Microsoft Office has built-in help for people with disabilities, such as voice synthesizers, special screen readers and enlargers, Winske said. But he said OpenDocument-based products do not yet.
OpenDocument is a standard format for documents that anyone can use. It doesn't have anything to do with voice synthesizing or special screen readers. That's the editor/viewing application's responsibility or capability.
You are witnessing ignorance when someone claims a format is insufficient because a suite of applications supports more functionality.
Microsoft's eager to offer plug-ins for nearly any other proprietary file format. It just seems that the second someone tries to give something they worked on away for free, Microsoft starts criticizing it as being too slow for the user.
'The process, quite frankly, was driven by one individual in a very powerful position (Kriss) issuing a memo to an individual in a less powerful position (Quinn). Then he was told to get it done and forget about any obstacles,'
And what's wrong with that? Happens all the time. You put a person in a powerful position and they make executive decisions. They are busy so they delegate it to someone else. I'm waiting for the reason that this was a bad move. Do you expect a board to discuss and delegate on every issue down to what file format is used by the government? Do you want the process to require that much time and resource?
Nobody's crapping bricks when the sewage administrator is mandating standardized units being used on reports for the city's waterways and sewers now, are they? Won't somebody please think about the vertically disabled people that like to report their height in centimeters, not inches so that it's a larger number and they feel taller?
<sarcasm>My god, the state's IT Division is trying to advise the state government on what file format to adopt. What is this world coming to?</sarcasm>
After delivering his speech, John Winske shook hands with Steve Ballmer & was seen struggling to drag away a visibly overladened burlap sack with a giant green '$' on the front of it.
In 2008, Anderson suggests 15.5 million units in homes for the Xbox 360, 13.5 million for PS3, and 6.8 million for Wii.' Is the Wii really going to trail by so much, or do the analysts not 'get it'?
The analysts probably get it. But their talking sepeculation based on economics. Economics is an in-exact science. More specifically, it's an observational science--much like weather forecasting.
Problem is, we'll never be able to say, "Hypothetically, if all three had came out at the same time, PS3 would have carried strong through 2009." Why can't we say that? Because we observe one experiment (what really happens) and we have no control over the variables and the control factors in the experiment. You can't apply the scientific process to much of economics so why is it considered a science? Things like the Phillips Curve hold true for 30 years and then suddenly fall flat on their face so now it's not so much a curve as a movable line that can be placed anywhere automagically.
It's almost painfully obvious that there's very little pertinent data to observe to make this assumption about the XBox, so why make any predictions at all?! Oh, that's right, attention & web traffic.
I can think of a lot of things I'd like to ask him. Pick which ever one seems best.
First I'll state my question in the form of a question: What do you think it is that gives Futurama such a unique kind of humor? Do you think that only a small part of the population finds Futurama funny?
More specifically, I enjoy the humor in Futurama. Maybe it's because I'm a nerd and appreciate the N-NP references or maybe it's because I read a lot and I like obscure references (or perhaps even the two are inherently married). What I can't seem to understand is why I like Futurama so much.
You do a great job on the voices and the writing is pretty good. But every so often there will just be these little "intellectual" jokes left and right that just make me laugh every time I see them. Some shows try to be scientific and just dribble the facts down the leg of their pants. It annoys me to no end. Futurama seems to manage to make fun of itself and in the process keep me entertained.
I don't want to sound like a snob but I wonder if Futurama suffers from being too genre or personality specific. Does it target only graduate level people with its nerdy humor?
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I'd also like to ask a second question: Do you select what shows you work on by their quality?
You've been in a lot of my favorite shows as a voice actor ever since I was a kid. I've also noticed that from your IMDB entry that you really stick to some genuinely funny shows. There are some where I've never found the shows funny but that's just me. I've always wondered if you only like to do shows that you yourself find funny. Do you think that many people in your business do this? I mean, assuming you're not starving and dying for work.
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Third question: Why do you think Futurama was cancelled?
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Fourth Question: What were your favorite voices you've done? What were your most hated?
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Fifth Question: When you're approached to do a voice for a show, how is the type of voice (sound, texture, pitch, etc) determined? Is there a line of people ready to do their interpretation of a character? Do you come up with your own idea based on the character's personality and then sit there refining it with the show's creators/writers? What does this process entail? Do you think of someone you know with the same personality and mimic their voice as a base for the character? If not, where do you get your ideas from?
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Sixth Question: What made you want to do voice acting as a profession? It must not be very glamorous if the only way a fan could recognize you is by your voice, why'd you choose it?
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Seventh Question: What exercises (if any) do you use to warm up your voice when you perform? Is it just something you're naturally good at or do you go through daily techniques and practicing like a musician or singer?
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Eighth Question: Have you ever used computer enhancements for your voices? Does this ever occur?
The recent arrest of 17 men in the Toronto area on terrorism charges proves that Canada already has effective law enforcement tools, Geist argues.
Countries constantly arrest people on terrorism charges. Luckily, at least in the United States, we have a fairly unbiased court system that gives everyone a fair trial.
I would like to see the false positives and true negatives that result from these arrests. That is, I would like to see a two by two matrix such that:
Breakdown of arrests from statute blah
# of arrest | # of arrest+ +conviction | no conviction
est. # of | population violators | count
The bottom left square & upper right square would give you an idea of:
The effectiveness of this statute or law.
The error rate.
How prone it is to being abused.
An attempt at quantifying how much life, liberty and pursuit of happiness we have wrongfully intruded upon.
Do you need more laws & procedures to catch the lower left block?
For other countries (like China) where the trial system may not be present, I would like to see them publish trials online and in print from the unadulterated viewpoint of the prosecutor and the defendant in regards to each of these statutes. Hell, I'd be interested in skimming those daily for every country! I think that if countries were more open about their success rates & their law enforcement convictions, we'd be in much better states to criticize them. More importantly, the criticism could be warranted and productive.
When I was in college, I was 'taught' how to develop software.
And so started a cycle of hatred towards methodologies about how to be productive in application development.
To me, the wild wild web is still here. I still get my kicks from coding without set in stone documentation and I still hate schedules.
I've always had the view that every project was a wild animal. Worse yet, it's a wild animal in sheep's clothing. And you approach the sheep with a shepherd's hook. When the veil is lifted and you see man eating marsupial with alligator teeth and a scorpion's tail, you have no choice but to throw the shepherd's hook at them and give it all you've got.
And this is how I approach managing a development project. You remember prior projects and throw together a bag of tools that have worked before and then you set to taming the beast. If you tell yourself "Waterfall works every time" then you're just going to find yourself with a shepherd's hook facing a lion or a bear.
Instead, you learn to adapt to every situation and that's the important thing. The rules are few and loose. The customer has the power to destroy everything and you have to deal with it. The best development is done on the fly with just enough documentation to convey the big idea of what's going on and keep everyone on that page. Given real life schedules and timed deadlines, there is such a thing as too much documentation.
Agile development is better in that it allows you more play and doesn't inhibit spur of the moment innovation. I think some of my most demoralizing moments have been when I realized some great new possibility for a project only to have my manager tell me that so much documentation would have to change that "maybe we'll put that in next year's scope." I find this to be ridiculous.
What was happening was people were starting to assume that waterfall was the silver bullet for project management. "What kind of project is it?" "I don't care, we're using the waterfall." And the big problem is that the waterfall is only considered 'adaptable' if you're ok with reworking everything from step one. Is this really necessary for every project though?
Another new thing we have these days is a "framework" that fits a specific type of problem well. You can throw these together on the fly and have very little documentation because the framework provides a well known implementation strategy (see Spring's MVC).
It is my opinion that using an incremental deliverable approach with frequent customer meetings and executive power at any point in the project is the most successful strategy. The "rules" you have to adhere to are up to you and should be purely a case by case basis.
There has been a lot of talk lately about what the 'next big thing' in development will be.
