Current research papers put a EEG-based BCI throughput limit at about 30bpm. This is bits per minute. 18bpm has actually been achieved. This is because it is rather hard to alter one's beta waves : one need to concentrate for about 2s or more to make a change (flip a bit) reliably. EEG is what the linked article talks about.
With this kind of throughput one can compose no more than a couple of sentences a day. Clearly this is not going to replace typing for most people anytime soon. Even if one is severely impaired by some brain damage (e.g. a stroke) even a little bit of retained mobility is better. There was for instance this man who manage to write a whole book (the diving bell and the butterfly) through his fluttering eyelid.
However different techniques are being developed. The best in terms of throughput and quality of data make use of f-MRI and other advanced techniques, or are very invasive (actual electrodes in the brain), and clearly this is not going to be possible as a usable tool for most people anytime soon either.
Check back in a few years. Right now BCI is definitely pie-in-the-sky, although it does sound cool.
Excellent, Thompson, you've just given up a part of the market to Chinese/Taiwanese/South African manufacturers, who will make the exact same boxes except without the Watermarking misfeature.
This misfeature is something consumers won't want, in particular the Arrrh Matey pirates, therefore they wont buy.
Actually none of what you are writing is completely impossible. Face recognition essentially works in the lab, so it may one day make it to home-use apps. Voice recognition works even better, I'm sure some guy at the MIT media lab must have tried automated lyrics recognition.
The person who wrote this article doesn't even know what CS is. CS is computer science. It will be dead when science is dead.
CS won't be dead until all the interesting questions in the theory of computing are solved : is P != NP? What can a quantum computer achieve? what are the theoretical limits to computation in the physical world, beyond Turing machines? Given the truly enormous current production in all the branches of IT from HCI to pure mathematics via signal and image processing, I would not be worried at all.
Just to rehash, CS is not about designing the best accounting package. This is ICT, not CS. CS is a means to an end.
As to ICT, I don't think the final word has been said either. Just look at the sad state of Vista, or for that matter, at just about any accounting package. Who can say with a straight face that's the best that can be done?
There are a few barriers to macs' entry into the mainstream workforce.
0- (The biggie): enterprise support is crap. Really it is, especially for laptop. Where I work, *every* vendor proposes same-day, on-site support for desktop and laptops alike, except for Apple (which propose it only for desktops). There is absolutely no way any reasonable executive will put up with that complete and utter crap. Who can wait for a 15 days turnaround for their laptop ? Who will accept actually going to an accredited Apple repair store ? Apple needs to work on this fast if they want to get any traction at the enterprise level. Almmst everybody is working with laptops now.
1- Apple doesn't sell a wide enough range of machines, especially at the bottom. Where is the $400 mac, good enough for most office tasks (ie : running a browser, word and excel, full stop) ?
2- No native microsoft office. I hate that stuff, mind. However, everyone requires it, and it runs extremely poorly on Rosetta : a mere office mac requires almost 1GB to run it. This is insane ! OpenOffice is even worse.
3- To run well, Macs require a lot more resources (Video, RAM *and* HD) than the equivalent Windows-XP PC (see Rosetta, but OS/X is also incredibly memory-hungry). This may change with Vista, but probablly will get still worse with Leopard.
1- in France, to be considered a professional journalist beyond the shadow of a doubt you need to have a press card, full stop. The issue of remuneration is not at stake : you can get your press card as a freelance journalist even if you've never made a buck out of your articles or photos. However, I'm not sure that other definitions would not be acceptable. Someone who runs a regular well-attended blog would have a good shot before the courts, I would say.
2- regarding definitions and the idiocy or merit of debating them, it turns out that "the law" does not define everything in advance, as this is clarly impossible. Was Van Gogh a professional painter, even though he only sold a single painting (to his doctor) in his lifetime ? What is a professional mathematician ? Where I used to work a mathematician was someone who had published at least one paper in one of a finite list of international maths journals ; remuneration was never mentionned. Was Louis De Broglie, the Nobel-prize winner, a professional physicist, even though he was an independently wealthy nobleman and didn't hold an academic position until after he got his prize ?
