like office, and trying to replicate Office causes it to be more bloated than office for compatability reasons.
This is one of my biggest complaints about OpenOffice. Yeah, OpenOffice 2.0 is much better than the 1.x series was, but basically they just made it a bad clone of Microsoft Office. I find many of the cloned MS Office features difficult to use, and they usually won't accomplish what I need them to. I'd love to see the OpenOffice people take a fresh approach to office software, and instead of saying "Let's make a free version of MS Office" say "This is how office software should be done." On the bright side, perhaps it is because of OpenOffice's attempt to duplicate MS Office that Microsoft is finally doing something innovative with the new version of Office.
I don't know, I think I might buy it if it's ever released just because of all the PR the game has been getting. There aren't many things that have been able to make Slashdot headlines for as long as this has. Who knows, if it's ever finally released, maybe it will sell well to people wanting to relive the old days. The decade old graphics might even be a feature. It would be sort of like releasing a game they discovered in a time capsule somewhere.
The close button'll be on the tabs, but that seems about the only user-visible improvement.
In my opinion that's not really an improvement. I prefer having the close button on the side like it is now, because that way it's always in the same place, instead of having to find which tab is active and then home in on a new place for the close button each time I have to close a tab.
It will be interesting to see how Google Pages works out, since they are now also in the "everyone should be able to make a web page easily" camp. I was playing with it some last night. It didn't get along with my browser very well (Firefox on Linux). The site was incredible unresponsive. I'd type a couple sentences and then go off and IM for a couple of minutes as I watched the characters slowly appear one by one on the page. I don't suppose anyone else has found a way to fix this?
What's a cool thing about Google Pages that sets it apart from sites like MySpace is that it gives you a choice of lots of professionally designed themes. It still lets you edit raw HTML if you want, so I would assume you have a lot of customization possible, though I haven't used it enough to know. I wonder what they have done to keep people from making sites that look disgusting though. Maybe the themes are nice enough that people don't feel the need to make their site look gross. It seems like it could be just a matter of time before people start abusing the HTML feature and we start seeing things like there are on MySpace.
Google Pages does seem to remove some of the tags that are more likely to cause problems. It removes object tags, and script tags, which should at least keep people from playing twelve background songs at once.
I haven't been to MySpace in a while, since I think it all looks like vomit, but another complaint I had was that the thing seems to be about 80% covered in ads, and the ads are placed in such a way that you can't tell what's an ad and what's part of the site.
As far as usability, a good way for a site like this to run is to give everyone relatively limited customization. This way the site still provides a consistent look and feel, which is good for usability, but still lets users express themselves through whatever theme they pick. Let the people who know what they are doing design themes, and then give the users a way to customize them to suit their tastes.
I haven't read the article, but I'd be surprised if data from quasars truly had no patterns in them. I doubt this will ever be used extensively in cryptography though, because the one time pad is really difficult to implement. The key has to be as long as the message, and you can only use the key once, so in many cases you're better off just sending the message instead of the key if you have a secure way to exchange keys.
I didn't say there was such a correlation, just that it would be nice if there were. Still, if you get enough people together (though hopefully still small) you will probably start to find more of a correlation. Lots of people are going to be interested in their local weather, for example. While your neighbor might go to MSN and you go to CNN instead, if you add enough people then others will also start to look at the same site. While it may not be possible to hook everyone on your street up to the same ethernet network, college campuses and offices have lots of people clustered together which high bandwidth connections to each other. You can also do caching at higher levels. Thus, even if your neighbors don't have what you're looking for, maybe some routing you have to go through in your state has it, which could save the cross country trip.
Still, in practice there is probably going to be too much overhead to justify the relatively small gains you'll get. Again, this is sort of the idea that Freenet works under, and the extremely high latency on Freenet makes it almost unusable.
I think the problem is more that you have lots of people in Seattle who want things in New York. Ideally you could move people closer to the information they want. I guess that's a little different than what I was talking about there though. Say you have a 256k DSL connection, but a 100Mbit connection to your neighbor. Obviously you want to get as much as you can from your neighbor rather than going across your DSL line.