Why do we constantly look for the "next big thing" when the "big thing" is simply experience?
I think the important thing here is the possibility that these eyes could be giving the coffee fund a human feature.
It's entirely possible that the people who were just taking coffee before thought the coffee fund to be more of a faceless corporate operation run by management at their company. Perhaps they thought they weren't paid enough and so it was 'ok' to take coffee.
They didn't feel like they were doing something wrong because they could easily justify their free coffee--plus it made them work harder! Even better for the company providing it.
If you look at the eyes, they look very concerned and hurt. I think that this probably triggered emotions of the coffee fund being an employee thing and you weren't taking coffee from the company but your fellow man. That's why this is interesting and that's why I don't think that the people who were taking coffee ever thought they were really doing something wrong.
I once was very good friends with a card shop owner. In the back two corners of his store, he had two very huge obtrusive obnoxious surveillance cameras angled into the store. I had been in the back of the store to play cards with him every now and then and had never seen any television sets. So I asked him one day where the feeds went on his cameras so that he could catch people shoplifting. He just laughed and told me that the feeds didn't need to go anywhere. And if I looked closer, those cameras were fake.
I would suspect that anything symbolizing or triggering our mind to think of surveillance would cause us to be more honest. It would be interesting to instead of eyes use pictures of surveillance cameras pointed at the coffee. Or, perhaps simply the words, "We are watching you!" I mean, it's only natural for us to react to what we see.
This article has some very interesting examples of successful biomimicry. But, it leaves out the many failed attempts of biomimicry.
Even so, they are not perfect models. Natural selection isn't just a matter of physiological perfection, but how an organism's traits suit it for a particular environment, scientists say. For this reason, Bandyopadhyay stresses it is important not to just copy nature's work, but to take the best parts of it and apply it elsewhere.'
This is something very important. But even where the "best parts of it" apply, it still may not be the best option for man.
Such as the struggle of flight. You'll notice that many attempts at flying involved mimicking birds. We didn't get it right until we noticed that our materials functioned better under a stable non-morphing wing structure. Planes do not fly at all the same way a bird or insect does and it took us a while to realize this.
I think it is naïve to assume a lot of things can be mimicked from nature but it is interesting to see the successes. Just remember that a lot of times there are more simple mechanical alternatives such as non-morphing planes, the wheel & digital signals that work well or better in areas that mother nature already has inventions.
For this post, please select your ending paragraph depending on your views of creavolution:
*Warning! Evolution assumed below!*
Remember that evolution is simply random mutations. The most successful being the smallest and useful changes. Just because some is successful for an organism in no way means we can adapt that into our technology. I find it interesting to look to random mutations for inspiration but a possible pit fall if you're relying on that for innovation such as the early attempts at flight.
*Warning! Creationism assumed below!*
Remember that God created animals in a non-technologically perfect form since their purpose is to serve humans. If He had created them perfectly, they would be better than humans. Therefore, we should not rely solely on them for inspiration in our technology as they are not optimized by Him. They were deliberately made to be inferior to humans so that we could harness them and use them for our needs. We should also avoid from mimicking God's work as we may anger Him and incur the fury of the Lord Almighty (that's not good).
You might notice that if you click a link with a swgemu.com base, it redirects you to Crayola, Teletubbies or Lego's site. This is because of how the hosting service is implemented. Almost all the swgemu sites I go to require me to cut and past links into the browser and to make sure they are preceded with http://./ So for instance, paste "http://forums.swgemu.com/viewtopic.php?p=24081#24 081" into your browser and you should see the linked forum.
This is, of course, with the exception of the screenshots hosted by gamerspace or the video (which really just seems to be a transition of the stills). Note, I'm not sure if the YouTube video is the same as the one from the mirrors, I'm still downloading that.
I should also point out that the forums are tightly moderated as swgemu is not looking for trouble with legal issues regarding SOE. I think they've had tangles with them in the past and don't enjoy discussing it. I don't actively post on swgemu but am thrilled by the idea of what they are trying to create. The concern by SOE is not only stealing paying customers but also the fact that if this is open sourced, then anyone will be able to see the reverse engineering work which means a whole lot more attempts on hacking the servers.
Most importantly, there are no dates set whatsoever for this project. I am just sitting back and waiting for hopefully a chance to play a game I once knew and loved. A game that exists no more. Pre-CU SWG.
I guess it had such a huge client that most of the functionality had to be sitting on each client machine and the server required some interaction. Hopefully this reverse engineering provides a stable alternative. If you'd like to contribute, help them with the datapack done in a Wiki format! If you're interested in development for the team and know C/C++, check out this post.
Both representatives hung up on me, thinking I was trying to con them or something. Any advice to what this could be?
Here's some advice: Don't take that shit.
You're a human being. But more importantly, you're a paying customer. Call them up, get the guy's name. Inform him that if he hangs up, you'll contact his supervisor. Then ask him what zip code these calls were made from, they should be able to figure that out. Verify that it's something reasonable.
If they won't believe you and you can convince them you're not making the calls, try calling the number and letting your phone ring. See if anyone picks up.
If that doesn't work, simply demand they change your number for you.
If they refuse to do that, be sure to inform them where you're taking your business.
Personally, I'd be pretty damned pissed if anyone ever hung up on me when I was simply inquiring as to why they were charging me money. In fact, I know right where I'd file that complaint.
If I had a credit card associated with the account, I'd call my credit card company and dispute the charge. You explain to the credit card company that they hung up on you twice. What the operator will do is put you on hold while they contact T-Mobile. The operator should introduce you to the T-Mobile rep and try to resolve the issue. If T-Mobile has a call from a credit card company, I'm certain they'll be a bit more understanding when they're looking at the possibility of having to chase down a stopped payment.
I think I'll sign up for this and store a few of these numbers on my phone. I hope they remain active, that way I'll always be able to call the RIAA about the DRM on my sister's iPod or even just to remind them that their invited to accompany me and a certain politician on a "hunting trip."
Something that I do when I'm drinking at 2 or 3 am is drunk dial people. This is pretty much a curse as I proceed to leave indiscernible/garbled phone messages for my victims.
Thanks to this website, I'll now be able to leave those messages on RIAA answering machines. If I get an RIAA representative on the phone, it will be perfect because:
I've never lost an argument when drunk. At least, nobody's ever not conceded to me.
I'm twice as opinionated and polarized when I'm drunk compared to when I'm sober.
I constantly like to give people a "piece of my mind" and/or "settle their hash" when wrecked.
I love to sing when I'm drunk. This is bad because it usually comes out in an a-melodic fashion.
Phone conversations with me can last an hour or more. Sometimes taking as much as 10 minutes to figure out who I am, what I'm doing, where I am & (the hardest one) why I'm calling you.
So, as you can see, there are so many good reasons for me to put the RIAA on the top of my drunk dialing list. Not because I want to call them and tell them how much I'm going to miss after everyone graduates and moves away... but instead to let them know my true inner feelings about DRM, who they are and what they do.
I see this article was still in Chinese when I read it. Allow me to translate it into English:
Ministry of Information Industry (MII), Internet Society of China (ISC) and China Communications Standards Association (CCSA) launched a national anti-spam campaign on June 21, reports Nanfang Daily.
Translation: "The MII decided it was time to start a campaign that looks like it will help the people. The ISC & CCSA were informed of this decision."
An insider at ISC said MII has set up a hotline at 01-12321 for spam-related tip-offs and is preparing to send out one million anti-spam notices.
Translation: "The MII instructed the Nanfang Daily to print this. Like every other government controlled media outlet, the Nanfang Daily immediately complied. The MII has constructed methods for witch hunts and omitted the precise definition of 'spam' or what the criteria consists of. There are roughly one million people the MII doesn't really care for and they will receive notices informing them that they had better go underground or face prosecution without a trial."
The report said that professional training will be offered for 1,000 email administrators and that 20,000 anti-spam volunteers will be recruited.
