It doesn't have to be likely. It just has to be a probable at approximately the same level as the incidence rate, and more probable than any competing explanation.
Of course, more probable than a bit flip due to cosmic rays is a bit flip due to marginally bad RAM.
I would think that Toyota's design process includes some sort of Byzantine fault tolerance. And I would think the automobile industry would have regulation regarding how safety-critical firmware is written. But then I think how the pressure from management is to developed software in the least expensive manner possible.
I'd also like to see some sort of study of the incidence of reported runaway acceleration per vehicle mile by brand of vehicle (excluding the data from the last few months). There are tons of theories we can all throw around, but I haven't seen any evidence of the scope of the problem.
Okay, let's do the numbers (in millions)
NSA consultancy to determine the need for new hardware: $7
External auditors of NSA consultancy: $3
Environmental impact study: $5
Feasibility study: $2
Legislative Task Force (aka "Marketing"): $10
Publication and administration of call for outside bids: $5
Hardware: $.1
Comprehensive installation and migration package: $10
Ten years support: $20
Audit of tender and winning bid: $5
Annual support audits: $5
Verification and Validation (Internal): $3
V&V (external): $7
Facilities for hardware, ten years: $30
Legal Fees: $20
Overhead: $55
Total: $187.1 million
By the time Apple's announced it, the competitors should be working on their projects. There will be competing models -- heck some are already announced. And I'm hoping they build something different from what TFA wants:
We need something in between: a device that is small and light enough to take anywhere, but has a screen big enough to let you edit a complex video, watch a high-definition movie, view a whole book or magazine page, or paint on a virtual canvas—and, ideally, use multiple applications at once.
Edit a complex video? what huge advantage does portability and low power consumption bring to video editing?
What we need is something with a decent interface, USB ports, and tons of free software. The USB ports must be there so you can hook up a keyboard. TFA is wrong: virtual keyboards still suck, and will suck. Handwriting recognition cannot be fast and accurate without retraining the writer. Voice recognition is cute, but for most people cannot be the basis for a sustained interface: unless you have a compelling need to use your voice, it's usually slower than typing, far less accurate, unwieldy to edit, cognitively consuming (as you must concentrate on the screen transcribing your spoken words), and socially awkward (until, at least, the computer talks back).
So if the task requires extensive texual input, it's going to require a real keyboard. What are the odds that Apple's 1G tablet will have a USB port that works in host mode, or a non-proprietary accessories connector?
As a tablet user for two and a half years, I have an idea what they're useful for: a helluva lot. Every task where a computer can help, but isn't the focus of the activity works better with a tablet. Every task where a computer is too heavy, or has too awkward power requirements works better with a tablet.
Every task that works better with some other portable gadget is not for a tablet. You want a phone -- get a phone. You want a camera -- get a camera (now, a decent webcam that works with * and Skype is a different story). Windows 7 ain't gonna fly here: a tablet needs to be instant-on, and low, low power (think ARM). So, maybe the iSlate will take off; hopefully someone else will succeed in selling something better. But the market will soon explode with every variant.
Well, someone sure is getting a jump on the pre-CES media hype. A conspiracy theorist would suggest that this Corey Halverson dude over in Seattle was slipped some info by his buddies over in Redmond working on a competing product, and looking to exclude a VC-funded startup right when they start gaining traction. That would explain why his blog only has three posts, and why he brought this up right before CES.
Me, I take this as an object lesson for what happens when you dump your product on woot, and when you don't bother to make even the slightest effort at security.
This truly is a PR nightmare, but will make a good plot mechanic in next season's procedural dramas.
A. It's not as readable as Mr. Lehrer's article. B. Mr. Lehrer is not the same as Dr. Dunbar, so what a journalist says about a scientist is not what scientist says. C. I gather the discussion of using fMRI on test subjects and noting ACC and DLPFC firing at the same time is, by your analysis, in the realm of cognitive psychology, and not neuroscience. D. So, according to your analysis, neuroscientists use the terms "Cognitive Dissonance" and "Confirmation Bias", while psychologists use ACC, DLPFC and the rest. E. There is 'nothing new' here. But formalizing what we already know, and pointing to it can lead to new conclusions and uses.
