None of the Mac owners I know (besides myself) are very tech savvy
Hmmm, I'm a grad student in Computer Science and about half of the grad students are running macs. At the last few conferences I've been to, more than half of the laptops I see are macs... and about half the remainder are running Linux. Geeks love it since we can get all of the great open source software, but with a nice, smooth, easy-to-maintain interface (I love Ubuntu, but I have to say Mac OS X is still nicer in many ways).
When I interned at Google, someone told me a funny anecdote about a guy who emailed their tech support insisting that the Google crawler had deleted his web site. At first, I think he was told that "Just because we download a copy of your site, doesn't mean your local copy is gone." (a'la obligatory bash.) But, the guy insisted, and finally they double checked and his site was in fact gone. Turns out that it was a home-brewed wiki-style site, and each page had a "delete" button. The only problem was, the "delete" button sent its query via GET, not POST, and so the Google spider happily followed those links one-by-one and deleted the poor guy's entire site. The Google guys were feeling charitable and so they sent him a backup of his site, but told him he wouldn't be so lucky the next time, and he should change any forms that make changes to POSTs -- GETs are only for queries.
So, long story short, I wonder how Google will avoid more of this kind of problem if they're really going off the deep end and submitting random data on random forms on the web. Like the above guy, people may not design their site with such a spider in mind, and despite their lack of foresight this could kill a lot of goodwill if done improperly.
with PSO, ant colony optimization, genetic algorithms, etc. is that they take tons of computational effort, and typically work no better than (or significantly worse than) much more efficient direct optimization methods. Wake me up if they show good results (esp. that didn't take a year of computer time to construct).
P.S. IAAAIR (I am an AI researcher, albeit not in computer vision)
Of course they promise they'll look into it now, because it doesn't matter anymore.
Or maybe it does matter. They got the benefit of claiming 44% losses 2 years ago, and now that they revise the estimate down, they can put out a new "study" claiming 44% losses this year *and* claim that losses have more than tripled in the past 2-3 years! The horror! Then, in 2010... well, you get the idea.
IANAP but I think by being a great absorber, it becomes a great emitter too: Black body. So it may not actually get much hotter than something less black. I guess it depends on where the equilibrium point is, and I don't have any intuition about that.
I'm on a 1.5 year old MacBook Pro, on my fourth battery. The first one was recalled, and the next two started performing poorly and both times I called AppleCare and had a new battery on my doorstep the next day without paying a dime.
Maybe this will cause more journals to go the way of Machine Learning, which IMO would be awesome.
From wiki: The [Journal of Machine Learning Research] was founded as an open-access alternative to the journal Machine Learning. In 2001, forty editors of Machine Learning resigned in order to support JMLR, saying that in the era of the internet, it was detrimental for researchers to continue publishing their papers in expensive journals with pay-access archives. Instead, they wrote, they supported the model of JMLR, in which authors retained copyright over their papers and archives were freely available on the internet.
you cannot make the computer "favor" the correct one (at least not in the sense you are implying)
In case anyone's interested, making the computer "favor" the correct one is essentially how Grover's algorithm works (IIRC). The problem is that you can only increase the probability of the correct answer(s) by a small factor per iteration, so it can still take 2^(N/2) steps to get an answer ("quadratic speedup"). Moreover, it's been proven that this is the best a QC can do with any similar "general-purpose" algorithm.
Check this page out... its for a class I took. The professor wants to define a whole new type of processor from scratch. The first memo on the page: FLEET - A [[One]] Instruction Computer. If things are going as planned, he should have an in-silicon prototype running by the end of the year.
Here's the webiste of a class at Berkeley that is designing totally new chip architecture, something actually innovative and quite interesting in my opinion.
http://research.cs.berkeley.edu/class/fleet/
It's still a few years away from being practical, but they are hoping to have in-silicon test chips very soon now.
