Dreamed up by Asimov when he needed an idea for a story and his eyes happened to fall on his copy of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Fiction. Not real.
Not that this necessarily mean he is right; but we do need to take this with some amount of seriousness.
We do need to take environment problems and climate change seriously. We don't need to take some alarmist's warning of imminent doom seriously, if there is no solid scientific basis for doing so.
On a personal level he has been a fan of the Mac since before it was released, when Apple showed it to him to try to sell MS on producing software for it. It's well documented(1) that during the early development of Windows he rode the team with comparisons to the Mac. It's been rumored that he keeps a current Mac in his office.
No doubt there are many good business reasons to keep Office around, but it also seems Bill just honestly likes Macs. They're high-quality and fun to use. A lot of geeks like Macs, and we all know what a geek Bill is. And, imagine how interesting it must be to him to use a computer and OS that he had no hand in developing.
Ingesting and indexing information makes it available, but it doesn't enable value judgments about it. There's plenty of inaccurate information on the Internet and in books (for instance--every fiction Web site or book), and I don't see how a cataloging system will be trained to make value judgments about it, or to synthesize it into new forms (as opposed to just present it).
Human children don't even tackle this process formally until they are about 4 or 5 and start school. And most aren't very good at it until they are over 20 years old. And they are directly trained by some of the best in the business--other humans. A system reading to itself for 10 years is probably not going to make it.
And even after all that, there is an unknown quantity of creativity or genius that is associated with advancing knowledge. Even with perfect understanding of physical data and theory in 1905, how obvious was deduction special relativity? The key to that breakthroughs was not encyclopedic knowledge and math horsepower, but rather the intuitive guesses Einstein made on assumptions and relationships.
Ultimately computer systems and living systems are different to their core--life systems at their core exist to propagate themselves at all costs, while computer systems at their core exist to execute commands at all costs. It's not your typical lifeform that will immediately cease its own existence at the slightest mistaken command from you. But every computer system will. Ultimately computers do what they are told and so will never develop free will, which is necessary for value judgments.
There'd be one question left unanswered, of course, the classic "Can entropy be reversed?." What would be really scary would be if G had an immediate answer.
We already have an answer to this, the answer is yes, it can be reversed, and that process is called life.
Humans are able to drive safely simply because we are able to adapt our reflexes to treat the car as an extension of our body. We develop a kinesthetic sense for the car--all senses inform the driving of a car, and most are processed automatically to provide the "feel" of driving. Most of driving occurs on the level of unconscious physical processing--an experienced driver can sense how much to slow down for a curve. They don't have to learn angles and speeds, they "just know" from experience. This is one of the things the human mind/body is best at.
And it occurs most easily when the entire body is engaged. Using our arms and legs to drive results in a more complete "feel" of driving that just sitting passively and moving a few fingers.
The media report on things that happen, but they are dominated by stories of the unexpected or unusual. When things go as expected, there is not much "news" to report. That's why you only see stories about car crashes, and not the converse (a story about what a great traffic day it was, for instance). That's why you see massive media storms when a few public companies are caught committing fraud, but short blurbs (if any) when the vast majority of companies dutifully report their accurate financial data every quarter.
There are a couple "usual" stories being subverted lately by Apple. The first, an ongoing story, is the resurgence of Apple. The company's decline is well-known, and all Netcraft jokes aside, pundits have predicted its demise for years. Yet in the last couple of years we have seen Apple surge in sales, profitibility and stock price. This is unexpected and therefore a story.
Another "usual" story is the wall that has existed between Apple/IBM and Intel/Microsoft. The Jobs announcement subverts that story by showing tangible proof of a breach in the wall.
Finally, the story of Microsoft's dominance is a very well-entrenched one, and Apple is subverting that too, with their successful move into CE with the iPod, and their domination of the online music market. Microsoft is seen to be reeling, off-balance and fighting hard to keep up--not the usual MS story over the past decade. Therefore worthy of a story.
The GP's concerns don't apply to spatial resolution but they do apply to color, which in fact is interpolated from sets of pixels. So while it might affect how many black/white line pairs you can resolve, it will affect the subtle gradations of color in a photograph.