I'm cool with 3 bucks a month. I'm not cool with having to link my credit card to a single password held by a third party in another country. I'm particularly not cool when that third party includes among their terms that I revoke all rights to dispute with my card issuer charges that they make. I'm not at all cool with it when, as far as I can tell from the web, people regularly claim being defrauded from using their service, and wind up having little recourse.
So, no, in terms of risk, I'd be paying far more than $3 a month.
Yeah, the rest of the world has to either have already cut a deal with PayPal, or sign up their credit card to be accessed dispute-free via a simple password. Then Last.Fm is only $3/month plus any charges from fraudulent activity.
Ship any offending models to California with some cheap, heavy batteries to supply power above the maximum wattage. They can take their charge during the "passive drain" when the television is turned off. Since these are residential TVs we're talking about, the regulator should be cool with the notion that they're only on for 8 hours a day, and the excess voltage after that period (when the batteries run out) is from abuse.
Microsoft already has these drop-down menus that only list the options you've used recently.
Sorry, I couldn't resist. I hate them too. "Grows with the user" isn't the answer.
In fact, I think you've fundamentally mistaken two concepts. 'Simple' is conceptual; 'easy' is experiential.
Clippy and dynamic drop-down menus are not ‘simple’ (cf. trying to run Word on a Mac in 1999. The light dims, a hush falls over the crowd, and Clippy chunders onto the screen. Three minutes later, that superquick animation manages to say something), but they were developed to make things ‘easy.
In truth, they weren't even developed for that reason. They were built because what matters most for software is the 15-minute sales pitch that results in corporate contracts. Office (and many, many other programs) needs to look cool and to engage the complete idiot for a quarter-hour of interaction.
If software can't sell itself in 15 minutes, it doesn't sell. A proper "simple" design that works well, without confusion, without encouraging bad habits (anyone remember the Macintosh "virtual, distributed desktop" that would result in endless disk swaps?) requires motivation or teaching to learn, and those things can't be communicated in 15 minutes.
You know, the penultimate paragraph where the author states exactly that: "mature" is being used equivocally: on the one hand, in the ratings sense, where it refers to a requirement on the player, and on the other hand, in the content sense, where it refers to the presentation and experiences given. Paradoxically, when we say "mature content", we mean mature in the first sense: "We deem this (puerile) content suitable only for those above a certain age", and not "We deem this content interesting to those past their teenage years."
Not that I don't enjoy some quality violence myself.
So Sony released the PSP along with their UMD, repeating the same mistake Sony's made since BetaMax. UMDs only work on PSPs, therefore Sony will have the monopoly on the platform. Now it turns out that nobody likes UMDs, and they can be defeated by hacking the firmware and using another proprietary Sony format, MemoryStick, onto which people can load videos that they own.
So Sony decides to enclose completely the PSP. Hell, I'd be surprised if you even own the hardware.
The only "victory" Sony had using this technique is Blu-Ray, and that's been flying off the shelves, hasn't it?
1. The book must be on a uniform surface. 2. All the edges of the book must be in the frame. 3. Only hold the book down from the side. 4. The photograph must be taken directly over the book. 5. Use a dSLR for best results.
Okay, so now try holding a dSLR directly over an open book that you're holding with another hand, from the side, and at a range where the entire book fits in the frame. At that point, you might as well build that book scanning rig.
Yup. They want an email address just to transmit a PDF info sheet (I'd apologize now to the sysadmin at mailer-daemon.styx.hel, but I have a funny feeling it's not going to help me much in the long run), and don't give the price anywhere = either $2k or (more likely) the mission-critical purchase price of $50-100k.
Yeah. Totally sweet. We have tons of them where I work too.