The small world thing comes into play because if you're highly clustered with people who generally are looking for the same things you are you can find what you need by checking local peers to whom you have a high bandwidth connection. If your neighbor doesn't have what you're looking for, you still don't have to go far, since overall the average path lengths are low.
Preface: Not really a networking expert or a graph theory researcher, but I'm doing research on peer-to-peer/swarm intelligent web search, which is somewhat related.
The type of network you're describing is known as a small-world network, and it has a lot of cool properties. The US Social Network is widely regarded as a small world network. A Harvard Professor named Stanely Milgram demonstrated this property rather dramatically in 1967 when he mailed 160 letters to randomly chosen people in Omaha, Nebraska. The letters contained instructions to forward the message on to a stockbroker in Boston by means of a person they knew on a first name basis. Forty-two of the letters made it to their destination, with a median of about 5.5 hops. This is where the six degrees of separation between any two people in the world comes from.
Anyway, the really cool feature about these types of graphs is that they're highly clustered, but have short average path lengths also. Your friends generally all know each other, but you always have a few in a group that have friends on the other side of the country or even the world. These people serve as intermediaries between other highly clustered groups of friends.
If a network could be constructed to take advantage of this phenomenon, it could have some pretty cool performance. It's not too hard generally to run a 100Mbit connection over to your neighbors, so there is usually way more bandwidth between nearby peers than necessary. With some aggressive caching or mirroring, you would very rarely have to get outside of your local neighborhood, and this would ease the load on the Internet quite a bit.
This is really the sort of thing Freenet is trying to do. Unfortunately, at least in my experience, Freenet suffers from to much latency to really be useful.
A more realistic example is a known but not super-famous group like They Might Be Giants.
They Might Be Giants also offers their albums online in FLAC, without any DRM. I decided to buy one of their albums largely because of this. I've been saying for years that when they finally start seeling Lossless audio, without any DRM, I would buy it. It's nice to see a band actually doing that.
To Apple's credit, I've been impressed that they advertise the MacBook as 4x faster on their web site, but the charts they show there show that on one of the tests it's actually over 5x faster. I would have expected most companies to advertise the 5x more than the 4x.
After heavy usage, or extended periods of inactivity (such as sleeping) your vision may begin to dim as the internal batteries are depleted. In this case, simply stare at the sun to recharge the batteries until your vision is restored to its normal brightness. WARNING: Do not stare at the sun for extended periods of time, as this may cause injury, blindness, or spontaneous combustion of the retinas.
I would guess sci fi helps to inspire researchers. Have you read anything by Jules Verne? He gives almost a perfect description of some technologies that weren't invented until years after he wrote. It's rather amazing. I think Science Fiction helps people dream about what can be done in the future, and this inspires inventors to actually create the things they grew up reading about or seeing in movies.
They don't have to be monetary micropayments, micropayments can be computational as well. It'd be as simple as adding a new authentication scheme to SMTP servers, where when you want to send a message the SMTP server says "Before you can send mail from this server, you must find a string that matches x digits from this MD5 hash." It's a lot easier for the server to verify a solution than for the client to come up with a solution, so there is a small computational cost with sending mail, but it's not prohibitive for the server. Even if Joe Spammer wants to set up his own mail server to send spam from, eventually the message is going to have to go to a reputable server, which would require computational micropayments. Granted, this solution requires changing an Internet standard that's pretty well entrenched. It's a relatively small change though, and if done right it would mean spammers would have to build supercomputers to send out as much mail as they do.
I find it much more likely that there has always been something in existence rather that that anything (God, matter/energy, etc.) spontaneously sprung into existence.
I rarely see a parent pysically punish their children a day or two after the incident. Physical punishment is usually done in the heat of the moment or very shortly thereafter. Parents who physically discipline their children, do it because they can't control themselves.