These are two attributes of any capture medium that will affect the perception of the image at any viewing distance. Greater color resolution leads to cleaner tones and smoother gradations. Greater microcontrast increases the perception of sharpness and resolution.
For these reasons a photographer with a good eye can pick a LF image out of a group of lower res images, even at pretty low res or print size. That's true whether you're talking digital or film. Simply having a larger capture area improves the actual *and perceived* quality of the image, assuming a constant final print size.
Look at these Velvia sky images scanned at 3200 dpi (about 15 Mpixel); if I saw that degree of noise in my digital camera at ISO 50 or 100, I'd send it to the repair shop.
The sky noise in those images is an artifact of the digital scanning process. Velvia viewed through a loupe on a light table does not look like that.
And since we're on the subject, if I got a Velvia slide back with the weak colors you see in most digital pictures, I'd ask for my money back and tell the lab to refresh their chemicals.
And, frankly, a good digital P&S will beat your 35mm film camera in image quality in most cases.
Maybe if you have no idea how to choose a film or use a 35mm camera.
I'm guessing you're an engineer and not a photographer, with a statement like that.
Digital has some great advantages but let's not go overboard on the capabilities of digital capture and software. Individual films have "looks" that software can only approximate. It's like the difference between hearing a violin in person and playing the "violin" sound on a synthesizer. Even on a great synthesizer it's just not all there.
Notice I'm not talking about just "resolution" here, but rather the way film interacts with light, which includes color, grain, and the over and under "shoulders" (how it drops into shadow or fades into highlights). Many photographers still choose film for some or all shots because of the look.
A 4x5 image will, certainly, make your 35mm look like crap, but mostly because of tonal range, not resolution..."
Nope, it's the resolution.
In a way you're both right--it's color resolution. Not only are large format films capable of resolving a a greater number of line pairs per mm than 35mm (assuming the same final print size), they are also capable of resolving a greater number of individual colors per mm. This leads directly to an appearance of clearer, cleaner tones.
National Geographic photographers have shot with 35mm film almost exclusively until very recently, and their prints are regularly shown at up to 6 x 4 feet in the Natl. Geo. display galleries on their first floor. Maybe not quite "wall size" but that is pretty good.
Properly exposed, low-speed 35mm slide film holds resolution surprisingly well. The tough part is usually printing it, actually, because pretty much every printing process (analog or digital) enhances grain. But as it's possible to tell from a slide show (which de-emphasizes grain), there is a ton of resolving power in the good films.
Using a 6mp Nikon D100, I would put a stitched image of landscape up against a LF print, depending on how many images comprise the stitch. You can get an over 125 MP image by stitching frames 6 wide by 4 high, for instance.
Yes, creating stitched images can be a pain and it requires heavy attention to detail to get it right. The same is true of LF. And it's only really good for static scenes--also true of LF.
Almost every media player already does this
on
iTunes is Malware?
·
· Score: 1
When you place a CD into your computer and press play, Windows Media Player takes information about the CD and phones home with it, to get the track and CD information to display in the little window. Same with Real. Same with Winamp.
Sure, you might say: "but that's only to get the CD and song info." I say: prove it.
You have no idea what happens with that data once it leaves your machine. For all you know, Microsoft and Real have aggregate records of how many times you've played Dark Side of the Moon, including at what time and date, and whether you've burned it into your library or not.
If you don't have a problem with phoning home for the CD and track info, I can only conclude that your issue lies not with the phoning home, but with the fact that it's then used to present an ad. In other words you don't care if it's spyware as long as it doesn't serve an ad. That's a different flavor of gripe.
BTW: iTunes is the only player I've used that does NOT automatically grab CD and track info. I have to request that it go out and get them.
An orbit is not just things falling down, it also requires a tangential velocity within a specific range. Gas spiraling into a black hole does have a tangential velocity, but it's not within the range create a orbit. In other words, yes, it was never in orbit.
ID proponents are not looking outside of science to explain how the natural world works. What they are doing is questioning how the natural order came to be.
You are wrong, looking outside of science is exactly what intelligent design proponents do. It is NOT a central tenet of intelligent design that God simply designed and started the universe and 12 billion years later here we are. That in fact is a reasonable tenet and compatible with modern science.