Translation: "One thousand citizens will be trained to point the finger at anyone the government doesn't like using an ISP. This will prevent anyone from speculating that it is just one person or the government doing this. It will also aid in making this look like a benefit for the people. A lucky 20,000 other individuals will learn to play ball for the government and this will go on their permanent records--which might lead to good fortune."
I'm going to take a stab in the dark and wager that SPAM simply means "e-mailing the way the government doesn't want you to" in Chinese. Whether that be based on the content or motive of your e-mails. The government seems to be implementing laws that have no clear definition in order to devise a method by which they can jail/fine/deter anyone they want. And it will most likely be met with synchronous thundering applause of one billion people clapping robotically togethor.
Americans lose their freedoms in the name of fighting terrorism. Now the Chinese will lose their freedoms in the name of fighting SPAM. *sigh* Canada keeps looking warmer and warmer.
If there are that many people that desperate to get into a university, the obvious question would be, why don't they just open more schools?
I certainly hope you are joking about that last statement.
I should start by saying I am an American and therefore have probably been exposed to much propaganda against the Chinese government. Despite this, I have tried to educate myself on the current state of China & would like to point out an RSC article that talks about the history of higher education in China. Here's an excerpt from it:
A brief history of higher education reform in China
1949
China's education system was based on the Russian model. Universities and colleges were divided to form specialist institutes and many universities were moved into rural areas to even out provision. These institutes were controlled by central government which also controlled the distribution of graduate students.
1966-1976
All formal education in China was stopped during the Cultural Revolution. During the later years, people entered university as students only by a process of recommendation. Many subjects were discontinued.
1977
The education system was restructured to give the system that operates today. The national university entrance exam was reintroduced and a comprehensive range of subjects became available with unified curricula for university degree courses.
1986
The government introduced the structural reform of higher education. Many institutes merged to form more comprehensive units. Mergers of centrally controlled institutions led to 72 'national' higher education institutes (HEIs). Mergers of locally controlled institutions led to 257 new HEIs.
1999
Tuition fees introduced for all university students. Fees are in the range Yuan 3000-6000 (£200-400), depending on the subject studied.
2001
Following China's entry into the World Trade Organization, new types of higher education establishments were introduced. These included independently funded universities and colleges, independent university-affiliated colleges for specialist subjects; and cooperation colleges that use foreign investment or foreign universities to set up an affiliated college or international university.
Wikipedia offers a much longer explanation including the criteria by which you were eligible for aid:
* top students encouraged to attain all-around excellence;
* students specializing in education, agriculture, forestry, sports, and marine navigation; and
* students willing to work in poor, remote, and border regions or under harsh conditions, such as in mining and engineering.
The most important change is the one from 1999 where tuition fees were introduced. It is my understanding (though I could be wrong) that money is often tight and your standard laborer in China makes roughly $50-$100 USD per month. Can you expect them to afford tuition rates of £200-400? Not really.
I guess it would require a miraculous grant to get a higher education in China and I'm certain that those are a limited number that is quite small compared to a population of one billion. Even then, the best place to find secondary education is abroad as most of the world's leading universities are in the United States.
This isn't how a Communist country is supposed to be run. There isn't supposed to be any "tuition fees" for education. There isn't supposed to be competition dividing people into two classes (one worthy of secondary education, one not). In a perfect Communist society, I was born to do something and as long as I work hard and do it, I get the exact same education you get. I ha
I'm not a doctor but I couldn't agree with this article more. I grew up picking rock, bailing hay & working with animals. Countless times I'd come home with dust, alfalfa or straw everywhere (eyes, nose, clothes, etc). I worked with a lot of people and every member of the family worked as soon as you were able to lift something. What was odd was that you had entire families and not one of them would have allergies.
Now, I'm sure there are exceptions but I think that it would be an interesting survey to compare people who work in dirty grimy environments with people who work in corporate America. I spent my childhood running through the weeds, pulling wood ticks out of my hair and watching my mom put iodine all over my cuts & scrapes (hurts like a b*tch). Although by some people's standards I grew up in utter squalor, it was a lot of fun.
I have two cousins who moved to Minneapolis and grew up in a house with an air filtration system. The tiniest pollen or cat dander will send them into sneezing fits. Those air filtration systems are more harm than good in my opinion.
To my knowledge, I don't have any allergic reactions or hay fever. Now, this is just my personal experience but when I lived out in the country, I didn't know anyone except my teacher who had hay fever. Once I went to college at age 18, I met tons of people with hay fever. Is this correlation due to the fact that our childhoods were spent in filth or is it simply because people with allergies move away from those areas? I'm not sure but considering that allergies can "develop" later in life, I'm prone to believe that the less you are exposed to tiny particles, the more your body wigs out when your immune system encounters them.
If you're a parent, I would suggest getting your toddler/infant out to the park as often as possible and let them get some fresh air. Yes, it has smog & pollen in it but everyone has to deal with these their entire lives.
There's no analogy to be used here, it's just simply speculation. They've done this study with lab mice, now why don't they do a sampling of populations and ask people whether they work in an office with a controlled air system or outdoors/farm work where they're exposed to plants & animals daily.
The human body is extremely adaptive. Anti-bodies are perfect examples of an immune system being exposed to something and then being able to deal with it later. I speculate that if people aren't exposed to dust, pollen, dander, etc. then their bodies will have a much more difficult time discerning them from actually harmful foreign particles.
Well, the article doesn't say much about what the army is supposed to do except kill them. I highly doubt that's the strategy and, after being raised on farms in my youth, it's easier to use a trap or target the nests than to get down on your hands and knees and kill each and every one of them. In fact, even if you killed all the visible ones, how do you kill/remove all the tadpoles and eggs from the ponds and water in Australia? It would be obviously stupid to try to introduce another foreign species that might rampage about the land. Especially one that would be immune to the toad's toxin.
It's odd that they deploy the military considering that current government research has been directed towards isolating a sex pheremone to disrupt the breeding cycle. The government fact sheet suggests removing the jelly strings of eggs from water & humane execution of adult cane toads. There are guides on Cane Toad control that talk about using traps but what do you do with the toads after you trap them. Will the Australian military be trudging through wetlands and collecting toad eggs while smashing the adults with specialized mallets? No one is alluding to the method of the military.
Perhaps this is some left over funding that was appropriated to the military and now they feel like they have to spend it? Either way, I don't live in North Eastern Australia so I don't know what level of effect these toads are truly having.
Here's a humorous Google Video on the cane toad. It's more just a dabble in CGI by film makers but I thought it worth mentioning given the topic.
For those software companies that don't have an academic injection strategy, I suggest you develop one.
Depending on the complexity/use of your software, you put it either in the primary schools (K-12) or secondary schools (colleges). And you make it free and secure. Use license pools/server or anything to get your product into the learning process. That's where the money is. That's where you ensure your future.
Back in my undergrad days, I had access to Matlab, Pro Engineer, Mathematica, MSDN licenses, Windows XP, Rational Rose, the list goes on. I think it was Macintosh that originally discovered that putting your technology into the hands of your youth ensures your future. Why? Because Americans are predominantly lazy and we hate to climb learning curves. Macs especially build a sort of security sense that the user is safe and the machine is super friendly.
You might call this the "bottom up" approach to seeding the public with your product. Because the students aren't customers but one day they will be raised to be customers and they will decide what will be used. If you don't believe this model works, you're a fool. Time and time again I've caught myself saying, I wish I could just script this in Matlab and let it dump it to an Excel sheet. It's not that it would be easier, it's just that I know precisely how to do computations in Matlab due to my undergrad years of using it.
Now you have Microsoft trying to stop a "top down" effect in Massachusetts. Whereby they try their "MSDN Academic Alliance" strategy targeting a state's public schools. But why are they only targeting Massachusetts? Probably because of the ODF movement in the state government. If the government mandates that everyone (schools included) use ODF files and ODF software, where does that leave Microsoft? No longer the primary tool of the children, that's where.
