In the literal sense, corporations do not speak. People who work for them do.
Let's say I work for a studio that is producing a new movie. If I go out on a movie forum and say "Have you heard about this movie that's coming up? It's going to be pretty cool!!!", that could be considered viral marketing.
So, what if it's true, and I really believe it? Even if it's not, you can't prove that it's false or misleading. An opinion, by definition, is subjective.
Also, where do you draw the line? I'm a software engineer. Am I not allowed to say good things about my company's products when I'm making the rounds at Christmas parties? Do I have to preface it every time with, "FYI: I'm an employee of X company, and my opinions my be influenced by that."
And, if it was mandatory to identify yourself, that's very difficult to enforce. Online, it's easy to be relatively anonymous. And, if I'm talking about my product and I don't properly identify myself, what are you going to do, throw me in jail? Fine me? What is a fitting punishment for the crime of stating an opinion in the improper way?
I can see your point that it can be misleading and untruthful. However, regulating it is impractical and unfeasible, not to mention clearly contrary to the first amendment (I don't think your comparison to insider trading laws really holds water).
It is each of our jobs as an internet citizen to determine what information on the web is good, and what is total crap. That's the way it's always been, and I genuinely hope it remains that way so that we don't start down the slippery slope toward internet censorship.
Video game driving algorithms rely on a discretized version of the world, meaning there is a finite set of possibilities for everything. There are far more possibilities in the real world, and a real-time system like this must take them all into account.
You have a point that this does boil down to the problem of reducing a car's surroundings into meaningful data, much like in OCR or voice recognition, but there is VASTLY more data in the real world than there is in a single image or audio file.
Humans have the benefit of a built-in filter so that we can pay attention to things deemed important, and ignore those that are not. If we had to take the time to process every piece of data that came in through our five senses, we would never be able to keep up, let alone focus on completing any meaningful work.
The mars rovers have the luxury of having nothing but time. They can take a set of pictures of their surroundings, and sit and think and crunch on them for a while before deciding on the best course of action. In a race situation, especially one with moving obstacles, that's just not an option.
AI often has the appearance of seeming easy, because so many of the calculations involved are not even conscious thoughts in human processing. This is a much more difficult problem that it seems on the surface, though.
You are right, but if we are going to pick nits here, the screenplay for The Hobbit the movie will be written after the screenplays for Peter Jackson's trilogy, so in that regard, the movie could be considered a prequel, while the book obviously cannot.
I agree that statistic are needed. In my undergraduate CS work, though, we couldn't escape without BOTH a year of calculus AND a semester of probability and statistics.
I've found them both very useful. Actually, in my work, there is a lot of calculation of rates of flow and such, so the calc has been more useful than the statistics. Stats, in general, though, are just as important, especially when it comes to computer learning applications.
I think that what math will come in handy is heavily dependent on where you end up in your career, but having the right tools will also help steer you in a good direction in that career. And, definitely, if you want to go further in school than a bachelor's, you'll need all the math you can get. The problem at most universities is that they can only really have so many required courses and still have students graduating on time, so they leave the rest up to electives.
While I'm on the subject, I'd recommend discrete math, linear algebra, and at least one course that teaches you the fundamentals of logic and proof writing. And, like I said, calculus and statistics.
The industry has transitioned from "Just look at all the great things you can do with technology!!!!" to "Oh, crap. People can do way too many things with technology."
The new generation of hardware, software, and consumer electronics they're trying to cram down our throats offers only minimal improvements over the old stuff in order to try to get the consumer to give up all the things they used to be able to do.
This is the reason that I'll never buy either of these products. I'm pretty happy with DVDs, thank you very much.
Not voting because you don't think you are informed enough results in fewer votes by smart people.
An opinion by a smart person is totally worthless if that person doesn't know what they're talking about. You wouldn't ask Bobby Fischer to make important decisions on global warming or whatever, because he doesn't know shit about that, even though he is a very smart guy.
That said, it takes all of half an hour to get up to speed enough to vote. Check out the info from the League of Women Voters. Or, if you don't trust them, there are tons of sources where you can get information with your favorite flavor of spin on it. You're not being an irresponsible citizen for staying home, you're being irresponsible citizen for failing to make the slightest effort.
More than that, it sounds like it is basically going to be client software for hosting your virtual life. So, you can manage files on your computer remotely through a browser, and also your friends and family can see all the stuff you have flagged as shared.