I would have to say my mother was one who applied physical discipline while still being in control. In fact, if she didn't feel like she could maintain control, she would leave the room rather than risk doing something she'd regret. My parents used physical discipline appropriately.
Physical discipline is a useful and effective tool parents have in raising children. It should by no means be the only tool, but when properly applied it is effective and there is a big difference between that and child abuse. However, to be effective, it must be applied immediately. Every parent should feel horrible if they spanked a child for something they did a week ago. That just doesn't make sense. There needs to be an immediate connection between the action and the punishment.
One interesting thing I've noticed recently is that after a child is spanked, they'll often go to the parent who just spanked them for comfort. The parent spanks the child, and then the two are immediately hugging each other. To me this suggests the parent is acting out of love rather than anger, and the child knows it.
Granted, physical discipline is not always applied appropriately, but that is not a reason to completely do away with it. Knives are used to commit murder, and also to cut our food. Clearly the benefits of knives outweigh the dangers with them, and I feel that physical discipline, when properly applied, falls into this category as well.
I remember talking about this when I took a psychology class a few years ago. If I remember, it's called "functional fixedness." It's where humans learn a particular function for a tool and have trouble coming up with other uses. For example, we learn to use screw drivers to screw in screws, but it may take us a while to learn to use them as a lever as well. This isn't the best example, because most people have also learned that screwdrivers are useful for prying things open.
What's surprising to me about this is that it took us as long as it did to realize those tusks actually weren't weapons.
And the truly weird thing is, the route given by Google maps isn't even that much longer time-wise depending on how well you time the ferry. Okay, well, maybe a 30 minute ferry vs over two hours of driving isn't the same, but for other routes, such as Seattle/Bremerton, it's generally a wash whether you take the ferry or not.
Re:Why emacs? Because it's greast
on
The Future of Emacs
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· Score: 2, Interesting
You know, I'm a fan of emacs, but doesn't this everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach go against the Unix philosophy of making lots of small interoperable tools that do one thing really well?
Slashdot Mirror
I use Hugin Panorama Tools. I think it works really well, though I don't have a lot of experience with other stitchers. It can do panorama stitching, and also correct for barrel distortion and such.
Haven't some very important scientific discoveries been released to the general public without peer review? Granted I'm going from a vague memory of 9th grade science, but I remember my teacher teling us that Galileo had his works published in Italian rather than Latin so his discoveries would be accessible to the general public rather than being censored by the "scientific" community of the time. I think your description of bad science is meant for today's time frame, and the academic world of Galileo's time was rather different than today's, but I think there are cases where releasing directly to the public is the mark of a good scientist. The other aspects of bad science I would say are pretty much universal, regardless of the time period. It takes a certain amount of maturity to be able to concede when observations contradict your theory, and similarly it takes a decent amount of maturity to not make stronger claims that your data warrant.
In the Road Ahead, Bill Gates made pretty much this same observation. He said that historically when a new medium comes around, pretty much the first thing people put on it is sex. Apparently some of the first uses of paper were erotic drawings.
This is one of my biggest complaints about OpenOffice. Yeah, OpenOffice 2.0 is much better than the 1.x series was, but basically they just made it a bad clone of Microsoft Office. I find many of the cloned MS Office features difficult to use, and they usually won't accomplish what I need them to. I'd love to see the OpenOffice people take a fresh approach to office software, and instead of saying "Let's make a free version of MS Office" say "This is how office software should be done." On the bright side, perhaps it is because of OpenOffice's attempt to duplicate MS Office that Microsoft is finally doing something innovative with the new version of Office.
I don't know, I think I might buy it if it's ever released just because of all the PR the game has been getting. There aren't many things that have been able to make Slashdot headlines for as long as this has. Who knows, if it's ever finally released, maybe it will sell well to people wanting to relive the old days. The decade old graphics might even be a feature. It would be sort of like releasing a game they discovered in a time capsule somewhere.