What's the lesson to learn from this article? The squeaky wheel gets the oil!
Not enough funding for computers and software at your school? Well then, simply alert your local media and just try to enforce the ODF standard. I think you'll find that Microsoft will suddenly come (with the national media) to meet all your software needs!
There was an article a couple days ago on TGDaily that stated the Samsung's first blu-ray player to be a grand.
I don't know why an article on Slashdot is reporting Sony's to be $1500 when Best Buy is already taking pre-orders for both the Sony BDP-S1 & Samsung BD-P1000 models each equally priced at a thousand dollars. Even the Froogle search for it seems to come out on the one grand consensus.
It seems a lot of articles have been against Sony while this fear of Sony's set top player being overpriced is relatively unfounded. As we all know, this shall prove interesting if the PS3s offer the same functionality for much less.
If both players debut at $1,000, perhaps this will be a war one in quality instead of price? Ah, who am I kidding--whoever licenses pr0n easiest/fastest will come out on top (no pun intended).
I don't intend to run out and buy one because the only movie I've seen advertised for blu-ray is the second Underworld movie. And I don't even know which kind of blu-ray player it's for (customer confusion indeed)!
Just a side note, the same Reuters article is in The Washington Post and I've linked the print format to avoid having to click through pages and view less ads.
There are some customers (government/military included) that are aware of the two concepts of precision and recall. Before you groan and skip this post because you recall those words from all classifying algorithms, you should take note that there are two stages we have yet to meet in this respect.
One is simply improving precision without sacrificing recall. When I search for 'horn' in Google, how many of those searches are relevant? I was thinking about a French horn (instrument) and the first link brings me to a society about them. The next three links, however, do not. You might say, "Well, gee, you should have put 'French' in your search" but is this really necessary? So there is some money to be made in "learning" search engines that tailor themselves to the user or perhaps the results could be displayed intuitively in domains of knowledge (a la Clusty). So that I can select a node that applies to the correct searching term and see all results returned below that. Have you ever wished to view your search results in a format other than a linear display of ranked results? The documents are related in more than one dimension, you know. As computing power increases, I suspect there will be room to display them in two dimensions (heat/area mapping, nodes & vertices on a plane) and three dimensions (spatial 3D engines with nodes & vertices in space).
The second stage is giving the user the power to adjust precision versus recall. Even a graphical interface that shows the F-measure relationship between precision and recall would be helpful to consider in the search engine wars. Say you give the user some control through a slider AJAX interface of a threshold ß. But the threshold isn't simply the "Google score cut off" or even a term frequency cutoff. Instead, it's applied to be a "relevance" threshold. You would score relevance by fingerprinting frequency, specificity, clustering and other useful tools by using a domain ontology or taxonomy.
Another big thing that is missing is identifying what kind of data you are searching. Social data? Scientific data? Historical data? etc. Perhaps I'm only interested in who's who to Stephen Hawking. I'd search for him and flip through nodes of separation from him to other people.
The current search sites also only tend to favor key-word regular expressions. What about searching with raw text or entire paragraphs? If you want to see an interesting demo of this, visit Collexis' Demo Site which alludes to a whole new kind of searching.
The key to entering the market as a competitor with Google is to pick up Google's slack and to try to pose yourself as a complimentary service to Google. Google is terrible at closed domain searches but amazingly efficient at open domain searches. You don't want to compete with them so fill a different part of the market. Google benefits from simple design, so go to an advanced flashy complex design. Most people aren't looking for that but the people that are have nowhere to go.
The Economist is alluding to potential leadership problems inside Google. Who cares? That's not going to be Google's downfall. Google's downfall will be an new intuitive way to search and the only thing that will prevent their downfall is if they buyout the company or bone up on the technology.
The search-engine battle hasn't even hit its stride.
Slashdot gets hundreds of submissions every day. Every day our authors go through these submissions, and try to select the most interesting, timely, and relevant ones to post to the homepage.
Or, as in this case, any story with a headline that will start an instant flame war.
It distributes itself to all your MSN contacts by sending a video called 'Fantasma.'
Not to be confused with the Spanish release of the film "Ghost" starring Whoopie Goldberg, Patrick Swayze, Demi Moore and a rotating lump of clay (possibly the only bearable thing in the movie).
A CNN poll taken recently showed that 98.1% of US citizens would rather have the MSN virus on their computer instead of the 1990 film in Spanish.
It's so unfortunate that we haven't invented the technology to "unwatch" films yet.
So I connect to the MSN network but through a nice free little app called GAIM.
My friends often try to send me files or pictures or videos through the MSN network and it doesn't work. They get annoyed and tell me to "just use MSN." I'm told that GAIM is stupid & crappy for not supporting these features.
Really makes you wonder if the people who developed gaim couldn't figure out how to make the videos/pictures stream through the chat box... or if it was a design decision by choice to avoid hidden viruses that the codecs unpack in the media files. Probably the latter.
GAIM also works on a number of other chat networks--as chat clients should. Another thing about chat clients is that they should stick to limited functionality. There are way more secure ways to transfer files. I don't want a profile, I don't want it integrated with my operating system (married to the kernel), I don't want media streaming, I just want to chat.
"I think it's a true statement to say the Arctic Ocean is the least well understood body of water out there" -- Dr Seymour Laxon, UCL
I think that's because few other bodies of water have a massive chunk of ice in them... with many more smaller chunks floating around.
Funny things happen when you have solid H2O in liquid H2O that, on a large scale, are probably not well understood. I'm not a physicist but you have heat dissipation as Newton's Law of Cooling goes into effect and a multitude of climate issues. I can speculate on a few things:
As the water becomes warmer, it is more prone to evaporation on the surface from the sun. Previously, less water would evaporate and keep the water levels slightly higher but now the difference in temperature at the surface is less making the water more easily transferred into a vapor.
Gravity pulls down on the free floating icebergs and it displaces the water. These icebergs are shrinking or being reduced greatly so the water height in the vicinity lowers slightly while the water levels around the world rise slightly.
The tides are becoming stronger and as the amount of water on the surface of earth increases, so does the effect of the moon on it. The moon pulls least on water at the caps and even more so on water near the equator.
Some force (moon, internal gravity, spinning of the earth, sun, etc.) is causing the water to accumulate at the equator which in turn reduces the water at the poles.
Like I said, this is pure speculation and I haven't thought out in advance the above propositions. But I'm going to speculate that there's an unknown effect that occurs when massive bodies of ice are half submerged in water on a planet. The basis of this effect is probably known in physical and chemical fields of science but we just haven't put them together to figure it out. Hopefully we can figure it out as these "discoveries" are oftentimes the foundation for more work and more discoveries that benefit mankind. Translation: curiosity spurs innovation.
If there's one thing that Slashdot is good for, though, it's testing half cooked theories! My fellow colleagues, I welcome you to point out the scientific flaws in my above hypotheses!
Microsoft never hand signed a sheet of paper telling me that I would have my copy of "Longhorn" by the end of 2005 or even 2006.
It's a new operating system. More importantly, it's an operating system that has to compete with OSX, Linux, Unix & Windows XP. That's right, they are going to have to figure out someway to improve Windows XP. They aren't stuffing Madden 2005 into Madden 2006 and I hope they are taking their sweet ass time to rework some of the Windows internals that may have been a long time plague on the OS.
My point is that they're making something new and probably forging new ground. According to this article, they suffered the same thing a lot of projects have suffered. You project management plan looks great in Microsoft Project. Then you print it out and re-wallpaper the offices only to have the developers sift through it and go, "What the fsck?"
If Vista is as complicated as its specs say it is, I hope Microsoft takes another two years to get this done because I don't want to have to put up with Vista SP1, Vista SP2, Vista SP3, etc. down the line. I think games like WoW took a lot of time to make but it paid off to be a really stable engine with great features that blew everyone away. Microsoft could learn from that. You might upset some fans and you might piss your boss off but misinformation/miscommunication in the early stages of a project only lead to its downfall. If you can voice concern/dissent to your boss, I suggest you get a new job. We're human beings, we are fallible and we do have limits. Even if we're hand selected by Microsoft's HR department.