My Macbook Pro never got more than 3.5 hours of battery life. In contrast, the Acer I had before got 5 hours out of the box, and that could be upped to 8 by swapping out the cd drive for a backup battery. Battery life is probably my biggest complaint with my Macbook Pro.
This does a google search for the term on wikipedia, then goes to the first link automatically... almost always does just what I want, and I use it about 10 times a day.
There are way too many misunderstandings in this thread. I've taken a class at Berkeley on QC, and the best known quantum algorithm for solving NP-C problems is Grover's algorithm:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover's_algorithm
The hitch is, it only provides quadratic speedup rather than polynomial. So, a problem you can solve in O(2^n) time now takes O(2^(n/2)) time. This would be a big deal if you could make a sufficiently big QC, but it's nothing like the polytime algorithm you get for factoring with Shor's algorithm. There are almost undoubtedly other undiscovered quantum algorithms out there (for the most part there is only Grover's and Shor's so far), but I seem to remember a proof of some sort that you can't do much better unless P=NP (in which case you could solve NP-C problems efficiently on classical computers too!).
Saw this earlier today: MIDDLE LATITUDE AURORAL ACTIVITY WARNING. Sadly, it's way too foggy here to see anything... I was really looking forward to seeing my first aurora.
I have got 3 of these calls in the past five days on my cell phone. I am pretty pissed about it, but they were all automated and didn't give a callback number, and I don't have the time to hunt these guys down and sue them. I was definitely happy to see the article though; hopefully someone else with more time on their hands will take matters into their own hands.
Feynman Point. From the Wikipedia article: "The Feynman point comprises the 762nd through 767th decimal places of pi... The name refers to a remark made by the physicist Richard Feynman, expressing a wish to memorise the digits of as far as that point so that when reciting them, he would be able to end with '... nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, and so on.'"
So, I dunno about "0000," but for some interesting sequences we may get lucky:).
Moore's law is often stated regarding the decreasing cost of a single transistor, or (equivalently) about the number of transistors per device of a given cost. Since flash RAM is constructed using a particular form of transistors (with an additional isolated gate that will hold a charge or lack thereof), Moore's law seems to (roughly) apply. In any case, flash is much closer to an ordinary IC than a hard drive.
I'm surpised nobody has posted an EFF link yet. Here's the summary & link from BoingBoing:
Cindy Cohn, EFF's stellar Legal Director, sez, "Senator Specter and the Bush Administration today announced that they have reached a deal to send all of the cases concerning the illegal NSA wiretapping (including EFF's) to the secret FISA court. This is being spun in the press as a big concession by the Administration but in truth it's an abomination -- the FISA court acts in secret and doesn't even hear argument from both sides. This bill will likely move fast, so we only have a limited window to try to stop it. Here's s direct link to EFF's action center to let you write to the relevant Congressional committees."
It takes less than 30 seconds to send an e-mail to your congresscritter, and it's really the least you can do if you really care about this issue.
eSnipe will snipe items at your behest, so you don't have to be sitting around your computer waiting for auctions to end. It's been around for quite some time, and I believe it has a decent-sized userbase... I've never used it, but the existence of such a tool seems to imply that this study's conclusion has been obvious to many for a long time. It's just common sense... items with more bids tend to gather more attention, whereas items with 0 bids often slip through the cracks. That's why, as a seller, it's often beneficial to start with $0.01 price and do a reserve auction rather than just starting bidding at your reserve price.
When you lose a physical CD, do you go whining to Best Buy for a replacement? Apple is certainly under no obligation to offer this service; although it costs them little to nothing, it also carries significant potential for abuse and they are already walking a tightrope with the record companies. (playing Devil's advocate here)
Slashdot Mirror
None of the Mac owners I know (besides myself) are very tech savvy
... and about half the remainder are running Linux. Geeks love it since we can get all of the great open source software, but with a nice, smooth, easy-to-maintain interface (I love Ubuntu, but I have to say Mac OS X is still nicer in many ways).