This aspect of it will be sort of like MySpace on crack, only it's hosted from your computer, and hopefully it's a lot more robust and user-friendly, and a lot less lame.
At least, that's the impression I got after R-ing TFA.
It sounds like people are mistaking the failure of this program for the failure of the actual OLPC program. This is a completely separate program. People who were not affiliated with the program set up this pledge drive in hopes that they could get their hands on one of the laptops while helping out the little kids.
From what I understand, even if there was 100,000 people who pledged, they still had not gotten confirmation from Negroponte's people that they would cooperate.
The OLPC program will still be distributing the laptops to the countries who have placed orders, regardless of the failure of this pledge program.
If you add up every cent that Google makes from search-related advertising, and then gave every site they index their "fair" share based on how many times their site was displayed in their search results, I bet your blog (or whatever) would get pennies on the dollar, if even that. It's a different business model than traditional media, and per-site compensation just doesn't make sense.
Google is compensating you, instead, by driving people to your site. From there, the task of making money is up to you.
Folding is what's know as a rediculously parallel problem. That is, it can be broken up in to small subproblems that can be distributed among many processors with a minimal amount of communication among processors. It also benefits from not requiring a lot of branching (if/switch statements and such), which GPUs generally do not handle well.
Many problems, (I'd argue MOST problems) do not cater well to these kinds of restrictions. So, while a GPU is well suited to crunching away on pieces of the folding problem, it's going to be lousy at doing the day-to-day stuff you do with your computer.
That is an interesting point, but your story is not a perfect fit here. The fact is, by buying the actual DS version, you got additional functionality that you didn't have with just the ROM. You will have the ability to play the game on your handheld rather than just on your PC.
However, if you download MP3s, you can burn a CD, upload them to your iPod or whatever, you can really do pretty much whatever you like with them.
Can you honestly tell me that you would have still bought the game if you could have just uploaded the rom to your DS and played it? I kind of doubt it.
"I doubt anyone's going to be running half-life or photoshop on that thing."
That's right, they'll be running Gimp instead.
The specs on this thing may seem a little light by modern standards, but I'm running XP/Ubuntu dual boot on my laptop, with plenty of apps under each OS (yes, including both Photoshop and Gimp), and I've only got 256 MB memory and a ~1.5 Ghz processor. It's not lightning fast, and it's certainly no gaming rig, but it still gets the job done.
However, there were lot's of "Group Projects", including take-home exams, where the professors actually encouraged students to work together. I don't think that qualifies as "Cheating" though.
OK, that's a little rediculous. This is a survey of people who admitted to cheating. Are you saying that you don't think they know when they're cheating or not? A grad student totally knows the difference between, as in your example, working together on a group project or a take-home exam, and something like plaigarism.
I'd believe a well-concucted survey over the anecdotal evidence of some random business school graduate any day of the week, anyway. Nice try, though.
I'm a software engineer. I love writing code, but I'm afraid I'm not seeing the problem here.
I look at it like this: being a programmer is to computer literacy what being an expert mechanic is to the ability to drive a car. We don't need a society where everybody knows how to write software, just like we don't need a society where everybody knows how to rebuild a carburator.
Of course, I think it sucks that Windows doesn't ship with a C++ compiler (or whatever, language is not the issue). The anyone willing to do a little tinkering can have the tools they need to write some code quickly, and for free, on the internet. They just need a little encouragement and mentoring.
Johnny can't play chess. Johnny can't appreciate Fellini films. Whatever. If Johnny's not into those things, then he can pursue something else. The whole "Johnny Can't Code" thing is just nonsense. So what? As long as a kid learns to effectively use a computer, which in todays society means being able to navigate an OS, use a word processor, and run a browser and email client, they're going to be fine. For those of us who enjoy it, there are great and promising careers out there, but don't try to push it off onto everybody else.
"With or without Tom singing, is what I want to know."
Tom singing? Is he talking about Tom Bombadil? That's not in the hobbit, anyway, that was in the first book of LOTR, and was cut from the move, if I'm not mistaken. And rightly so. That was quite possibly the lamest part of the whole middle earth saga, IMHO.
I don't want to reward Blockbuster for completely ripping off a very original and innovative business model. Also, I hate blockbuster and their drakonian repressive late fees. They once tried to take me to collections over a three-dollar late fee. I'm now an extremely happy Netflix customer, and never again will I have anything to do with Blockbuster.