I'm reminded of a story about Hitler where the Allies had broken through French beaches at Normandy (unexpectedly) and Hitler's aides were at his house trying to figure out how they could wake Hitler up and inform him of the brigade of tanks rushing across the countryside towards them. Because they all feared for their lives, no one ended up waking him up and they lost a whole lot of ground & a few resources because of it. If you run your company through fear and people can't talk back to you, you'll end up like Hitler. Dead in a ditch with petrol all over you.
I'm also getting really sick and tired of people measuring a project's greatness by KLOC. It's also very frustrating to hear people brag about how many KLOC they write each year. That's great--now how do I know it's not riddled with bugs or a complete memory hog? What ever happened to the desire for elegant computer code? When I see a program that does something quickly and elegantly, my brain releases the same chemical that I used to get when I saw beautiful math proofs. I know this is the mark of the nerd but there's something very satisfying about it.
One last note, this MSDN blogging site does not care for Firefox. The right hand side of the text hangs over about an inch into the right bar side and it's annoying because the text spills onto the calendar. I certainly hope this doesn't happen on purpose.
... and have to pay half of that right back to the company for housing and food.
It should be noted that by "the company" they mean Foxconn, not Apple. I don't really care for Apple but it should be noted that they are outsourcing the business to create parts of their iPods. Everyone does this. Hell, I challenge you to find a company that knows specifically where every single component in its product is made.
Like all large corporations, I believe it's now in their best interest to make the most ethical choice regarding human rights. Even if it means charging another $10 per iPod.
Apple should be given the chance to investigate and cancel their contracts before they're torn apart. Otherwise, if you wanted to ruin a company you could set up a shill business that has factories down in Latin America where the workers are beaten. Then route the parts you are selling to the company you want through that distribution center and alert the American media.
Someone saying something positive about games? Someone is suggesting that healthy relationships can arise from gaming?
We need to stop that. Those stereotypes and social stigmas are time honored and sacred traditions. If we lose those, the terrorists have already won.
I need to be able to say, "Well, at least I didn't meet my wife online!" in order to point out how obviously better I am than everyone else. I got drunk at a bar and knocked my wife up and that's how I became happily married. My son and his son are going to do the same thing if I have anything to say about it!
This is change & I don't like it. We need to stay as static as possible and prevent this from becoming the norm. Sure kids in my day listened to rock music and went to dances despite what our parents said... but kids today go on the internet and I've seen the things on there--it's the devil!
Someone get me Jack Thompson, we need a man of religious convictions that will secure the sanctity of this nation!
Slashdot Mirror
You are witnessing ignorance when someone claims a format is insufficient because a suite of applications supports more functionality.
The real irony is that someone will probably write a plug-in for MS products to use OpenDocument anyway.
Microsoft's eager to offer plug-ins for nearly any other proprietary file format. It just seems that the second someone tries to give something they worked on away for free, Microsoft starts criticizing it as being too slow for the user.
And what's wrong with that? Happens all the time. You put a person in a powerful position and they make executive decisions. They are busy so they delegate it to someone else. I'm waiting for the reason that this was a bad move. Do you expect a board to discuss and delegate on every issue down to what file format is used by the government? Do you want the process to require that much time and resource?
Nobody's crapping bricks when the sewage administrator is mandating standardized units being used on reports for the city's waterways and sewers now, are they? Won't somebody please think about the vertically disabled people that like to report their height in centimeters, not inches so that it's a larger number and they feel taller?
<sarcasm>My god, the state's IT Division is trying to advise the state government on what file format to adopt. What is this world coming to?</sarcasm>
After delivering his speech, John Winske shook hands with Steve Ballmer & was seen struggling to drag away a visibly overladened burlap sack with a giant green '$' on the front of it.
Problem is, we'll never be able to say, "Hypothetically, if all three had came out at the same time, PS3 would have carried strong through 2009." Why can't we say that? Because we observe one experiment (what really happens) and we have no control over the variables and the control factors in the experiment. You can't apply the scientific process to much of economics so why is it considered a science? Things like the Phillips Curve hold true for 30 years and then suddenly fall flat on their face so now it's not so much a curve as a movable line that can be placed anywhere automagically.
It's almost painfully obvious that there's very little pertinent data to observe to make this assumption about the XBox, so why make any predictions at all?! Oh, that's right, attention & web traffic.
I can think of a lot of things I'd like to ask him. Pick which ever one seems best.
First I'll state my question in the form of a question: What do you think it is that gives Futurama such a unique kind of humor? Do you think that only a small part of the population finds Futurama funny?
More specifically, I enjoy the humor in Futurama. Maybe it's because I'm a nerd and appreciate the N-NP references or maybe it's because I read a lot and I like obscure references (or perhaps even the two are inherently married). What I can't seem to understand is why I like Futurama so much.
You do a great job on the voices and the writing is pretty good. But every so often there will just be these little "intellectual" jokes left and right that just make me laugh every time I see them. Some shows try to be scientific and just dribble the facts down the leg of their pants. It annoys me to no end. Futurama seems to manage to make fun of itself and in the process keep me entertained.
I don't want to sound like a snob but I wonder if Futurama suffers from being too genre or personality specific. Does it target only graduate level people with its nerdy humor?
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I'd also like to ask a second question: Do you select what shows you work on by their quality?
You've been in a lot of my favorite shows as a voice actor ever since I was a kid. I've also noticed that from your IMDB entry that you really stick to some genuinely funny shows. There are some where I've never found the shows funny but that's just me. I've always wondered if you only like to do shows that you yourself find funny. Do you think that many people in your business do this? I mean, assuming you're not starving and dying for work.
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Third question: Why do you think Futurama was cancelled?
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Fourth Question: What were your favorite voices you've done? What were your most hated?
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Fifth Question: When you're approached to do a voice for a show, how is the type of voice (sound, texture, pitch, etc) determined? Is there a line of people ready to do their interpretation of a character? Do you come up with your own idea based on the character's personality and then sit there refining it with the show's creators/writers? What does this process entail? Do you think of someone you know with the same personality and mimic their voice as a base for the character? If not, where do you get your ideas from?
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Sixth Question: What made you want to do voice acting as a profession? It must not be very glamorous if the only way a fan could recognize you is by your voice, why'd you choose it?
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Seventh Question: What exercises (if any) do you use to warm up your voice when you perform? Is it just something you're naturally good at or do you go through daily techniques and practicing like a musician or singer?
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Eighth Question: Have you ever used computer enhancements for your voices? Does this ever occur?
I would like to see the false positives and true negatives that result from these arrests. That is, I would like to see a two by two matrix such that:
Breakdown of arrests from statute blahThe bottom left square & upper right square would give you an idea of:
- The effectiveness of this statute or law.
- The error rate.
- How prone it is to being abused.
- An attempt at quantifying how much life, liberty and pursuit of happiness we have wrongfully intruded upon.
- Do you need more laws & procedures to catch the lower left block?
For other countries (like China) where the trial system may not be present, I would like to see them publish trials online and in print from the unadulterated viewpoint of the prosecutor and the defendant in regards to each of these statutes. Hell, I'd be interested in skimming those daily for every country! I think that if countries were more open about their success rates & their law enforcement convictions, we'd be in much better states to criticize them. More importantly, the criticism could be warranted and productive.And so started a cycle of hatred towards methodologies about how to be productive in application development.
To me, the wild wild web is still here. I still get my kicks from coding without set in stone documentation and I still hate schedules.
I've always had the view that every project was a wild animal. Worse yet, it's a wild animal in sheep's clothing. And you approach the sheep with a shepherd's hook. When the veil is lifted and you see man eating marsupial with alligator teeth and a scorpion's tail, you have no choice but to throw the shepherd's hook at them and give it all you've got.