NO, what intelligent design proponents propose is that certain structures in living beings are so complex that it is nearly infinitely unlikely that they would have arisen through the "blind chance" of evolution. In addition they purport to perform statistical tests that reveal the hidden presence of willful design in the similarities between types of life.
At least educate yourself about a movement before you defend it. Intelligent design, as a movement, holds that some powerful intelligence outside of nature has willfully guided the evolutionary process. Whether this is how YOU define "intelligent design" or not, this is what you're referring to when you refer to "intelligent design" as a movement.
The world has looked for uranium much harder than they have looked for any other naturally occurring substance.
Uranium is the most strategically important resource on this planet--far more important than oil or any precious metal. Governments directly fund exploration for it, and reward those who find it richly. As a result, uranium is a far more economically lucrative resource than oil (per unit) and has been for over 50 years. And unlike oil, it announces its presence...anyone can look for it with a cheap geiger counter.
Uranium has been looked for as hard as, if not harder, than oil. The problem is simply that there is just not very much of it in concentrations great enough to extract.
However, they also do have only a 2.3% market share.
Knowing absolute market share of a company is useless for competitive analysis unless you also know the equivalent numbers for its competitors. Here are the rest of the numbers from your link.
I think a lot of people would be surprised to learn that the market share leader, Dell, has only 18% market share.
The common assumption is that Apple's 2.3% market share is terrible because of Window's dominating market share. But this is a false comparison, because Windows is software and Apple sells computers (software + hardware). When comparing computer companies, the relative size of Apple is put into proper perspective...the factor between Apple and the leader of their industry (Dell) is less than 8x, not the 43x that is commonly assumed.
First, Apple computers are in fact manufactured by Asian OEM companies, under contract with Apple. Apple is essentially a design firm; all manufacturing is outsourced. So your basis of comparison is flawed from the start.
Second, Apple is one of the top 10 largest computer companies in the world by sales volume. IDC reports that Apple's worldwide desktop market share in Q4 2005 was 1.75%. This ranks them in 9th, after:
Acer - 2.17% NEC - 2.19% Lenovo - 2.74% Gateway - 3.00% Fujitsu - 3.12% IBM - 4.18% HP - 15.28% Dell - 17.30%
Note that this list only adds up just over 50%--almost half of all computer sales worldwide are from companies with a smaller market share (and therefore sales volume) than Apple.
There was a time before Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Therefore there is no reason to make assumptions about what life "would" be like without these institutions--we have decades of data about what it actually *was* like.
Here's the summary--there was greater relief in between the socio-economic classes. The successful and well-off were very successful and well-off because there was little economic or regulatory drag on their success. But the destitute and poor were really destitute and really poor, with no safety net to protect them or help them better their lot in life.
Providing such safety nets benefits everyone, including the captains of industry. An educated and healthy population is a productive population. And in fact the data bear this out--since enactment of many of the social programs, the U.S. has grown from a successful and influential nation to the most economically and militarily powerful nation on earth.
And it's funny you mention Switzerland after that rant, because they have a tightly regulated health care system with mandated universal coverage, a well-funded public education system, a well-funded social insurance program, and mandatory gun training. If we're going to emulate the Swiss, we ought to at least acknowledge, if not understand, their system as a whole.
And I have to say I agree with Metcalfe--it was a lot of fun. In 9 months the company went from 10 employees to 100, and back down to 25. 3 months later it was dead. I was employee #12 and helped build a cool Web site in a well-funded, fun environment, working with mostly happy, smart, effective people. And we laughed behind our backs at the fakes and blowhards.
Yes it sucked to get laid off. But I stayed in touch with co-workers and eventually it led to my current, very stable job.
And the "dotcom scars" are a badge of honor that will only increase in value as I get older. I was there at the turbulent founding of an industry. It's like an exclusive club--"yeah I got axed in December 2000 right before the holidays", "hey me too!"
Slashdot Mirror
Dreamed up by Asimov when he needed an idea for a story and his eyes happened to fall on his copy of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Fiction. Not real.
Not that this necessarily mean he is right; but we do need to take this with some amount of seriousness.
We do need to take environment problems and climate change seriously. We don't need to take some alarmist's warning of imminent doom seriously, if there is no solid scientific basis for doing so.