Still, this is just stupid. Just because you innovated in a field doesn't mean you should get an automatic and total monopoly on it. This is America, for christ's sake. Competition is healthy and vital to the way our economy rolls, homies.
I'll vote with my dollars and stick with Netflix because of their awesome web interface and great service, but I'm not going to applaud them for being patent trolls. Not cool.
Hey, these kids going to MS Elementary are poor inner city kids as well. Lucky for them, they got selected to have a helping hand. Life isn't fair, and if you're saying that it's a bad thing that these kids get to go to a school that's well funded just because some other kids don't, then we might as well just implement communism, pool all our resources together, and distribute them evenly among everybody. We all know that doesn't really work, though, as nice an idea as it is.
We're not talking about an either-or kind of proposition. In a good curriculum, kids can learn both the basics that we all had to learn in school, and pick up some basic computer skills as well.
If you somehow manage to make it to college without knowing how to use a word processor and some kind of presentation software, these days, that's going to be a problem. Somebody's got to teach it to them.
Of course, I'll agree that you probably don't need your laptop out during your everyday math or social studies classes. A good curriculum would also mandate when it is appropriate to have your computer out, and what the appropriate ways to use it are.
Keep in mind that kids can distract themselves easily enough with just a pencil and paper. It's a teacher's job to keep them on task and learning.
I'm using it as my main distro right now. I really want to make a clean break from Windows. The main thing that has stopped me from getting rid of that nasty NTFS partition is that I could never get my wireless card to work. I've spent hours searching the forums and messing around ndiswrapper, with no luck.
Freespire is the first distro I've tried where it just worked, right out of the proverbial box. I've tried Ubuntu, Suse, Debian, Fedora, Knoppix, and a handful of others. My pattern would be to install it, play with it for a while, try desperately to get a wireless driver working, and then give up and go back to Windows, because I don't want to have to sit right next to my router, and I don't want to have to buy a new wireless card.
With my next computer purchase, I will totally do my research and make sure I'm buying hardware that works under any distro, but for somebody who is spontaneously thinking about making the switch from Windows, if their hardware doesn't work, they will generally give up.
So, for me, it is the proprietary drivers that are the big selling point. It's nice having Java, Acrobat, and others ready to go, too, I must say. Before, you could just apt-get Synaptic and you've got free software downloads and updates, but now with free CNR, which I've heard is rediculously easy, maybe I'll give that a try.
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In the literal sense, corporations do not speak. People who work for them do.
Let's say I work for a studio that is producing a new movie. If I go out on a movie forum and say "Have you heard about this movie that's coming up? It's going to be pretty cool!!!", that could be considered viral marketing.
So, what if it's true, and I really believe it? Even if it's not, you can't prove that it's false or misleading. An opinion, by definition, is subjective.
Also, where do you draw the line? I'm a software engineer. Am I not allowed to say good things about my company's products when I'm making the rounds at Christmas parties? Do I have to preface it every time with, "FYI: I'm an employee of X company, and my opinions my be influenced by that."
And, if it was mandatory to identify yourself, that's very difficult to enforce. Online, it's easy to be relatively anonymous. And, if I'm talking about my product and I don't properly identify myself, what are you going to do, throw me in jail? Fine me? What is a fitting punishment for the crime of stating an opinion in the improper way?
I can see your point that it can be misleading and untruthful. However, regulating it is impractical and unfeasible, not to mention clearly contrary to the first amendment (I don't think your comparison to insider trading laws really holds water).
It is each of our jobs as an internet citizen to determine what information on the web is good, and what is total crap. That's the way it's always been, and I genuinely hope it remains that way so that we don't start down the slippery slope toward internet censorship.
Video game driving algorithms rely on a discretized version of the world, meaning there is a finite set of possibilities for everything. There are far more possibilities in the real world, and a real-time system like this must take them all into account.
You have a point that this does boil down to the problem of reducing a car's surroundings into meaningful data, much like in OCR or voice recognition, but there is VASTLY more data in the real world than there is in a single image or audio file.
Humans have the benefit of a built-in filter so that we can pay attention to things deemed important, and ignore those that are not. If we had to take the time to process every piece of data that came in through our five senses, we would never be able to keep up, let alone focus on completing any meaningful work.
The mars rovers have the luxury of having nothing but time. They can take a set of pictures of their surroundings, and sit and think and crunch on them for a while before deciding on the best course of action. In a race situation, especially one with moving obstacles, that's just not an option.