And this is how I approach managing a development project. You remember prior projects and throw together a bag of tools that have worked before and then you set to taming the beast. If you tell yourself "Waterfall works every time" then you're just going to find yourself with a shepherd's hook facing a lion or a bear.
Instead, you learn to adapt to every situation and that's the important thing. The rules are few and loose. The customer has the power to destroy everything and you have to deal with it. The best development is done on the fly with just enough documentation to convey the big idea of what's going on and keep everyone on that page. Given real life schedules and timed deadlines, there is such a thing as too much documentation.
Agile development is better in that it allows you more play and doesn't inhibit spur of the moment innovation. I think some of my most demoralizing moments have been when I realized some great new possibility for a project only to have my manager tell me that so much documentation would have to change that "maybe we'll put that in next year's scope." I find this to be ridiculous.
What was happening was people were starting to assume that waterfall was the silver bullet for project management. "What kind of project is it?" "I don't care, we're using the waterfall." And the big problem is that the waterfall is only considered 'adaptable' if you're ok with reworking everything from step one. Is this really necessary for every project though?
Another new thing we have these days is a "framework" that fits a specific type of problem well. You can throw these together on the fly and have very little documentation because the framework provides a well known implementation strategy (see Spring's MVC).
It is my opinion that using an incremental deliverable approach with frequent customer meetings and executive power at any point in the project is the most successful strategy. The "rules" you have to adhere to are up to you and should be purely a case by case basis.
Why do we constantly look for the "next big thing" when the "big thing" is simply experience?
I think the important thing here is the possibility that these eyes could be giving the coffee fund a human feature.
It's entirely possible that the people who were just taking coffee before thought the coffee fund to be more of a faceless corporate operation run by management at their company. Perhaps they thought they weren't paid enough and so it was 'ok' to take coffee.
They didn't feel like they were doing something wrong because they could easily justify their free coffee--plus it made them work harder! Even better for the company providing it.
If you look at the eyes, they look very concerned and hurt. I think that this probably triggered emotions of the coffee fund being an employee thing and you weren't taking coffee from the company but your fellow man. That's why this is interesting and that's why I don't think that the people who were taking coffee ever thought they were really doing something wrong.
I'm not surprised by this at all.
I once was very good friends with a card shop owner. In the back two corners of his store, he had two very huge obtrusive obnoxious surveillance cameras angled into the store. I had been in the back of the store to play cards with him every now and then and had never seen any television sets. So I asked him one day where the feeds went on his cameras so that he could catch people shoplifting. He just laughed and told me that the feeds didn't need to go anywhere. And if I looked closer, those cameras were fake.
I would suspect that anything symbolizing or triggering our mind to think of surveillance would cause us to be more honest. It would be interesting to instead of eyes use pictures of surveillance cameras pointed at the coffee. Or, perhaps simply the words, "We are watching you!" I mean, it's only natural for us to react to what we see.
This is something very important. But even where the "best parts of it" apply, it still may not be the best option for man.
Such as the struggle of flight. You'll notice that many attempts at flying involved mimicking birds. We didn't get it right until we noticed that our materials functioned better under a stable non-morphing wing structure. Planes do not fly at all the same way a bird or insect does and it took us a while to realize this.
I think it is naïve to assume a lot of things can be mimicked from nature but it is interesting to see the successes. Just remember that a lot of times there are more simple mechanical alternatives such as non-morphing planes, the wheel & digital signals that work well or better in areas that mother nature already has inventions.
For this post, please select your ending paragraph depending on your views of creavolution:
*Warning! Evolution assumed below!*
Remember that evolution is simply random mutations. The most successful being the smallest and useful changes. Just because some is successful for an organism in no way means we can adapt that into our technology. I find it interesting to look to random mutations for inspiration but a possible pit fall if you're relying on that for innovation such as the early attempts at flight.
*Warning! Creationism assumed below!*
Remember that God created animals in a non-technologically perfect form since their purpose is to serve humans. If He had created them perfectly, they would be better than humans. Therefore, we should not rely solely on them for inspiration in our technology as they are not optimized by Him. They were deliberately made to be inferior to humans so that we could harness them and use them for our needs. We should also avoid from mimicking God's work as we may anger Him and incur the fury of the Lord Almighty (that's not good).
You might notice that if you click a link with a swgemu.com base, it redirects you to Crayola, Teletubbies or Lego's site. This is because of how the hosting service is implemented. Almost all the swgemu sites I go to require me to cut and past links into the browser and to make sure they are preceded with http://./ So for instance, paste "http://forums.swgemu.com/viewtopic.php?p=24081#24 081" into your browser and you should see the linked forum.
This is, of course, with the exception of the screenshots hosted by gamerspace or the video (which really just seems to be a transition of the stills). Note, I'm not sure if the YouTube video is the same as the one from the mirrors, I'm still downloading that.
I should also point out that the forums are tightly moderated as swgemu is not looking for trouble with legal issues regarding SOE. I think they've had tangles with them in the past and don't enjoy discussing it. I don't actively post on swgemu but am thrilled by the idea of what they are trying to create. The concern by SOE is not only stealing paying customers but also the fact that if this is open sourced, then anyone will be able to see the reverse engineering work which means a whole lot more attempts on hacking the servers.
Most importantly, there are no dates set whatsoever for this project. I am just sitting back and waiting for hopefully a chance to play a game I once knew and loved. A game that exists no more. Pre-CU SWG.
I guess it had such a huge client that most of the functionality had to be sitting on each client machine and the server required some interaction. Hopefully this reverse engineering provides a stable alternative. If you'd like to contribute, help them with the datapack done in a Wiki format! If you're interested in development for the team and know C/C++, check out this post.
You're a human being. But more importantly, you're a paying customer. Call them up, get the guy's name. Inform him that if he hangs up, you'll contact his supervisor. Then ask him what zip code these calls were made from, they should be able to figure that out. Verify that it's something reasonable.
If they won't believe you and you can convince them you're not making the calls, try calling the number and letting your phone ring. See if anyone picks up.
If that doesn't work, simply demand they change your number for you.
If they refuse to do that, be sure to inform them where you're taking your business.
Personally, I'd be pretty damned pissed if anyone ever hung up on me when I was simply inquiring as to why they were charging me money. In fact, I know right where I'd file that complaint.
If I had a credit card associated with the account, I'd call my credit card company and dispute the charge. You explain to the credit card company that they hung up on you twice. What the operator will do is put you on hold while they contact T-Mobile. The operator should introduce you to the T-Mobile rep and try to resolve the issue. If T-Mobile has a call from a credit card company, I'm certain they'll be a bit more understanding when they're looking at the possibility of having to chase down a stopped payment.
Something that I do when I'm drinking at 2 or 3 am is drunk dial people. This is pretty much a curse as I proceed to leave indiscernible/garbled phone messages for my victims.
Thanks to this website, I'll now be able to leave those messages on RIAA answering machines. If I get an RIAA representative on the phone, it will be perfect because:
- I've never lost an argument when drunk. At least, nobody's ever not conceded to me.
- I'm twice as opinionated and polarized when I'm drunk compared to when I'm sober.
- I constantly like to give people a "piece of my mind" and/or "settle their hash" when wrecked.
- I love to sing when I'm drunk. This is bad because it usually comes out in an a-melodic fashion.
- Phone conversations with me can last an hour or more. Sometimes taking as much as 10 minutes to figure out who I am, what I'm doing, where I am & (the hardest one) why I'm calling you.
So, as you can see, there are so many good reasons for me to put the RIAA on the top of my drunk dialing list. Not because I want to call them and tell them how much I'm going to miss after everyone graduates and moves awayI'm going to take a stab in the dark and wager that SPAM simply means "e-mailing the way the government doesn't want you to" in Chinese. Whether that be based on the content or motive of your e-mails. The government seems to be implementing laws that have no clear definition in order to devise a method by which they can jail/fine/deter anyone they want. And it will most likely be met with synchronous thundering applause of one billion people clapping robotically togethor.