Clearly here there is no way the French decision can prevent people from filming whatever they want, and clearly, as long as France remains a democracy, it cannot be used to prevent the diffusion of important amateur documents à-la Rodney King or, for that matter, the JFK assassination. It just shows that in this instance the conseil constitutionel wasn't thinking properly.
My own experience shows that you must keep paying though, or stay with the exact same distro you started using Wine/Cedega with.
New features in the kernel can quickly make Wine/Cedega obsolete (as in not working at all). The only way to keep running the same old games you have and keep a modern distro is to keep paying for Cedega (or give up playing games altogether, which was my solution:-)
(I'm not him although I know his work and his ex-supervisor)
Also consider CImage, by the same author. CImage is a C++ image processing template library (cue to how much C++ sucks compared to the language du jour and/or LISP/Python/Haskell/OCaml, etc;-)
Concerning the inpainting algorithms that many here find impressive, there has been lots of work in this area. One of the seminal works is the paper at ICCV'99 by Efros and Leung. Many CS people will love that one since it is a fairly straightforward extention of the 1948 Markov model proposed by Shannon himself for the automated production of pseudo-english text (i.e. texts that look and sound english but really aren't). The Practice of Programming book by Kernighan and Pike makes use of that algorithm to compare various languages in a fun way.
The Tschumperlé algorithm works on different principles and is much faster, but their particular Markov model shows the impainting problem is not that difficult in practice.
In case you don't remember, similar "prophecies" were made from other texts, such as a supreme court ruling, using the same rules. I wasn't aware that a supreme court ruling was such a holy text.
Also I don't remember that the bible code actually predicted anything that hadn't happened already. Prediction is always difficult, especially about the future (N. Bohr).
I happily run both Fedora and Ubuntu and manage a package in both environments. Neither make it particularly easy and dependencies are a problem in both. I suspect you'll eventually find that both environments have their pros and cons.
There's functionnality on the one hand, which I'll agree BK may have in drove, and there's availability on the other. For example I'd like to use Matlab for some personal projects, but it costs too much for me, so I don't.
Some people interested in Linux development were limited by BK's license. They couldn't use it outside of strict Linux development, which was bad for learning the tool. It didn't interface with other tools (GUIs, etc). BK's author retracted the license overnight because someone reversed-engineered the protocol to improve interoperability, IIRC. Overnight BK became a very powerful unavailable tool.
No matter what you think about BK, it is now unusable for Linux kernel development. That doesn't make it a superior tool by any definition.
To follow up on this, you can read the nice book "The curious incident of the dog in the night-time", by Mark Haddon, to have an idea how much people with Asperger truly are handicapped. Sure some can cope and even be functional to some degree but it is in reality an extremely debilitating illness.
I doubt it, that would mean a TSP solution in polynomial time. Did anyone tell you that TSP path must loop ? You must come back to your starting point.
Anyway, you should be able to work it out again. If you are correct, publish it and you have won at least a million dollar proving P=NP.
Undying fame awaits you. Or you might just be wrong, I don't know.
Actually endurance seems to improve up to age 30 or so, and really only starts declining, in regular athletes, until after age 45. This paper seems to indicate that as they get older, athletes tend to switch from shorter, more intensive races to longer, endurance-limited ones. Triathon experts write one should not attemps ironman too young, but work up to it.
Male runners seem to be able to keep running for very long distances until after 70. There is the famous case of John A. Kelly who ran the Boston marathon until he was 84. He had won this race at age 35 and 37.
Slashdot Mirror
Current research papers put a EEG-based BCI throughput limit at about 30bpm. This is bits per minute. 18bpm has actually been achieved. This is because it is rather hard to alter one's beta waves : one need to concentrate for about 2s or more to make a change (flip a bit) reliably. EEG is what the linked article talks about.
With this kind of throughput one can compose no more than a couple of sentences a day. Clearly this is not going to replace typing for most people anytime soon. Even if one is severely impaired by some brain damage (e.g. a stroke) even a little bit of retained mobility is better. There was for instance this man who manage to write a whole book (the diving bell and the butterfly) through his fluttering eyelid.
However different techniques are being developed. The best in terms of throughput and quality of data make use of f-MRI and other advanced techniques, or are very invasive (actual electrodes in the brain), and clearly this is not going to be possible as a usable tool for most people anytime soon either.