On a personal level he has been a fan of the Mac since before it was released, when Apple showed it to him to try to sell MS on producing software for it. It's well documented(1) that during the early development of Windows he rode the team with comparisons to the Mac. It's been rumored that he keeps a current Mac in his office.
No doubt there are many good business reasons to keep Office around, but it also seems Bill just honestly likes Macs. They're high-quality and fun to use. A lot of geeks like Macs, and we all know what a geek Bill is. And, imagine how interesting it must be to him to use a computer and OS that he had no hand in developing.
(1) See Barbarians Led By Bill Gates for instance
Ingesting and indexing information makes it available, but it doesn't enable value judgments about it. There's plenty of inaccurate information on the Internet and in books (for instance--every fiction Web site or book), and I don't see how a cataloging system will be trained to make value judgments about it, or to synthesize it into new forms (as opposed to just present it).
Human children don't even tackle this process formally until they are about 4 or 5 and start school. And most aren't very good at it until they are over 20 years old. And they are directly trained by some of the best in the business--other humans. A system reading to itself for 10 years is probably not going to make it.
And even after all that, there is an unknown quantity of creativity or genius that is associated with advancing knowledge. Even with perfect understanding of physical data and theory in 1905, how obvious was deduction special relativity? The key to that breakthroughs was not encyclopedic knowledge and math horsepower, but rather the intuitive guesses Einstein made on assumptions and relationships.
Ultimately computer systems and living systems are different to their core--life systems at their core exist to propagate themselves at all costs, while computer systems at their core exist to execute commands at all costs. It's not your typical lifeform that will immediately cease its own existence at the slightest mistaken command from you. But every computer system will. Ultimately computers do what they are told and so will never develop free will, which is necessary for value judgments.
There'd be one question left unanswered, of course, the classic "Can entropy be reversed?." What would be really scary would be if G had an immediate answer.
We already have an answer to this, the answer is yes, it can be reversed, and that process is called life.
Humans are able to drive safely simply because we are able to adapt our reflexes to treat the car as an extension of our body. We develop a kinesthetic sense for the car--all senses inform the driving of a car, and most are processed automatically to provide the "feel" of driving. Most of driving occurs on the level of unconscious physical processing--an experienced driver can sense how much to slow down for a curve. They don't have to learn angles and speeds, they "just know" from experience. This is one of the things the human mind/body is best at.
And it occurs most easily when the entire body is engaged. Using our arms and legs to drive results in a more complete "feel" of driving that just sitting passively and moving a few fingers.
It gives you greater control over the vehicle.
Stick is the CLI of driving.
The media report on things that happen, but they are dominated by stories of the unexpected or unusual. When things go as expected, there is not much "news" to report. That's why you only see stories about car crashes, and not the converse (a story about what a great traffic day it was, for instance). That's why you see massive media storms when a few public companies are caught committing fraud, but short blurbs (if any) when the vast majority of companies dutifully report their accurate financial data every quarter.
There are a couple "usual" stories being subverted lately by Apple. The first, an ongoing story, is the resurgence of Apple. The company's decline is well-known, and all Netcraft jokes aside, pundits have predicted its demise for years. Yet in the last couple of years we have seen Apple surge in sales, profitibility and stock price. This is unexpected and therefore a story.
Another "usual" story is the wall that has existed between Apple/IBM and Intel/Microsoft. The Jobs announcement subverts that story by showing tangible proof of a breach in the wall.
Finally, the story of Microsoft's dominance is a very well-entrenched one, and Apple is subverting that too, with their successful move into CE with the iPod, and their domination of the online music market. Microsoft is seen to be reeling, off-balance and fighting hard to keep up--not the usual MS story over the past decade. Therefore worthy of a story.
The GP's concerns don't apply to spatial resolution but they do apply to color, which in fact is interpolated from sets of pixels. So while it might affect how many black/white line pairs you can resolve, it will affect the subtle gradations of color in a photograph.
These are two attributes of any capture medium that will affect the perception of the image at any viewing distance. Greater color resolution leads to cleaner tones and smoother gradations. Greater microcontrast increases the perception of sharpness and resolution.