Hmmm, I'm a grad student in Computer Science and about half of the grad students are running macs. At the last few conferences I've been to, more than half of the laptops I see are macs
When I interned at Google, someone told me a funny anecdote about a guy who emailed their tech support insisting that the Google crawler had deleted his web site. At first, I think he was told that "Just because we download a copy of your site, doesn't mean your local copy is gone." (a'la obligatory bash.) But, the guy insisted, and finally they double checked and his site was in fact gone. Turns out that it was a home-brewed wiki-style site, and each page had a "delete" button. The only problem was, the "delete" button sent its query via GET, not POST, and so the Google spider happily followed those links one-by-one and deleted the poor guy's entire site. The Google guys were feeling charitable and so they sent him a backup of his site, but told him he wouldn't be so lucky the next time, and he should change any forms that make changes to POSTs -- GETs are only for queries.
So, long story short, I wonder how Google will avoid more of this kind of problem if they're really going off the deep end and submitting random data on random forms on the web. Like the above guy, people may not design their site with such a spider in mind, and despite their lack of foresight this could kill a lot of goodwill if done improperly.
with PSO, ant colony optimization, genetic algorithms, etc. is that they take tons of computational effort, and typically work no better than (or significantly worse than) much more efficient direct optimization methods. Wake me up if they show good results (esp. that didn't take a year of computer time to construct).
P.S. IAAAIR (I am an AI researcher, albeit not in computer vision)
Of course they promise they'll look into it now, because it doesn't matter anymore.
... well, you get the idea.
Or maybe it does matter. They got the benefit of claiming 44% losses 2 years ago, and now that they revise the estimate down, they can put out a new "study" claiming 44% losses this year *and* claim that losses have more than tripled in the past 2-3 years! The horror! Then, in 2010
IANAP but I think by being a great absorber, it becomes a great emitter too: Black body. So it may not actually get much hotter than something less black. I guess it depends on where the equilibrium point is, and I don't have any intuition about that.
I'm on a 1.5 year old MacBook Pro, on my fourth battery. The first one was recalled, and the next two started performing poorly and both times I called AppleCare and had a new battery on my doorstep the next day without paying a dime.
How about this?
Maybe this will cause more journals to go the way of Machine Learning, which IMO would be awesome.
From wiki: The [Journal of Machine Learning Research] was founded as an open-access alternative to the journal Machine Learning. In 2001, forty editors of Machine Learning resigned in order to support JMLR, saying that in the era of the internet, it was detrimental for researchers to continue publishing their papers in expensive journals with pay-access archives. Instead, they wrote, they supported the model of JMLR, in which authors retained copyright over their papers and archives were freely available on the internet.
String theory has objects of many different dimensions. They are called p-branes, in analogy with "membrane", where p is the dimension.
Wiki link.
you cannot make the computer "favor" the correct one (at least not in the sense you are implying)
In case anyone's interested, making the computer "favor" the correct one is essentially how Grover's algorithm works (IIRC). The problem is that you can only increase the probability of the correct answer(s) by a small factor per iteration, so it can still take 2^(N/2) steps to get an answer ("quadratic speedup"). Moreover, it's been proven that this is the best a QC can do with any similar "general-purpose" algorithm.
http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html
Check this page out ... its for a class I took. The professor wants to define a whole new type of processor from scratch. The first memo on the page: FLEET - A [[One]] Instruction Computer. If things are going as planned, he should have an in-silicon prototype running by the end of the year.
Here's the webiste of a class at Berkeley that is designing totally new chip architecture, something actually innovative and quite interesting in my opinion. http://research.cs.berkeley.edu/class/fleet/ It's still a few years away from being practical, but they are hoping to have in-silicon test chips very soon now.
My Macbook Pro never got more than 3.5 hours of battery life. In contrast, the Acer I had before got 5 hours out of the box, and that could be upped to 8 by swapping out the cd drive for a backup battery. Battery life is probably my biggest complaint with my Macbook Pro.
Captchas are far from human-readable (the good ones at least), and I seriously doubt this project will help very much in that arena.