Check back in a few years. Right now BCI is definitely pie-in-the-sky, although it does sound cool.
Excellent, Thompson, you've just given up a part of the market to Chinese/Taiwanese/South African manufacturers, who will make the exact same boxes except without the Watermarking misfeature.
This misfeature is something consumers won't want, in particular the Arrrh Matey pirates, therefore they wont buy.
Keep up the good work.
Actually none of what you are writing is completely impossible. Face recognition essentially works in the lab, so it may one day make it to home-use apps. Voice recognition works even better, I'm sure some guy at the MIT media lab must have tried automated lyrics recognition.
ICT is the new acronym : Information and Communication Technology. IT is not a TLA and therefore doesn't pass muster.
The person who wrote this article doesn't even know what CS is. CS is computer science. It will be dead when science is dead.
CS won't be dead until all the interesting questions in the theory of computing are solved : is P != NP? What can a quantum computer achieve? what are the theoretical limits to computation in the physical world, beyond Turing machines? Given the truly enormous current production in all the branches of IT from HCI to pure mathematics via signal and image processing, I would not be worried at all.
Just to rehash, CS is not about designing the best accounting package. This is ICT, not CS. CS is a means to an end.
As to ICT, I don't think the final word has been said either. Just look at the sad state of Vista, or for that matter, at just about any accounting package. Who can say with a straight face that's the best that can be done?
There are a few barriers to macs' entry into the mainstream workforce.
0- (The biggie): enterprise support is crap. Really it is, especially for laptop. Where I work, *every* vendor proposes same-day, on-site support for desktop and laptops alike, except for Apple (which propose it only for desktops). There is absolutely no way any reasonable executive will put up with that complete and utter crap. Who can wait for a 15 days turnaround for their laptop ? Who will accept actually going to an accredited Apple repair store ? Apple needs to work on this fast if they want to get any traction at the enterprise level. Almmst everybody is working with laptops now.
1- Apple doesn't sell a wide enough range of machines, especially at the bottom. Where is the $400 mac, good enough for most office tasks (ie : running a browser, word and excel, full stop) ?
2- No native microsoft office. I hate that stuff, mind. However, everyone requires it, and it runs extremely poorly on Rosetta : a mere office mac requires almost 1GB to run it. This is insane ! OpenOffice is even worse.
3- To run well, Macs require a lot more resources (Video, RAM *and* HD) than the equivalent Windows-XP PC (see Rosetta, but OS/X is also incredibly memory-hungry). This may change with Vista, but probablly will get still worse with Leopard.
Not to take anything from your post, but "Summa cum laude" is latin for "with highest praise", whereas "Magna cum laude" is only "with high praise".
;-)
Summa is better than Magna.
You couldn't have done anything better. You should have been depressed for not knowing Latin enough instead
Cheers.
Two things :
1- in France, to be considered a professional journalist beyond the shadow of a doubt you need to have a press card, full stop. The issue of remuneration is not at stake : you can get your press card as a freelance journalist even if you've never made a buck out of your articles or photos. However, I'm not sure that other definitions would not be acceptable. Someone who runs a regular well-attended blog would have a good shot before the courts, I would say.
2- regarding definitions and the idiocy or merit of debating them, it turns out that "the law" does not define everything in advance, as this is clarly impossible. Was Van Gogh a professional painter, even though he only sold a single painting (to his doctor) in his lifetime ? What is a professional mathematician ? Where I used to work a mathematician was someone who had published at least one paper in one of a finite list of international maths journals ; remuneration was never mentionned. Was Louis De Broglie, the Nobel-prize winner, a professional physicist, even though he was an independently wealthy nobleman and didn't hold an academic position until after he got his prize ?
Clearly here there is no way the French decision can prevent people from filming whatever they want, and clearly, as long as France remains a democracy, it cannot be used to prevent the diffusion of important amateur documents à-la Rodney King or, for that matter, the JFK assassination. It just shows that in this instance the conseil constitutionel wasn't thinking properly.
There would be a lot of things to say about your post, but I'll leave it at that :
There isn't a single line in your comment that is correct. Not a one.
Cheers.
If I change my oil I may not be a mechanic, but if I change a 1000 peoples oil I sure am some kind of automotive professional....