Only thing is, the IT department decided that scanning to PDF would be impossible to bill and invite copyright abuse, so they disabled any action that didn't result directly in printing to paper.
Okay, as per my previous post, I'm trying Snapter. It might have crashed, for alll I know. I'm at 3 bars (out of about 20) on the left side of the first page, and one processor is pegged. We'll see if it comes out.
Seriously, have you ever compared the time photographing a book vs. scanning it? The fastest scanners run like photocopiers. With a book, all you need is to set up a decent or ghetto rig for the camera and turn the pages. Until now, I've been shooting with a DSLR at the same lighting/camera settings for each shot, and applying a batch transform process followed by a universal levels setting, finishing up with a PDF assembly. But I'll report back on how Snapter works on the same files.
Script styles follow the technology. Epigraphs are not in cursive. Notes in wax tablets are. Many would classify a13th-century cursive as "block writing" compared to what we have today. The cursive taught thirty years ago in schools was optimized for fountain pens. At the same time, ball point pens were prevalent in the US, and making inroads in Europe. Fountain pens allow ink to flow with very little surface pressure. Ball point pens require pressure to write. All those loops and ligatures that make sense on a flowing-ink pen take energy on a ball-point. So the benefits of the "fountain-pen cursive" are not so great with different tech. People switch to print writing because it takes less energy and produces a clearer result. That's also why pressure-based touch screens will not be "faster" for most cursive writers. In any case, keyboards are an order of magnitude faster for text entry.
OCR only works better on printed characters because OCR is optimized to look for shapes. The ideal way to read cursive -- or any handwriting style -- is to look at it in terms of motion, as the result of certain movements of the pen. Read the motion, not the static result. That's why many cursives up to the nineteenth century are so hard for us to read now: we're used to reading printed letters, and not cursive ones.
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It doesn't have to be likely. It just has to be a probable at approximately the same level as the incidence rate, and more probable than any competing explanation.
Of course, more probable than a bit flip due to cosmic rays is a bit flip due to marginally bad RAM.
I would think that Toyota's design process includes some sort of Byzantine fault tolerance. And I would think the automobile industry would have regulation regarding how safety-critical firmware is written. But then I think how the pressure from management is to developed software in the least expensive manner possible.
I'd also like to see some sort of study of the incidence of reported runaway acceleration per vehicle mile by brand of vehicle (excluding the data from the last few months). There are tons of theories we can all throw around, but I haven't seen any evidence of the scope of the problem.
Okay, let's do the numbers (in millions) NSA consultancy to determine the need for new hardware: $7 External auditors of NSA consultancy: $3 Environmental impact study: $5 Feasibility study: $2 Legislative Task Force (aka "Marketing"): $10 Publication and administration of call for outside bids: $5 Hardware: $.1 Comprehensive installation and migration package: $10 Ten years support: $20 Audit of tender and winning bid: $5 Annual support audits: $5 Verification and Validation (Internal): $3 V&V (external): $7 Facilities for hardware, ten years: $30 Legal Fees: $20 Overhead: $55 Total: $187.1 million
If firmware affects airworthiness. There's plenty of stuff that doesnt get installed.
Besides, error corrections in avionics can be deadly.
teeth + machinery + bugs = better your hardware than mine.
Edit a complex video? what huge advantage does portability and low power consumption bring to video editing?
What we need is something with a decent interface, USB ports, and tons of free software. The USB ports must be there so you can hook up a keyboard. TFA is wrong: virtual keyboards still suck, and will suck. Handwriting recognition cannot be fast and accurate without retraining the writer. Voice recognition is cute, but for most people cannot be the basis for a sustained interface: unless you have a compelling need to use your voice, it's usually slower than typing, far less accurate, unwieldy to edit, cognitively consuming (as you must concentrate on the screen transcribing your spoken words), and socially awkward (until, at least, the computer talks back).
So if the task requires extensive texual input, it's going to require a real keyboard. What are the odds that Apple's 1G tablet will have a USB port that works in host mode, or a non-proprietary accessories connector?