Americans lose their freedoms in the name of fighting terrorism. Now the Chinese will lose their freedoms in the name of fighting SPAM. *sigh* Canada keeps looking warmer and warmer.
I certainly hope you are joking about that last statement.
I should start by saying I am an American and therefore have probably been exposed to much propaganda against the Chinese government. Despite this, I have tried to educate myself on the current state of China & would like to point out an RSC article that talks about the history of higher education in China. Here's an excerpt from it:
Wikipedia offers a much longer explanation including the criteria by which you were eligible for aid:
The most important change is the one from 1999 where tuition fees were introduced. It is my understanding (though I could be wrong) that money is often tight and your standard laborer in China makes roughly $50-$100 USD per month. Can you expect them to afford tuition rates of £200-400? Not really.
I guess it would require a miraculous grant to get a higher education in China and I'm certain that those are a limited number that is quite small compared to a population of one billion. Even then, the best place to find secondary education is abroad as most of the world's leading universities are in the United States.
This isn't how a Communist country is supposed to be run. There isn't supposed to be any "tuition fees" for education. There isn't supposed to be competition dividing people into two classes (one worthy of secondary education, one not). In a perfect Communist society, I was born to do something and as long as I work hard and do it, I get the exact same education you get. I ha
I'm not a doctor but I couldn't agree with this article more. I grew up picking rock, bailing hay & working with animals. Countless times I'd come home with dust, alfalfa or straw everywhere (eyes, nose, clothes, etc). I worked with a lot of people and every member of the family worked as soon as you were able to lift something. What was odd was that you had entire families and not one of them would have allergies.
Now, I'm sure there are exceptions but I think that it would be an interesting survey to compare people who work in dirty grimy environments with people who work in corporate America. I spent my childhood running through the weeds, pulling wood ticks out of my hair and watching my mom put iodine all over my cuts & scrapes (hurts like a b*tch). Although by some people's standards I grew up in utter squalor, it was a lot of fun.
I have two cousins who moved to Minneapolis and grew up in a house with an air filtration system. The tiniest pollen or cat dander will send them into sneezing fits. Those air filtration systems are more harm than good in my opinion.
To my knowledge, I don't have any allergic reactions or hay fever. Now, this is just my personal experience but when I lived out in the country, I didn't know anyone except my teacher who had hay fever. Once I went to college at age 18, I met tons of people with hay fever. Is this correlation due to the fact that our childhoods were spent in filth or is it simply because people with allergies move away from those areas? I'm not sure but considering that allergies can "develop" later in life, I'm prone to believe that the less you are exposed to tiny particles, the more your body wigs out when your immune system encounters them.
If you're a parent, I would suggest getting your toddler/infant out to the park as often as possible and let them get some fresh air. Yes, it has smog & pollen in it but everyone has to deal with these their entire lives.
There's no analogy to be used here, it's just simply speculation. They've done this study with lab mice, now why don't they do a sampling of populations and ask people whether they work in an office with a controlled air system or outdoors/farm work where they're exposed to plants & animals daily.
The human body is extremely adaptive. Anti-bodies are perfect examples of an immune system being exposed to something and then being able to deal with it later. I speculate that if people aren't exposed to dust, pollen, dander, etc. then their bodies will have a much more difficult time discerning them from actually harmful foreign particles.
Well, the article doesn't say much about what the army is supposed to do except kill them. I highly doubt that's the strategy and, after being raised on farms in my youth, it's easier to use a trap or target the nests than to get down on your hands and knees and kill each and every one of them. In fact, even if you killed all the visible ones, how do you kill/remove all the tadpoles and eggs from the ponds and water in Australia? It would be obviously stupid to try to introduce another foreign species that might rampage about the land. Especially one that would be immune to the toad's toxin.
It's odd that they deploy the military considering that current government research has been directed towards isolating a sex pheremone to disrupt the breeding cycle. The government fact sheet suggests removing the jelly strings of eggs from water & humane execution of adult cane toads. There are guides on Cane Toad control that talk about using traps but what do you do with the toads after you trap them. Will the Australian military be trudging through wetlands and collecting toad eggs while smashing the adults with specialized mallets? No one is alluding to the method of the military.
Perhaps this is some left over funding that was appropriated to the military and now they feel like they have to spend it? Either way, I don't live in North Eastern Australia so I don't know what level of effect these toads are truly having.
Here's a humorous Google Video on the cane toad. It's more just a dabble in CGI by film makers but I thought it worth mentioning given the topic.
For those software companies that don't have an academic injection strategy, I suggest you develop one.
Depending on the complexity/use of your software, you put it either in the primary schools (K-12) or secondary schools (colleges). And you make it free and secure. Use license pools/server or anything to get your product into the learning process. That's where the money is. That's where you ensure your future.
Back in my undergrad days, I had access to Matlab, Pro Engineer, Mathematica, MSDN licenses, Windows XP, Rational Rose, the list goes on. I think it was Macintosh that originally discovered that putting your technology into the hands of your youth ensures your future. Why? Because Americans are predominantly lazy and we hate to climb learning curves. Macs especially build a sort of security sense that the user is safe and the machine is super friendly.
You might call this the "bottom up" approach to seeding the public with your product. Because the students aren't customers but one day they will be raised to be customers and they will decide what will be used. If you don't believe this model works, you're a fool. Time and time again I've caught myself saying, I wish I could just script this in Matlab and let it dump it to an Excel sheet. It's not that it would be easier, it's just that I know precisely how to do computations in Matlab due to my undergrad years of using it.
Now you have Microsoft trying to stop a "top down" effect in Massachusetts. Whereby they try their "MSDN Academic Alliance" strategy targeting a state's public schools. But why are they only targeting Massachusetts? Probably because of the ODF movement in the state government. If the government mandates that everyone (schools included) use ODF files and ODF software, where does that leave Microsoft? No longer the primary tool of the children, that's where.
What's the lesson to learn from this article? The squeaky wheel gets the oil!
Not enough funding for computers and software at your school? Well then, simply alert your local media and just try to enforce the ODF standard. I think you'll find that Microsoft will suddenly come (with the national media) to meet all your software needs!
There was an article a couple days ago on TGDaily that stated the Samsung's first blu-ray player to be a grand.
I don't know why an article on Slashdot is reporting Sony's to be $1500 when Best Buy is already taking pre-orders for both the Sony BDP-S1 & Samsung BD-P1000 models each equally priced at a thousand dollars. Even the Froogle search for it seems to come out on the one grand consensus.
It seems a lot of articles have been against Sony while this fear of Sony's set top player being overpriced is relatively unfounded. As we all know, this shall prove interesting if the PS3s offer the same functionality for much less.
If both players debut at $1,000, perhaps this will be a war one in quality instead of price? Ah, who am I kidding--whoever licenses pr0n easiest/fastest will come out on top (no pun intended).
I don't intend to run out and buy one because the only movie I've seen advertised for blu-ray is the second Underworld movie. And I don't even know which kind of blu-ray player it's for (customer confusion indeed)!
Just a side note, the same Reuters article is in The Washington Post and I've linked the print format to avoid having to click through pages and view less ads.
There are some customers (government/military included) that are aware of the two concepts of precision and recall. Before you groan and skip this post because you recall those words from all classifying algorithms, you should take note that there are two stages we have yet to meet in this respect.
One is simply improving precision without sacrificing recall. When I search for 'horn' in Google, how many of those searches are relevant? I was thinking about a French horn (instrument) and the first link brings me to a society about them. The next three links, however, do not. You might say, "Well, gee, you should have put 'French' in your search" but is this really necessary? So there is some money to be made in "learning" search engines that tailor themselves to the user or perhaps the results could be displayed intuitively in domains of knowledge (a la Clusty). So that I can select a node that applies to the correct searching term and see all results returned below that. Have you ever wished to view your search results in a format other than a linear display of ranked results? The documents are related in more than one dimension, you know. As computing power increases, I suspect there will be room to display them in two dimensions (heat/area mapping, nodes & vertices on a plane) and three dimensions (spatial 3D engines with nodes & vertices in space).