Um, the whole point of CAPTCHAS is that they are human-readable (albeit often not easily so) but not machine-readable.
I find that a google search of wiki works better than Wiki's own. Entering the following into Opera Preferences ... Search ... new search ...
o rg+%25s&btnI'm+Feeling+Lucky
... almost always does just what I want, and I use it about 10 times a day.
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:en.wikipedia.
This does a google search for the term on wikipedia, then goes to the first link automatically
There are way too many misunderstandings in this thread. I've taken a class at Berkeley on QC, and the best known quantum algorithm for solving NP-C problems is Grover's algorithm: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover's_algorithm The hitch is, it only provides quadratic speedup rather than polynomial. So, a problem you can solve in O(2^n) time now takes O(2^(n/2)) time. This would be a big deal if you could make a sufficiently big QC, but it's nothing like the polytime algorithm you get for factoring with Shor's algorithm. There are almost undoubtedly other undiscovered quantum algorithms out there (for the most part there is only Grover's and Shor's so far), but I seem to remember a proof of some sort that you can't do much better unless P=NP (in which case you could solve NP-C problems efficiently on classical computers too!).
Amount of $$ I've spent at allofmp3.com: greater than $100
Amount of $$ at spent at iTMS: about $.99
Saw this earlier today: MIDDLE LATITUDE AURORAL ACTIVITY WARNING. Sadly, it's way too foggy here to see anything ... I was really looking forward to seeing my first aurora.
I have got 3 of these calls in the past five days on my cell phone. I am pretty pissed about it, but they were all automated and didn't give a callback number, and I don't have the time to hunt these guys down and sue them. I was definitely happy to see the article though; hopefully someone else with more time on their hands will take matters into their own hands.
Tangentially related and mildly amusing trivia:
... The name refers to a remark made by the physicist Richard Feynman, expressing a wish to memorise the digits of as far as that point so that when reciting them, he would be able to end with '... nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, and so on.'"
:).
Feynman Point. From the Wikipedia article: "The Feynman point comprises the 762nd through 767th decimal places of pi
So, I dunno about "0000," but for some interesting sequences we may get lucky
Moore's law is often stated regarding the decreasing cost of a single transistor, or (equivalently) about the number of transistors per device of a given cost. Since flash RAM is constructed using a particular form of transistors (with an additional isolated gate that will hold a charge or lack thereof), Moore's law seems to (roughly) apply. In any case, flash is much closer to an ordinary IC than a hard drive.
I'm surpised nobody has posted an EFF link yet. Here's the summary & link from BoingBoing:
Cindy Cohn, EFF's stellar Legal Director, sez, "Senator Specter and the Bush Administration today announced that they have reached a deal to send all of the cases concerning the illegal NSA wiretapping (including EFF's) to the secret FISA court. This is being spun in the press as a big concession by the Administration but in truth it's an abomination -- the FISA court acts in secret and doesn't even hear argument from both sides. This bill will likely move fast, so we only have a limited window to try to stop it. Here's s direct link to EFF's action center to let you write to the relevant Congressional committees."
It takes less than 30 seconds to send an e-mail to your congresscritter, and it's really the least you can do if you really care about this issue.
eSnipe will snipe items at your behest, so you don't have to be sitting around your computer waiting for auctions to end. It's been around for quite some time, and I believe it has a decent-sized userbase ... I've never used it, but the existence of such a tool seems to imply that this study's conclusion has been obvious to many for a long time. It's just common sense ... items with more bids tend to gather more attention, whereas items with 0 bids often slip through the cracks. That's why, as a seller, it's often beneficial to start with $0.01 price and do a reserve auction rather than just starting bidding at your reserve price.
When you lose a physical CD, do you go whining to Best Buy for a replacement? Apple is certainly under no obligation to offer this service; although it costs them little to nothing, it also carries significant potential for abuse and they are already walking a tightrope with the record companies. (playing Devil's advocate here)