As a tablet user for two and a half years, I have an idea what they're useful for: a helluva lot. Every task where a computer can help, but isn't the focus of the activity works better with a tablet. Every task where a computer is too heavy, or has too awkward power requirements works better with a tablet.
Every task that works better with some other portable gadget is not for a tablet. You want a phone -- get a phone. You want a camera -- get a camera (now, a decent webcam that works with * and Skype is a different story). Windows 7 ain't gonna fly here: a tablet needs to be instant-on, and low, low power (think ARM). So, maybe the iSlate will take off; hopefully someone else will succeed in selling something better. But the market will soon explode with every variant.
So which EA executive is a recent hire from Apple?
Also, what kind of traffic are these titles currently generating on EA's servers?
Well, someone sure is getting a jump on the pre-CES media hype. A conspiracy theorist would suggest that this Corey Halverson dude over in Seattle was slipped some info by his buddies over in Redmond working on a competing product, and looking to exclude a VC-funded startup right when they start gaining traction. That would explain why his blog only has three posts, and why he brought this up right before CES.
Me, I take this as an object lesson for what happens when you dump your product on woot, and when you don't bother to make even the slightest effort at security.
This truly is a PR nightmare, but will make a good plot mechanic in next season's procedural dramas.
Obviously your childhood didn't include a PLATO system. Those suckers were bulletproof.
A few things about your post:
A. It's not as readable as Mr. Lehrer's article.
B. Mr. Lehrer is not the same as Dr. Dunbar, so what a journalist says about a scientist is not what scientist says.
C. I gather the discussion of using fMRI on test subjects and noting ACC and DLPFC firing at the same time is, by your analysis, in the realm of cognitive psychology, and not neuroscience.
D. So, according to your analysis, neuroscientists use the terms "Cognitive Dissonance" and "Confirmation Bias", while psychologists use ACC, DLPFC and the rest.
E. There is 'nothing new' here. But formalizing what we already know, and pointing to it can lead to new conclusions and uses.
I'm cool with 3 bucks a month. I'm not cool with having to link my credit card to a single password held by a third party in another country. I'm particularly not cool when that third party includes among their terms that I revoke all rights to dispute with my card issuer charges that they make. I'm not at all cool with it when, as far as I can tell from the web, people regularly claim being defrauded from using their service, and wind up having little recourse.
So, no, in terms of risk, I'd be paying far more than $3 a month.
Yeah, the rest of the world has to either have already cut a deal with PayPal, or sign up their credit card to be accessed dispute-free via a simple password. Then Last.Fm is only $3/month plus any charges from fraudulent activity.
Ship any offending models to California with some cheap, heavy batteries to supply power above the maximum wattage. They can take their charge during the "passive drain" when the television is turned off. Since these are residential TVs we're talking about, the regulator should be cool with the notion that they're only on for 8 hours a day, and the excess voltage after that period (when the batteries run out) is from abuse.
Microsoft already has these drop-down menus that only list the options you've used recently.
Sorry, I couldn't resist. I hate them too. "Grows with the user" isn't the answer.
In fact, I think you've fundamentally mistaken two concepts. 'Simple' is conceptual; 'easy' is experiential.
Clippy and dynamic drop-down menus are not ‘simple’ (cf. trying to run Word on a Mac in 1999. The light dims, a hush falls over the crowd, and Clippy chunders onto the screen. Three minutes later, that superquick animation manages to say something), but they were developed to make things ‘easy.
In truth, they weren't even developed for that reason. They were built because what matters most for software is the 15-minute sales pitch that results in corporate contracts. Office (and many, many other programs) needs to look cool and to engage the complete idiot for a quarter-hour of interaction.
If software can't sell itself in 15 minutes, it doesn't sell. A proper "simple" design that works well, without confusion, without encouraging bad habits (anyone remember the Macintosh "virtual, distributed desktop" that would result in endless disk swaps?) requires motivation or teaching to learn, and those things can't be communicated in 15 minutes.