AI often has the appearance of seeming easy, because so many of the calculations involved are not even conscious thoughts in human processing. This is a much more difficult problem that it seems on the surface, though.
You can't have an article mentioning Michael Richards and Lloyd Braun without some mention of procuring gum from Chinatown, can you?
You are right, but if we are going to pick nits here, the screenplay for The Hobbit the movie will be written after the screenplays for Peter Jackson's trilogy, so in that regard, the movie could be considered a prequel, while the book obviously cannot.
I agree that statistic are needed. In my undergraduate CS work, though, we couldn't escape without BOTH a year of calculus AND a semester of probability and statistics.
I've found them both very useful. Actually, in my work, there is a lot of calculation of rates of flow and such, so the calc has been more useful than the statistics. Stats, in general, though, are just as important, especially when it comes to computer learning applications.
I think that what math will come in handy is heavily dependent on where you end up in your career, but having the right tools will also help steer you in a good direction in that career. And, definitely, if you want to go further in school than a bachelor's, you'll need all the math you can get. The problem at most universities is that they can only really have so many required courses and still have students graduating on time, so they leave the rest up to electives.
While I'm on the subject, I'd recommend discrete math, linear algebra, and at least one course that teaches you the fundamentals of logic and proof writing. And, like I said, calculus and statistics.
The industry has transitioned from "Just look at all the great things you can do with technology!!!!" to "Oh, crap. People can do way too many things with technology."
The new generation of hardware, software, and consumer electronics they're trying to cram down our throats offers only minimal improvements over the old stuff in order to try to get the consumer to give up all the things they used to be able to do.
This is the reason that I'll never buy either of these products. I'm pretty happy with DVDs, thank you very much.
That said, it takes all of half an hour to get up to speed enough to vote. Check out the info from the League of Women Voters. Or, if you don't trust them, there are tons of sources where you can get information with your favorite flavor of spin on it. You're not being an irresponsible citizen for staying home, you're being irresponsible citizen for failing to make the slightest effort.
More than that, it sounds like it is basically going to be client software for hosting your virtual life. So, you can manage files on your computer remotely through a browser, and also your friends and family can see all the stuff you have flagged as shared.
This aspect of it will be sort of like MySpace on crack, only it's hosted from your computer, and hopefully it's a lot more robust and user-friendly, and a lot less lame.
At least, that's the impression I got after R-ing TFA.
It sounds like people are mistaking the failure of this program for the failure of the actual OLPC program. This is a completely separate program. People who were not affiliated with the program set up this pledge drive in hopes that they could get their hands on one of the laptops while helping out the little kids.
From what I understand, even if there was 100,000 people who pledged, they still had not gotten confirmation from Negroponte's people that they would cooperate.
The OLPC program will still be distributing the laptops to the countries who have placed orders, regardless of the failure of this pledge program.
If you add up every cent that Google makes from search-related advertising, and then gave every site they index their "fair" share based on how many times their site was displayed in their search results, I bet your blog (or whatever) would get pennies on the dollar, if even that. It's a different business model than traditional media, and per-site compensation just doesn't make sense.
Google is compensating you, instead, by driving people to your site. From there, the task of making money is up to you.
Yes. That's basically right.
Here's a Wikipedia article on general purpose GPU processing.
Folding is what's know as a rediculously parallel problem. That is, it can be broken up in to small subproblems that can be distributed among many processors with a minimal amount of communication among processors. It also benefits from not requiring a lot of branching (if/switch statements and such), which GPUs generally do not handle well.
Many problems, (I'd argue MOST problems) do not cater well to these kinds of restrictions. So, while a GPU is well suited to crunching away on pieces of the folding problem, it's going to be lousy at doing the day-to-day stuff you do with your computer.
That is an interesting point, but your story is not a perfect fit here. The fact is, by buying the actual DS version, you got additional functionality that you didn't have with just the ROM. You will have the ability to play the game on your handheld rather than just on your PC.
However, if you download MP3s, you can burn a CD, upload them to your iPod or whatever, you can really do pretty much whatever you like with them.
Can you honestly tell me that you would have still bought the game if you could have just uploaded the rom to your DS and played it? I kind of doubt it.
The specs on this thing may seem a little light by modern standards, but I'm running XP/Ubuntu dual boot on my laptop, with plenty of apps under each OS (yes, including both Photoshop and Gimp), and I've only got 256 MB memory and a ~1.5 Ghz processor. It's not lightning fast, and it's certainly no gaming rig, but it still gets the job done.