In my opinion that's not really an improvement. I prefer having the close button on the side like it is now, because that way it's always in the same place, instead of having to find which tab is active and then home in on a new place for the close button each time I have to close a tab.
It will be interesting to see how Google Pages works out, since they are now also in the "everyone should be able to make a web page easily" camp. I was playing with it some last night. It didn't get along with my browser very well (Firefox on Linux). The site was incredible unresponsive. I'd type a couple sentences and then go off and IM for a couple of minutes as I watched the characters slowly appear one by one on the page. I don't suppose anyone else has found a way to fix this?
What's a cool thing about Google Pages that sets it apart from sites like MySpace is that it gives you a choice of lots of professionally designed themes. It still lets you edit raw HTML if you want, so I would assume you have a lot of customization possible, though I haven't used it enough to know. I wonder what they have done to keep people from making sites that look disgusting though. Maybe the themes are nice enough that people don't feel the need to make their site look gross. It seems like it could be just a matter of time before people start abusing the HTML feature and we start seeing things like there are on MySpace.
Google Pages does seem to remove some of the tags that are more likely to cause problems. It removes object tags, and script tags, which should at least keep people from playing twelve background songs at once.
I haven't been to MySpace in a while, since I think it all looks like vomit, but another complaint I had was that the thing seems to be about 80% covered in ads, and the ads are placed in such a way that you can't tell what's an ad and what's part of the site.
As far as usability, a good way for a site like this to run is to give everyone relatively limited customization. This way the site still provides a consistent look and feel, which is good for usability, but still lets users express themselves through whatever theme they pick. Let the people who know what they are doing design themes, and then give the users a way to customize them to suit their tastes.
I haven't read the article, but I'd be surprised if data from quasars truly had no patterns in them. I doubt this will ever be used extensively in cryptography though, because the one time pad is really difficult to implement. The key has to be as long as the message, and you can only use the key once, so in many cases you're better off just sending the message instead of the key if you have a secure way to exchange keys.
I didn't say there was such a correlation, just that it would be nice if there were. Still, if you get enough people together (though hopefully still small) you will probably start to find more of a correlation. Lots of people are going to be interested in their local weather, for example. While your neighbor might go to MSN and you go to CNN instead, if you add enough people then others will also start to look at the same site. While it may not be possible to hook everyone on your street up to the same ethernet network, college campuses and offices have lots of people clustered together which high bandwidth connections to each other. You can also do caching at higher levels. Thus, even if your neighbors don't have what you're looking for, maybe some routing you have to go through in your state has it, which could save the cross country trip.
Still, in practice there is probably going to be too much overhead to justify the relatively small gains you'll get. Again, this is sort of the idea that Freenet works under, and the extremely high latency on Freenet makes it almost unusable.
I think the problem is more that you have lots of people in Seattle who want things in New York. Ideally you could move people closer to the information they want. I guess that's a little different than what I was talking about there though. Say you have a 256k DSL connection, but a 100Mbit connection to your neighbor. Obviously you want to get as much as you can from your neighbor rather than going across your DSL line. The small world thing comes into play because if you're highly clustered with people who generally are looking for the same things you are you can find what you need by checking local peers to whom you have a high bandwidth connection. If your neighbor doesn't have what you're looking for, you still don't have to go far, since overall the average path lengths are low.
Preface: Not really a networking expert or a graph theory researcher, but I'm doing research on peer-to-peer/swarm intelligent web search, which is somewhat related.
The type of network you're describing is known as a small-world network, and it has a lot of cool properties. The US Social Network is widely regarded as a small world network. A Harvard Professor named Stanely Milgram demonstrated this property rather dramatically in 1967 when he mailed 160 letters to randomly chosen people in Omaha, Nebraska. The letters contained instructions to forward the message on to a stockbroker in Boston by means of a person they knew on a first name basis. Forty-two of the letters made it to their destination, with a median of about 5.5 hops. This is where the six degrees of separation between any two people in the world comes from.