The second stage is giving the user the power to adjust precision versus recall. Even a graphical interface that shows the F-measure relationship between precision and recall would be helpful to consider in the search engine wars. Say you give the user some control through a slider AJAX interface of a threshold ß. But the threshold isn't simply the "Google score cut off" or even a term frequency cutoff. Instead, it's applied to be a "relevance" threshold. You would score relevance by fingerprinting frequency, specificity, clustering and other useful tools by using a domain ontology or taxonomy.
Another big thing that is missing is identifying what kind of data you are searching. Social data? Scientific data? Historical data? etc. Perhaps I'm only interested in who's who to Stephen Hawking. I'd search for him and flip through nodes of separation from him to other people.
The current search sites also only tend to favor key-word regular expressions. What about searching with raw text or entire paragraphs? If you want to see an interesting demo of this, visit Collexis' Demo Site which alludes to a whole new kind of searching.
The key to entering the market as a competitor with Google is to pick up Google's slack and to try to pose yourself as a complimentary service to Google. Google is terrible at closed domain searches but amazingly efficient at open domain searches. You don't want to compete with them so fill a different part of the market. Google benefits from simple design, so go to an advanced flashy complex design. Most people aren't looking for that but the people that are have nowhere to go.
The Economist is alluding to potential leadership problems inside Google. Who cares? That's not going to be Google's downfall. Google's downfall will be an new intuitive way to search and the only thing that will prevent their downfall is if they buyout the company or bone up on the technology.
The search-engine battle hasn't even hit its stride.
A CNN poll taken recently showed that 98.1% of US citizens would rather have the MSN virus on their computer instead of the 1990 film in Spanish.
It's so unfortunate that we haven't invented the technology to "unwatch" films yet.
So I connect to the MSN network but through a nice free little app called GAIM.
... or if it was a design decision by choice to avoid hidden viruses that the codecs unpack in the media files. Probably the latter.
My friends often try to send me files or pictures or videos through the MSN network and it doesn't work. They get annoyed and tell me to "just use MSN." I'm told that GAIM is stupid & crappy for not supporting these features.
Really makes you wonder if the people who developed gaim couldn't figure out how to make the videos/pictures stream through the chat box
GAIM also works on a number of other chat networks--as chat clients should. Another thing about chat clients is that they should stick to limited functionality. There are way more secure ways to transfer files. I don't want a profile, I don't want it integrated with my operating system (married to the kernel), I don't want media streaming, I just want to chat.
Don't bloat your software.
Funny things happen when you have solid H2O in liquid H2O that, on a large scale, are probably not well understood. I'm not a physicist but you have heat dissipation as Newton's Law of Cooling goes into effect and a multitude of climate issues. I can speculate on a few things:
- As the water becomes warmer, it is more prone to evaporation on the surface from the sun. Previously, less water would evaporate and keep the water levels slightly higher but now the difference in temperature at the surface is less making the water more easily transferred into a vapor.
- Gravity pulls down on the free floating icebergs and it displaces the water. These icebergs are shrinking or being reduced greatly so the water height in the vicinity lowers slightly while the water levels around the world rise slightly.
- The tides are becoming stronger and as the amount of water on the surface of earth increases, so does the effect of the moon on it. The moon pulls least on water at the caps and even more so on water near the equator.
- Some force (moon, internal gravity, spinning of the earth, sun, etc.) is causing the water to accumulate at the equator which in turn reduces the water at the poles.
Like I said, this is pure speculation and I haven't thought out in advance the above propositions. But I'm going to speculate that there's an unknown effect that occurs when massive bodies of ice are half submerged in water on a planet. The basis of this effect is probably known in physical and chemical fields of science but we just haven't put them together to figure it out. Hopefully we can figure it out as these "discoveries" are oftentimes the foundation for more work and more discoveries that benefit mankind. Translation: curiosity spurs innovation.If there's one thing that Slashdot is good for, though, it's testing half cooked theories! My fellow colleagues, I welcome you to point out the scientific flaws in my above hypotheses!
This isn't some critical release patch.
This isn't some driver that's long overdue.
Microsoft never hand signed a sheet of paper telling me that I would have my copy of "Longhorn" by the end of 2005 or even 2006.
It's a new operating system. More importantly, it's an operating system that has to compete with OSX, Linux, Unix & Windows XP. That's right, they are going to have to figure out someway to improve Windows XP. They aren't stuffing Madden 2005 into Madden 2006 and I hope they are taking their sweet ass time to rework some of the Windows internals that may have been a long time plague on the OS.
My point is that they're making something new and probably forging new ground. According to this article, they suffered the same thing a lot of projects have suffered. You project management plan looks great in Microsoft Project. Then you print it out and re-wallpaper the offices only to have the developers sift through it and go, "What the fsck?"
If Vista is as complicated as its specs say it is, I hope Microsoft takes another two years to get this done because I don't want to have to put up with Vista SP1, Vista SP2, Vista SP3, etc. down the line. I think games like WoW took a lot of time to make but it paid off to be a really stable engine with great features that blew everyone away. Microsoft could learn from that. You might upset some fans and you might piss your boss off but misinformation/miscommunication in the early stages of a project only lead to its downfall. If you can voice concern/dissent to your boss, I suggest you get a new job. We're human beings, we are fallible and we do have limits. Even if we're hand selected by Microsoft's HR department.
I'm reminded of a story about Hitler where the Allies had broken through French beaches at Normandy (unexpectedly) and Hitler's aides were at his house trying to figure out how they could wake Hitler up and inform him of the brigade of tanks rushing across the countryside towards them. Because they all feared for their lives, no one ended up waking him up and they lost a whole lot of ground & a few resources because of it. If you run your company through fear and people can't talk back to you, you'll end up like Hitler. Dead in a ditch with petrol all over you.
I'm also getting really sick and tired of people measuring a project's greatness by KLOC. It's also very frustrating to hear people brag about how many KLOC they write each year. That's great--now how do I know it's not riddled with bugs or a complete memory hog? What ever happened to the desire for elegant computer code? When I see a program that does something quickly and elegantly, my brain releases the same chemical that I used to get when I saw beautiful math proofs. I know this is the mark of the nerd but there's something very satisfying about it.
One last note, this MSDN blogging site does not care for Firefox. The right hand side of the text hangs over about an inch into the right bar side and it's annoying because the text spills onto the calendar. I certainly hope this doesn't happen on purpose.
Like all large corporations, I believe it's now in their best interest to make the most ethical choice regarding human rights. Even if it means charging another $10 per iPod.
Apple should be given the chance to investigate and cancel their contracts before they're torn apart. Otherwise, if you wanted to ruin a company you could set up a shill business that has factories down in Latin America where the workers are beaten. Then route the parts you are selling to the company you want through that distribution center and alert the American media.
Someone saying something positive about games? Someone is suggesting that healthy relationships can arise from gaming?
... but kids today go on the internet and I've seen the things on there--it's the devil!
We need to stop that. Those stereotypes and social stigmas are time honored and sacred traditions. If we lose those, the terrorists have already won.
I need to be able to say, "Well, at least I didn't meet my wife online!" in order to point out how obviously better I am than everyone else. I got drunk at a bar and knocked my wife up and that's how I became happily married. My son and his son are going to do the same thing if I have anything to say about it!
This is change & I don't like it. We need to stay as static as possible and prevent this from becoming the norm. Sure kids in my day listened to rock music and went to dances despite what our parents said
Someone get me Jack Thompson, we need a man of religious convictions that will secure the sanctity of this nation!