I'd believe a well-concucted survey over the anecdotal evidence of some random business school graduate any day of the week, anyway. Nice try, though.
I'm a software engineer. I love writing code, but I'm afraid I'm not seeing the problem here.
I look at it like this: being a programmer is to computer literacy what being an expert mechanic is to the ability to drive a car. We don't need a society where everybody knows how to write software, just like we don't need a society where everybody knows how to rebuild a carburator.
Of course, I think it sucks that Windows doesn't ship with a C++ compiler (or whatever, language is not the issue). The anyone willing to do a little tinkering can have the tools they need to write some code quickly, and for free, on the internet. They just need a little encouragement and mentoring.
Johnny can't play chess. Johnny can't appreciate Fellini films. Whatever. If Johnny's not into those things, then he can pursue something else. The whole "Johnny Can't Code" thing is just nonsense. So what? As long as a kid learns to effectively use a computer, which in todays society means being able to navigate an OS, use a word processor, and run a browser and email client, they're going to be fine. For those of us who enjoy it, there are great and promising careers out there, but don't try to push it off onto everybody else.
Wow. Seriously? Where do you live? I bet it's the suburbs, right?
It's easy to say ignorant, overly idealistic nonsense like that when you've never encountered dangerous inner-city life in the real world.
Of course we can all do what we can to work toward change, but you're being completely naive.
Walking into a conference room is not exactly a feat of innovation.
I don't want to reward Blockbuster for completely ripping off a very original and innovative business model. Also, I hate blockbuster and their drakonian repressive late fees. They once tried to take me to collections over a three-dollar late fee. I'm now an extremely happy Netflix customer, and never again will I have anything to do with Blockbuster.
Still, this is just stupid. Just because you innovated in a field doesn't mean you should get an automatic and total monopoly on it. This is America, for christ's sake. Competition is healthy and vital to the way our economy rolls, homies.
I'll vote with my dollars and stick with Netflix because of their awesome web interface and great service, but I'm not going to applaud them for being patent trolls. Not cool.
Hey, these kids going to MS Elementary are poor inner city kids as well. Lucky for them, they got selected to have a helping hand. Life isn't fair, and if you're saying that it's a bad thing that these kids get to go to a school that's well funded just because some other kids don't, then we might as well just implement communism, pool all our resources together, and distribute them evenly among everybody. We all know that doesn't really work, though, as nice an idea as it is.
Why would you be "glad to see you're not the first"? Is it not a desireable thing to be the first to do something innovative?
"Whew. I sure am glad somebody beat me to the punch. That would have been aweful if I had done it first".
We're not talking about an either-or kind of proposition. In a good curriculum, kids can learn both the basics that we all had to learn in school, and pick up some basic computer skills as well.
If you somehow manage to make it to college without knowing how to use a word processor and some kind of presentation software, these days, that's going to be a problem. Somebody's got to teach it to them.
Of course, I'll agree that you probably don't need your laptop out during your everyday math or social studies classes. A good curriculum would also mandate when it is appropriate to have your computer out, and what the appropriate ways to use it are.
Keep in mind that kids can distract themselves easily enough with just a pencil and paper. It's a teacher's job to keep them on task and learning.
I'm using it as my main distro right now. I really want to make a clean break from Windows. The main thing that has stopped me from getting rid of that nasty NTFS partition is that I could never get my wireless card to work. I've spent hours searching the forums and messing around ndiswrapper, with no luck.
Freespire is the first distro I've tried where it just worked, right out of the proverbial box. I've tried Ubuntu, Suse, Debian, Fedora, Knoppix, and a handful of others. My pattern would be to install it, play with it for a while, try desperately to get a wireless driver working, and then give up and go back to Windows, because I don't want to have to sit right next to my router, and I don't want to have to buy a new wireless card.
With my next computer purchase, I will totally do my research and make sure I'm buying hardware that works under any distro, but for somebody who is spontaneously thinking about making the switch from Windows, if their hardware doesn't work, they will generally give up.
So, for me, it is the proprietary drivers that are the big selling point. It's nice having Java, Acrobat, and others ready to go, too, I must say. Before, you could just apt-get Synaptic and you've got free software downloads and updates, but now with free CNR, which I've heard is rediculously easy, maybe I'll give that a try.