For these reasons a photographer with a good eye can pick a LF image out of a group of lower res images, even at pretty low res or print size. That's true whether you're talking digital or film. Simply having a larger capture area improves the actual *and perceived* quality of the image, assuming a constant final print size.
Look at these Velvia sky images scanned at 3200 dpi (about 15 Mpixel); if I saw that degree of noise in my digital camera at ISO 50 or 100, I'd send it to the repair shop.
The sky noise in those images is an artifact of the digital scanning process. Velvia viewed through a loupe on a light table does not look like that.
And since we're on the subject, if I got a Velvia slide back with the weak colors you see in most digital pictures, I'd ask for my money back and tell the lab to refresh their chemicals.
And, frankly, a good digital P&S will beat your 35mm film camera in image quality in most cases.
Maybe if you have no idea how to choose a film or use a 35mm camera.
All of that can be simulated in software.
I'm guessing you're an engineer and not a photographer, with a statement like that.
Digital has some great advantages but let's not go overboard on the capabilities of digital capture and software. Individual films have "looks" that software can only approximate. It's like the difference between hearing a violin in person and playing the "violin" sound on a synthesizer. Even on a great synthesizer it's just not all there.
Notice I'm not talking about just "resolution" here, but rather the way film interacts with light, which includes color, grain, and the over and under "shoulders" (how it drops into shadow or fades into highlights). Many photographers still choose film for some or all shots because of the look.
A 4x5 image will, certainly, make your 35mm look like crap, but mostly because of tonal range, not resolution..."
Nope, it's the resolution.
In a way you're both right--it's color resolution. Not only are large format films capable of resolving a a greater number of line pairs per mm than 35mm (assuming the same final print size), they are also capable of resolving a greater number of individual colors per mm. This leads directly to an appearance of clearer, cleaner tones.
National Geographic photographers have shot with 35mm film almost exclusively until very recently, and their prints are regularly shown at up to 6 x 4 feet in the Natl. Geo. display galleries on their first floor. Maybe not quite "wall size" but that is pretty good.
Properly exposed, low-speed 35mm slide film holds resolution surprisingly well. The tough part is usually printing it, actually, because pretty much every printing process (analog or digital) enhances grain. But as it's possible to tell from a slide show (which de-emphasizes grain), there is a ton of resolving power in the good films.
Using a 6mp Nikon D100, I would put a stitched image of landscape up against a LF print, depending on how many images comprise the stitch. You can get an over 125 MP image by stitching frames 6 wide by 4 high, for instance.
Yes, creating stitched images can be a pain and it requires heavy attention to detail to get it right. The same is true of LF. And it's only really good for static scenes--also true of LF.
When you place a CD into your computer and press play, Windows Media Player takes information about the CD and phones home with it, to get the track and CD information to display in the little window. Same with Real. Same with Winamp.
Sure, you might say: "but that's only to get the CD and song info." I say: prove it.
You have no idea what happens with that data once it leaves your machine. For all you know, Microsoft and Real have aggregate records of how many times you've played Dark Side of the Moon, including at what time and date, and whether you've burned it into your library or not.
If you don't have a problem with phoning home for the CD and track info, I can only conclude that your issue lies not with the phoning home, but with the fact that it's then used to present an ad. In other words you don't care if it's spyware as long as it doesn't serve an ad. That's a different flavor of gripe.
BTW: iTunes is the only player I've used that does NOT automatically grab CD and track info. I have to request that it go out and get them.
An orbit is not just things falling down, it also requires a tangential velocity within a specific range. Gas spiraling into a black hole does have a tangential velocity, but it's not within the range create a orbit. In other words, yes, it was never in orbit.
I just bought iWork a few weeks ago, and had to enter a CD key when I installed it.
ID proponents are not looking outside of science to explain how the natural world works. What they are doing is questioning how the natural order came to be.
You are wrong, looking outside of science is exactly what intelligent design proponents do. It is NOT a central tenet of intelligent design that God simply designed and started the universe and 12 billion years later here we are. That in fact is a reasonable tenet and compatible with modern science.
NO, what intelligent design proponents propose is that certain structures in living beings are so complex that it is nearly infinitely unlikely that they would have arisen through the "blind chance" of evolution. In addition they purport to perform statistical tests that reveal the hidden presence of willful design in the similarities between types of life.