You know, the penultimate paragraph where the author states exactly that: "mature" is being used equivocally: on the one hand, in the ratings sense, where it refers to a requirement on the player, and on the other hand, in the content sense, where it refers to the presentation and experiences given. Paradoxically, when we say "mature content", we mean mature in the first sense: "We deem this (puerile) content suitable only for those above a certain age", and not "We deem this content interesting to those past their teenage years."
Not that I don't enjoy some quality violence myself.
So Sony released the PSP along with their UMD, repeating the same mistake Sony's made since BetaMax. UMDs only work on PSPs, therefore Sony will have the monopoly on the platform. Now it turns out that nobody likes UMDs, and they can be defeated by hacking the firmware and using another proprietary Sony format, MemoryStick, onto which people can load videos that they own.
So Sony decides to enclose completely the PSP. Hell, I'd be surprised if you even own the hardware.
The only "victory" Sony had using this technique is Blu-Ray, and that's been flying off the shelves, hasn't it?
Okay Cool. I found out what my problem was:
1. The book must be on a uniform surface.
2. All the edges of the book must be in the frame.
3. Only hold the book down from the side.
4. The photograph must be taken directly over the book.
5. Use a dSLR for best results.
Okay, so now try holding a dSLR directly over an open book that you're holding with another hand, from the side, and at a range where the entire book fits in the frame. At that point, you might as well build that book scanning rig.
In short: FAIL.
Speaking of which, how do you automate a task in GIMP? In Photoshop it's dead easy: just hit record, type in a name, and you're off.
restarted. 30 minutes later, it threw a fatal exception.
My short review: FAIL.
Yup. They want an email address just to transmit a PDF info sheet (I'd apologize now to the sysadmin at mailer-daemon.styx.hel, but I have a funny feeling it's not going to help me much in the long run), and don't give the price anywhere = either $2k or (more likely) the mission-critical purchase price of $50-100k.
Awesome. Can I borrow your tools?
Yeah. Totally sweet. We have tons of them where I work too. Only thing is, the IT department decided that scanning to PDF would be impossible to bill and invite copyright abuse, so they disabled any action that didn't result directly in printing to paper.
Okay, as per my previous post, I'm trying Snapter. It might have crashed, for alll I know. I'm at 3 bars (out of about 20) on the left side of the first page, and one processor is pegged. We'll see if it comes out.
Seriously, have you ever compared the time photographing a book vs. scanning it? The fastest scanners run like photocopiers. With a book, all you need is to set up a decent or ghetto rig for the camera and turn the pages. Until now, I've been shooting with a DSLR at the same lighting/camera settings for each shot, and applying a batch transform process followed by a universal levels setting, finishing up with a PDF assembly. But I'll report back on how Snapter works on the same files.
Script styles follow the technology. Epigraphs are not in cursive. Notes in wax tablets are. Many would classify a13th-century cursive as "block writing" compared to what we have today. The cursive taught thirty years ago in schools was optimized for fountain pens. At the same time, ball point pens were prevalent in the US, and making inroads in Europe.
Fountain pens allow ink to flow with very little surface pressure. Ball point pens require pressure to write. All those loops and ligatures that make sense on a flowing-ink pen take energy on a ball-point. So the benefits of the "fountain-pen cursive" are not so great with different tech. People switch to print writing because it takes less energy and produces a clearer result. That's also why pressure-based touch screens will not be "faster" for most cursive writers. In any case, keyboards are an order of magnitude faster for text entry.
OCR only works better on printed characters because OCR is optimized to look for shapes. The ideal way to read cursive -- or any handwriting style -- is to look at it in terms of motion, as the result of certain movements of the pen. Read the motion, not the static result. That's why many cursives up to the nineteenth century are so hard for us to read now: we're used to reading printed letters, and not cursive ones.
Late Merovingian Cursive for the win: send your invitations in that stuff, and you cut out the riff-raff and SCA freaks.