No, you are a guy that knows how to change oil - thats a long way from a professional.
Actually, professionalism is defined by (1) education and (2) expertise. In many cases, (2) is more than sufficient if in large enough amount.
The above can be a professional at changing cars' oil. Entire businesses are based on that sort of specialized service.
If that were the case then elephants and whales would be much more intelligent than we are. There is no indication of any large animal being so smart.
Thanks for the link, the paper is fascinating to read. Awe-inspiring science.
My own experience shows that you must keep paying though, or stay with the exact same distro you started using Wine/Cedega with.
:-)
New features in the kernel can quickly make Wine/Cedega obsolete (as in not working at all). The only way to keep running the same old games you have and keep a modern distro is to keep paying for Cedega (or give up playing games altogether, which was my solution
(I'm not him although I know his work and his ex-supervisor)
;-)
Also consider CImage, by the same author. CImage is a C++ image processing template library (cue to how much C++ sucks compared to the language du jour and/or LISP/Python/Haskell/OCaml, etc
Concerning the inpainting algorithms that many here find impressive, there has been lots of work in this area. One of the seminal works is the paper at ICCV'99 by Efros and Leung. Many CS people will love that one since it is a fairly straightforward extention of the 1948 Markov model proposed by Shannon himself for the automated production of pseudo-english text (i.e. texts that look and sound english but really aren't). The Practice of Programming book by Kernighan and Pike makes use of that algorithm to compare various languages in a fun way.
The Tschumperlé algorithm works on different principles and is much faster, but their particular Markov model shows the impainting problem is not that difficult in practice.
In case you don't remember, similar "prophecies" were made from other texts, such as a supreme court ruling, using the same rules. I wasn't aware that a supreme court ruling was such a holy text.
Also I don't remember that the bible code actually predicted anything that hadn't happened already. Prediction is always difficult, especially about the future (N. Bohr).
Hello ESR,
I happily run both Fedora and Ubuntu and manage a package in both environments. Neither make it particularly easy and dependencies are a problem in both. I suspect you'll eventually find that both environments have their pros and cons.
Good luck to you.
In your own words, a good random number generator is therefore *NOT* easy to obtain.
3D cards are not just for gaming : CAD, 3D image analysis and display, etc. Also the integrated graphics board eats up precious main memory.
Not to mention that they would know this fact thanks to their permanent link with Earth, and will be expecting the pickup. Nothing lost !
There is no goal, the article is a midly interesting thought experiment. You might as well ask what's the point of living, we all die in the end.
Superior in what sense ?
There's functionnality on the one hand, which I'll agree BK may have in drove, and there's availability on the other. For example I'd like to use Matlab for some personal projects, but it costs too much for me, so I don't.
Some people interested in Linux development were limited by BK's license. They couldn't use it outside of strict Linux development, which was bad for learning the tool. It didn't interface with other tools (GUIs, etc). BK's author retracted the license overnight because someone reversed-engineered the protocol to improve interoperability, IIRC. Overnight BK became a very powerful unavailable tool.
No matter what you think about BK, it is now unusable for Linux kernel development. That doesn't make it a superior tool by any definition.
To follow up on this, you can read the nice book "The curious incident of the dog in the night-time", by Mark Haddon, to have an idea how much people with Asperger truly are handicapped. Sure some can cope and even be functional to some degree but it is in reality an extremely debilitating illness.
I doubt it, that would mean a TSP solution in polynomial time. Did anyone tell you that TSP path must loop ? You must come back to your starting point.
Anyway, you should be able to work it out again. If you are correct, publish it and you have won at least a million dollar proving P=NP.
Undying fame awaits you. Or you might just be wrong, I don't know.
Perhaps you could edit it yourself a little bit to make it more pedagogical and less useless ?
Actually endurance seems to improve up to age 30 or so, and really only starts declining, in regular athletes, until after age 45. This paper seems to indicate that as they get older, athletes tend to switch from shorter, more intensive races to longer, endurance-limited ones. Triathon experts write one should not attemps ironman too young, but work up to it.
Male runners seem to be able to keep running for very long distances until after 70. There is the famous case of John A. Kelly who ran the Boston marathon until he was 84. He had won this race at age 35 and 37.