Anyway, the really cool feature about these types of graphs is that they're highly clustered, but have short average path lengths also. Your friends generally all know each other, but you always have a few in a group that have friends on the other side of the country or even the world. These people serve as intermediaries between other highly clustered groups of friends.
If a network could be constructed to take advantage of this phenomenon, it could have some pretty cool performance. It's not too hard generally to run a 100Mbit connection over to your neighbors, so there is usually way more bandwidth between nearby peers than necessary. With some aggressive caching or mirroring, you would very rarely have to get outside of your local neighborhood, and this would ease the load on the Internet quite a bit.
This is really the sort of thing Freenet is trying to do. Unfortunately, at least in my experience, Freenet suffers from to much latency to really be useful.
To Apple's credit, I've been impressed that they advertise the MacBook as 4x faster on their web site, but the charts they show there show that on one of the tests it's actually over 5x faster. I would have expected most companies to advertise the 5x more than the 4x.
I would guess sci fi helps to inspire researchers. Have you read anything by Jules Verne? He gives almost a perfect description of some technologies that weren't invented until years after he wrote. It's rather amazing. I think Science Fiction helps people dream about what can be done in the future, and this inspires inventors to actually create the things they grew up reading about or seeing in movies.
They don't have to be monetary micropayments, micropayments can be computational as well. It'd be as simple as adding a new authentication scheme to SMTP servers, where when you want to send a message the SMTP server says "Before you can send mail from this server, you must find a string that matches x digits from this MD5 hash." It's a lot easier for the server to verify a solution than for the client to come up with a solution, so there is a small computational cost with sending mail, but it's not prohibitive for the server. Even if Joe Spammer wants to set up his own mail server to send spam from, eventually the message is going to have to go to a reputable server, which would require computational micropayments. Granted, this solution requires changing an Internet standard that's pretty well entrenched. It's a relatively small change though, and if done right it would mean spammers would have to build supercomputers to send out as much mail as they do.
I find it much more likely that there has always been something in existence rather that that anything (God, matter/energy, etc.) spontaneously sprung into existence.
I would have to say my mother was one who applied physical discipline while still being in control. In fact, if she didn't feel like she could maintain control, she would leave the room rather than risk doing something she'd regret. My parents used physical discipline appropriately.
Physical discipline is a useful and effective tool parents have in raising children. It should by no means be the only tool, but when properly applied it is effective and there is a big difference between that and child abuse. However, to be effective, it must be applied immediately. Every parent should feel horrible if they spanked a child for something they did a week ago. That just doesn't make sense. There needs to be an immediate connection between the action and the punishment.
One interesting thing I've noticed recently is that after a child is spanked, they'll often go to the parent who just spanked them for comfort. The parent spanks the child, and then the two are immediately hugging each other. To me this suggests the parent is acting out of love rather than anger, and the child knows it.
Granted, physical discipline is not always applied appropriately, but that is not a reason to completely do away with it. Knives are used to commit murder, and also to cut our food. Clearly the benefits of knives outweigh the dangers with them, and I feel that physical discipline, when properly applied, falls into this category as well.
I remember talking about this when I took a psychology class a few years ago. If I remember, it's called "functional fixedness." It's where humans learn a particular function for a tool and have trouble coming up with other uses. For example, we learn to use screw drivers to screw in screws, but it may take us a while to learn to use them as a lever as well. This isn't the best example, because most people have also learned that screwdrivers are useful for prying things open.
What's surprising to me about this is that it took us as long as it did to realize those tusks actually weren't weapons.
And the truly weird thing is, the route given by Google maps isn't even that much longer time-wise depending on how well you time the ferry. Okay, well, maybe a 30 minute ferry vs over two hours of driving isn't the same, but for other routes, such as Seattle/Bremerton, it's generally a wash whether you take the ferry or not.
You know, I'm a fan of emacs, but doesn't this everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach go against the Unix philosophy of making lots of small interoperable tools that do one thing really well?