At least educate yourself about a movement before you defend it. Intelligent design, as a movement, holds that some powerful intelligence outside of nature has willfully guided the evolutionary process. Whether this is how YOU define "intelligent design" or not, this is what you're referring to when you refer to "intelligent design" as a movement.
Obsolete! Too big! Too old!
You fucking suck and I hope this annoys you.
(There's your first case, you can thank me later.)
(unless this gets modded funny...uh oh...)
The world has looked for uranium much harder than they have looked for any other naturally occurring substance.
Uranium is the most strategically important resource on this planet--far more important than oil or any precious metal. Governments directly fund exploration for it, and reward those who find it richly. As a result, uranium is a far more economically lucrative resource than oil (per unit) and has been for over 50 years. And unlike oil, it announces its presence...anyone can look for it with a cheap geiger counter.
Uranium has been looked for as hard as, if not harder, than oil. The problem is simply that there is just not very much of it in concentrations great enough to extract.
However, they also do have only a 2.3% market share.
Knowing absolute market share of a company is useless for competitive analysis unless you also know the equivalent numbers for its competitors. Here are the rest of the numbers from your link.
#1 - Dell - 18%
#2 - HP - 16%
#3 - Lenovo/IBM - 7.7%
#4 - Acer - 4.7%
#5 - Fujitsu - 3.8%
I think a lot of people would be surprised to learn that the market share leader, Dell, has only 18% market share.
The common assumption is that Apple's 2.3% market share is terrible because of Window's dominating market share. But this is a false comparison, because Windows is software and Apple sells computers (software + hardware). When comparing computer companies, the relative size of Apple is put into proper perspective...the factor between Apple and the leader of their industry (Dell) is less than 8x, not the 43x that is commonly assumed.
Apple is a very competitive computer company.
First, Apple computers are in fact manufactured by Asian OEM companies, under contract with Apple. Apple is essentially a design firm; all manufacturing is outsourced. So your basis of comparison is flawed from the start.
Second, Apple is one of the top 10 largest computer companies in the world by sales volume. IDC reports that Apple's worldwide desktop market share in Q4 2005 was 1.75%. This ranks them in 9th, after:
Acer - 2.17%
NEC - 2.19%
Lenovo - 2.74%
Gateway - 3.00%
Fujitsu - 3.12%
IBM - 4.18%
HP - 15.28%
Dell - 17.30%
Note that this list only adds up just over 50%--almost half of all computer sales worldwide are from companies with a smaller market share (and therefore sales volume) than Apple.
There was a time before Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Therefore there is no reason to make assumptions about what life "would" be like without these institutions--we have decades of data about what it actually *was* like.
Here's the summary--there was greater relief in between the socio-economic classes. The successful and well-off were very successful and well-off because there was little economic or regulatory drag on their success. But the destitute and poor were really destitute and really poor, with no safety net to protect them or help them better their lot in life.
Providing such safety nets benefits everyone, including the captains of industry. An educated and healthy population is a productive population. And in fact the data bear this out--since enactment of many of the social programs, the U.S. has grown from a successful and influential nation to the most economically and militarily powerful nation on earth.
And it's funny you mention Switzerland after that rant, because they have a tightly regulated health care system with mandated universal coverage, a well-funded public education system, a well-funded social insurance program, and mandatory gun training. If we're going to emulate the Swiss, we ought to at least acknowledge, if not understand, their system as a whole.
And I have to say I agree with Metcalfe--it was a lot of fun. In 9 months the company went from 10 employees to 100, and back down to 25. 3 months later it was dead. I was employee #12 and helped build a cool Web site in a well-funded, fun environment, working with mostly happy, smart, effective people. And we laughed behind our backs at the fakes and blowhards.
Yes it sucked to get laid off. But I stayed in touch with co-workers and eventually it led to my current, very stable job.
And the "dotcom scars" are a badge of honor that will only increase in value as I get older. I was there at the turbulent founding of an industry. It's like an exclusive club--"yeah I got axed in December 2000 right before the holidays", "hey me too!"
"And by induction, all odd numbers are prime. Sometimes patterns really do stop. Even in history."
Not all odds are prime, but no primes are even.
Patterns don't start or stop, they're just misinterpreted or misunderstood.